This is Edwin k Morris, and you are about to embark on the
next Pioneer Knowledge Services because you need to know a digital
resource for you to listen to folks share their experience and
knowledge around the field of knowledge management and nonprofit work. If your company or organization would
like to help us continue this mission and sponsor one of our shows, email, b y n t k@pioneerkss.org, everyone, we are going to listen to how a
picture puzzle of action and innovation all came together to create something
that I think you're gonna find very interesting. First, we're
gonna go around the horn. We've got three guests today. We're gonna talk to each one of them
and figure out what exactly happened and what's going on, and what's in the future for what
you're about to find out about. Uh, Doug Smith, please. You're up first. Hello everyone. My name is Doug. I live in the beautiful Hudson
Valley region of New York, and I'm delighted to be here with
Edwin and the others because I've spent a lot of time in my life trying to help
people figure out how to make their best future happen. So you're like, you're a
counselor or something? Uh. I try to be a friend. Just a
friend and a colleague. . Okay. Yost. Hello, Edwin. Uh, everyone.
My name is Yost Visser. I am co-founder c e o of Connects, which is a company based out
of Russels, Belgium, Europe. Delighted that we are partnering
with Doug and Ed, and the strategic, doing networks to help people
collaborate and innovate not only in a face-to-face setting, but also in,
uh, in what we call a hybrid setting. So both on and offline and. Thank you. Alright, ed Morrison,
tell me what you got going on there. I'm Ed Morrison and Doug. I'm
leading, uh, strategic doing networks. I'm coming to you from
Greenville, South Carolina, and I've spent most of my professional
life trying to figure out how people collaborate when nobody can tell
anybody else what to do. Hmm. So that's what I've been focused on. Have. You guys seen that? That happens a lot. Yeah. Well, collaboration is a process,
Edwin. It's a process of innovation. It's not a thing, it's not an event,
and it's not a single skill, actually, it's a portfolio of skills and we
don't really teach that with skills. That's where I focused. Yeah. Collaboration. Let's all define that,
Doug. What's collaboration? Two. Or more people working together
towards some shared purpose. Wow, that sounds pretty easy.
Why is that so hard? Well. Uh, one of the reasons. Hold on, hold on. Let me just back up here because
we're not talking about operations by committee, right? So anybody that's worked in an academic
framework understands that pain point that when you got the
more hands in the pie, it's almost pulls back
the activity to a bit, it loses some energy. How do
you find a balance to that? Let me jump in on that. I think
part of the challenge, I'll, I'll define collaboration
first of all. In, in my mindset is it's a creative
process of, uh, recombinant innovation. In other words, creating things that no individual partner
can do by themselves using the assets they already have. Hmm. And it's a
process among equal partners. That's, that's part of the challenge
is that it requires, I think, and Doug can amplify this, but it does require us to develop new
skills and behaviors to really be good at it. Well, it's interesting because
we're talking about the behaviors, and there's two points to this, is that,
one, you've got individual behaviors, then you've got group
behavior in a collaborative environment. You have, and this is me
speaking here, you guys shoot it up. You have to have a expectation of
behavior that everybody's gonna play. There's gotta be an engagement
in kind of a rule set, or at least some general common Yes.
