02 The Missing Element – Knowledge Processing
Two Major Outputs
Successfully bridging the gap between separate knowledge and interests and stakeholder alignment on detailed processes and plans requires the creation of two major outputs:
- 1) work products, including requirements, process models and action plans, and
- 2) shared understanding and consensus about those work products.
Both of these outputs are required together in order for either of them to be of value.
- Understanding and consensus without models and plans can’t be acted on, and
- models and plans without understanding and consensus won’t be acted on.
One without the other produces little or no effect.
An important insight here is that when people they are “communicating to agree on what to do together”, they don’t perform “collaboration”, “decision support”, “process modeling” and “project planning” as separate activities.
In fact they use all of these functions in an iterative, interleaving, integrated way, in order to discover, share and reconcile interests at the same time that they are constructing and considering alternative process models and plans.
Again, virtually everyone has some ability to do this. It seems to be a “built-in” human function. Society and civilization would clearly be very different if this function did not exist.
This is in fact why the “long cycles of meetings and communications” are the primary approach to bridging the gap described above. Collaborative solutions development, regardless of how efficiently it is performed, is essentially a group communications activity.
What’s needed is an effective fusion of collaboration, decision support, process modeling and project planning that can be delivered in interactive group sessions, whether in-person or on-line, and that can:
a) support and amplify this “built-in” real-time human knowledge processing, while at the same time
b) lead it to produce high quality process development work products.
(more detail on “knowledge processing” at http://blog.actionmap.com/2007/10/12/csd_gap_center/)