SolutionsMapping

Unlocking A Public Health Team's Hidden Knowledge Wealth

Did you know that almost 80% of the knowledge in your organization is invisible. This ¨tacit knowledge¨ is the lifeblood of your organization or team - what makes it tick. Failure to unlock this tacit knowledge and use it well is like failing to use a large part of your brain!

One of the most challenging jobs creative leaders & innovators face is making their organization's or team´s tacit knowledge more productive & effective - a high-impact strategy.

This capability is even more critical in public sector organizations due to typical staff and budget  limitations - which are becoming more pronounced as a result of the economic crisis.

I had the privilege of working with a county public health department to help make the expert knowledge and insights of public health nurses visible and accessible for all members of the department - community health & environmental health. The agency director, a very creative and capable leader, wanted the community health and environmental health groups to be more integrated in their use of core public health concepts to guide their daily work and decisions.

In the process of the tacit knowledge elicitation, we created new knowledge tools for the environmental health team to use to prioritize its response to citizen complaints. The shared vision and common language across both community & environmental health have helped the public health department become more integrated and effective.

The insights offered by one long-time and very knowledgeable community health nurses - were "Ah has" for other staff. Her clear explanation of how the core public health concept of "prevention"enables her to make tough decisions - like filing a child protective services report. 

Several community health nurses described the "ecology of caring relationships" in their department that made it possible for them to function in the emotionally demanding context of their work with families in need.

I'd be happy to send you a copy of the paper describing this work - send me an email and note whether you want the English or Spanish version.

 

New Knowledge Tools for Lawyers

My colleague Patrick Hindert, Managing Director of S2KM,  posted a revised version of "Web 2.0 for Lawyers" in his blog yesterday. Web 2.0 for Lawyers is a resource-rich visual knowledge model that provides an overview of web 2.0 and its implications for lawyers and law firms.

The embedded podcast provides a guided tour of the suite of concept maps.

How can visual knowledge models such as this one create value for attorneys and law firms? A portfolio of concept maps I have created to assist small businesses to increase employee effectiveness provides a couple of examples.

One promising use is to help juries understand the conceptual landscape and inter-relationships among the key points key arguments presented during a trial. The current standard methods for summative presentations to juries are PowerPoint and graphic drawings on flip charts or presentation boards.

The limitations to these methods are:

1) the "recency effect" means that the last point is the one that people tend to remember and while that may the most important, the "beyond reasonable doubt" requirement means that the jury needs to feel comfortable in adopting that final point.

2) it is difficult to impossible, using these methods, for the jury build a cognitive model of the case and arguments that in any way approximates that of the defense or prosecuting attorney. The cognitive load is simply too great.

Imagine that as a defense attorney, when you made your summary presentation to the jury, the presentation could unfold a conceptual model of your arguments that made clear the high-level concepts and the key inter-relationships?

What if photos, diagrams, audio or video recordings could be displayed in the context of this model, so that the impact and implications of their content would be apparent?

What if, as defense attorney, you could bring the jury along during the trial to support them to develop a "mental model" of the case that corresponds to your mental model?

Concept mapping software, and the embedded presentation tool, accomplish this by being constructed of "knowledge claims" or propositions. Cognitive research has revealed that the brain stores knowledge in the form of propositions - two concepts connected by a linking phrase, i.e., "Knowledge" "is" "Power." Propositions are the bite-sized chunks the brain uses to build internal knowledge representations.

Patrick Hindert has been using concept maps to define the business landscape for the structured settlement industry. He has been able to share his insights about new opportunities created by regulatory changes as well as to clearly communicate how different industry players perceive "hot issues" such as factoring.

The concept mapping tools my firm uses differ from other so-called concept mapping and mind-mapping tools in the extensive cognitive research that informs their design and the use of propositions as the core unit from which the concept map is constructed.

As pre-eminent knowledge workers, lawyers deserve the best knowledge tools and knowledge assets available. Concept mapping tools, such as InsightTM and CmapToolsTM, offer great promise.

Concept Mapping & Mind Mapping

An effective, and increasingly important, way to address information overload is to create organizing frameworks that support learning and sense-making. Visual frameworks support the viewer to grasp the overall "shape" and extent of the information landscape.

Mind mapping tools, such as NovaMind, MindJet, and Inspiration, are widely used in business, education and government. Concept mapping tools are becoming increasingly important due to the capability of concept maps to represent propositional knowledge and to clarify the conceptual hierarchy and interconnections among the key concepts the domain-of-interest.

The terms "mind-mapping" and "concept-mapping" are often used interchangeably, but the tools, mapping process and products are different in important ways. While both of these process result in visual diagrams, mind maps are best-suited for brainstorming, to create flow charts or visual representations that sketch out a project plan. Mind mapping software has become quite sophisticated. Mind Jet's MindManager, for example, can be a project management tool when used as a front-end to Microsoft Project.

Tony Buzan is credited with creating mind-mapping as a tool to support the associative syle of "lateral thinking." Because it was created to support highly associative thinking, the connections in a mind map can be arranged in any way. Usually, they radiate out from a central core, e.g., an image or word. Buzan calls the result an "information picture."