Themes that everybody's agreeing to. Correct. Definitely. True. Yeah. You have to, you have
to be very explicit about this. This has to be, you. You can't just jump
into this assuming that everybody's, uh, got a shared purpose or assuming that
everybody's gonna behave in ways that build trust and mutual respect. That's
not necessarily the case in many, many situations. So you really have to
be explicit in setting these things up. Is that where most collaboration fails? Well is they don't build
the container first. One place it does fail is first
of all two things. First of all, most collaborations happen among people
who are already busy. Hmm. Secondly, there's a common well-intentioned
step that's taken that can get you into trouble, which is establishing those expectations
or what are often called norms. People will list out 12, 15, 20 things. And so they don't even give themselves
a chance to sort of repeatedly practice one or two things. Yeah. I think that's a very good
point, which is that, uh, collaborations emerge out of a set of
simple rules rather than complex rules. And so part of this is flattening the
hierarchical structures that usually come into a room. You've got power
differentials that are playing out here, and you've got default behavior. You've got habits that people have in
terms of how they interact in a group. And oftentimes those habits
are dysfunctional. You know, those are the things that
really undercut a collaboration. So is it a key ingredient that
you have to have a leader? I. Believe you do, but the key here is
at the beginning of a collaboration, it's useful to have a leader, especially if the leader knows only
the team can succeed or fail. Not, not any single person. And the leader is committed to over
time building shared leadership. I. Would put it a little bit differently. I would say that I like the
term guide instead of leader, simply because in a collaboration,
you're kind of on a path, you're on a journey here. And, uh, so
you do need a guide. The evolution, emergence of distributed leadership
is really a key element of collaboration. You start to see, you know, a distributed power within
that group in an equal sharing. I'd like to add another
perspective on collaboration. Is, is that one plus one
equals three or five or, or 11 as opposed to individuals
working together in a team. The added value synergies that are
created by trusting each other, by sharing assets is a very important
aspect for collaboration in my point of view. So everything you guys are talking
about sounds pretty easy in the idea that creating a shared understanding
of why we're here and what we're doing. Sounds, sounds pretty easy, but in historical perspective
of my own experience, that's not very common when you
walk into an organization or a team that anybody tells you that. I'm gonna challenge you on that.
It's, it's simple. It sounds simple, but it's not easy. , it
sounds simple, but it's not easy. And that's because it requires
new behaviors and skills. Yeah. And this is not easy. New
habits are not easy to form. It takes perseverance, it takes
focus, it takes discipline. And when you're in a group
of 6, 7, 8 people in a team, same problem, same challenge. You've
gotta build a shared discipline. And this is critical. Yeah. Let me, if I could, Edwin,
just to add to that, you see, one of the reasons it's difficult
is that in certain contexts, and with respect to
certain purposes and goals, actually hierarchy is better
than collaboration. Hmm. That's to be really clear, Edwin, if you were to fall and need stitches
and you went to the emergency room and you got an intern, uh, and
there's an attending resident there, you kind of want the resident to be
telling the intern exactly what to do. . So. This, right. So, so the part of the complexity in
this is knowing when Yeah. Uh, the kind of collaboration we're
talking about is needed. Yeah. In order to succeed at purposes and goals
and stuff versus when it's not needed. Because if it's not needed and then we
all get together and try to make each other feel good and everything, it's
a disaster. It's a waste of time. Let me prompt Doug, because he's got a really clever way
to assess when it's needed and when it's not needed. So, Doug, keep
going a little bit further. Sure. The beauty of collaboration
and when it's needed, we have a group of people who confront
something that has parts to it they don't know how to do. Again, if everybody knows how to do
what each individual needs to do, then why not have hierarchy, why not
have a boss, a, a leader, a guide? Again, any of that is fine. Yeah.
Just saying, you do this, you do this, you do this, you already know
how to do it. Come on, gang. That doesn't mean you don't have good
conversation. Try to help one another. But that's way different
than a situation where, let's say the four of us face something
that we don't fully know how to do. My goodness. We better
figure it out together. At least those parts that we don't know. There's gotta be a, a piece missing in order to
create the reason why we're collaborating. So the, the puzzle
piece is missing for some reason. And if it's a knowledge or skill
or attributes, that's one thing. But if it's a mechanical piece, if
it's an external thing that's still, it requires a collaborative effort
to try to figure out what's missing. I'll go even further than that because
increasingly we're confronting problems that are intertwined. You know,
you really can't pull 'em apart. And you can think of everything from
trying to solve a complex problem that requires a collaboration
with your partners to, uh, everything to climate
change and things like that. So there's a set of really
challenging problems that we're confronting that we can't
use our traditional approach to solve. We have to experiment. We have to figure out how do
we get better results in our current situation? How do we solve this?
How do we generate a solution to this? 'cause there are many, many different solutions that creates
two dimensions here of problems and the complexity. And going
back to your question, one is that the problem itself can't
untangle it. You know, it's not, it's not easily untangled. You just have to experiment and figure
out how we can get better results. The second is, you gotta
work with people to do that. So the collaboration itself is complex.
