The power of flows and weak ties in your knowledge ecosystem

Summary
Stocks of information aren't enough to build a robust knowledge system. You also need to enable flows and streams of knowledge.

1. Stocks are important for stable knowledge. For emergent practice, you need to enable flows between people.
2. Focus not just on the strong ties that exist in the team, but also on weak ties across the organisation and outside. This is where serendipity happens.
3. Build your handbook, and also implement an internal community platform. This will help keep knowledge up-to-date in your company.

In the previous article, I made the case for a fresh look at knowledge management. We took inspiration from Andrew McAfee’s Enterprise 2.0 provocations of the last decade. In summary, I outlined five capabilities of the consumer internet that enterprise knowledge systems should embody.

1. Serendipitous discovery

2. AI assistance

3. Reputation patterns

4. Means for “expression”

5. Structure, after the fact

In this article, I will expand on the point, “the approach of creating stocks of well structured, organisational knowledge has its limitations”. In fact, I argue that you’re better off investing in solutions that create flows and streams of knowledge while stocks move to a supporting act.

Fast-paced businesses demand knowledge flows besides stocks 

John Hagel III & John Seely Brown

“As change accelerates, something interesting happens… The life-time value of knowledge rapidly shrinks as the rate of obsolescence in knowledge increases. Stocks of knowledge become progressively less valuable while flows of knowledge — the relationships that can help to generate new knowledge — become more and more valuable.”

In a fast changing business environment, explicit knowledge as an asset has diminishing returns. It gradually becomes outdated or irrelevant in the face of new challenges or disruptive technology. 

The shelf life of knowledge has reduced considerably in recent decades. Shane Parrish tells us that a century ago, it would take 35 years for half of an engineer’s university education/syllabus to become defunct. Today, that half-life is down to 2.5 years. 

The pace of knowledge change means people have to keep learning. Organisations have to create the culture and framework for people to keep learning. For instance, you can teach someone to write user stories. To operate as a product strategist for an AI product suite though, they’ll need more than explicit knowledge. They’ll need mentorship, observation and experience. Similarly, proficiency in Sketch or Adobe XD as a visual designer is not enough. To adapt one’s skills to a new domain, one will need to lean on other people’s tacit knowledge.

If one’s new to a domain, they’ll need to build relationships with people who can help them learn. They’ll also have to bring something to that relationship. If not as part of the immediate transaction, some time in the future. This form of learning doesn’t rely on accessing stocks of knowledge in a repository or in some training program. It’s leans on knowledge flows.

Optimise for the strength of weak ties

In 1973, Mark Granovetter published a research paper called “The Strength of Weak Ties”. Granovetter challenged traditional network models that implicitly favoured strong ties, which “confined their applicability to small, well-defined groups”. Granovetter surmised that in several cases, weak ties (acquaintances of people you don’t know that well) help you reach a level of expertise that you may not achieve through just strong ties. 

Why do I bring up a sociologist from the last century? Well, how many people do you have strong ties with? Compare that with the number of people in your company that you know in passing. Which number is bigger? My guess is that you already have several more weak ties than strong ties. 

The Dunbar number places a maximum limit of about 150 people that you can maintain stable relationships with. For people like me, that’s a hundred people too many! With professional networks, for example, we can manage many weak ties because they require less effort to maintain. These networks are often sources of information and knowledge that we’d otherwise struggle to find.

Types of ties and the systems that support them

Granovetter’s work has some important implications for organisational knowledge. While wikis and productivity suites help groups of strong ties work together, enterprise social networks (ESNs) can create and multiply weak ties. They also give people the ability to express themselves through blogs, videos and other media. Your people can then access “potential” new connections based on common interests.

Your community platform is your knowledge platform

If the brave new world is about enabling flows, and if you’re optimising weak and potential ties - what does that mean for knowledge platforms? It means you need to flip your knowledge strategy. Sure, create those stocks, but go about it in this order.

1. Implement a community platform where people can self organise and share content. Make all content accessible to everyone by default. Confidential information should be the exception, not the norm.

2. Make content creation free-form - videos, blog posts, discussions, files - everything’s kosher.

3. Give people a way to build their own profiles through contributions to the ecosystem. This gives them an identity or brand that others will want to connect with. You earn your stripes by producing good content. Your title becomes irrelevant.

4. Provide means for people to add metadata through tags, descriptions, comments and reactions. Let the most popular and the most relevant content bubble to the top. 

5. Add structure to the most popular, well reviewed content. Update that structure constantly so it represents the “state-of-the-art” for your organisation. These will be your stocks - up to date, dynamic and representative of your organisation.

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Those five steps provide a simple summary of how I recommend you build a knowledge ecosystem for your distributed organisation. I have to add a word of caution. Don’t confuse your community-based knowledge system with your handbook. A handbook contains stable knowledge. The more stable the knowledge, the more it lends itself to structure. Community platforms are ideal for volatile, emergent knowledge. Balance how you structure stable knowledge with how you nurture emerging practice.

In a future post, I’ll share my thoughts on the people and governance side of the knowledge management puzzle. Meanwhile, tell me what you think about creating a community ecosystem in your organisation. How well do you think you can balance this with the need to make knowledge explicit using traditional stocks? I’d love to hear your thoughts!