Martin Cleaver, masterfully.

Wikis - Making Sense out of a House of Shards
(c) Martin@Cleaver.org
2 December 2004

A wiki can be a posting board, knowledge base, project tracker, photo album, and discussion forum. It’s all of these, yet none alone does it justice. Even for the most experienced, a Wiki can be infuriatingly difficult to classify!

From a linguistic perspective, the word ‘Wiki’ is Hawaiian, it means ‘quick’. From an innovation and organisational alignment perspective a Wiki is a power tool: a universal feedback channel, a web-based mechanism to place and reflect on otherwise random observations people have about every aspect of the firm. It is a place to reflect, to innovate and to collectively strategise.

Wikis are used by corporations such as Yahoo R&D, Disney, SAP, The New York Times Motorola, by communities of practice such as the AstroGrid project, by communities such as the towns across the world, and by individuals as their personal knowledge base or website. Mentions of Wikis in the press have been numerous, especially in the past year (2004 saw articles by Business Week, Associated Press, The Wall Street Journal, Wired and InfoWorld), and Gartner put Wikis as an emerging technology, primed at the trigger point.

Since the original Wiki inception by Ward Cunningham in 1995 (fuelled by his past addiction to its forerunner, HyperCard), many Wiki technologies have emerged. 2004 has seen the onset of the first commercial, venture funded operators. And the largest Wiki, an online encyclopaedia called Wikipedia, has some 400,000 pages and approximately 140,000 registered editors.

This Article

The rest of this article reminds us that departments often locally optimise without appreciating the knock-on effects on the rest of the firm; that suppressed insights hold a key to innovation and that Wikis are a cheap, proven and widespread way to collaborate on the implications and thus actions needed to act on these insights. It likens a Wiki to a morphing crystal of reflections, that unexpected events are but fractal shards of many bigger stories, and that a Wiki provides room for discourse about the world. Through collectively building definitions around individual and almost unremarkable data points, the conversations collectively build a strategic asset that empowers a community to grapple, analyse and debate realities and that this asset can be harnessed by executives as a key means to engage, depict and inspire a community.

Organisational Disharmony

A common scenario: Sales get a series of unusually large orders. Manufacturing struggle to meet demand, they expense overtime. Meanwhile Marketing quietly congratulates itself on its promotional run: they’ve exceeded targets. Disaster strikes two months later: sales are at an un-seasonal low while consumers slowly use the stocks they’ve hoarded and made available at those promotional prices. Manufacturing is practically idle.

Isolated, individuals and thus departments ignore small signs. Such goal misalignments incur serious costs in the real world, and unnoticed, can be repeated for years on end. Yet such leading indicators, here the trouble experienced in other departments, can be suppressed by the drive for operational efficiency until both the issues and ultimately, tempers, flare. In this context a Wiki is a mechanism for painlessly and uniformly publishing small insights - the little messages not worthy of involving management, for which the observer does not necessarily know who to address, and for which there might not even be any interested parties until a further snippet of information materialises.

Decentralised self-organisation

A Wiki can be a place for collecting intelligence. Better cross-functional understanding facilitates cross-functional harmony and unity. The process of understanding one another on a Wiki results in a deposit, a mine rich of conversations, reasoning and lore. This repository embodies culture, is subject to analysis, can be cheaply introduced to newcomers and can be used to provide channels between strategic and operational staff, tightening the relevance and guidance of decision criteria. A decentralised self-organising coordination mechanism, a wiki creates an interaction point for self-managed teams and lessens the communication burden on managers. The result is more frequent, more direct and more meaningful cross-functional communication. Mistakes get more quickly surfaced and their origins more fully determined, enabling policies and strategies to be more quickly changed, resulting in lower costs and frustration levels.

More, after the jump:

Shared and Escalated Meaning Making

In a Wiki, members - using solely a web browser - can create pages about their observations and then write stories to build layers of meaning upon each others’ thoughts. Physically a Wiki is little more than the ability to create and easily link named pages on the web. Topics are named as compound phrases depicted as WikiWord or [Wiki Word]: e.g. CompetitiveAdvantage; and when these compound words appear in the text of another page it becomes a reference linking to the first. The predictable names reduce the possibility for duplication: the naming scheme channels people with the same ideas onto the same page.

