KM & Communications

SlideShare presentation on the future of communication and social media

The following story was developed for an Africa healthcare organisation in order to give people a picture of “where we are” following interviews conducted in the discovery phase of a change project. The story is designed as a point of feedback and reflection and is deliberately left as a cliff-hanger in the African storytelling tradition; what happens next is dependent on the listeners who are challenged to tell the rest of the story. In old Africa, these stories are called African Dilemma Tales. Such stories may be allegorical – many of the things described may not actually have happened and the characters might not be real. The story is designed to create a shared understanding that we are all involved in a process and that our values, attitudes and beliefs create the experience of the complex system we call an organisation. The story also allows us to talk about complex realities in a new way.

African drums and drumming circles are often used for teambuilding and end of year functions in corporations...They are interesting in that it gets participants aware that there are ways of communicating other than voice. We often use African musical instruments in workshops where we ask participants to communicate a message to other individuals and the group just by using the instrument (no talking allowed!) then we try and decode with voice what the message might have been. Have you ever thought of using African rhythms in facilitation work?

The mission of K4Health is to increase the use and dissemination of evidence-based, accurate and up-to-date information to improve health service delivery and health outcomes worldwide. CKM4Health's current knowledge management activities include:

• Collectively developing “toolkits” of up-to-date and evidence-based resources that make information easy to find and easy to use;

• Adapting existing toolkit knowledge resources for local and regional use;
• Developing new toolkit resources—articles, guides, curricula, fact sheets, job aids, and eLearning courses;
• Encouraging feedback about toolkit resources through discussion boards;
• Sponsoring global, regional, and country-level forums;
• Providing free online and offline eLearning courses on a variety of health topics; and
• Supporting virtual networks among health care professionals, communities of practice, and technical working groups.

Our lives, our cultures, are composed of many overlapping stories. Novelist Chimamanda Adichie tells the story of how she found her authentic cultural voice -- and warns that if we hear only a single story about another person or country, we risk a critical misunderstanding.

About Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Inspired by Nigerian history and tragedies all but forgotten by recent generations of westerners, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novels and stories are jewels in the crown of diasporan literature.

The KM and communications SIG wants you to think about this question:

What do you know now that you wish you had known when you were 18?

In this SIG project, we'll co-operate to find ways of creating and communicating compelling stories about this question to African Youth in a way that is meaningful and life-changing. We will use electronic media to distribute the campaign so your ideas for video, posters, banners and designed rituals are possible.

To Co-operate Add comments under this post to this SIG. We are also looking for designers and movie makers to submit their ideas.

Audience 16-30year old from all over Africa.

Media Video, radio, posters, banners, web media (.jpg, .pdf .txt (stories))

Language English, French, Portuguese, Arabic

Postmodernism is a term used by philosophers, social scientists, art and social critics to refer to aspects of contemporary art, culture, economics and social conditions that are the result of the unique features of late 20th and early 21st century life. These features include phenomena such as globalisation, consumerism, branding, the fragmentation of authority, and the knowledge economy. An important characteristic of postmodernism is that we now have myriad different symbols and metaphors through which we can view the world – these include politics, religion, consumerism, science, art etc... Anything that cannot be physically sensed, such as social justice or one's concept of God, must be referred to by metaphor and symbol. The result is that meaningful communication about issues such as families, politics, sexuality, crime & violence without the use of shared metaphors and symbols is impossible. Some common metaphors in use today include:

• Religion and God

AIDA or AIDAS is an acronym used in marketing that describes a common list of phases in the purchasing cycle. When you are marketing a product or service, ensure you provide points of contact for customers during these phases:

• A - Attention (or Awareness): attract the attention of the customer/market.

• I - Interest: raise interest by focusing on and demonstrating advantages and benefits (instead of focusing on features)
• D - Desire: convince customers/market that they want and desire the product or service and that it will satisfy their needs.
• A - Action: lead customers/market towards taking action and/or purchasing.
• S - Satisfaction: satisfy the customer with the goal of them becoming repeat customers who give referrals to a product or service

Semiotics (also called semiotic studies or semiology) is the study of sign processes (semiosis), or signification and communication, signs and symbols, both individually and grouped into sign systems. It includes the study of how meaning is constructed and understood. One attempt to formalize the field was notably led by the Vienna Circle and presented in their International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, in which the authors agreed on breaking the field, which they called "semiotic", into three branches:

• Semantics: Relation between signs and the things they refer to, their denotata.

• Syntactics: Relation of signs to each other in formal structures.
• Pragmatics: Relation of signs to their impacts on those who use them.

A number of research projects have suggested key areas to attend to if you are interested in improving the level of the service that you provide. These models suggest that of good customer service includes Responsiveness, Assurance, Tangibles, Empathy and Reliability or RATER for short. While there are commonly acceptable meanings for these terms, it is important that organisational participants be provided an opportunity to create their own definitions and meanings specifically in the context of your organisation.

Responsiveness means:

• Prompt service to customers

• Willingness to help customers
• Readiness to respond to customers' requests
• Going out of the way to make customers happy
• And specifically in our organisation, responsiveness means to perform well on ________________________

Assurance means:

• Employees who instill confidence in customers

• Making customers feel safe in their transactions
  

We oftentimes tend to focus on the latest technologies and Gizmos but all too often the person behind the technology - you - is overlooked. It seems that while the education system is reasonably good at telling you about the world around you, it is not terribly effective about teaching you about yourself and what happens in your brain/mind/body/nervous system. Therefore, I believe that a study of thinking skills should form part of each PKM practitioner's personal growth plan.

I have taught thinking skills to a variety of audiences over the years ranging from school children to engineers and boards of directors in listed companies through our thoughtformz thinking skills project - the course outline includes: