Knowledge Harvests!

Knowledge Harvests - what a great term! Authors Katrina Pugh and Nancy Dixon define a “knowledge harvest as a systematic, facilitated gathering and circulation of knowledge”. I stumbled upon their article on the topic in the May edition of HBR (Harvard Business Review). It was in the Forethought section of the magazine which looks at ideas and trends on the business horizon. Let me recap my now limited understanding of a knowledge harvest and then offer some thoughts on its challenge to us as we seek to leverage E2.0.

From their short article, I believe that a knowledge harvest is a simple but purposeful and interactive approach to a postmortem analysis or debriefing. The basic idea is that the intentional review of a business occurrence or process will yield helpful information or insights for the future; hence - a knowledge harvest!

However, there is a twist. The authors say that the first step in the process is to recruit a set of “knowledge seekers” who want to learn from the harvest. They go on to characterize these people.

Because seekers are self-interested, they ask tough, exploratory questions of knowledge originators, extracting important nuances – not only about how a project was executed but also about how costs built up, how knowledge might be applied elsewhere, what worked and what didn’t, and so on.

A knowledge facilitator leads these seekers through a process of interacting with the knowledge originators to derive key information and valued insights. The knowledge facilitator then works with the seeker to package the content and distribute it around the company.
My question is whether or not our E2.0 applications are focused enough on these knowledge seekers. Do we have people who are clearly articulating what they need to know in order to do their jobs better? Do our apps help to connect these knowledge seekers with the appropriate knowledge originators within the business? I have a feeling that a lot of our Web 2.0 content is produced by knowledge facilitators who are doing screen scrapes from knowledge originators with no idea whatsoever of the needs of knowledge seekers! What do you think?

I do believe that we have the tools and technologies but I’m not sure that we have them working together to support this interesting approach of a knowledge harvest.

E2.o as the Catalyst for Organizational Evolution

Last month, Fast Company’s Fast 50 highlighted Google as the top selection in their list of the world’s most innovative companies. This past weekend, I read through Harvard Business Review’s April 2008 cover story titled Reverse Engineering Google’s Innovation Machine by Bala Iyer and Tom Davenport.

Noting these two recent cover stories from two of the more popular business management periodicals of our day, I would say that Google has captured the attention of the best of today’s business management minds. We are preoccupied with the company because they are unflinchingly trying (successfully at that) to manage complexity using a nontraditional management approach - an approach which encourages flexibility and widespread experimentation in the face of chaos. The HBR article goes on to highlight six traits that Google has embraced to “Build Innovation into Organizational Design”.

The article states, “Innovating on internet time requires dynamic capabilities to anticipate market changes and offer new products and functions quickly. Google has made substantive investments in developing the capacity to innovate successfully in this fast-changing business environment. The company is pioneering approaches to organizational culture and innovation processes …”

One of the six traits that the article highlights is Google’s ability to “Use Data to Vet Inspiration”. The company is known to be very analytical but the article cites their advanced use of both internal prediction markets (300) and an idea management system to vet their thoughts. Google is using the foremost of E2.o tools to democratize the management input process and to fully harness the intellectual capital of their entire company.

This makes Google very interesting to me. First because I am an advocate of E2.o and want to study any business that is attempting to incorporate social computing to augment business management!

However, the second reason is because I want to understand Google’s management approach, itself - a unique culture that encourages innovation - or adaptation. To this point, I refer to Eric Beinhocker’s book, The Origin of Wealth, in which he expounds on organizational adaptation. In our world of increasing complexity, we must use all of the information available to us as a means to educate our organizations to the evolving dynamics of the marketplace. Only by understanding one’s changing market does an organization stand the chance to survive and adapt to the next generation. This organizational learning is fueled by equipping all aspects of a business to “exploit and explore” their interactions within their current marketplace.

Briefly, I see E2.o tools as the catalyst to our getting to this fully-enabled next generation approach to business management. With E2.o tools, our organizations can harness, prioritize, and make sense of all of the information that is bombarding us on a daily basis. By doing so, we can begin to adapt continuously. Google may actually be leading the charge on something quite remarkable.

Join the dialog. What do you think?

(As an aside, Google will be joining us this May at DIG2008. I am excited to hear from Bo Cowgill on the company's use of internal prediction markets. Check out the short case study overview.)