A functioning collaboration and knowledge sharing system is essential for a distributed organisation. More so for companies and teams that want to work asynchronously. If you can’t trust your systems to help you find information and answers to your questions, you’ll default back to a meeting culture. So whether it’s explicit, stable knowledge that goes into your handbook, or tacit knowledge - the information needs to be easily available. This is the last of my posts about piecing together your knowledge and collaboration strategy and toolset. Here’s what we’ve already discussed. 

• First, I addressed the key consumer internet capabilities that your knowledge ecosystem needs.

• Next, I explained why you need flows and weak ties, besides the traditional approach of creating knowledge stocks.

In this post, we’ll discuss how you can enhance your knowledge ecosystem by building on your existing collaboration stack. I’ll also go over how to create the right team of people to govern, curate and nurture that platform.

Audit your current systems

To simplify your system analysis, start with evaluating your existing toolset across two dimensions.

1. Audience and sources - How easy is it to identify your knowledge source and intended audience?

2. Content, questions and insights - How easy is it to define your content’s insights and/or questions you seek to answer?

This analysis yields a 2 x 2 matrix like the one above. Let’s dive deep into each part of the matrix.

Once you’ve completed this exercise, you’ll discover how you can improve your knowledge sharing infrastructure. The toolset should ideally have coverage across all four quadrants. This system audit can help you propose an investment roadmap to your company. It can also give executives the information they need to prioritise investments. 

All systems need people

A truly democratic and free-form system allows everyone to contribute to the collective, just like Andrew McAfee said - free-form, without friction. The emergent part of McAfee’s universe, however, needs two levels of “sense making”:

1. Community managers: This group should exist at every community, practice, centre of excellence or department level in your organisation. While the best content will bubble up, these people help add metadata and organisation - so it’s easy to access the “state-of-the-art” at a later point in time.

2. Curators/ Knowledge managers: These individuals help create an information architecture that mirrors the structure of your organisation. Their responsibility is to ensure that your knowledge ecosystem is “browsable and navigable”. 

Think of this sense making structure as similar to that on Wikipedia. While each one of us can enrich the system with our contributions, dedicated editors help interlink pages, and to organise them in the right hierarchy. Editors also watch pages, so they can review changes when necessary.

Today, AI can handle many of the mundane tasks that a community manager or a curator would do - adding tags, updating metadata, creating newsletters and digests. In case you’re able to get to this level of sophistication, your community managers and curators can take charge of more human activities. Here are some indicative activities that your community managers and curators can take part in. 

• Being cheerleaders and creating opportunities for people to connect outside the system.

• Building personal connections with and between valuable contributors across organisational boundaries.

• Breaking silos where they may exist.

• Fine tuning recommendations and search results.

• Blurring the boundaries between work, knowledge sharing and learning by embedding the content creation process into work itself.

• Enabling peer review and feedback mechanisms for content.

• Helping people get answers to unanswered questions.

These sense-making roles are the building blocks for nurturing communities and knowledge sharing in a distributed workplace. Successful distributed organisations are “intentional” about everything they do, as you’ve noticed, with all the advice on this blog. Organisations that care about communities, knowledge sharing and serendipity, can’t leave this to chance alone. 

With the right systems and the right people in community management and curation roles, you can brew the perfect storm of “organised serendipity”. I daresay, that this can often work better than the proverbial watercooler meeting. I hope this series of articles helps you reimagine how knowledge sharing could work in a remote-first, asynchronous organisation. 

Regardless of how you think about remote or hybrid work, this will eventually be a problem you need to address. I’m sure I’ve glossed over several complexities, so give me a shout if you’d like to talk about how to develop your knowledge system for this new decade. I’ll be happy to chat!