Barcamp - the KM Unconference

kamp-blr - the unconference at Bangalore on Knowledge Management was an eye-opener for me. It was indeed the difference between the so called conference and unconference (the structured agenda versus evolving self-organizing agenda of the unconference) which was of interest. Although the difference did not play out to the extent I thought it will, considering the newness of concept may be it requires more practice. Nevertheless, hats off to the people who made this happen - there is whole bunch of them. It indeed will be my privilege to be part of the same crowd.

I made following presentation - but to make this presentation I really had to struggle. Morning my laptop conked off. It was not ready to access the OS - it is amazing how at the specific moment it went off - Kaput. Prakash, my friend helped me with his laptop, luckily I had some presentations with me in the USB memory stick which I collected together to make a - pot pourrie presentation.

Globalizing Innovation Complexity - Creating Wealth in GIXBang world

One intereting event at the end of the day was what was termed Knowledge Cafe - the details are described at Murali's Blog. The question was interesting " what comes in the way of idea generation" - My mind looked at the root of an idea - it has to be some sort of thought - which itself comes to us through some experience. Well once experiences (which can be problems, crisis, normal behaviour, something unique or extraordinary etc) becomes thoughts they can develop into ideas. Obviously it is not about ideas in the mind - the whole problem of Intellectual property is related to so called idea-expression dichotomy - ideas need to be articulated and should be expressed to be considered generated. People mentioned the past experience in an enterprise inhibits people to express ideas again - the psychological safety is an issue most of the enterprises.

However to my mind it is really following two issues

1. There are not enough varied experiences for people to have richness of understanding of reality
2. There is not enough imagination if you have experiences to link one experience with another to generate thoughts that become an idea and then get articulated

Second part was - what should the enterprise do to increase the hinderances - well make it an experience based learning

Let people get into varied experiences - more variety they have more likelihood of ideas - plus enable them with to generate more ideas by providing them capabilities to link multiple experiences.

Learning Enterprise is a really the framework for success!