Fireside Chat

By : Ralf Sibande with Steve & Eugenie Banhegyi

Note: this article is written using the perspective of Zulu leadership and knowledge systems.

The western business leadership education model provides comprehensive and detailed information in myriad specialist fields but fails to emphasise a holistic and integrative approach to human development in the context of working life. This lack of a holistic approach causes a problematic discontinuity between the experience of home/community life and the world of work where the all-important ‘soft skills’ of interpersonal behaviour are rarely reflected upon.

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 term information processing is used equally in information technology, psychology and the neurosciences to describe brain processes. In psychology, it refers to the operations by which people mentally manipulate what they learn and know about the world and information technology talks about information processing as the efforts to understand how we take in, process, access and store new information.

The brain’s purpose is to integrate information about the outside world together with information from inside the body. The purpose of this, as some have suggested, is to predict the future. To anticipate and engage with change in an adaptive way. Consciousness consists of monitor images of the inner and outer worlds; it can be seen as a container for the representation of all experiences.

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

Many researchers – and their advisors on research method – adopt a doctrine called empiricism, which claims that researchers may only use empirical methods. This restrictive doctrine impoverishes any academic discipline where it is dominant. The main reason is that a discipline only qualifies for the status of a science after it has progressed beyond empirical generalisations to explanatory theories; but although empirical methods are useful for discovering the former, they are inherently useless for creating the latter. So the empiricist doctrine retards scientific progress. Researchers should be aware of this danger, and research methodologists should attempt to counter it.

Introduction

Here is an interesting fact: In America, a billion is a thousand million written thus 1,000,000,000

However, in England, the British define a billion as a million million. That is 1,000,000 times 1,000,000 which would be written thus 1,000,000,000,000

Once you get past eight zeroes, the British names do not match the American names. For example, a number followed by 9 zeroes is in the British "milliards" but the American "trillions". In other words, the British Numbering System is completely different from the American Numbering System after the thousands and millions. Thousand and Million are the same, but then you see Milliard, Billion, Billiard, Trillion, Trilliard, etc.

When most of us were at school failure was seen as something that was negative, should be avoided and often worth punishment. And yet most learning theorists agree that it is only through failure that we really learn – as opposed to just memorising. Failure is useful when it helps us critically appraise our own performance. This is evaluation is an example of feedback. A simple way to think of feedback is experiencing the output of your own performance as a new input.

Students of psychology and education are becoming increasingly aware of the vital role that feedback plays in how we learn. All complex systems (like your body, your organisation, your family, your community) change their behaviour or learn through feedback - even if this means weaving in and out of the best path (like Wiener’s boat example) rather than sticking to the best path in any strict way.

A paradigm is a self-consistent set of ideas and beliefs which acts as a filter, influencing how we perceive and make sense of the world. The way in which we often structure our organisations is based on the model of a Egyptian pyramid and is an example of a paradigm. Other examples of paradigms include – how to make bread, what a bed looks like, the characteristics of a chair that lend the idea of “chairness”, the general features of a ship or an aircraft and so on. The term was first used by Thomas Kuhn in “the structure of scientific revolutions” (1962) to describe the the impact of change within the ruling theory of science when fundamental assumptions changed. Kuhn argued that the history of science is not a linear and continuous assimilation of facts but rather a number of revolutions in which new paradigms or new ways of seeing the world, entirely replace the old. Some of his conclusions include:

While we all know something about power, working in conflict or change management requires a clear understanding of power and how to decode and understand it. So what is power really and how is it constructed? Our world identifies certain individuals as 'having power' and then proceeds to make them more powerful by talking about them in the media. Politicians, high profile business leaders, characters from the entertainment industry and those frequently in the public eye are often said to examples of ‘powerful people’.

