Reprising a role in a previous life at Bellanet.org, I gave a presentation last week in Maputo to the Knowledge Sharing (KS) community within the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR). Actually it started out that way but because the CGIAR’s Annual General Meeting is such a confluence of actors and agendas, the KM workshop was combined with another workshop organised by the Global Forum on Agricultural Research (GFAR) and the Commonwealth of Learning (CoL) focused on agricultural education and farmer to farmer learning through collaboration.
You may already have a sense of the complex and acronym-friendly environment of the workshop. My job was to open the workshop with a talk about how our understanding of knowledge sharing has evolved over the last ten years. You can see the presentation on slideshare.net. FWIW, it is my first presentation since reading Presentation Zen.
https://www.slideshare.net/ssong/how-connectedness-changes-everything-including-knowledge-management-presentation?type=powerpoint
My talk built on many of the ideas in Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody. I tried to get across the idea that the impact of connectedness eclipses in scale the substantial changes that we have seen since the beginning of the industrial revolution. This was well-received by some and others felt that it was taking too technological a slant on knowledge. It is hard to not talk about technology when it is the key enabler but connectedness is not really a technological issue, it is an essentially human issue. Connectedness offers the possibility of increased human connection, conversation, innovation, knowledge creation, call it what you like. It increases the possibility of talking to that one person who is holding the piece of the puzzle that you want to solve.
As we came to the end of the workshop, we had a closing circle in which each participant had the opportunity to reflect on what they were taking away from the workshop. By coincidence, twenty minutes earlier I saw a tweet from @whiteafrican pointing out a recent essay by Paul Graham on the future of large organisations. Graham argues that we may be seeing the end of the dominance of large organisations because, in the connected world, it is impossible for them to be nimble enough to compete with start-ups. He suggests that a start-up mentality is increasingly the norm, at least in the high tech sector in the U.S.
In the closing circle, I made the point that perhaps, in spite of the tirelesss and inspiring efforts of the likes of Enrica Porcari, Simone Staiger-Rivas, and others, the CGIAR is like a huge supertanker that even vast forces can only turn a tiny bit at a time. I wondered aloud whether the supertanker nature of the CGIAR meant that it was increasingly out of place in the world we live in now.
Someone in the group piped up that some pirates ought to hijack that supertanker. Everyone laughed… but after reading Paul Graham’s essay, I think this is exactly what the CGIAR needs. It needs some agile agricultural researchers to start forming smaller startups that threaten the work that it does, that hijack some of its work, and shakes up some of the inevitable inertia of a large organisation like the CGIAR.
In fairness, this assessment is based on a one and half day workshop in which I gained a necessarily imperfect sense of the challenges the CGIAR is dealing with and how well it is succeeding. Just my impressions.
Excellent post. I agree with much of it. I also think small organizations can now act like very large organizations but in much more agile ways. – I’ve heard the term micronational being used on occasion. That is to say small organizations can use such communications to link, share etc. to other colleagues in any part of the world in very inexpensive ways that in the past was only possible for larger companies who could afford to carry out a global operation. The other bit I often hear from commentators within Silicon Valley is that more and more startups don’t seek venture capital because the startup costs have become so low especially when it comes to infrastructure costs.
Hi Steve,
I took a look through your presentation – you did a great job of taking a lot of Garr Reynolds points to heart! It is very slick. I wanted to let you know about SlideRocket, if you haven’t heard of us already (www.sliderocket.com). We help you make great presentations, with a full set of authoring tools, plus the ability to manage, share, deliver, and track your presentations. I’d love to see what you could do with this presentation in SlideRocket. Please give it a try, if you are so inclined, and let us know what you think! One of the best places to give us feedback is on our UserVoice forum here: http://sliderocket.uservoice.com/.
Please let me know if you have any questions, and I look forward to seeing you on SlideRocket!
