Thinking about elevator pitches this morning – of which more later.

OK – I sell knowledge management consulting. That means I do workshops, awaydays, mentoring, interim management, public speaking and some poor clients occasionally commission me to write them a report.

But what differentiates me from other KM consultants who do those things? Well I am a bit different, personally – I don’t know how to describe it but you get a flavour of that from reading what I write here. And I think a bit differently (I swing wildly along the techno-fetishist fluffy bunny spectrum).

I also mainly help public sector clients – and the things they need are sometimes very different from commercial folk (though often frighteningly similar).

The creed is getting refined and this is how I wrote it today as the elevator doors squeak to a close behind me:

I believe that much of the pain we feel as managers in modern organisations comes from trying to apply management thinking and methods that are 100 years out of date and which were developed to solve a very different set of problems.

My understanding is that nobody has worked out a one-size-fits-all set of techniques for managing people in knowledge-based organisations and that it’s possible (probable?) that no such o-s-f-a set exists.

What I do is help people work out what are the right techniques for them and their colleagues to use today and to see how they can really use them for organisational benefit – however they may perceive that.

My experience has been that this usually requires them to find ways of being comfortable with their own creativity, and to nurture the creativity of others around them, while at the same time coming to feel at home with technology that is evolving very very quickly.

“ding”

100 posts I’m sure I’ve written, but can’t for the life of me find anywhere

1.On gratitude for Kettle Chips
2.On gratitude for escalators
3.On being an attractive man in middle age
4.On having man breasts
5.On Coffee Republic vs Starbucks
6.On having days when I’m particularly sensitive to smell
7.On fear of being bitten by a dog
8.On the morning after the death of John Lennon
9.On using my mobile as a net bridge using GPRS
10.On the very first time I saw the WWW
11.On the very first time I drank Coca-cola
12.On the way I walk
13.On the way to the forum
14.On the importance of daily showers
15.On people who let their dog pee in the street
16.On skimmed milk and it’s part in my downfall
17.On just being fine
18.On the Central Line and the joy of Leyton Station
19.On using open source software wherever possible
20.On the Ukulele Jazz Orchestra of Great Britain vs The Hula Bluebirds (no contest)
21.On the joy of Pulp Fiction
22.On my physical reaction to Reservoir Dogs
23.On the Prince Charles cinema’s forward rake
24.On Kettners All-Day-Breakfast
25.On the power of the present moment
26.On digging holes in the sand
27.On sandcastles and moats
28.On the beach – the video
29.On the people I knew before they were famous
30.On my frustration with my children’s attitude to my stories about the people I knew before they were famous
31.On picking your nose in public
32.On the desirability of a town house in Chelsea
33.On the beauty of Chelsea Town Hall
34.On Local Government Reorganisation in London in 1965
35.On Ken Livingstone and London Buses
36.On how teenagers in 50 years time will think how cool it must have been to be living in the first few years of the 21st Century
37.On railway simulation using object oriented programming
38.On how weakness is strength
39.On the other side of the tracks
40.On sweeping my side of the street
41.On Sidney Bechet & Muggsy Spanier playing Sweet Lorraine
42.On the sameness of Wringin’ and Twistin’ and It’s the Last Time
43.On Lionel Hampton’s version of Panama Rag
44.On Ghost Town and my first half of bitter
45.On Banks’s Mild and it’s part in my downfall
46.On doing a runner from Pizza Hut and why it’s not a good idea kids
47.On the importance of keeping the floor dry in the bathroom
48.On the importance of placing raw meat on a shelf below cooked meat in the fridge
49.On being an ENFP
50.On not being an ISTJ
51.On walking in the country on my own
52.On walking on the beach on my own
53.On talking to myself
54.On the joy of blue and green
55.On not being who I truly am
56.On the difficulty of writing lists
57.On the ease of expressing thoughts in pictures and the difficulty of understanding other people’s pictures without intervention
58.On the British Museum vs the Science Museum
59.On the National Portrait Gallery
60.On owning my first mobile phone
61.On dinner and dancing at the Ritz
62.On the power of prayer before talking to call centres
63.On people jumping off bridges for fun
64.On Portmeirion and other highly places on the edge of the civilised world
65.On eating bacon, rice and peas
66.On forgetting what it was I was looking for in the shed
67.On the zen of weeding
68.On For Sale signs outside houses
69.On the rise and fall of the fax machine
70.On the renaissance of the coffee shop
71.On the back of a postcard
72.On walking from Pershore to Naunton Beauchamp
73.On rainbow pencils and rubber stamps
74.On the simultaneous ease and trickiness of playing the ukulele banjo
75.On drawing in public
76.On talking in public
77.On being PLACID
78.On school strikes and unemployment benefit
79.On leaving behind holes in my shoes
80.On starting again afresh
81.On being sunburned from sitting in rockpools
82.On the pain of being hit with a cricket bat – and why I’m really sorry Jason
83.On the secret sauce
84.On corruption and disease
85.On the futility of running the business by the numbers
86.On Steve Ross at Pizza on the Park
87.On living and talking dangerously
88.On not taking myself or others too seriously
89.On the belief in the healing power of software tools
90.On listening to people I can’t stand and thanking them for what they’re telling me
91.On estate agents and the impending end of the world
92.On falling over my own feet in the carpark of Toys R Us
93.On the Bolton report
94.On paper aeroplanes and major security alerts
95.On going tits up
96.On The Beat after a CND march in Rugby c1981
97.On the taste of honey
98.On marmite on toast and a cup of tea
99.On walking through treacle
100.On the comfort that comes from completing a list, quickly followed by the realisation that there are 100 more to write.

