Huub Rutten, who is into linguistics, described “listening” to me when we met last November at KM in Europe as “fastening strings on things you already know and then attach them to parts of what someone is telling you.”, while moving his fingers from his own forehead (him being the listener) to mine. Please try and visualize this for a sec, while I try to explain why I think this is a powerful picture.
First of all it places the listener at the center of the action, or indeed the conversational universe, and not the storyteller. It is a picture where the storyteller is not pushing information at me, but where I as the listener deliberately pick up parts of the ‘audio-stream’ (no disrespect to the story teller meant here) based on how it relates to what I already know or think to know.
The storyteller is ‘merely’ a part of my surroundings that is a source of information (again no disrespect meant). This turns around the classic picture of storytelling, where the public is gathered round the campfire hanging on the storyteller’s lips, and which features the storyteller as broadcaster and the listeners as passive bystanders.
Second, it demonstrates the contextuality of listening. My listening to you is based on my intellectual and emotional context at the time of listening. (In the same way the context of the storyteller determines the packaging of the story) If my context, my mind, is ripe, I will recognize a good idea if it comes along, and otherwise I will not grasp it (probably to my own loss, but nevertheless). Now listening to me is a basic part of every interaction with another individual, even if the interaction is not based on verbal language but e.g. body language. My eyes can listen as well as my ears, which probably turns my definition of listening into the interpretation of my surroundings.
Listening, using the above definition even wider namely also in instances where “surroundings” does not entail any other individual or only
mediated as when reading texts, is then my only road to acquiring new knowledge. The storyteller, or the environment in general, gives me information, and my listening turns it into personal knowledge, by the act of placing the information into the pre-existing context of my mind.
Summarizing listening has at its core the concepts of action ( I decide the things I pick out of a story), contextuality (only within my personal context does what I listen to gain value) and knowledge acquisition (the value gained from listening).
Now on to the next post where I intend to use this in demonstrating the role of blogs in knowledge sharing.

Our company recently acquired CAB as a partner. We are currently teaming up people from both companies who work in the same areas of expertise, encouraging them to share info, and discuss clients and projects together. A colleague of mine, whom I introduced to blogging recently, has now suggested to give these intercompany-teams a blog to jot their references and thoughts down. Hopefully we’ll see this idea through to implementation in the coming weeks.

Everybody I guess sometimes ponders questions like “what is it I want to do?”, “where do I want to stand in five years?”, “what exactly are my capabilities and will I be able to use them in the next project?”. This is especially so in an environment where what you actually do is quite abstract, and the competences you bring into the project probably even more so.
Anyway, as I see me employing myself some time these are the kind of questions to answer to decide what this self-employed me should bring to the market. Yesterday I met for lunch with my former employer, with whom I keep in regular contact, and it turned out that between us we know a lot more people that want to answer the same questions from their respective professional perspectives.
This leads me to the idea to spent a few sessions with these people to play around with these questions using a handful of philosophical thinking schemes. I have tried this a few times before and it always yielded answers and new questions I hadn’t thought of before. With thinking schemes like deconstruction, transcendentalism, phenomenology, dialectics and hermeneutics we might get a foot in the door of these questions.
A book in Dutch on this was written by Paul Wouters, director of the International School of Philosophy in Leusden, ISVW.

Later this month I will give our junior researchers a course in these thinking methods, to boost their competences in assessing the research questions put to us by customers.

Last Thursday I spent a great day in Brussels contributing to a project that will produce a good practice guide to KM for SME’s. This takes place under the flag of CEN/ISSS. There are five items in the guide, that is due to appear in Octobre:

Terminology

Frameworks

Measurement

Implementation in SME’s

Culture
I have taken up interest in the items on measurement, implementation and culture. The breakout session on culture was a lot of fun, thanks Neill and Manon. The next meetings will be held in May and Octobre, which I will certainly attend. Why not join this project yourself? Especially if you work in a small to medium sized company, run or own one, this is your chance to help set the pace and direction of KM in 25 European countries.
You’re welcome to contribute!

Zones for other languages than english on KnowledgeBoard have been around for some time now. This week a Zone in german was added, called Wissensmanagement und Networking. The last word being as german as can be of course 😉
This is of interest to me as I live near the German border and have several contacts in other german speaking countries like Austria, Switzerland and Liechtenstein as well. Hope it turns out as a source for meeting new people with great ideas. Go check it out, or better: Geh schnell hin und schau nach!

Lilia Efimova points me to a new blog by Andy Boyd with the explicit goal to try and find out how blogs might be useful in commercial surroundings:
Here as part exploratory and as part of our KM research program I will be keeping a blog and asking my colleagues and others to come in and comment on it’s use for commercial companies employees – our main purpose is to assess is this a tool by which we can share knowledge. 10 years ago I was skeptical about whether we could apply CoPs within industry and now after riding high on our success with them, this is yet another KM process to explore
I promised Denham Grey to start a discussion here on the use of blogs as a knowledge sharing tool, as we seem to have opposing views on this. Will have to honor that promise soon! Lilia ends her reference to Andy with mentioning The Tipping Point and wonders if it will happen to blogs as well.
Ross Mayfield links to the same thing: two references, a sign for me to go explore.