Mm-hmm. . So you're doing, you're managing two dimensions
of complexity all at once. And you can easily get distracted and
easily default back to old behaviors and all of that. That's why it's not easy.
It sounds simple, but it's not easy. So I've got two questions
for everybody at the table. Is collaboration equal to
marriage? Oh, oh, oh. Oh. That's good. Who's gonna
step into that pie? . No, I, I think, I think
that there's, you know, to to, to have a successful
merits, I think, you know, the skillset that you need for good
collaboration, , that is a, is absolute necessity. You know,
you need to be able to listen. You need to give and take, you need to
share your assets. You know, if it's, it's a hierarch, you know, hierarchical
marriage is more like a kind of bondage. There's lots of similarities there. You know, there are, there
definitely are. And, uh, Edwin, I'm going to do something here that
I'll try to explain for the wonderful listeners out there. Okay.
But it's another aspect of
marriage or relationships, uh, that your question
really is crucial to that. We have friends or we've
experienced ourselves, et cetera. We know of other people who have
difficult relationships. The often the, the term is dysfunctional relationships.
And so in marriage, you know, there's a whole group of people out
there called marriage counselors. One of the things that they do, and
they do well and they try to do, is they try to get people to sort of talk
to one another. Listen to one another. Yeah. And if you think about it, what's really going on is
they're trying to reset the way the relationship is supposed
to work. So right now, for all the listeners out there, I
have a rubber band on two thumbs, and I'm stretching the rubber band. And that's what happens in a
marriage counseling relationship. They set some new guides, like those simple rules and things
like that in a very fraught, difficult, dysfunctional relationship. The couple leave the marriage counselor
and within 24 hours or 48 hours, one of them makes a mistake, does something that is reflective and
the rubber band just snaps back. Mm-hmm. . So I think people can
learn from this by, by giving mm-hmm. some slack to others as
they maybe make a mistake with some of those simple rules and not
immediately jump on them. The other thing I would say is the kind
of collaborations that we're talking about are not marriage.
Mm-hmm. , this is not a lifelong
commitment to another person
with, which is a very, very, very rich and deep and wonderful
experience, but, but a difficult one. We're talking about trying
to get something done in
our busy lives that can make a difference, that leads to an innovation. I'm gonna amp off of, uh, what Doug just said and talk about
how do we actually do that? Well, we do that through our conversations.
And so dysfunctional relationships, you can characterize
dysfunctional relationships
by the pattern of conversation that, that they've designed and guided.
And some of it's just reflexive. You react, you know, you get angry or. Lack, lack, lack of conversation. Or lack of conver Yeah. Sitting. Opposite each other. Or misinterpretation or mis
Right. A misinterpret or. Just repeating the same old, same old
conversations. Oh, we can never do that. Oh, that's impossible. Oh, that
person won't ever listen. Right. So the conversation, one of the things we've learned in
years of doing this is that, uh, collaborations emerge from conversations
with a very predictable structure to them. Mm-hmm. , if you
understand that structure, you can, you can improve your skills
at building collaboration, but it requires practice. It's like learning to swim or learning
to play the violin or whatever. The. Learning aspect you keep going
back to, I hear listening, learning that requires an
inquisitive mind and a lifelong learner mindset. Oh yeah. Alright.
So do we just hire those folks? Do you just not hire the guy, the
folks that won't play or won't learn, or they're like, yep, I know
enough, I'm good. How do you, how do you weeded out those folks
that are not participating? Well. Quick story. Many years ago I worked
with the c e o of a Fortune 500 company. A wonderful guy, good friend.
When we started working together, he really believed that the only way that
his company could succeed is if he had extraordinary people.
And I used to say, Steve, you have about a thousand
people working for you. Can you help me understand
how all thousand of 'em
are gonna be extraordinary? So we started changing our
conversation to getting extraordinary contributions out of ordinary
people. Ah, and by ordinary, this was not a condemnation. Yeah, no.
