Speaking For All Mankind

I picked a bad week to be on vacation.  It cold, rainy, and I’ve developed a chest cold.  Catching up on my reading in computational social science.

“After studying 1,200 children, researchers from the Institute of Child Study at Toronto University, found that kids can be confirmed to have developed ‘executive functioning‘, when they are able to keep the truth at the back of their mind so their fib sounds more convincing.”

“Dawn of the commercial space age.”

As the author points out, private spacecraft don’t have to meet the requirements for a deep space mission.

“11,800 Direct Jobs to Result From NASA’s $6.1 Billion Commercial Spaceflight Investment, Independent Analysis Shows.”

Looks like a big hurdle to further space commercialization has been cleared – Laser “tractor beams” to tidy up space junk.

I wish the dates were moved up – Obama Vows Renewed Space Program.

“This is an age of Knowledge Economy, where an intelligent organization, whether in the public or private sector, should be a learning organization.”  So writes Khan who argues for the creation of formal communities of practice in the public sector.  The formal communities of practice would be called knowledge groups and would consist of cross-agency teams that work on a shared problem with the goal of producing a body of knowledge to manage the problem. 

Khan starts his argument for knowledge groups by describing the benefits of knowledge and how knowledge is created.  Nothing surprising here and these sections serve as a good review of basic knowledge management concepts.  He then describes how learning organizations learn by using Peter Senge’s framework of the five core competencies.  What I found especially valuable was the description of barriers by public organizations to each of the five competencies:

1)      Shared purpose and vision – public organizations often have conflicting goals that makes creating a shared vision impossible.

2)      Systems approach – public organizations are divided into virtual fiefdoms that compete with each other for resources thus blocking the systems approach to problems.

3)      Personal mastery – Government functions follow routine standardized procedures and individual employees are not recognized for improving their skills.

4)      Mental models – The fiefdom mindset of “us versus them” precludes sharing of mental models for team learning.

5)      Capacity for team leaning – Again, public agency fiefdoms prevent team learning.

Khan further describes the process of organizational unlearning where time and change have rendered existing processes obsolete.  Organizations must unlearn the old process and create a new process in response to the new environment.  Public agencies learn from six major sources – internal resources and experience; citizens and customers; partners, rival, and comparators; top-down direction and review; and critiques, advice, and media.  Even so, agencies tend to ignore outside sources in favor of internal learning sources thus hindering the unlearning process.

Despite these barriers, public organizations do share knowledge in informal groups and through social networking.  Khan argues that these informal structures are constantly at risk of disintegration and he advocates creating formal Knowledge Groups (KG) that can withstand the pressures of being torn apart as members seek their own self-interests.  A KG is created by selecting a professional in a particular field and granting him or her authority from an executive sponsor.  The KG Lead selects relevant subject matter experts and manages stakeholders while setting the vision and direction of the KG.  Khan describes several advantages of the KG:

1)      Governments are more receptive to internally-generated information.

2)      The process of creating and disseminating the information is formalized.

3)      Synergy is created from the diversity of agencies and viewpoints.

4)      The relevant stakeholders are identified and recruited to support the KG.

5)      Avoiding an overdependence on consultants.

I agree with Khan on the importance of knowledge and organizational learning.  His analysis of the barriers that prevent organizational learning in public agencies is also on target but I just don’t agree with the need for a formal Knowledge Group.  There are numerous examples of informal communities of practice and social networks that are robust and provide the same benefits as a formal KG.  Having worked on a top-down KG, I found it to be less valuable for innovation and learning than an informal network.  One just has to look at the example of GovLoop to see the power of a set of informal communities of practice.  So, while the barriers to organizational learning in public agencies are very real they can be overcome without having to create yet another formal organizational layer in government.

Reference:

Khan, I.A. (2010). Knowledge groups: A model for creating synergy across the public sector. Public Organization Review 10. 139-152.

Fascinating story on NPR about the “trust” hormone (oxytocin) and one researcher’s findings that trust in the government is related to the amount of stress someone feels at the time.  According to the study, trust in the government is at an all time low because of the stress people feel due to the recession.  When college students were given a squirt of oxytocin they reported feeling more trusting of other people.  From this trust, they also reported less distrust in the government.

So, by promoting wellness and lowering the national stress level, could the government also be promoting better citizen engagement?

White House released the self-evaluations of the agencies open government plans.  Only three agencies (Health and Human Services,  Department of Transportation, and NASA) fully met the requirements while the rest made progress on their goals.

I’ve fully read both NASA’s plan and the Office of Personnel Management’s plan while skimming the rest of the plans.  NASA does have a great plan that is detailed and just well thought out.  Other plans used the right buzzwords but you can tell that there is not a strategy for fully realizing the capabilities of social networking.

It would be good to see some independent reviews of the plans.  Might be an interesting project for the summer.