Why asking senior managers to blog may be the wrong model for KM

 If you wish to introduce blogs as a knowledge management tool, it is tempting to ask senior managers to take the lead and set an example.  Here's why that may be the wrong thing to do (and some suggestions about what to do instead).

Let's assume

1) that you want to introduce Knowledge Management,
2) that you want to improve exchange and re-use of knowledge between peers in the organisation,
3) that you have chosen blogging as a component in the toolbox, and that
4) you would like this tool to be used widely by the knowledge workers for collaboration and knowledge sharing.

Perhaps your vision is that a project team could use a blog as a shared, recorded and comment-able "project log" for storing lessons as they are identified, or maybe a community of practice could use a blog as a way to develop knowledge collaboratively (see for example this story on the use of blogs and wikis for collaborative problem solving).

It can be very tempting to ask someone senior to take the lead in blogging and to set an example for the organisation, and he or she will very often agree. Your KM sponsor, for example, might agree to lead by example.  

But this approach may well not help you in the long run.

The wrong model

The big problem with senior manager blogs is that they are not the example that you want to set or the model you want others to copy. Specifically they are generally not focused on peer-to-peer knowledge sharing.

• A director blogging is a bit like a director standing up behind the lectern and making a speech. It's hierarchical and it's one way - it's "me talking to all of you". Most of the directors blogs that I have seen have been one-way, with little or no comments. And if you want to know more about the topic covered by the blog, there are pressures against picking up the phone and asking the director for more details. This one-way blogging can be useful, but it belongs more to Internal Communications than to Knowledge Management. It is not collaborative, it's not two-way dialogue, it's not peer-to-peer and its not an example you want to set as part of your KM program.

• Very rarely is does the blog contain knowledge (by which I mean concrete "how to" advice and details which will help the reader do their job better). The director is not communicating to peers.  Most of the directors blogs that I have seen have been general musings, or thought pieces. They may sometimes be of interest to the audience, but they're not going to teach the audience anything that helps them do their job better. It won't make a difference to the way people work. It won't add immediate value. Blogging which does not transfer knowledge to help people work better is not an example you want to set as part of a KM program. 

• If you are a director, you care about style (with a few happy exceptions, of course). You want your post to be well crafted.  You may even get somebody else to write it for you.  It becomes formal, it becomes a publication, and not the start of an informal conversation that invites others to take part. That's not the blogging example you want to set; you would much rather have that sort of messy informal creativeness that leads to real knowledge.

• It becomes "something extra to read". Instead of providing a better alternative to existing mechanisms of sharing knowledge between peers, you have created something new to read which doesn't teach you anything that really helps you, but is just "yet another top-down communication from management". You are adding noise to the system.

Blogging per se - blogging for the sake of blogging - is not worth doing. Blogging to improve internal management communication may be useful, but not to KM. Blogging to share knowledge and  collaborate is what you need, and this should be the first model you set.

A better way

A better way to introduce blogging is to take the already existing internal communication mechanisms within communities of practice or projects, and replace some of these with blogs. Take the ways people currently try to share knowledge, and improve them. For example -

• Maybe your community of practice has a quarterly newsletter, with a dozen articles. Replace this with a weekly blog, in order to get the news out more quickly, and in order to allow commentary on, and discussion of, the key items, which was never possible in a hard copy newsletter.

• Your community of practice may routinely send out email alerts about new lessons, improved practices, and other things that the community members really need to know about. Replace these Email alerts with blog items, which can be searched, can spawn comment threads, and which avoid the curse of "reply all".

• Perhaps your project manager sends out a weekly email summarising progress and learnings in the project. Replace this with a blog, and ask people to comment on the learnings and the actions arising, and add other insights they may have.  This can be very useful for virtual and hybrid teams, and may become a new common practice as such teams become commonplace.

Think carefully about how you promote blogging.

Start by modelling the outcome that you want to see, which is peer-to-peer sharing of useful knowledge that others need in order to improve the way they work. Think about the WIIFM for the reader, and make sure the blog gives them something they can use immediately to make their work better or their life easier.

Beware the seductive option of the senior manager's blog, which may the wrong model for KM.

A good way to use in-house blogs

Blogs have not lived up to their promise in KM terms. Maybe we are just using them in the wrong way?

Blogging readiness, by Cambodia4kids.org on Flickr

In our 2017 global KM survey, blogs got a bad rating. Although blogs are a reasonably popular technology choice (number 10 in popularity out of 19 technologies) they rank the worst for value delivery.

Why is this?

I think its partly because we tend to use blogs within organisations in the wrong way.  We use them in our companies in the same way that people use them on the web, which is the way I am using this blog now; we use them as personal vehicles for musing and for opinions, rather than ways to build, record and discuss knowledge.

See for the example the typical approach of the "Director's blog" - one of the more common uses for blogging and one of the least useful in KM terms, because

• A director blogging is a bit like a director standing up behind the lectern and making a speech. It's heirarchical - it's "me preaching to all of you". 
• They are generally one-way, with little or no comments. They are not collaborative, and its not an example you want to set as part of your KM program. 
• Very rarely is does the blog contain knowledge (by which I mean concrete "how to" advice and details which will help the reader do their job better). 
• If you are a director, you care about style and it becomes a publication, and not the start of an informal conversation that invites others to take part. 
• It becomes "something extra to read" - just noise in the system 

So how can blogs add value? Firstly you want them t replace something else rather than adding one more communication channel, and then you want to make them about work.

Enter the project blog.

