Abstract
Leadership 2.0 is a set of alternative management values and practices driven by a set of coherent assumptions about the nature of human communication. In this paper, the authors argue that Leadership 2.0 is critical to make Web2.0 work. This paper is informed by Dervin’s Sense-Making Methodology (SMM) as an approach to design knowledge sharing platform incorporating Web2.0 features which allow user-generated content and have a stronger emphasis on collaboration and interaction amongst users. SMM is a philosophically derived approach which allows knowledge management (KM) researchers and practitioners to more fully understand and listen to user’s needs so as to inform the design of dialogic KM practices and systems to promote knowledge sharing. This paper presents a “Safety Moment” project to illustrate how SMM has been applied to inform the design of a Web2.0 enabled ‘knowledging’ application in Environmental Resources Management (ERM), the world’s largest all-environmental consulting firm. The project discussed has been implemented since January 2008 as part of ERM’s commitment to improve Health & Safety Performance to ensure all ERM employees, contractors and clients are safe at work. The use of SMM informed Web2.0 application has correlated with increased staff satisfaction, increased company reputation and reduced risks.
Highlights
Leadership 2.0, Web2.0, Intranet 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0Knowledge Management (KM) in the enterprise setting has increasingly been associated with the use of collaboration technologies, social computing and interactive online communities to leverage collective insights of all staff to inform decision making and promote innovation
This section draws on Environmental Resources Management (ERM)‟s own experience adopting Web2.0 features on Minerva and discusses how Dervin‟s Sense-Making Methodology has contributed to the art of designing Web2.0 enabled „Safety Zone‟ to promote the „knowledging‟ of Safety topics
The Director went in to explain how the situation has been/could be handled in other ways. In another example, when the Environmental Health & Safety (EHS) Director spotted a trend that there were 9 near misses related to Sub-Surface Clearance (SCC) within 2 months, he organised a global one hour Safety Stand Down to ask colleagues to reflect on what went wrong and how to avoid serious injuries. After he posted the SCC Safety Moment on the blog, a sceptical comment titled „Thanks for nothing‟ came in, the contributor challenged EHS Director that ERM carried out many SCC jobs in a year, and there were many which we did very well, why did we only look at the problems but did not celebrate our success
Summary
Knowledge Management (KM) in the enterprise setting has increasingly been associated with the use of collaboration technologies, social computing and interactive online communities to leverage collective insights of all staff to inform decision making and promote innovation. Staff do not need to be spoon fed with information, and research shows spoon-feeding rarely is effective, The focus of information literacy in the workplace places less emphasis on Web2.0 tools training but more on guidance to adopt good two-way communication procedures, such as listening, evaluating, presenting and visualizing ideas with the audience‟s needs in mind. Since the early 20th century, most industrialized countries have implemented a set of management disciplines that have focused almost exclusively on top-down command-and-control strategies (Putnam & Krone, 2006) It remains a much contested issue in organizational communication research, command-and-control procedures have been shown to have decided limits even in these presumably routinized contexts and even more so in complex organizations whose core purposes involve knowledge sharing and meeting the demands of changing, sometimes chaotic environments. The purpose of Leadership 2.0, as we define it, is to promote "knowledging" -- in essence the using of systematic communication practices that enable participants to make and unmake, refine and expand, exemplify and abstract their "knowledging" by using systematically designed processes of self-reflection and shared communicating
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