We had presentation, but let me just share a few words of wisdom from our keynote speakers:

Etienne Wenger

"The real learning issue of the 21st century is not access to a curriculum, but being able to manage multiple membership, i.e. managing identity."
"Verticality in organizational structures is usually associated with accountability. But there is acountability in horizontal structures too: you cannot give any kind of advice in a community of practice without being held accountable for it. Your reputation is at stake."

Henry Mintzberg :

"Leaders that don't manage don't know what is going on"
"We should never talk about leadership without using the term communityship in the same sentence".
"There should be no bonuses for executives. Period."
"A company is not a collection of human resources, but a community of human beings"
"Why talk about 'empowering'? Real professionals know what to do, and don't need to be 'empowered'!"
"Management is NOT taught in MBA programs. Case studies may be good to gather insights, but not to make decisions. How can you make a decision based on 20 pages of reading?"
"To learn, managers need to step back and reflect thoughtfully on their own experience"

What failed to materialize in the conference though - at least when I was there - is the recognition that a company is also a political system, by and large autocratic, i.e. based on shared mental models of heroic leaders developing a strategy and human resources executing on that strategy. It seems to me quite naive to believe that we can introduce "communityship" (term coined by Dr. Mintzberg) in a bonus-driven company. It's a radical cultural change. When you build communities, you change communication patterns, and therefore you change the power structures. It takes a lot of patience and determination to do this, and you will losse your job if you don't have the support of the CEO to introduce such a change.

Funny to see the eery parallel with companies, where management ("doing") always has the upper hand, and expertise ("knowing") is often downplayed, with consequences that might not be as awful, but still terrible.

1. Teaching/Master Class: Presentation of fundamental and operational knowledge; review and discussion of a learner's specific problem or results in a group. (typically performed in corporate universities)
2. Community of Practice: Groups of practitioners in a discipline that connect to seek/share experiences, develop/adopt practices or tools and develop/support a learning agenda.
3. Technical Mentoring: Interaction between expert and learner to help the learner do a job more effectively and/or to progress in their career.
4. Job Shadowing / Apprenticeship: Opportunities for a learner to observe the expert interacting with others or doing more complex work. 
5. Guided Experience / Development Assignments: Carefully selected projects or work assignments that fill gaps in experience or broaden/deepen targeted skills.  "Guided" includes expert observation and feedback. Typically research projects like case studies, lessons learned, documentaries etc.
6. Coaching: Combines mentoring, shadowing and observation to assess learner competency gaps, and guide development with timely performance feedback. 
7. Knowledge Elicitation: Interview-based approach with expert to articulate big picture, mental models and detailed "how to" and "when to" guidance. This was the main approach of KM a few years back. We talked about "knowledge books" at that time, whereas we are more into storytelling approaches today.
8. Group Intervention Methods: Synchronous collaboration methods designed for large groups with a specific outcome in mind. A good example is the Peer Assist of BP:  Experts share experiences and knowledge in a facilitated meeting with a person or team who is looking for advice on a challenge, problem or project. Other similar group collaboration methods are used when the issue is about creating or sharing knowledge e.g. Brainstorming, Open Space, Knowledge Marketplace
9. Codification / Publication: Process of codifying knowledge to make it available to a wider audience, typically with little intermediation. This can take the form of blog posts, scientific publications, books, software code.
10. Bookmarking / Library Management: Experts categorize and tag their database of digitized content, and add glossaries and thesauri, to make it easier for others to search and navigate into for future reuse.

When we talk about collaboration, we actually talk about the implicit relationship between the giver and taker of knowledge in each one of those settings. That's why learning to collaborate is by and large about practicing each one of those methods.

[this list is partly inspired by the work of Kent Greenes]

Another example of the knowing-doing gap...

After having worked in the KM field for a while now, I have become utterly convinced that not much can be done in terms of developing a culture of collaboration and knowledge sharing if the very top management is not driving it, albeit in a very special way. The reason is simple: as I said we are dealing with culture here, and the "Chief Cultural Officer" of a company is and will always be either the Chairman or the CEO.

In a consulting partnership, it is far more complex, because the CEO is a sort of "primus inter pares" who has limited influence on the culture of the company, which has sedimented over time. Moreover, if the incentive structure of the company favors partners who sell (whatever that means) by creating P&Ls everywhere, every partner will rush out to sell consulting missions, and will consider Knowledge Management as technical back office stuff, a sort of necessary evil that adds a burden to the overhead structure.