Fundamentally, all pages are edited in the same way: hit edit, change the text and just save - with each change creating a new revision. Some authors choose to place special controls, such as “add comment” or “poll” features placed under particular headings so that the audience can add their agreement/disagreement with one click, but these are just convenient ways to edit the text, the real edit button is usually available.

Wikis provide a means to embed searches - this is commonly to turn the Wiki into a simple database, aggregating pages based on query term such as “show me the headings embedded in topics with the string ‘Comparative’ in the topic name”, which might pick up the topic [Comparative Advantage], and headings such as “Opportunity Cost” and “Employing Staff”. Some Wikis offer capture of structured data on the pages and these too can be the subject of searches: Wikis make a capable operational environment, providing a digital alternative to the ultimately flexible paper and pen.

A Wiki’s power is not in the technology, but its application: Think of a Wiki as a collection of pins sticking into reality. Each web page pinpoints a different aspect of that reality, and is labelled with a WikiWord: the phrasing of the WikiWord serving as a lens to guide the conversation on the page. Observers might comment on what they believe about reality, or reflect on what someone else has commented on, or indeed a combination of these two. Pages are co-edited: each subsequent editor typically adds detail, links to related topics through prose, tidies irrelevant content to a different page, or generalises the conversations into meta-level conversations, perhaps even creating templates to be reused in for other processes.

There is always space for expression on a Wiki. And as all thoughts are kept in pages with pronounceable, common place names (such as “[Competitive Advantage]”), these names quickly pervade shared vocabulary.

Wiki-based communities aim to increase the profoundness of the definitions and the structures of groups of pages: the key to doing so is synthesising simplicity out from the mass of discourse. The co-editing fosters ownership and empowerment. Sense-making in the firm thus becomes a shared, distributed and co-owned experience: the process becomes resilient, and by engaging in co-creation, the organisation creates a repository and engages its people to build structural capital for the firm.

This ever-evolving prism of thoughts sparkles with the tiny shards of observation: each page is a potential a hallway of conversation free to either deepen with each iteration or to be replaced so that newcomers see - at first blush - only the latest view. There is always space for disagreement, for they are pushed to other pages where those who are passionate enough to continue conversation are free to present their evidence and discuss to their hearts content - but this is kept out of the original discussion’s way. The result is that alternate views spring forth. Everyone has voice.

In discussion boards and blogs, and most pre-structured systems, boundaries, such between as statement and subsequent follow-ups are fixed. This is not true in the Wiki: here, demarcations are continually redrawn according to the views and wishes of the editing audience.

Breaking the silo

Wiki breaks away from silo at the origin of the problem: the humble document. Hand or email someone a document and it is intrinsically separated from its associated subjects, its historical record and its audience. Give someone a link to a Wiki, and not only can one see how this topic evolved but also how its context evolved too. Further, the recipient’s feedback go right into the text - not just appended, but inserted by that new person: assimilated in place, the visitor becoming another co-author of the document.

A cultural root of a Wiki: anyone can not only can interject and tack on, but also is encouraged to synthesise their observations. Thus a fundamental phenomenon of a Wiki is its provision to the audience that members can reorganise the topics to make it better reflect reality: the documents inviting continuous improvement of the model, with reanalysis in the light of a new insight, and elimination of waste.

A Wiki’s usefulness rises with the breadth of domain of its experts. Cross-fertilisation from outside ones peer group provides further incentive for the experts to contribute: for those can add something truly novel. Perhaps an academic testing a theory can ask business people to contribute real data; yet a hang-glider notices the article and provides analogy that clarifies and generates linkage to a whole system body of knowledge. So, instead of relying on authorised facilitation from a bureaucracy to refer you to someone to help, Wiki’s create markets for ideas, with findable names. This eliminates waste, creates excitement, and in most cases, causes a grassroots effect that spreads like wildfire fanned by the enthusiasm of the now empowered practitioner level.

Experts inviting comment from all, interjection of such comments straight into the documents - ideas spilling from one domain to another, cross-functional integration of knowledge assets: boundaries from document-as-silo through function-as-silo: these enable new ways of working, culminating in creating possibilities for chemical-like reactions between every part of the corporation, and beyond.

Idea market

The happiest discoverers of a Wiki are often those whose personal network is insufficient to carry their dreams. Suffering from idea-market-failure, some have tacitly held beliefs without articulable justification, and some have incomplete ideas achingly seeking a mate. For these people finding someone with complementary insights can flip a desperate pipedream into an idea with balance and gravity. Yet, as exciting as that is, if the Wiki ever truly has real power, it doesn’t stop there! A Wiki is as an ideas integration platform: a place to combine principles, strategies, observations, insights and operational data accessible through a common lexicon where the unit of exchange is natural to us all: a written form of the spoken word.

