Stories

Tag: knowledge production

  • Don’t cancel or postpone your conference, workshop, or training – go digital

    Don’t cancel or postpone your conference, workshop, or training – go digital

    How we respond to the threat of a disaster is critical.

    Organizations planning physical-world events have a choice:

    • You can cancel or postpone your event OR
    • You can go digital.

    Why not go digital?

    • You think it cannot be done.
    • You do not know how to do it.
    • You believe the experience will be inferior.

    It can be done. You can learn. You are likely to be surprised by how much you can achieve.

    The Geneva Learning Foundation is inviting conference and other event organizers to a Special Event in which we will share how you can rapidly move or ‘pivot’ your events online.

    What is The Geneva Learning Foundation?

    The Geneva Learning Foundation is a Swiss non-profit with the mission to develop trial, and scale up new ways to lead change to tackle the challenges that threaten our societies.

    We are purely digital. This means all of our operations and activities take place online.

    • Nearly every day, we organize and facilitate one or more digital events that convene hundreds or thousands of participants from all over the world.
    • We want to help other organizations by sharing our experience and know-how.

    Why are we doing this?

    • We believe that the digital transformation can strengthen the resilience of our societies.
    • Cancelling or postponing a conference weakens ongoing work that may be significant or important.

    Why attend this Special Event?

    If you are planning a conference:

    • During this Special Event, we will share the critical success factors for digital events. You are likely to be surprised by what we have found makes the greatest difference.
    • Attendees will receive an invitation to join our #DigitalConference short course, in which you actually build a practical plan you can use to go digital.

    If you are an event organizer, we know you may be already facing severe consequences.

    • If you have experience in providing services to design and run digital events, we invite you to share your services with participants.
    • If you have been primarily focused on physical-world events, we invite you to share how you are adapting.

    Here is a case study.

    We just organized a conference that was attended by more than 1,700 participants from 95 countries, including those hardest hit by COVID-19.

    • This conference ran in English 3-13 March and in French 16-30 March.
    • World-class presenters shared their expertise with practitioners.
    • Dialogue was constant – 24 hours a day, given participants spread across time zones.

    We were awed by the number and diversity of participants and the quality of their contributions in this Pre-Course Conference.

    How do we compare digital and physical? It is comparable?

    In the past, our partner had organized three successive face-to-face events in Barcelona and Dar Es Salaam.

    • Each event was attended by around 80 people.
    • Each event was well-planned and executed.
    • Each time, 80 people went back to their countries with new knowledge and relationships.

    After the third time, our partner was ready to go digital.

    Previous conferences were limited to around 80 participants.

    • They required everyone to stop their work in order to travel.
    • This is the hidden opportunity cost of face-to-face conferences.
    • It often adds up to far more than the actual expenditure on the event itself.

    What about the intangible serendipity of a conference?

    We know the real value of a physical event resides in the impromptu meetings of minds and bodies on the conference floor.

    • Sharing a drink or a meal provides the occasion to establish or strengthen informal relationships.
    • Yes, there are dozens of digital tools that can match individuals and organizations, schedule ad hoc meets, and stir idea generation and serendipity.
    • Yet, it is undeniable that some aspects – and the ones that matter – are difficult to replicate.

    Conversely, you may discover new ways of doing new things in a digital conference that can accelerate and multiply serendipity.

    If you cancel or postpone, you will get nothing.

    Is it expensive?

    • No. You can make an awesome event digital using only free tools.
    • You can also hire people and providers with the right combination of tools, talent, and vision.
    • The secret sauce is in the know-how required: not to use the tools, but to figure out how to both replicate and augment the experience you wish to create.

    This is where organizations and service providers with experience can help.

    Is it difficult or time-consuming?

    No. If you already have an event scheduled, there is a simple method to:

    • Identify what is the value and significance provided by the event – including the intangible, serendipitous bits
    • Think through how to recreate and augment this value
    • Convert everything you planned into a digital format

  • Publishing as learning

    Publishing as learning

    We are both consumers and producers of publications, whether in print or online.

    Publications are static containers for knowledge from the pre-Internet era. Even if they are now mostly digital, the ways in which we think about them remains tied to the past. Nevertheless, at their best, they provide a useful reference point, baseline, or benchmark to establish a high-quality standard that is easy, cheap and effective to disseminate. In the worst, they take so much time to prepare that they are out of date even before they are ready for circulation, reflect consensus that is so watered-down as to be unusable, and are expensive – especially when printed copies are needed – to produce, disseminate, stock and revise.