So how can we deal with this?

I believe the best solution, and perhaps the only viable solution, which I have seen at work in the most advanced consulting firms, is to give a partner the responsibility of running the KM program as a temporary assignment - typically two years full time -, with full authority over the associated ressources (librarians, research assistants, collaborative technology, practice leaders). Here's the catch: since the reputation of a partner, and hence her income, comes primarily from clients, she cannot take that responsibility for too long without putting her career at risk. Thus, the only acceptable way to deal with this is to make the assignment a temporary one, so that she can keep her clients.

The alternative, which is the usual 20% of the lead partner's time devoted to KM is pure bullshit. No partner will ever take the time to dig into the highly complex issues of knowledge sharing if she knows that her clients are waiting at the gate, unless the other partners are prepared to pay her for this.

• When we change the way we communicate, we change society.
• The current change in one sentence is this: most of the barriers to group action have collapsed, and without those barriers, we are free to explore new ways of gathering together and getting things done.
• [The value of hierarchies] is obvious- it vastly simplifies communication among the employees.
• (...) no institution can put all its energies in pursuing its mission; it must expend considerable effort on maintaining discipline and structure, simply to keep itself viable. Self-preservation of the institution becomes job number one, while its stated goal is relegated to number two or lower, no matter what the mission statement says.
• because the minimum costs of being an organization in the first place are relatively high, certain activities may have some value but not enough to make them worth pursuing in an organized way.New social tools are altering the equation by lowering the costs of coordinating group action.
• The basic capabilities of tools like Flickr reverse the old order of group activity, transforming "gather, then share" into "share, then gather".
• If you have ever wondered why so much of what workers in large organizations know has been shielded from the CEO and vice-versa, wonder no longer: the idea of limiting communications, so that they flow only from one layer of the hierarchy to the next, was part of the very design of the system at the dawn of managerial culture.
• (...) any forum of public expression is dangerous, because no matter how innocuous the original form form of organization is, if the state is seen to tolerate it, it can become a forum for more focused discontent.
• In the open source world, trying something is often cheaper than making a formal decision about whether to try it.
• Because of transaction costs, organizations cannot afford to hire employees who only make one important contribution - they need to hire people who have good ideas day after day (...) Most of the time, most institutions have to choose "steady performers" over "brilliant but erratic".
• Microsoft simply cannot afford to take any good idea wherever it finds it; the transaction costs that come from being Microsoft see to that.
• No matter who you are, most of the smart people work for somebody else;
• When there is a real revolution going on, (...) net value is useless, since the society before and the society after are too different to be readily compared.
• (...) the important questions [about modern collaboration tools] aren't about whether these tools will spread or reshape society, but rather how they do so.
• collective action is harder to get going because all of the participants stand or fall together.
• What makes such collaborative efforts work is copyright law, where some form of license is created that allows people to come together and share their work freely, without fear of having that work taken away from them later.
• Novices make mistakes from lack of experience. they overestimate mere fads, seeing revolution everywhere, and they make this kind of error a thousand times before they learn better. In times of revolution though, the experienced among us make the opposite mistake. When a real, once-in-a-lifetime change comes along, we are at risk of regarding it as a fad.

1. Millennials expect to work overseas - Millennials expect job mobility and want the opportunity to experience overseas assignments.


2. Sustainability and climate change - Today's recruits will choose employers who have corporate social responsibility (CSR) values that reflect their own.


3. Technology and the ability to network - Millennials view technology as key to socializing and networking and believe it will change the way they work.


4. Work place flexibility - Only a small percentage of millennials expect flexibilities such as working at home and outside regular office hours.


5. Sharing personal information - Millennials are comfortable about giving employers greater access to their personal information in the interests of personal and business security.


6. Millennial views on portfolio careers - The idea of employees job hopping in a portfolio working arrangement is not likely to become a reality for millennials.


7. Employee loyalty - Millennials express loyalty to the organization they work for, but by no means are they willing to commit to blind loyalty.


8. Training and development - Training and development is the benefit the millennials value most highly--particularly coaching and mentoring.


9. Retirement - Millennials have accepted the idea that neither the state nor the employer will fund their retirement.


10. Thoughts on 2020 - Millennials envision a world where China, India and Russia will have more economic influence than the US and Europe and believe that companies will be more influential than governments by 2020.

[community organizers] have delivered a message to Rudy Giuliani, whosneered at the Republican National Convention that he didn't even know "what a community organizer is." This is who they are: they are the people who won this election.