Communities of Practice, Virality, and Josh Billings

In this last post for the semester, I am going to try and relate the three articles as well as discuss what I (and maybe my classmates) learned.  We may not have internalized it, but at least we saw it. 

I picked up several articles this weekend and put them aside; they just didn’t call to me.   The one about “United Breaks Guitars” (aka “Knowledge and Knowledge Management in the Social Age”) gave me a lot to think about.  The article examines social media’s role in helping to spread ‘information’ in a manner which could be considered ‘viral’. There’s a lot in here.  For example, the article points out that “Research shows that individuals are more likely to receive novel ideas from weak ties (roughly, acquaintances) than from strong ties (close relationships)” which just floors me because selling and buying psychological studies show that people ask their friends for buying recommendations over almost anything else and that is a strong tie relationship.  I had no idea.  Cue Josh Billings quote: 

The trouble with people is not that they don’t know but that they know so much that ain’t so.

Okay, the definition of ‘viral’ wasn’t immediately forthcoming. so I’ll extract something out of the article:

A word-of-mouth cascade is analogous to epidemic models, wherein people who are infected (who receive the message) can pass it to those who are not infected or who do not have the message, hence the term “viral”.

Nor is the definition of ‘fast’ exactly forthcoming; I took it to be something like: “wow, that spread quickly”.  By this point, it should be obvious that this article and discussion could be related to the class comments on the AMTC crisis (see the comments on EB Collier’s excellent post, “Lessons Learned in …“).  I admit, this article had me ‘rat-holing’ (diving into other topics) such as ‘mob mentality’ and ‘crowds & riots’.

So here is a question for you: Given Hara’s discussion on Communities of Practice, which could be extrapolated onto Communities of Interest; does that make a mob a Community of Interest?  It is a mass assembly defined by the Cambridge Dictionary as: “to gather in a large group around someone to express admiration, interest, or anger”.  Discuss.  

Knowledge generally distributes / exchanges in an atmosphere of trust and a community.  I thought that it also transferred well in relationships of strong ties – well, I still do believe that; what else is a Master/Apprentice relationship? – but the comment above about the novel ideas coming from weak ties has me chewing on that thought.  So on to Dr. Lucas, who discusses “The impact of trust and reputation on the transfer of best practices”.  For those of you wondering where the heck I’m going – and I’m not talking about the best ways to virally transfer knowledge about how to make a pipe bomb here – I’m asking could a best practice become ‘viral’?  Szulanski implies that would be hard.  Dr. Lucas writes,

As the trustworthiness increases, it also suggests that both the knowledge acquirer and knowledge provider are willing to be vulnerable to each other’s actions. Knowledge acquirers drop the defensive mechanisms that protect them from making poor decisions and willingly place themselves at risk. That is, knowledge acquirers increase their vulnerability to the actions of knowledge providers (Mayer et al., 1995). Trusting a knowledge source increases the prospect of knowledge transfer, even if the provider has an alternative agenda.

Well, at least the strong tie idea got reinforced.  Lucas goes on to say three things: First, that trust was important to knowledge transfer; second, provider reputation becomes a filter that people (employees) will engage in knowledge transfer with a select group of other employees; and third, recipient reputation is also important to knowledge transfer. That is, people of similar reputation engage in successful knowledge transfer.  Question: if you have a ‘strong tie’ with someone, are those last two items assumed?  Cue Josh Billings again:  

There are lots of people who mistake their imagination for their memory.

Which brings us to rapidly changing, highly charged, competitive environments.  Or highly charged, virally moving, public relations disasters.  Ooo, what about disasters in general?  They are so fast moving, you’d say they were “high velocity”.  Ah, let’s look at, “Nimble knowledge transfer in high velocity/turbulent environments” (HVTE) by Nory B. Jones and John F. Mahon.  They postulate that HVTE require people who have the ability to absorb and adapt tacit knowledge on the fly.  Further, they postulate that

The greater the embedded knowledge base (e.g. the absorptive capacity of people via intense training), the more relevant it is to people in high velocity/turbulent environments. This assumes that people in the field have the ability to access tacit knowledge via something like a real time command center.

I had to spend some time interpreting that one.  What I think they are trying to say is that for people/staff involved in highly fluid situations (and high-tech is full of that) a centralized center, such as a Competitive Intelligence team which holds the real-time knowledge of the marketplace and the competition (who are always building something new or talking about it), is more useful than just a wiki.  Similarly, a centralized disaster management center.  See the excellent post – and commentary – from Carolyne Millsap’s post, “A tale of Two Hurricanes: …”

Wow, this is what I do.  That is so cool.  Cue Josh Billings again:

There is nothing so easy to learn as experience and nothing so hard to apply.

Josh Billings was the pen name of 19th-century American humorist Henry Wheeler Shaw. He was a famous humor writer and lecturer in the United States, perhaps second only to Mark Twain, during the latter half of the 19th century. – Wikipedia

Bibliography

Hemsley, J. & Mason, R. M. (2013). Knowledge and Knowledge Management in the Social Media Age. Journal of Organizational Computing and Electronic Commerce, 23, 138–167. doi: 10.1080/10919392.2013.748614

Lucas, L. M. (2005). The Impact of trust and reputation on the transfer of best practices. Journal of Knowledge Management, 9, 87-101. doi: 10.1108/13673270510610350

Jones, N. B. & Mahon, J. F. (2012). Nimble knowledge transfer in high velocity/turbulent environments. Journal of Knowledge Management, 16, 774–788. doi: 10.1108/13673271211262808

Szulanski, G. (1996). Exploring Internal Stickiness: Impediments to the Transfer of Best Practice Within the Firm. Strategic Management Journal, 17, 27-43.