Most of us are ordinary, so please, that's not what I meant. But
I did mean the other thing, which is it was an illusion that you
could just have all extraordinary people, you know, famous Lake Wobegon
series. All the people, uh, in that part of Minnesota
were extraordinary . Yeah. I think, I think part of the challenge here is to
understand that everybody has gifts and a lot of the behaviors
that our organizations, uh, communities have, have
engendered, tends to shut down. People tends to shut
down those conversations, tends to shut down those situations
where we can share our gifts. I prefer to think about this
as learned behavior. Yeah. This is learned behavior, and we need a new if in this world
of networks and complex problems, we need a new set of behaviors
mm-hmm. . And we need to help each other
build these habits together. One of the things we've learned about
collaboration is there's a variety of skills to it. And nobody's good at all
of 'em. Nobody's good at all of 'em. So you need a team to really be good. And Edwin, that just
reminds me of another trap. Hold, hold on, Doug. Okay.
Yoss was gonna jump in. I wanted to bring in the, the
cultural dimension of collaboration. How some cultures, let's say foster
collaboration a lot more than others. And, uh, what what's interesting
is, is, uh, you know, this is something I learned recently
that, uh, at and and duck, they, they became French college,
uh, in, in same studies, which sub-Saharan African studies, which I think from a sort of cultural
point of view, clever point of view, it's, it's quite striking Absolutely. That
you ended up on the same path. And, and with that, with
that kind of dimension. That's an interesting point. Well, you know, when I taught high school in West
Africa when I was 20 years old, uh, one of the things I quickly learned in
the culture was the word participate. Uh, so for example, if you were
hitching a ride in a land rover, as you went down the road toward the
Capitol, it was about 150 mile drive. There would be people asking to, to get
a ride. And every time somebody came in, it was participate, which mean
move over and make room. Uh, so oftentimes by the time
I got down to the coast, I had about one square
centimeter to sit on. And that was all about the culture of
participate, which it was very, very, uh, meaningful to me and has,
uh, uh, influenced my work. That whole civil structure that, uh, that social construct doesn't
seem to be reflected well in a capitalistic mindset. A capitalistic mindset as we've come
to know it in the last 30 or 40 years. That's true. But you know, this whole notion of the individual
being supreme really is misplaced in many ways. And, and, you know,
I fault the economists among us, my colleagues who are economists, because they've given us a very narrow
view of what a market economy should look like. Part of the challenge, I
think, in understanding this, is that we can design market economies
differently to tie together what the point I'm making now. And with Yost, an African-American entrepreneurial
ecosystem operates differently than a predominantly white ecosystem.
This is an important insight, is that because there are communal values
in the African American community that come into play that oftentimes we tend
to, in predominant white community, we tend to focus on the sole
entrepreneur, the hero, you know, in fact mm-hmm. , no entrepreneur has been successful
without a team and without, uh, support and without, frankly,
without a government, what I call a civic economy that
supports the market economy. And so this is a important distinction. That kind of sit opposite of what
most media represents in the hero complex of the Lone Ranger, or, you know, all those icons out there that are,
it's just me. I'm, that's right. I'm doing every, I'm Rambo, I'm gonna
fix everything. I'm gonna, whatever. So. But that's, that's part of the culture,
right? It's, it's the lone hero, the the one that we aspire
to, you know, to be, and, and that is gonna fix all our
problems. That's the myth. It's a myth of entrepreneurship. I mean, we've seen the myth of an entrepreneurship
unfortunately have disastrous results with the Titan Implosion. You know, it's the notion that an individual can
strip away all government regulation and be innovative. You know, that's not
really the case in this country. Many of our innovations,
including internet, G p s, all of that has come from a collaboration
between government and the private sector. Mm-hmm. . So it's a much more complex story than
we want to share in the public media or. Talking about innovation