Concept mapping was developed by Prof. Joseph Novak, and his research team at Cornell University, as a way to represent the emerging conceptual structure of science knowledge in K-12 students. It has subsequently been used to represent the expert knowledge of scientists, product development teams, physicians, attorneys, software designers, nuclear engineers, and business strategists - among others.

Novakian concept maps are rooted in a David Ausubel's theory of meaningful learning and a theory of knowledge.  Concept maps support cognitive development by: 1) helping the learner and teacher determine what the learner knows, the hierarchy and relationships of concepts in her cognitive structure, and 2) by providing advance organizers that foster the meaningful integration of new information into existing cognitive structure.

Concept maps move beyond "information pictures" to create "conceptual landscapes." A major advance of concept maps as a tool to support cognitive development and expert learning is that they are hierarchical and are constructed from building blocks called "propositions". Propositions are two concepts joined by a linking phrase, e.g., "Knowledge" "is" "Power." 

Research indicates that the brain stores knowledge in units of meaning that have the same structure as propositions. The capacity of concept maps and concept mapping to facilitate meaningful learning and knowledge construction is validated by over thiry years of research by Prof. Joseph D. Novak--first at Cornell University and continuing since 1992 at the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition (IHMC). 

The power of concept mapping lies in the rigor and clarity required to create a concept map, starting with the creation of a concise focus question.

There are a number of articles by Novak, Alberto Canas, head of the CmapTools team at IHMC, and their colleagues, on Sound Knowledge Strategies' resource page.

The IHMC website contains links to hundreds of research papers on:

• the impact of concept mapping on learning,
• technical papers on CMapTools, and
• a suite of concept maps representing the features and applications of concept mapping and CMapTools.

I posted some Cmaps to Flickr a few days ago and encountered a Cmap posted by someone else representing how Flickr works. We may be at the beginning of a surge in the use of concept mapping and CmapTools to create and represent knowledge on the web.

It is a powerful cognitive technology that can enhance the knowledge creation and knowledge sharing in any organization and as an element of Web 2.0.

Sound Knowledge Strategies' portfolio provides examples of concept maps I have created for clients and case studies of how they have used them.

If you've used mind-mapping or concept mapping to enhance learning, sense-making or business processes, please share your success. Questions and comments are welcome.

Web 2.0 and Concept Maps

What does the term Web 2.0 bring to mind for you?--MySpace, podcasting, LinkedIn, Skype, Google maps, wikis, flickr and blogs? Or Technorati, Ajax and mashups?  It's challenging to keep the list of tools and technologies up-to-date because new ones are appearing all the time. And what if, like me, your primary interest is knowledge creation, knowledge sharing and sense-making.

I had a chance to grapple with these questions over the past couple weeks as Patrick Hindert, Managing Director of S2KM, Denham Grey, Knowledge-At-Work and I developed web-based knowledge resources for a presentation Patrick made on September 6 to the Cincinnati Bar Association. We worked as a virtual team supported by primarily by SocialText, Skype, and concepts maps.

"How Does Web 2.0 Impact Lawyers" is the title of the root concept map of a rich knowledge model  designed and produced for Patrick's presentation. I invite you to explore the root concept map and the other concept maps and knowledge resources attached to it.  It's an example of the functionality that concept mapping offers in the Web 2.0 space:

1. Concept maps can increase the effectiveness of virtual teams. They help align everyone in a team or workgroup so that there is a common shared vision--the vision is made visible in the form of the concept map. Patrick, Denham and I worked together asynchronously with SocialText, Skype and concept maps as our primary tools. The organization of the initial draft concept map changed quite radically as we better understood and re-formulated the hierarchy of concepts, sub-concept maps, and discerned inter-relationships.
2. Concept maps facilitate sense-making. The content is organized hierarchically--the most general concepts at the top, and particular examples at the bottom. The context is extablished by a focus question. Key relationhips among concepts are made visible. The units of meaning that concept maps are built from are the same units of meaning your brain uses to store knowledge, i.e., propositions--two concepts connected by linking words that describe the relationship between them, e.g., "Web 2.0" "is defined by" "Communities and Social Networks."
3. Concept maps facilitate innovation and insights. It sounds paradoxical, but having an organized knowledge framework enables people to see connections and inter-dependencies that would otherwise remain invisible. In the rapidly changing social and business environment driven by Web 2.0, this is a core benefit.
4. The CMapToolsTM software used to create concept maps is free to schools and universities. It can be obtained from the CmapToolsTM webpage of the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, the developers of CMapTools. The commercial version, Insight, is available from Ceryph.
   

There are links from the concept maps in the "How Does Web 2.0 Impact Lawyers" knowledge model to the Weblaw20 wiki and from the wiki to the concept maps. These linkages create a new virtual knowledge structure, one that's enriched by the wiki's support for collaboration and content development, and the visual knowledge organization and inter-relationship benefits of concept maps. Explore the wiki, click through the to concept map, and back to the wiki.

After your exploration, I'd be delighted to hear from you--your comments, questions and insights.