A useful way of decoding any phenomenon is to go beyond the 'what is it?' question and rather look at 'what does it do?'. In organisations, power can do many things. It can speed things up, slow things down, alter trajectory, transform our understanding of ‘what is going on’ and divert attention to something altogether different. We each have some measure of power and your position of power could be defined by:

With the increase in users of microblogging sites such as Twitter.com, a profusion of services have emerged to support analysis and search of this live 'stream' of data. This Tweetgrid example provides an view of how seaching on particular hashtags (designated with a '#') can yield useful results and interesting connections. Importantly, it provides insight into how people in distant places are talking about your field of interest, what metaphors they are using, who they are recommending etc.. Obviously there is a lot of junk and so, as always, you need to exercise discernment. You can update the #hashtags on the tweetgrid and save your own personal glimpse into the mind of the collective.

The Inaugural Summit of the AU of July 2003, in Durban, South Africa, endorsed the NEPAD progress report and initial action plan and encouraged member states to adopt the NEPAD Declaration on Democracy, Political, Economic, and Corporate Governance, and accede to the APRM. After years of difficulties and African pessimism, some leaders thought that it was time to act rather than wait for others to come and solve their problems. They realised that there was a need to create an atmosphere conducive to development and to create conditions that would encourage the private sector to invest in African economies.

The African Renaissance is about developing Africans and Africa. It is a call for the rebirth renewal, reinvention and repositioning of Africans and Africa in a globalizing world. Furthermore, it is a call to Africans to relearn and rediscover who they are and where they are in a global scheme of things. It is a vision bigger than the African Union, NEPAD and many other initiatives by individuals, communities, governments and multilateral organisations. It is not an effort to emulate 'world class' standards set by others but to set world standards to be followed by others. The African Renaissance is seen as the rebirth of the continent after centuries of suppression, correcting negative images. Rebirth must be through rediscovery of Africa's past, reversing the downfall into chaos. It is about planning for the future based on a new knowledge framework accommodating the ideas and philosophies that created the great empires of Ghana, Monomotapa, Songhai and Mali. (Gutto 2005).

The uptake of mobile phones on the African continent continues with growth rates in excess of 100% over the past twelve months (Source MTN 'Yello corporate publication, 2008). This is happening while technologies that link people across space and time are becoming ubiquitous and mobile telephony is the preferred means of telecommunication. The result is a narrowing of the technological gap between the developed and developing world. Rates of ownership, even among the poorest, is surprisingly high and while estimates vary, there were already more than 100 million connected handsets in Africa in 2005.

The ability to network powerfully is an important skill and a key resource in your personal knowledge management strategy. In this discussion we'll look at ways of interacting with your network plus ideas for powerful networking. You could see your network as a series of circles that contain your immediate family, your friends, your professional networks, and the general public. While some of these overlap, others do not are and quite distinct. In addition to the face-to-face networks you engage in on a day-to-day basis, the vast majority of these networks are becoming available on-line and so these ideas are designed to provide know-how designed to help you get the best out of all of your networks:

• Create a clear vision of success for yourself including an idea of what you want. Do not proceed until you have achieved this.

• Cultivate a clear idea of the network, its' identity, why you want to be part of it and what you want from it.
  

Permaculture is a particularly useful metaphor in change management and KM and many organisations are using permaculture principles to teach design and sustainability. Permaculture concerns itself with the use of ecology as the basis for designing integrated systems of food production, housing, appropriate technology, and community development.

"Companies are actually living organisms, not machines. We keep bringing in mechanics, when what we need are gardeners." Peter Senge

According to Dunning (1997, 370) the geographical imbalance between the current 'technology revolution' and the 'population revolution' is a potential time bomb. The wealthiest 12% of the world population controls 85 % of the world's stock of created assets, while the rest owns or controls only 15 % of these assets. An increase of approxamately 50 % of the world population over the next five years will probably occur in the less wealthy part of the world. This imbalance can be addressed by Chinese and Indian economic development and removing the threat of ideological warfare (referring to the war between Islam and the West).

Peter Drucker defines knowledge as "Information that changes something or somebody-either by becoming grounds for actions or by making an individual (or an institution) capable of different or more effective action." This definition highlights both individual and corporate aspects of knowledge. KM models focus on what kinds of information move through a system, how the information moves and the relationship of information to processes of change within that system. A number of biomedical models have suggested that the HIV virus can change other information at the level of the DNA of a CD4 cell. In this way, it is suggested, the Virus uses corrupted immune system cells to create replicas of itself thus compromising the ability of the immune system to defend against opportunistic infections. Because of this, HIV itself can be framed as knowledge in it has the ability to change other information.

