Reinventing the path from knowledge to action in global health

Global health, Learning strategy, The Geneva Learning Foundation

At the Geneva Learning Foundation (TGLF), we have just begun to share a publication like no other. It is titled Overcoming barriers to vaccine acceptance in the community: Key learning from the experiences of 734 frontline health workers. You can access the full report here in French and in English. Short summaries are also available in three special issues of The Double Loop, the Foundation’s free Insights newsletter, now available in both English and French. The report, prefaced by Heidi Larson who leads the Vaccine Confidence Project, includes DOI to facilitate citation in academic research. (The Foundation uses a repository established and maintained by the Geneva-based CERN for this purpose.) However, knowing that academic papers have (arguably) an average of three readers, we have a different aspiration for dissemination. As a global community, we recognize the significance of local action to achieve the global goals. The report documents vaccine confidence practices just …

Diving platform on Graveyard Hill in Kabul from TV-Hill, Afghanistan. Sven Dirks, Wien

The significance of digital platforms to the business

Learning strategy, Thinking aloud, Writing

Business gets done by groups in workshops and meetings and by individuals in private conversation. There is an undeniable cultural advantage for diplomacy that comes from looking your interlocutor in the eye. Emerging digital platforms are in the margins of this business. The pioneers are creaky in their infrastructure and, ironically, playing catch-up. They have long lost the initial burst of enthusiasm that led to their creation. Yet they are still here, alive and kicking with funding that can support, in principle, their reinvention. For this, they need courage and creativity, especially if they function in a bureaucratic environment. Then there are new platforms in search of purpose and the users it would bring. Sometimes, it is the other way around. No platform is perfect. All of them have strengths, experience, insights, and the potential to be more in the future than what they are now. Some have already achieved …

Blossoming across both digital and physical spaces

Meeting of the minds

Events, Presentations, Theory

This is my presentation for the Geneva Learning Foundation, first made at the Swiss Knowledge Management Forum (SKMF) round table held on 8 September 2016 at the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). Its title is “Meeting of the minds: Rethinking our assumptions about the superiority of face-to-face encounters.” It is an exploration of the impact of rapid change that encompasses learning at scale, the performance revolution, complexity and volatility, and what Nathan Jurgenson calls the IRL fetish. The point is not to invert assumptions about the superiority of one medium over another. Rather, it is to look at the context for change, thinking through the challenges we face, with a specific, pragmatic focus on learning problems such as: You have an existing high-cost, low-volume face-to-face learning initiative, but need to train more people (scale). You want learning to be immediately practical and relevant for practitioners (performance). You need to achieve higher-order learning (complexity), beyond information transmission to …

Vintage Bank Vault (Brook Ward/flickr.com)

Death of the knowledge bank

Learning strategy

The complexity of the networks in which our organization operates is scaffolded by a corpus of mostly-unwritten, tacit knowledge and ‘ways of working’ that we learn mostly from our peers. It would be impossible to justify time to study even a fraction of the written corpus of policies, procedures, regulations and other instruments of bureaucracy that provides the legal and operational framework – and even that would not provide access to the tacit knowledge that we need. So we learn as we go from our colleagues. In some contexts, we may proceed by trial and error, making adjustments when we receive negative feedback. When asked where we learn such knowledge, sources may remain apocryphal. We seldom reflect on where, when, how, and from whom we learn. Relegating learning about operational complexity to the informal domain may seem to present a risk for the organization. In practice, we find that we do tend to …

Contradiction – Kyoto Train Station (Stéfan/flickr)

Dialectics

Thinking aloud

4:35 p.m. “My working hypothesis is that the learning that matters is mostly incidental and informal.” “Maybe,” he smiled. “Yet, my conviction that we need to explore this is grounded in my formal training in knowledge management.” 5:17 p.m.  “When we are under-funded and overwhelmed,” he sighed, “is just not the right time to go off on a tangential project!” “I won’t argue with you. Let us go through with it to determine how useless it is to trade short-term survival tactics for long-term strategic thinking.”   Photo: Contradiction, Tokyo train station (Stéfan/flickr).  

Autopsy

Thinking aloud

Knowledge management has met its timely demise. No matter how sophisticated or agile, knowledge management (or “KM”)  remains fundamentally embedded in a container view of knowledge. Where the ephemeral and superficial nature of social media reflects the failure of communication in the Twenty-First Century, KM’s demise stems from the Chief Information Officer’s view of knowledge as discrete packets of data, each one destined to be filed in its own pigeon hole. The death of KM is a soulless one, because it is devoid of culture. Even though KM shares commonalities with publishing (static knowledge, expertise frozen in time), the latter adds the significance of culture (whether organizational or literary) to the flow of knowledge. A book as an object (physical or electronic) does not confuse the container with the message or the processes that infuse the former with meaning. Photo: Tables in disused autopsy room (Eric Allix Rogers/Flickr)