BONUS WLP297: Sharing and Retaining Knowledge in Your Organisation
In this bonus episode of the 21st Century Work Life podcast, Ana Neves talks about how she’s structured the conference Social Now, which covers how enterprise social network tools can help organisations in the day to day, “rather than being an extra thing we have to do”.
The Social Now conference started in 2012, and has a fictitious company at its centre. The people in the company have challenges that will resonate with most employees in organisations, and the conference is structured around helping people in the company. Ana blogs as a new employee in this organisation, so that attendees have a background on the case study through the blog http://houseofcables.socialnow.org/
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The discount code WCL21 now gets you 15% off the Early Bird, as this period has been extended.
Many organisations have implemented these tools, but are not making the best use of them, being used at a superficial level. Pilar was under the impression that online tools are being used efficiently and deliberately at a team level, but this is not the case.
Ana talks about Social Collaboration Maturity Benchmark Report 2021, which shows that teams are still using online tools for videoconferencing and direct messages, but not for what the tools are best, which is working out in the open and documenting.
The concepts of “working out loud” or “working in the narrative” are still not being adopted. Eg from I’ve done this document vs I’m working on this document. Work in progress can be useful to others in your team or the organisation, but of course to share this requires a lot of psychological safety. For example, if you’re writing a report over a month, even the first sentences that you write down could already be of use to others.
It’s all about having the right culture, not just the right tools.
Before the pandemic, the number of direct messages was smaller than during. Before the pandemic, the teams and people using these tools were already behind the concept of working out loud, whereas now they’ve adopted them because that’s all they had. People are afraid of having their work in progress visible to all.
At an organisational level, Ana has seen orgs try to compensate for the lack of being together in the physical space. However some of these ways of keeping employees “engaged” sometimes seem purposeless, and focused on the social. If this is not consistent with the organisation’s culture, it jars with people and can be worse than doing nothing.
These tools work best when they are used to listen to people and what they have to say, around topics that link back to business. What brings people together is their work, not just their social ties. Creating organisation-wide dialogues about things linked to work eg internal processes, new products is where these tools become valuable.
For some employees, it’s difficult to think about some of these spaces where we can have important conversations, not just “watercooler conversations”. The spaces are informal, but you can have good conversations. The key is to evidence that you have been listening, else there’s no point.
These tools work best asynchronously and are great for documenting thoughts and ideas that don’t get implemented. For example, “we’ve made this decision, and if you want to look at other ideas that were generated, have a look at this conversation”. This also helps to see who was part of the conversation.
It also helps to support the concept of “peer assist”, where people learn from others when they’re kicking off a project. Asynchronous conversations stay as a record for others to 1) identify the people who can help them, and then have a conversation with them and 2) to access thoughts of people who have left the organisation, through their posts
19.30mins
Ana talks about the conference Social Now, on the different ways in which these tools can be weaved into how the day to day looks like in organisations. The focus this year is about enabling engaged and high performing teams, aligned with the organisation’s values and culture.
The conference is centred around the fictitious company Cablinc, and Ana is blogging as the Head of Marketing & Internal Communications at Cablinc. Through the blog http://houseofcables.socialnow.org/ she covers the challenges a new employee might have when joining a company, especially around the issues of knowledge management and communication.
Regarding the content of the conference itself, Ana talks about the focus of some of the sessions, including Pilar’s. You can find the whole agenda here: https://socialnow.org/agenda/ Some examples, how to run great hybrid meetings, and how to draft some of the posts to facilitate conversation in the enterprise networks. The conference will kick off with a “liberating structure”, tapping into the knowledge of the attendees straight away.
The attendees share common context from the beginning, with the case study providing a common language for all. And the names of the characters are memorable, so they become part of the conversation.
This is a good example of using an external (and fictitious!) focus to talk about our own issues, even something that we can use in your own teams.
As well as advice from the consultants for the fictitious company, there are also live demos of some online tools, showing how they can be used in the day to day. This helps participants to get a sense of the impact these tools can have in the day to day. (And if participants feel like they’re being sold to, they can raise their flags!)
The blog http://houseofcables.socialnow.org covers the challenges of the access and retention of critical knowledge, employee engagement, internal communication and teamwork & collaboration. Presenters, vendors and participants of the conference have access to these fictitious (but based in reality!) challenges, and on what everything is anchored.