    With respect to the knowledge we consume, some of us may heretically scorn formal guidelines and other publications. Reading as an activity “remains a challenge”. Others manage to set aside time to pore over new guidelines and other reference content, journals, or online sources. Yet others cannot justify such time because they prioritize their own knowledge production rather than its consumption.

    The development of guidelines, training manuals, and other standards- and evidence-based approaches remains an accepted formal process of knowledge development that also embeds many of the benefits of informal learning, at least for its participants. When peers gather to think and work together, to figure out what should be put into the publication-as-container and why, this is often a dynamic learning process. Dialogue as real-time peer review mixes with more formal review, editing, and revision. Serendipity and creativity are not just possible, but more likely in those spaces, especially when there is one or more layer of social interaction.

    So the challenge for learning strategy is to figure out how to capture not just the knowledge artefact of such a process, but also the community, affective, and other social dimensions that help build trust and relationships, to then keep this knowledge current and put it to work – for both the immediate participants and those learners who, in the past, were mere recipients or readers.

    Photo: Read the news (Georgie Pauwels/flickr.com)

  • Unified Knowledge Universe

    Unified Knowledge Universe

    “Knowledge is the economy. What used to be the means has today become the end. Knowledge is a river, not a reservoir. A process, not a product. It’s the pipes that matter, because learning is in the network.” – George Siemens  in Knowing Knowledge (2006)

    Harnessing the proliferation of knowledge systems and the rapid pace of technological change is a key problem for 21st century organizations. When knowledge is more of a deluge than a trickle, old command-control methods of creating, controlling, and distributing knowledge encased in a container view do little to crack how we can tame this flood. How do you scaffold continual improvement in learning and knowledge production to maximize depth, dissemination and impact? A new approach is needed to apply multiple lenses to a specific organizational context.

    What the organization wants to enable, improve and accelerate:

    1. Give decision makers instant, ubiquitous and predictive access to all the knowledge in its universe – and connect it to everywhere.
    2. Rapidly curate, collate and circulate most-current content as a publication (print on demand, ebooks, etc.) when it is thick knowledge, and for everything else as a set of web pages (micro-site or blog), or individual, granular bits of content suitable for embed anywhere.
    3. Accelerate co-construction of new, most-current knowledge using peer review to deliver high-quality case studies, strategies, implementation plans, etc.

    How do you crack this? Here are some of the steps:

    1. Benchmark existing knowledge production workflows and identify bottlenecks, using multiple lenses and mixed methods.
    2. In the short term, fix publishing bottlenecks by improving existing systems (software) and performance support (people).
    3. In the longer view, adopt a total quality management (TQM) approach to build ‘scaffolding’ and ‘pipes’ that maximize production, capture, flow, and impact of high-quality, most-current knowledge production, with everything replicated in a centralized, unstructured repository.

    Multiple lenses are needed as no single way of seeing can unravel the complexity of knowledge flows:

    • The lens of complexity: Systems thinking recognizes that we do not need a full understanding of the constituent objects in order to benchmark, analyze, or make decisions to improve processes, outcomes, and quality.
    • The lens of learning: Learning theory provides the framework to map knowledge flows beyond production to dissemination to impact. The co-construction of knowledge provides a ‘deeper’, less fleeting perspective than conventional social media approaches. More pragmatically, a number of tools from learning and development and education research can be used to benchmark.
    • The lens of talent: Staff lose precious time and experience frustration due to duplication of effort, repetitive tasks, and anxiety due to the risk of errors. They may feel overwhelmed by the complexity and intricacies of multiple systems, as well as by the requirement to learn and adapt to each one. Informal learning communities can bring together in the workflow to identify potential, develop competencies, and drive performance. Hiring, on boarding and handover can be used to identify gaps and improve fitness for purpose.
    • The lens of culture: Determinants of quality through print-centric publishing processes are grounded in a rich cultural legacy, for example. Other specialists (IT, comms, etc.) also have their own, overlapping universes. Correct analysis of these and how they interact is indispensable.
    • The lens of total quality management (TQM): This lens includes quality development, business process improvement (BPI), and risk management. It can help both in the initial diagnosis (process maps) and in designing systems and procedures for continual improvement.
    • The lens of IT: Information technology management includes both agile methods as well as traditional requirements-and-specifications. Although such approaches on their own are unlikely to achieve the desired outcomes, their familiarity may facilitate acceptance and usage of the other lenses.

    The remaining pieces of the puzzle involve standards, mixed methods, and deliverables.

    Unified Knowledge Universe
    Unified Knowledge Universe

    Photo: Lenses rainbow (csaveanu/flickr).