I’m increasingly distracted today by a conversation that’s been going on a few cubicles away (I use a serviced office with lots of hotdesks) about e-mail marketing.

They’ve been going on and on about the ways you can get round spam-filters and make sure you get through to people; fooling people into opting-in to stuff just to get the message through; getting whitelisted IP addresses. The most important thing seems to be getting their message (I think they’re promo-ing a gambling site) into someone’s inbox. Forget the fact that even if it gets through the filter, everyone’s got a delete button. Forget that by doing this and chasing people, you turn people even further off from using your service and maybe online services in general.

I just keep thinking “Why, why, why are you putting so much effort into contacting people who don’t want to hear from you.”

And better to think it and blog it than to go round there and poke my nose in directly

COLLAR – is an idea right now that I want to turn into a real place – not simply a conceptual space or an online/virtual space, although it can’t escape being those too. But a real space that people can physically come together in to talk and learn and teach each other about the current state of organisational life and how best to survive it. It reflects my passionate belief that we need new institutions to help us survive and thrive in the knowledge economy.

COLLAR stands for the “Centre for Organisational Life, Learning and Associated Research” – the name was provided by MUSICA (Made-Up Silly Institute for Contrived Acronyms) whose previous work was the PICKLE (Public Inspection Centre for Knowledge Learning and Enlightenment). Mmmm….I do like that “Enlightenment” bit, so in homage to PICKLE an alternative name for COLLAR would be LICKLE – the London International Centre for Knowledge Learning and Enlightenment.

“Enough of the stupid name game – geddon with it – Ed”

What’s it for?
The Centre’s primary purpose is to provide a physical space for people to come together to discuss the nature of organisational life in the early 21st Century and to share their experience of ways of dealing with it and managing it. I think it’s important to have an urban location rather than a rural one to make it easy for people to drop in while they’re in town.

The kinds of products that could initially be available to people visiting the centre would be of two types:

Classes and Workshops in tools and techniques

• Cultivating your creativity
• Using creativity for better business
• Developing your 60-second personal pitch
• Making Personal Knowledge Management work for you

Interesting Conversations

• Knowledge Cafes (any subject you want to introduce)
• Talking Walks around interesting areas of London
• The Talking Shop (ongoing conversations, primarily developing products and ideas)
• Research Colloquia (gulp this is getting frighteningly academic, let’s stop now)

Haven’t we already got one of those?
If so, then great, point me there and I’ll go and sit on their doorstep until they find a use for me, but I’m not sure. What I have in mind is not as academic as the Business Schools or Management Training Centres. Nor is it as wildly, ecstatically cutting-edge as the Cynefin Centre. It’s the sort of place I’d love to hang out in and do the sort of stuff, for example that we did on BlogWalk IV recently.

Why not?
I can make up a hundred reasons why other people might think this is a bad idea, but I’d rather hear them from other people than to entertain them myself. I think it can work, it’s needed and I’m prepared to put time, effort and money into making it happen. The worst that I can hear is that someone’s already doing exactly this – and as I’ve said, that doesn’t bother me.

What’s needed next?

• Money
• Someone other than me to think about it
• People with time etc. to start making it happen
• Constructive ideas on making it happen
• Premises
• Suggestions of people who might be fired up by this idea (preferably ones who are already sympathetic, but also have some spare cash or cheap, but beautiful premises to offer and don’t want to have complete control over everything – shouldn’t be too hard to find ;-))

Comment here or e-mail me to lend a hand, keep the conversation going or point out any enormous blind spot that you think I have.

The Improvement and Development Agency for Local Government has produced some research on it’s I&DeA knowledge site (Grrrr…annoying need to register to get at the goodies) about Communications functions in local councils.

I skimmed one on core competencies and one on who should run the website before getting a bit antsy – neither of them even mention blogs (not even “there are some dangerous individuals out there who suggest that we should all be talking to the public more often and they’ve got this tool of the devil called a blog. If someone tries to sell you one, call 999 and walk away from them, backwards while maintaining eye-contact”) and the one on the place of the website only really gets as far as saying, it’s not a technical task, it’s a business one….so give it to communications.