There is also a session which follows the format of “peer assist”, whereby people in one part of the organisation can benefit from the experience of others in the organisation with similar experiences, or with experiences with transferable learning.
The Social Now conference is taking place on 19 and 20 May 2022 in Lisbon. You can find all the details and book tickets here: https://socialnow.org/agenda/
And you can connect with Ana on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ananeves/
And Twitter: https://twitter.com/ananeves
And if you speak Portuguese, you can listen to the podcast that Ana hosts, KMOL: https://kmol.pt/category/podcast/
Looking for the transcript? You can find it further down…
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Transcript for WLP297: Sharing and Retaining Knowledge in Your Organisation
Pilar Orti 0:00
Hello, and welcome to a bonus episode of the 21st Century Work Life podcast, where we talk about leading remote teams, online collaboration and working in distributed organisations. My name is Pilar Orti. If we haven't met before, it's lovely to have you here, and if you're a regular listener, you'll know that every now and then we release a bonus episode when either something happens, or because we feel like it, let's face it. And in this case, it was because I was recording with Ana Neves, who is the organiser of a conference called Social Now. And I was recording just a little bit of a segment to put in our What's Going On episodes. And in that segment, the idea was that she would tell us about this conference, which has a very interesting structure and is a lot of fun. And in which I'm involved, I'm going to be there in Lisbon, 19th and 20th, of May. And during the conversation, we just started talking about this whole concept of knowledge management in organisations, why social enterprise networks, or enterprise social network platforms, are not being adopted. The fact that there is actually very little culture and habits still, and especially in remote teams that became remote during the pandemic, there's still very little habit of working out loud, and how this, what this means to organisations is that a lot of the knowledge is lost. Whereas if we tweak how we use technology, and in particular, these social enterprise networks, or enterprise social networks, like I never get it right, come on Pilar. In particular, if we look at these platforms, and we look at them as something that can bring real value to an organisation, then we can, we can exploit that opportunity that technology is giving us. So what was supposed to be a 10 minute chat became a…I think, it was even 40 minutes by the end. And I thought this really needs its own episode. And it adds to what Maya and I were talking about in last week's episode about your team's rhythm. And again, this mixture of asynchronous documentation, etc. So I hope you enjoy it. Now, this is being released on the 31st of March 2022, which is when the early bird date for the conference tickets expires. But Ana has said, well, it'd be great if you can offer your listeners the opportunity to buy tickets at the reduced early bird price. So listeners if you use the code, and I'll give you the URL in a second, if you use the code 21 C W L, so two, one, C W L, you can get the early bird discount until the 8th of April. Otherwise, you can buy the tickets at the normal price. So in today's episode, Ana will talk about what this conference is about, which is essentially about high performing teams. It's got a really interesting structure. And the website of the conference is socialnow.org. So without further ado, here's an innovation talking about the conference, but also the need to start thinking about how we manage knowledge in our organisation.
Pilar Orti 3:33
So listeners, I met Ana Neves. Recently, she invited me to come to Lisbon to be part of her conference. And when she was explaining what the conference was about and how it operated, I thought you have to come and tell our listeners because I think not just the theme is going to be interesting, but also the way in which she is structuring the conference in order to give people a different kind of learning experience. And I think there's definitely something that we can apply into how we curate learning experiences for our teams and also the subject is going to be very interesting. So Ana, I just give you a very brief introduction listener. She's a management consultant and the founder of Knowman. She is the author and host of KMOL. She's a knowledge management specialist. And she is the organiser of social now, which is a conference that is taking place on the 19th and 20th of May 2022. We are recording now in Lisbon, and it will be the first in person conference I attend in a very long time. So welcome, Ana.
Ana Neves 4:41
Thank you, Pilar. I thank you so much for inviting me and I look forward to meeting you in Lisbon. I have to say
Pilar Orti 4:48
Yes, And you're also a listener of the podcast, which I love. I love having listeners on the show because they know what they're getting themselves into. So that is great. So I'm going to ask if you can give us a quick overview of the conference. And then we'll go into a bit more detail of some of the stuff that's going to happen there and how.
