Be a Good Neuron - Start a Blog

The Forest Service, like so many organizations, is struggling to find ways to communicate more effectively. At present we're relying on emails, newsletters, intranet sites, meetings, and conference calls. We're innundated by irrelevant information in our inboxes so often that in order to survive we have to tune most of it out. Then we miss the pieces of news which were really crucial.

For the past 100 years the agency has gone through phases of both centralization and decentralization. The next phase of development is struggling to emerge - networked intelligence. My good friend and colleague Faye Fentiman says "intelligence is widely distributed in organzations - one brain per person." Each brain has an amazing depth of unique knowledge which is currently only barely tapped.

Think of it this way. There are 35,000 hard drives each with huge volumes of information, but none of them are networked. There's no way to Google a topic and find anything valuable because each hard drive is encased inside a skull and there are no wires connecting them. Some people call it a knowledge management issue, others call it a communications issue.

There may not be wires from my head to yours, but there are connections and channels of information and influence between individuals. They're called relationships. The more trust and commraderie between two people, the more freely they share their knowledge. The collection of relationships throughout the agency are social networks.

True networked intelligence requires a healthy and vibrant web of interconnected social networks which allow for the unimpeded flow of knowledge throughout the organization. What's interesting to me is that intelligence within one brain also requires a network, a neural network. In your brain there are neurons which fire electrical impulses. Think about your mom for a minute. Everything which comes to mind about your mom can be called a thought construct. Each thought construct is a network of neurons which fire in tandem while you are thinking about that topic. These neural networks, like all networks, are self-organizing. That means that sometimes you can spontaneously realize there is a connection between two or more formerly separate thought constructs. When that happens we describe it as a light bulb going off in our heads, which is fitting since the neurons connect via electricity. When you get a new idea or insight it is said to look like a lightning storm in your brain - it's the flash of thousands of neurons firing in conjunction for the first time - the birth of a new neural network.

If I record my ideas, theories, experiences, knowledge, etc. in my blog and if others do the same, then by Googling I can find and connect with other people around the topics which interest us. Over time as these connections multiply, a network is born. In the knowledge management world it's called a Community of Practice.

The Forest Service is only just entering the world of Social Media. We can Wiki, and executive leaders can blog. I've recently heard that blogging will open up to any employee, provided the supervisor agrees to monitor the blog. I'm choosing to blog outside the fire wall now, and when the opportunity arises, I'll have a duplicate blog on the inside. The reason I think it's important to do both is that I want to participate in dialogue both internally as well as with my external peers.

Even if no one ever reads these posts, it's helpful to me to process and record information in this way.