Virology has provided our culture with many useful insights and the term 'viral' and the viral metaphor spring up in the form of computer viruses, viral marketing, memetics and memeplexes. Human beings are by nature metaphorical beings and understand complex concepts through metaphor and analogy. In other words, we understand something in terms of something else.

However, trying to understand a virus in terms of a virus throws the thinker into ever more greatly convoluted loops of logic. To think about HIV, what we need is a good metaphor for HIV - what is it 'like'? What organisms or systems do we know of that do the things HIV does? Could the emergent properties of billions of human beings transacting with each other be doing to our planet what HIV does to our bodies?

When engaged in Change Management project, we often use a KM framework to guide and share elements of the system's functionality with client. This simultaneously engages Systems Theory, Logical Framework Analysis (LFA), Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and Dialogic approaches in project work. The novelty of this approach is that is both analytical and analogical simultaneously and creates a multidisciplinary framework for engaging complex information. It has proved particularly helpful in working with African government and NGOs. The process is generally completed within 3 days as an organisational ritual and outputs form inputs to the change process. The enquiry framework asks the following key questions when we assess organisational culture and the nature of a system:

1. What are the roles and the relationships that make up the complex social system under investigation?

Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is an interdisciplinary approach to the study of discourse, which views "language as a form of social practice" (Fairclough 1989: 20) and focuses on the ways social and political domination is reproduced by text and talk. CDA developed within several disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, such as 'critical linguistics'.

The terms dialogic and dialogism often refer to the concept used by Mikhail Bakhtin in his work The Dialogic Imagination. The dialogic work carries on a continual dialogue with other works of literature and other authors. It does not merely answer, correct, silence, or extend a previous work, but informs and is continually informed by the previous work. Dialogic literature is in communication with multiple works. This is not merely a matter of influence, for the dialogue extends in both directions, and the previous work of literature is as altered by the dialogue as the present one is.

e-Knowledge markets are becoming recognised as “disruptive and discontinuous technology innovation” (Kaieteur Institute for KM 2005) which are changing the way which people manage their social networks, education, wealth and intellectual property assets. The possibility here is the exploitation of intellectual capital in real-time by a larger number of people. Some of the categories of these business models which have emerged include:

• b2b (business-to-business) knowledge exchanges

• community / social capital knowledge networks
• e-education or e-learning exchanges
• expert knowledge exchanges/ question and answer exchanges
• intellectual capital/free-lance exchanges (human capital, talent, work, job, project, free agent or professional services exchanges )
• intellectual property exchanges
• knowledge auctions
• knowledge banks (know-how banks)
• knowledge grids
• knowledge market & exchange - enabling technologies
  

Anti-knowledge refers to the collective set of questions that form an antithetical structure to a subset or the sum of knowledge. Put more simply, Antiknowledge is whatever we don't know. Of course, we can't know what we don't know and so the only way to find out is to ask a question. Thankfully, the questions we can ask are the Who, What, Where, Why, How and When questions which operate on Anti-knowledge converting the questions into knowledge by structuring them. There are two fundamental types of questions:

1. Learning questions - questions about knowledge that exists

2. Knowledge Discovery Questions - questions that form knowledge when structured

If you are new to social media and are still exploring the area, here are 4 steps to help you get the best out of it:

• Step 1: Explore - search & browse for content that interests you. Find out where your friends, colleagues and peers spend their time on the web. Particularly look for notable commentators and figures in the area in which you are interested, subscribe to their personal blogs and follow the comments and conversations.

While Africa remains the least developed continent, it’s quite startling to see a map showing how big it actually is. Africa is 30,3 million km² and so is larger than the combination of China (9,6 million km²), the US (9,4 million km²), Western Europe (4,9 million km²), India (3,2 million km²) and Argentina (2,8 million km²) plus the Scandinavian countries and the British Isles with room to spare.