and entrepreneurship, because everyone always speaks about
startup scale-ups and then coming really, really big. And, and, and speaking
about the, the funding challenge, but it's not only about access to
funding. It's, it's very often, uh, innovative companies fail because the, the loan entrepreneur that starts the
company actually lacks the skills and capabilities to take it to the next level. And doesn't have the mindset to understand
that this is a collaborative effort, it's a team effort that
therefore, therefore fails. Sometimes it's that ego and
control mechanism that says, I have to do everything because
it's, it's my baby. You know, versus being able to
distribute leadership. Let's wrap this up in
a different direction. So in the world of knowledge management,
we work with three main functions, people, process and
technology. Now, of the people, process and technology bucket, what
brings you three cats together? Well, I, I would argue that all
three of 'em do. Uh, you know, part of what we've been
doing is understanding that
Doug's work over the last 30, 40 years aligns very closely with
my work over the last 30, 40 years. But in order to, uh, share what we have in terms of what
we've learned in terms of people and process, we do need to
leverage technology. We do need to create peer to peer
groups that are learning from each other because this is a continuous process
of adaptation. Mm-hmm. . And so that's, I think what's brought
all three of us together is this, uh, exciting moment in time. Edwin. Just to underscore what Ed just said, it's important for everybody
to remember all systems are sociotechnical. Even if Edwin, you are a coder who codes
code that then is coding, it's still sociotechnical. You
did the original code, by the way, an explosive realization over the last
three to five years in machine learning and artificial intelligence. Intelligence. Increasingly the scientists
and the coders involved, many of whom probably did not
have a liberal arts education. That's not a criticism, it's an
observation. have come to say, well, wait a second, where do human beings
fit into this? Mm-hmm. . Well. You, you look at just
digital transformation. Hold on, lemme, lemme bring the techno
guy in here, Mr. Technology. Well. One of my favorite phrases, it's,
it is not about the, the technology, it's about people. And it's, it's exactly what what Duck was saying
is that technology is designed by a person with, with a certain
functionality in, in mind. And, and if you have no understanding
of the concept of collaboration, how are you gonna design a collaboration
platform? This is what what Ed has, has, has mentioned many
times before. The, the, the Connects platform
was actually, is one, was not just a group of tech
guys getting together and let's, let's design collaboration platform. Our founding partners were people
with a private sector background, public sector, background,
of course also the tech. You need to have the tech capabilities.
If we were to create this thing, what would it look like based on
our understanding of collaboration, our needs as leaders of different,
uh, networks. And, and therefore it's, it's a very, very different approach and, and it led to a different outcome than
having a more one-sided view on it. And this is the whole point
about collaboration. If, if, if you are designing something in tech,
you need to make sure that you have, you know, diverse group of people
that can help you co-design it. Edwin, just to tie that back to your original
question about knowledge management from the very beginning of talk
about knowledge management, which goes back to the late
eighties, early nineties, the kind of picture that people
mostly talked about was this thing where you'd be able to go
into some system and get the perfect answer to whatever question that
you have. Mm-hmm. . And it turns out, of course, that if you're actually up against
something that does require collaboration, uh, up against trying to figure out
things that you don't know how to do, as we talked about before, no, you can't design and implement
such a system because language is ambiguous, and unless you have some other people
to help you understand the words, the language of what you've capped out
of the knowledge management system, you're not gonna know what
to do with them. Yeah. And I, I'm, I'm gonna try to focus on that a
little bit because knowledge itself is knowledge to do what, to act, to
change, to do something with ideally, yeah. I ideally, right, but to change
our situation, get better results, better solutions and knowledge,
that kind of knowledge, uh, large part of it is hidden.
