Have you invested in the latest and greatest in collaboration technology but still feel people are still not collaborating? How many Microsoft Sharepoint servers and IBM Quickplaces remain relatively untouched or only used by the organisation’s technorati? I think it’s a big problem because this narrow view of collaboration starts to get the concept a […]

One of the best ways to illustrate the value of Community of Practice efforts is to find stories of success and to use them. We previously posted on the publication of ‘Stories from the Coal Face’, a booklet produced by Rio Tinto’s coal division that communicates many of the ways that CoP have added value […]

As the co-ordinator of the SIKMLeaders community of practice, Stan Garfield asked the community members this question: “If you were invited to give a keynote speech on knowledge management, what words of wisdom or lessons learned would you impart?” Here’s my answer. All KM is change management View every knowledge management initiative as a change […]

Inspired by a conversation with Chris Young at Thiess, Robyn and I ran a knowledge market activity with our client and their spatial modeller community of practice. We had three objectives: Help participants appreciate the nature of what members are keen to share with the community and what members are seeking to learn Create new […]

I caught up with Julie Perrin yesterday. Julie is a storyteller and performer and we got talking about the dangers of spin in teaching people storytelling. Julie made the important point that any storytelling effort must start with good intentions and be told with authenticity. Then it dawned on me: in a complex world many […]

I heard Marshall Goldsmith say this on my ipod this morning: “So many people have spent a lifetime for preparing themselves for technological skills yet have spent no time training themselves on how to influence people so the technical skills make a difference.” The same is true for collaboration. So many people have spent countless […]

The ability to collaborate is becoming an essential capability for innovative organisations (actually, for any organisation). Imagine getting any big project done without collaborating. Here’s what scientist and Australian of the Year, Fiona Wood, said on Andrew Denton’s Enough Rope TV show about collaboration: “I haven’t got the intellectual capacity or the time or energy […]

Here is a poem by Lao Tsu, a Chinese philosopher circa 700 BC. It’s well quoted on the web but it was difficult to find exactly which writing it was included in (any ideas?). Anyway, it speaks to how we should be helping our communities of practice develop. Go to the People Live with them […]

Your teleconference system is one of your most important KM technologies. Here are 7 things a facilitator can do to improve teleconference experience. Encourage everyone to be on time . Unlike f2f meetings where people can sneek in and catch up, arriving late at a teleconference meeting seems to be doubly disruptive. Introduce everyone. When […]

BHP Billiton axed their division called Operational Excellence last year. This was the group that, among other services, supported the organisations Knowledge Networks (also called communities of practice but language matters in this story). BHPB had developed the networks over the last 10 years but when the new CEO arrived he thought that if the […]