Because the page names are predictable, Wikis interface to people the same way people interface with each other: through language. It leverages one of human species’ most powerful abilities: the ability to verb concepts into language (the other being spatial abstraction and comprehension in the form of maps ).

A Wiki is a place to spotlight observations: for a community to provide focus, analysis and feedback, and from which a leader can interpret data, and then project and declare the future knowing that the ideas are backed by hard data, observations and requests made and supported by the community.

Challenges

Beyond the regular knowledge management obstacles, the main challenges with Wikis are cultural, not technical. Maintaining high levels of trust (both to interject competently and to attribute appropriately), writing clearly, and being open to reflection from those outside the formal control structures are essential ingredients. There are some administrative tasks that aid this: vigorous pruning to isolate what should be separate conversations keeps the content focussed, respect that just because a popular opinion does not know a claim that the claim is not fact. These are especially important in the initial stages when newcomers are unfamiliar with cutting into each others’ text. In time, this normally becomes a collective task: but early attention is vital.

Wikis raise the number of people thinking strategically, they facilitates the continuous and autonomous reengineering of processes and it makes flatter teams work better. The increased autonomy makes overt controls increasingly unworkable and the use of guiding shared values more attractive. Clearly many organisations have a distance to go to accomplish this! The good news is that these guiding shared values also become comment-worthy data points, so a Wiki can help such an organisation in its values-articulation and negotiating process. Even better, the trivial uses of Wikis - independently maintained webpages for community members ideas provides value from day one.

Cross-functional

Departments mostly optimise along functional lines and the search time available to do so funnels solutions towards already developed competences. A cross-functional Wiki exposes the conversations from other departments, providing the history of issues, the context and giving a flavour to the culture. Wikis thus offer the greatest advantage to those who purposefully work horizontally across the different departments of the firm; for those who can not only understand, process and shape content but those who can also articulate, addresses and influence the stakeholder group they meet. The exposure of informal processes into documents shifts power towards such integrators and brings advantage to those who use a Wiki regardless of their tenure in the firm. The result is that integrators cross-fertilise the organisation’s knowledge bank, for both their own advantage, and for the firm’s for which they deposit structural capital trails in their wake of their reengineering changes.

Conclusion

Wikis prove a cheap, simple and effective platform for collaborating today. Still, all these technologies continue to evolve: The Semantic Web, Concept Mapping, Topic Mapping, automatic categorisation and summarisation, incorporation of data feeds - all these will serve us with better representation, better automatic synthesis of human and machine contributed content, greater transparency across the organisation and enhanced competitive positions.

Most find the nature of a Wiki both beautiful and devastatingly simple. A relentless churn of definitions, a never repeating kaleidoscope of conversation: it defies description, yet, like a whirlwind, the more one looks at it, the more one is drawn in.

For all my attempts at functional description, living with a Wiki is definitely something to be experienced. If you have not experienced being part of a community collectively hooked on one, I suggest you seek out one that serves your interests. For it is only through co-writing in an active Wiki community that one can truly appreciate its power and enchantment.

References
• Tour of key examples http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/04_23/b3886141.htm
• Is there a Wiki in Your Future? http://lfw.pennnet.com/Articles/Article_Display.cfm?Section=ARCHI&Subsection=Display&ARTICLE_ID=183199&KEYWORD=wiki&p=12

Martin Cleaver is a long standing fanatic of Wiki technologies. After completing a BSc and Advanced MSc in Computing Science in 1995 he worked for Reuters in London and Hong Kong, and for Arthur Andersen in the UK and Spain, working in the field of Enterprise Application Integration. In 2004 he completed an MBA (Melbourne, Australia; Rotman, Toronto & McMaster, Hamilton, Canada) where he specialised in Implementing Strategy in Organisations.

Martin has a particular interest in Knowledge Management, Innovation and Concept Mapping. An independent contractor, Web 2.0, speaker and coach he can be contacted through http://martin.cleaver.org/ or 416-786-6752.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 7th, 2007 at 6:17 pm and is filed under Wiki, Innovation, semantic web, Collaboration, WikiConsulting, Business, Knowledge Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.