It's tacit knowledge. It's, it's not brought forth by
people until you have a context, until you have a challenge,
until you have a, what we call a framing question
or Doug would call a challenge, then tacit knowledge becomes more
explicit. People say, oh yeah, I know this guy that
might be able to help us, or I have this asset that
might be able to, no. Those are tentacles of
contextual connection, right? Those are things that are ways to
connect and understand comprehension awareness, all those things that create awareness
in a human framework has to be there for that to even make the dot,
the dot connection and to say, Hey, did you know about X over
here? Joe's got this and that, but that requires participation. It goes all back to you're
gonna participate or you're not. And that to me goes back to
the question I asked about, how do you hire for that? I think if organizations got more
critical in letting people go that don't participate, we'd all be. There. Yeah. I would say, not before they've given them every
opportunity to participate, but yes, I understand that when you do
have a person as wonderful, a human being as they are, who
is a true loner or whatever, that can have consequences. And it's
important to recognize those consequences. As Ed said, everybody has something
to offer in most contexts, and it's the job of all of us to try
to tease that out within limits. So, Edwin, I, I don't disagree. I'm gonna share an insight that
I had with one of my mentors, a guy named David Morgan Thaler, who,
who was a big venture capitalist. David's gone now, but, uh, he shared
with me, I said, I talked about this, you know, learn behavior versus, okay,
this is a defective person. I mean, there's children of the lie, you know,
just cannot, cannot tell the truth. That's a very small percentage of the
population. Mm-hmm. , mm-hmm rather
than try to weeded people out. The question is with new hires,
how do we onboard these people? How do we create the environment that the
learning expectation that you're gonna be a full contributor, and that you're
going to learn and share your learning, share your learning, because
that's mm-hmm. , that's the onboarding process that would
have higher leverage than trying to, to weeded out people who don't. Participate. And most organizations
understand that that front end, the front gate that brings people in
is the most critical as far as I think, that engage in participant of
the organization. But to me, 98% of the organizations I've
been through don't do that. Well. Yeah, I agree. And they don't,
uh, you know, in my experience, they don't teach people the expectations
around collaboration. Mm-hmm. , you know, what, what,
what kinds of behavior do we expect here? Instead, you're, here are the
forms that you need to fill out. Here are the process. Here's. Sign this, here's a three ring binder
on our safety stuff, blah, blah. Go, go work, work, work. . It's a huge, huge responsibility for the organization
in terms of their hiring processes and, and talent acquisition
and recognizing the, the importance of cognitive
diversity. If you, if you only recruit people that
are exactly like you, you will not, you will not get the best, uh, the
best outcomes. That's one aspect. But also the example that Doug was
giving, this may be people that are, you know, cognitively diverse
or even neurodiverse. So, so you need to understand
that if they're quiet, it's maybe not because they're not
motivated, but because that's their, their most comfortable state
of beings. As an organization, you have the responsibility to
understand where people sit and what, what the diversity is in for your own
benefit. Because if you do that well, you will get much better results. I'm gonna go around to each one of you. You're gonna put your individual
hat on your anti collaboration hat, and you're gonna say, why
are you in this discussion? What do you bring into this?
And what's the future? Meaning? What's your piece of this
puzzle as you, as an individual? And don't get all tied into
the collaborative strings.
Just, why are you here? And what are you doing, Doug? You're up. I'm here because I was lucky
enough to reconnect with Ed, and I just have a great deal of confidence
that I can learn a ton from him and Yost and others, and that together we can really help
people find their best future and make it happen. Well. That sounds like a great purpose
to be on a planet. Thank you Ghost. I, I think similar to Doug, I, I'm
deeply appreciative of the fact that, that we, we came together with
these complimentary skills and, and sets of experiences with, with a
common purpose, common common vision. It's very, I mean, it's, it's exceptional.
And I'm, I'm I'm very, very happy that this happened. So,
and I'm really looking forward to the, to the next couple of years,
uh, working together. Thank you. Yost. Ed? Well, I'm here because, uh, again, I met both Yost and Doug in the
past year and it's been a remarkable collaboration that's, uh,
emerged out of that interactions. But the primary reason I'm here, I think is because the next generation
of leadership is gonna need these skills. And it's no longer about a theory of
change. It's a practice of change. Both Doug and I have demonstrated
it's possible to transform systems, it's possible to transform organizations
at a large scale. And I think both, uh, Doug and I feel an
obligation to distill and share what we've learned working in the swampy
lowlands of these real world problems. Well, thank you all. I want to ask, who here is brave enough to give me
the definition they have in their head of what knowledge management is. Anybody? I would define it as the, both the use and the creation of
knowledge that makes a difference. I would call it generation and
distribution of knowledge that helps us generate solutions
to these complex problems. Yost. I would say the ability to
turn knowledge into wisdom. And if you manage knowledge well,
it will lead to wisdom. Alright. Well, thank you all for being
here today. It's been a blast. We want to have you back probably next
spring to see where this is all at. All right. We'll do a,
this is our benchmark. We're gonna set the expectation and then
we're gonna check in in a year or so and see what's shaking. Yeah. Sounds
great. Doug. Say goodbye. Bye-bye. Everyone. Thank you. . You have just finished our latest because
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