And while we are all used to seeing maps of the world, Africa's size in relation to the World Map has been understated for many years and is actually longer and wider than the shape we are accustomed to. One reason for this is that these maps were first drawn in the age of the British Empire, when the emphasis was on accentuating the centre of Empire to the detriment of "the Provinces" or Colonies.

The following are knowledge discovery / creation questions that you might like to apply to yourself.

• What unusual and useful know-how do I have? What is this know-how generally called and what could I call it?

• Which creative metaphors could I develop to contain this knowledge and what stories could I tell that demonstrate my competence in the domain?
• How do I quantify the value of this know-how to myself, my family, my community, the earth and society at large?
• What does this know-how help me to create and achieve?
• Who else is (or might) be interested in this know-how?
• From where have I acquired this know-how?
• What is the potential value of this know-how? To whom is it valuable and in what way?
• How do I organise myself so that I can remember and reliably re-enact this know-how?
• How do I create and sustain a sustainable income for myself, my family and my community using know-how?
  

While there are a number of models available for practitioners of KM to help implement KM projects, few models have tried to deconstruct KM itself and how it works. Understanding a complex dynamic is often best done by adopting a metaphor; a good metaphor can go a long way and serve you well in understanding a complex system.

A reminder about metaphors

Knowledge results from humans interacting with their environment and upon each other. As human interaction is the source of knowledge, it is necessary to ask what factors may impede the effective generation of knowledge and the sharing of know-how. Knowledge sharing / creation can only occur in the context of a 'safe space' but unfortunately many organisations find it difficult to maintain those conditions of culture and lived values that make for a safe space. This represents a paradox and a challenge to all key role players in such institutions who profess to support KM to take an honest, objective look at themselves. There are a number of behavioural factors related to power politics which are known to impede KM activities. These behaviours are particularly important because they are emulated in a cultural context (Katz and Kahn). Behaviours that negatively impact knowledge sharing and the practice of KM include:

• Uninvolved, disinterested leadership

A particle physicist who knows about Brownian Motion (the random movement of particles in a solution) provides useful know-how and input into solving problems of traffic traffic control or the management of disease transmission. Anthroplogists used to studying pre-industrial cultures can provide insights into how social and community systems could be better designed. Film producers and directors have a wealth of experience in project management that has proven to be useful in helping design approaches to service delivery for government.

Without an operating system, computer hardware is inanimate and about as capable as a brick. In the early days, the operating system was considered to be an integral part of the computer until a brilliant move by Bill Gates when the hardware was separated from the operating system with MS.DOS Version 1.0. From this point, the operating system became glamorous, glitzy and branded as a consumer product - and had to be paid for separately to the hardware.

I use 3 operating systems - MS.Windows XPPro , Ubuntu 9,04 (Jaunty Jackalope) and Windows Mobile 6.0 on my HTC palmtop. I first started using Linux about 4 years ago. Up 'till then I used Microsoft exclusively apart from my experiences with some of the more exotic operating systems of the early 1980s which included the Commodore PET (with 16Kb RAM!), the Sinclair ZX-81, an o/s for designing integrated circuits called Gaelic and even an O/S called Gerbil.

There is an important concept in KM that suggests that all knowledge is created by asking questions; the question is therefore a basic tool of KM. The the question here is, what is the smartest question that you can ask? Here are some possible answers to the question:

• What is a question?

• What is the smartest question I can ask?
• What does "is" mean?

increasingly I'm starting to see software titles for corporates that represent themselves as 'Knowledge Management Systems Software' or words combing these magic words in some order. The idea is a clear and a seductive one; you can somehow take what is in the heads of your people and make it magically available to future generations via some computer-based information technology. With all the features and marketing hype around such software, it is important to remember some fundamentals:

Authors: By Mr. J. J. Musakali and Dr. D. C. Rotich, Moi University, Kenya

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the development and access to knowledge through Open Access, propelled by emerging technologies in the publishing industry in Africa. The paper further discusses opportunities that present themselves through Open Access and the benefits to scholars worldwide. Challenges that face this practice are discussed and solutions suggested.