Ana Neves 5:10
Okay, so Social Now was started in 2012, as a way of making it tangible for organisations to understand how enterprise social tools can actually be part of the way we work, rather than something extra that people need to worry about. So as you were saying, my area of expertise is knowledge management. And these tools can really help with that. But it's important that people realise that using these platforms is not something on top, and it can really help. And, Social Now basically lives on the back of a fictitious company that I created, fictitious, but which feels very real, with very real challenges. And what happens during the conference is that all presentations are about offering advice to help this fictitious company. And by doing that, you get real practical advice for all participants to take home and implement. So that's basically in a nutshell, that's the whole thing about Social Now.
Pilar Orti 6:27
And listeners, Ana and I have just finished recording for Facilitation Stories, which is another podcast. And there she tells the whole story of how this came about. And that’ll be Episode 42, I think so worth checking out as well. So we might feel a bit like we're saying the same thing. So we check in like, “Have I said that before?” That will be where that comes from. So we're talking about these social enterprises, social networks, which is… it's the first tool that I came across that I was really excited about. And this was Yammer before teams, before slack, before a lot. And you mentioned in facilitation stories that sometimes, and this is how I used to describe it as well to people, was a Facebook for your organisation, which had the negative connotations you were talking about.
Ana Neves 4:41
Yes, indeed. And I think it's really important that people see and understand the differences, but also, the opportunities. And for instance, this whole COVID thing that we're living through at the moment, it's been amazing in terms of getting people to use these platforms a lot more. It's been amazing for knowledge management, because all of a sudden, lots of our decision making processes are documented in a way. Because in chats, theme spaces and things like that, but what's, and it's part of a study I conducted recently with orange trails, we have lots of organisations using these tools more, but in a very superficial way. So all these years after Social Now has started, I still feel it's really relevant so that people get a good sense of how these tools become part of the way they can work, or should be working.
Pilar Orti 8:25
I'm thinking as you're talking, and I think it's worth just exploring this a little bit more before we go further into the conference itself, is that we can see how teams at a team level and we've started to adopt things like Slack teams, or other project management tools, where we're making more of our work and our conversations visible and our learning. I think the next step will be to take it seriously at the organisational level. So that if we have Yammer playing alongside teams, we know that Yammer is not just for chats and talking about hobbies and stuff. But actually there can be some really good networking throughout the organisation happening there. But it needs curating. And you're saying it needs someone who's really looking after it.
Ana Neves 9:12
Yeah, Pilar, even if at a team level. When you look at the social collaboration, maturity benchmark I was referring to, we have the luxury of having done the first edition before COVID. Just before, we didn't know what was coming. But it was really convenient because now we can get a before and after more teams are using these tools. But they are still at a very early stage in terms of how they're using these platforms. It's just very much for calls, for video conferences, for direct messages. And there's a lot of cultural elements, cultural barriers that are still blocking teams from actively, and effectively, and smartly using these platforms. So we still see that a lot.
Pilar Orti 10:11
I'm glad you brought that up. Because I've seen that too. I shared in a recent episode, how three or four years ago, I was working with a client who completely understood these tools. And we were saying, they're gonna end up being used as storage places where we just share files, which I've seen recently. So what is the next step? Do you think then if people are using direct messages? So yeah, one-to-ones, mainly, the calls and stuff? What do you think? What could we see? To think, yes, teams are going on to the next level and making full use, or more use of these tools.
Ana Neves 10:49
I think the concept of working out loud, or as my partners there at the orange trial, say, working in the narrative, is really important, because what we need to see it seems is sharing not necessarily what they've done, like I finished these documents. But more like, I'm working on these documents, and making the documents… Even with the documents, I know, it's really hard to take people outside of documents, because that's how they have worked for ages. And we still need documents if you're interacting with clients. But it's important that people understand, or teams see documents as a work in progress, not something that you just share when it's done, because you're afraid of being criticised. It's something that you say you're about to start, it's something that you gather ideas of how to go about, it is something that you have open for everyone to benefit while you're still in the process of working on it. Because if you're working on a report for a month, maybe something that you've written one week into writing, it can be already of use for someone before the month is over. So this whole idea of I'm part of a team, and I'm comfortable making errors, I'm comfortable sharing what I know, I'm comfortable getting feedback from others. That's culture, that's not tools, the amazing thing is that tools make it possible now, and I think that's the shift that needs to happen, the click that needs to happen, for organisations and for teams to make better use of the available tools.
Pilar Orti 12:39
Myself and other listeners are nodding, we are nodding.