The project blog can replace other channels of project reporting, can allow collaborative entries from the project leader and core team, can provide a central channel for a potentially dispersed team, and can host discussions on project topics through the comments feature. It automatically notifies the people who need to be notified, without the need for email. People interested in the project may subscribe, and the blog creates a narrative record. And then when you get  to the end of the project and it is time for collecting the lessons, you will find many of them already documented in the project blog. 

A great example is the Polymath project - an international collaborative project among mathematicians to solve a particularly tricky problem. The team used blogs to discuss interesting ideas and ways forward with the problem, and validated content was moved to a wiki as the team converged on a solution. It was interesting that it was not always the most experienced or most academic mathematicians that helped make progress - sometimes it was the amateurs and the school maths teachers that helped with breakthroughs. 

The Polymath project used two types of blog

• Blogs hosted by mathematicians, where particular aspects of the problem were addressed in the blog comments
• An administrative blog, which summarised progress, and hosted administrative discussion.
• The wiki provided write-ups of the work done on the blogs. Comments on the blogs were the working process, the wiki was the summary of the outcome.

There are also some administrative conventions and ground rules, such as the following

• No working independantly on the problem without discussing progress on the blog
• Any blog post is not allowed more than 100 comments. This convention forced the leaders to summarise, and then restart, progress
• Comments were divided into numbered comments (comments which make a direct contribution to the solution of the problem, and which were numbered for reference by other comments), and other comments, mostly about the process or administration of discussion ("metacomments").

That's how blogging became a working tool for the project - directly relevant to the work they were doing, a collaboration platform, and a record of the project over time.

That's a far better use for a blog than capturing senior managers' musings.

Why you should not ask your senior managers to blog

 If you wish to introduce blogs as a knowledge management tool, it is tempting, but dangerous, to ask senior managers to take the lead.  Here's why it's dangerous, and what you should do instead. 

Let's assume

1) that you want to introduce Knowledge Management,
2) that you want to improve exchange and re-use of knowledge between peers in the organisation,
3) that you have chosen blogging as a component in the toolbox, and that
4) you would like this tool to be used widely by the knowledge workers for collaboration and knowledge sharing.

Perhaps your vision is that a project team could use a blog as a shared, recorded and comment-able "project log" for storing lessons as they are identified, or a community of practice could use a blog as a way to develop knowledge collaboratively (see for example this story on the use of blogs and wikis for collaborative problem solving).

It can be very tempting to ask someone senior to take the lead in blogging and to set an example for the organisation, and he or she will very often agree. Your KM sponsor, for example, might agree to lead by example.  But this will not help you in the long run.

The wrong model

The big problem with senior manager blogs is that they are not the example that you want to set or the model you want others to copy. They are different, and generally they are not focused on knowledge sharing.

• A director blogging is a bit like a director standing up behind the lectern and making a speech. It's heirarchical - it's "me preaching to all of you".  Is not really very conducive to two-way discussion or dialogue. Most of the directors blogs that I have seen have been one-way, with little or no comments. And if you want to know more about the topic covered by the blog, there are pressures against picking up the phone and asking the director for more details.  This one-way blogging belongs to Internal Communications and not to Knowledge Management. It is not collaborative, and its not an example you want to set as part of your KM program.

• Very rarely is does the blog contain knowledge (by which I mean concrete "how to" advice and details which will help the reader do their job better). The director is not communicating to peers.  Most of the directors blogs that I have seen have been general musings, or thought pieces. They may sometimes be of interest to the audience, but they're not going to teach the audience anything that helps them do their job better. It won't make a difference to the way people work. It won't add immediate value. Blogging which does not transfer knowledge to help people work better is not an example you want to set. 

• If you are a director, you care about style (with a few happy exceptions, of course). You want your post to be well crafted.  You may even get somebody else to write it for you.  It becomes formal, it becomes a publication, and not the start of an informal conversation that invites others to take part. That's not the blogging example you want to set; you would much rather have that sort of messy informal creativeness that leads to real knowledge.

• It becomes "something extra to read". Instead of providing a better alternative to existing mechanisms of sharing knowledge between peers, you have created something new to read which doesn't teach you anything that really helps you, but is just "yet another top-down communication from management". You are adding noise to the system.

Blogging per se - blogging for the sake of it - is not worth doing. Blogging to share knowledge and  collaborate is what you need, and this should be the first model you set.

A better way

A better way to introduce blogging is to take the already existing internal communication mechanisms within communities of practice or projects, and replace some of these with blogs. Take the ways people currently try to share knowledge, and improve them. For example -

• Maybe your community of practice has a quarterly newsletter, with a dozen articles. Replace this with a weekly blog, in order to get the news out more quickly, and in order to allow commentary on, and discussion of, the key items (which was never possible in a hard copy newsletter).

• Your community of practice may routinely send out email alerts about new lessons, improve practices, and other things that the community members really need to know about. Replace these Email alerts with blog items, which can be searched, can spawn comment threads, and which avoid the curse of "reply all".

• Perhaps your project manager sends out a weekly email summarising progress and learnings. Replace this with a blog, and ask people to comment on the learnings and the actions arising, and add other insights they may have.  This can be very useful for virtual teams.

Think carefully about how you promote blogging.

Start by modelling the outcome that you want to see, which is peer-level sharing of useful knowledge that others will use to improve the way they work. Think about the WIIFM for the reader, and make sure the blog gives them something they can use immediately to make their work better or their life easier.

Beware the seductive but potentially damaging option of the senior manager's blog.