However in a great bit of joined up-ness, elsewhere on Knowledge there are some suggestions that blogging might be good for councillors at least.

I take this as a reminder that I’m storming up the hill and not looking back often enough to realise that everyone else is still having fun just struggling to get their shoes on.

In the first issue of Global Knowledge Review, the ultra-cool Lilia Efimova (Mathemagenic) writes about her irritation with the dominance of tree models in knowledge and information management and provides a great reference to Christopher Alexander on organic city design.

This is the corollory (sp? – other side anyway) of the challenge we faced at the Commission for Patient & Public Involvement in Health (CPPIH) earlier this year of building a knowledge management system that was more like a city than a tree – we came up against enormous resistance and unwillingness to try this model out to see whether it worked.

My perception of what people said was “We know what an information system looks like and it looks like a tree. This does not look like a tree and therefore, it cannot be a good information system.” At the same time we also had people saying “I don’t know where to put stuff”, to which the answer was a very empowering, “You should put it where you would expect to find it again, but it’s really up to you, there is no single right place to put it” which many people chose to interpret as “We’ve designed this badly, we’re a bit incompetent and don’t know where you should put it”.

I sincerely hope that the CPPIH KMS survives the governmental jiggery-pokery after the NHS arms-length bodies review – it’s still one of the strongest ideas in the whole patient involvement movement.

I’m drawn to the idea of some explanatory statement for people I’ve never met or spoken too this intimately. Now, I’ve read some darned good manifestos in my time: Marx & Engels set me on fire as a teenager, Cluetrain turned my understanding of the world upside-down and encouraged me to leave the “security” of a “well-paid” job in public service and more recently Hughtrain has rewoken my thinking about creativity in business.

As I like to be different for the sake of it, I’m going to steer clear of talking manifesto (…yet) I’d like instead to present a sort of creed (or credo if we need to be everso latinate about it which I don’t think we do, no it’s a creed) – what I believe about modern organisational life – and (later) a memorandum, those things that I need to remember about living that life. I knew that Latin ‘A’ level would both pay off and turn me into an unbearable pain in the arse.

My creed is mostly my answer to the most difficult question in the history of the world. It inevitably creeps up at cocktail parties when I’m asked what I do and it slips so easily out of their mouths and bites me hard “oh that sounds fascinating….so what exactly is Knowledge Management?”. The answer I give here is not really suitable for most cocktail parties; but this is my party, so here it is.

When I talk about KM I simply mean the subject of managing the dominant form of organisation in our economy, the knowledge-based organisation, chock-full of knowledge workers.

Of course, managing knowledge work isn’t new, universities and craft guilds have been doing it for centuries – it’s just that when, in the 19th Century, we started thinking about how to manage the new industrial processes we came up with a whole new bunch of ideas about how to organise people to carry out processes and indeed what management means. This radical notion of organisations as mechanical entities, which could be steered and engineered found it’s expression as Taylorism and although it just doesn’t work in lots of situations it has stuck with incremental tweaks every so often ever since.

However, groups of people working on solving a human problem or delivering a personal service are much further away from being a mechanical entity than a bunch of guys putting a car together. And so as the economy becomes more and more knowledge-based, the management techniques taught for the best part of the 20th Century work less and less. The trouble is that most people don’t see it this way, they don’t realise that we’re using the wrong tool to do the job. They don’t understand that the tools they are using (because they were once told was “the right way to do things”) were actually devised for a very different sort of business in a very different sort of economy and a very different sort of society than that which we now live in, let alone the one that is likely to emerge over the next few years.

I believe that this is part of the reason why, for example we find “matrix management” and “virtual teams” so attractive, but horribly difficult to do. This too is why so much “change management” turns into corporate-wall head-banging, because we go into conversations with people saying things like:

“Look, I know you’re not a machine, and you know you’re not a machine, but in order to manage this organisation, we all have to pretend for a moment that we’re like a machine and that our parts are easily changeable and so that’s why we want you to start doing a completely different job in different ways with people you’ve never met before and we want you to be performing at absolutely optimal levels from day one, at least and preferably day minus two, which was yesterday.”

I know, I’ve heard myself saying it and it’s not pretty.

I believe we need to be learning a new “right way to do things” and that one of the ways to help people is to reconnect them with the fact that they are not just a “dumb agent” who must do exactly what they are told in order for the organisation to survive, but rather that they are miraculous, intelligent human beings who are infinitely capable of creativity and innovation as long as they are nurtured and encouraged.

Well, that’s what I believe… today.

My close friends are becoming tired of hearing about me taking the whole of August off from work to just be – be dad, be husband, be me. But it did me the power of good and helped me remember several things that I tend to forget when back in super-money-making-machine mode.