Take care,
Tracy
SlideRocket
@Michael. Thanks. I am curious about the term micronational. I googled a bit but came up with a confusing array of links. Could you point me somewhere?
@Tracy. SlideRocket looks interesting. I tried it out but it is just too slow to work online on something like that from where I am in South Africa. One day.
Hi Steve,
Good of you for pointing this out. The correct term is micro-multinational. My mistake. I first heard about it in an IT conversations interview podcast with C.K Prahalad of ‘Bottom of the Pyramid’ fame. He references it in his book ‘The Future of Competition’ here – http://tinyurl.com/5wdl35. Also I found a great opinion essay about it in Forbes Magazine here – http://tinyurl.com/6yj759
I like the term.
Steve,
thanks you for sharing your thoughts about our workshop. The thing that most worries me is that the change process of the CGIAR will lead us to an even more centralized organization. The rational was that we (the 15 centers) were actually like smallboats in the ocean and that we didn’t really float in the same direction. The thing that the change process teams couldn’t figure out is how to become a well coordinated networked organization. Are there successful examples out there?
Steve,
thanks a lot for joining our efforts in Maputo.
Your presentation was truely inspirational. The power of conversations resonated a lot with me!
Now on the subject of supertanker or smallboats, you may enjoy reading my post on Starfish or Spider…http://ictkm.wordpress.com/2008/09/10/the-starfish-and-the-spider/. Similar thoughts but using a different imagery.
I join the group of those who worry that the CGIAR might be turning more and more into a spider!
One of the things I took back from the workshop was a confirmation that unless organizations such as the CGIAR and FAO, who are considered major centres of knowledge generation and use for agricultural progress, accelerate change in the flow and absorption of knowledge within their organization and with the outside world, they will soon be obsolete and doomed to become irrelevant.
Both these organizations have recently initiated change, as they say, of their management. The focus of this change in the CGIAR has been on how it relates to its donors rather than how it enables generation, free flow and use of knowledge. In fact this whole area has been neglected.
What worries me is that in spite of demand expressed by a large number of stakeholders to agricultural progress and development there has not been any explicit plan or even a statement on how the CGIAR will reorganize its knowledge system, its governance of knowledge or the processes through which it will generate new information and knowledge, enable its flow within its 15 international centres and with the outside world and most importantly enable efficient use of outputs such as information, technology and new skills from the CGIAR.
One of the aims of the workshop at Maputo was to look at how knowledge sharing and exchange within and outside these ”supertanker” organizations can be a part of the continuum where agricultural communities can be equal partners in collective learning for agricultural innovation. I hope discussions such as these contribute to furthering this perspective.
A question however arises after the Workshop. Can change in these organizations be expected to be brought about by “pirates” who have no respect for existing norms for knowledge sharing and exchange and will try something new or by those who are on the watch of these supertankers and tied down by a host of organizational structures?
One of the most revealing insights about KM for me came from Steve Denning back in 2002 or so. He said that organisations don’t embrace KM unless threatened with extinction. I have yet to see this contradicted. The challenge with the CGIAR is that no matter how much donors complain about the CGIAR, they haven’t really got a better plan and agricultural research is too important to abandon. So while the pressure may be on, I wonder ultimately how seriously it is taken.
But things are changing. The power of the Internet in enabling self-organisation means that if I were a Internet-savvy and somewhat entrepreneurial agricultural researcher who had recently entered the CG system, I might consider banding together with some similarly-minded researchers and try and carve off a piece of the CGIAR research agenda for myself. It would have to be a fairly biggish chunk as most donors in this space don’t deal in small amounts. But why not? That is what I meant by pirates but who knows there may be other kinds.
In order to really change the CGIAR, needs to feel threatened for its very livelihood. In order for that to happen, there needs to be competition. Perhaps if we just got the NARS some decent bandwidth, some interesting things might start to happen.
But there I go talking about technology again. Connect people, start conversations, and interesting things happen. Simple but not simplistic.