Do organisations value connections between professions/disciplines intelligently?
As I continue digging deeper in the Knowledge Board, I keep finding items of interest. This one from Chris Macrae, commenting on briefings on social network analysis, social capital, and cognitive social networks:
Do organisations value connections between professions/disciplines intelligently?
This idea started to develop in my mind, partly because of conversations about trust across professions and disciplines which is needed if organisational connectivity is to produce value. I was wondering whether people feel that social capital mapping tools can help or hinder with this specific issue.
I wonder if anyone has explored this line of thinking and if it has its own tools within KM.
From a lot of observational research I have been doing recently it is clear that there is an organisational design or human resources error, that's quite out of control actually. We force people to boast about their deep disciplinary expertises without asking the second question which disciplines are you good at listening to and working with?
Hypothesis: This has become so extreme that in many organsiations the real value is coming from appraising people on the quality of their second answer more than their first.
Assuming this hypothesis is true: this should be a fundamental practice-application of KM - but is it?
Interdisciplinary communication is an issue I've been thinking about a lot recently. I think I really should prepare an elaborate answer at some point, but for now here are my thoughts in a nutshell:
Organizations are typically made up of specialized divisions. Each division has strong knowledge in one particular area and is weaker in others. If people only hang around with people within their group, each group will develop and speak only its own language and distrust can be expected between groups. The result is poor synergy, reduced knowledge flow, and overall loss of the "living" quality found in healthy organizations.
It is, however, hard to get people to cross language barriers. Divisions are not all that permeable. Here are two ways which I think are practical:
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Find competent people who are not afraid of moving across groups and make them move regularly. They'll develop a web of horizontal relationships and become connectors for the others who did not move.
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Help people get socially connected with like minds (people with an intellectual affinity) in other groups without leaving their own. One cost-effective way to achieve this would be to grow a klognet. After a little while, you'll see connections and trust across groups that would have been difficult to obtain otherwise.
The purpose of doing things like this is not immediately obvious and this may be seen as a waste of effort because the specific situations that will benefit from increased horizontal social connectivity are quite unpredictable.
But just as nurturing lateral thinking fosters creativity in the individual, cultivating horizontal connectivity in the organization makes it more resourceful and helps it solve emerging, nasty, critical problems that do not neatly fall in the province of a single division.
 8:39:23 AM
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