Ana Neves 12:44
And I remember lots of converts now, but let me just share something very quickly from the report. Before the pandemic, the percentage of people using direct messages was smaller than currently. And I was struck by that, I thought, no direct messages are now less because there's more people working in teams in shared team spaces. But then I started thinking before the pandemic, those using the platforms were the converted, those who believed in these tools, so they were happy to share in open spaces. And now we have everyone there because they have to be there. Therefore, they don't feel comfortable. And they use direct messages because they don't want to share directly in open spaces. So I was really struck when I saw it, but then I started to think back to my clients. And now I see them using it and it makes sense.
Pilar Orti 13:53
Yeah. And also the people who had adopted the tools beforehand, probably already had a culture and they saw what those tools could enable them to do. Whereas as you say, this has been forced, and the only way, that is so interesting. I remember talking about going back to the documents thing, precisely that now of having visible work, and having creating your documents that you were working on, not on your computer, but in the cloud, and having your team being able to access and I was talking to one of my friends and she had such a negative reaction against it. And it was precisely because she was like…she's a manager to say “my team would be okay, but I don't want anyone else in the organisation to see it till I'm ready.” So this point that you make about culture, not tools is really important.
Ana Neves 14:40
Yeah, yeah, totally.
Pilar Orti 14:43
Yeah, so we've got that. And there is that, the adoption at the team level, which we are further behind then I would wish for. Maybe if I say enough times that we're there, maybe we'll get there. And how about it on an organisational level? So looking at these tools that are like Facebook for businesses, so looking at something like Yammar, how have you seen these being used? If you want to focus on the knowledge management aspect, that's great as well.
Ana Neves 15:16
Well, I've seen organisations trying to compensate for the lack of being together in a physical space, using these tools to compensate for that, and to make up for that, in this idea, or in this aim to get employee engagement, or at least keep employee engagement up. But the thing is, sometimes it looks very purposeless, or without a purpose, basically, just creating something for the sake of creating it, or let's organise these parties every Friday with live music, or let's do an all together thing on Mondays, and that is all good. But if it's not consistent with everything else that feels shallow and feels fake, and people are, they are wise, people will know that you're just checking the boxes without really meaning it and I think it's even worse than not doing it sometimes. What I also feel is, these tools are amazing for employee engagement, if they're used to listen to people, and what they have to say, not necessarily about their hobbies, that's important, but these need to link back to business. Because what brings people together and this idea of context, people are there not because they're friends, they're there because they work in the same company. So let's bring them together to talk about the business objectives, the business purpose, the business vision. So create dialogues, that's what these tools are really good for, create organisation wide dialogues around topics that are important for the business. Maybe it's about getting to new markets, maybe it's about designing new products, maybe it's about improving internal processes, maybe it's about improving employee adoption, employee engagement, let's make it part of the business and the values and integrate and get people to talk with each other and listen to them. Because that's the other thing. It's these parties online and these moments together, are for employees. And very often you don't see managers there. And again, this feels inconsistent and like a wasted opportunity for me.
Pilar Orti 17:53
Oh, I'm nodding so much, and I know some listeners are also because it's exactly my thoughts and I think it is going back to how many people feel about the space. It's like saying a space that I've always associated with a party or informality like a bar, for example, to then switch my mind to have to think about it as a place where we can have conversations about work around the work. And that can be useful to the organisation, it will take some kind of mindset shift, if we've always seen a space as a space for X or Y is really difficult. But these enterprise social networks were designed to create dialogue, and that dialogue can be about everything, and it's still under the umbrella of the organisation. So it's okay to encourage dialogue about work in these informal spaces.
Ana Neves 18:42
Yeah, and when you create dialogue, you need to give evidence that you've actually listened to what people are saying, because that's the other thing. I see organisations just asking this question, “oh, we really want to hear from you what you have to say about x?” But then nothing. There's no noise, there's nothing back. There's no “yes, we've listened to what you've said, and this is what we are going to do. And this is why we're not doing what you suggested”. This acknowledgment part is really important because it's a key element in the dialogue. So, the tools are there, but sometimes the culture and the practices are lacking. And that's where I think we're still missing an opportunity.
Pilar Orti 19:30
And another point, so we're also talking about asynchronous communication a lot of the time with these tools. Another thing is if you're having these dialogues at an organisational level, and it's guiding how you're making decisions, you can also say, we've decided to do this because x, y and z, we could have gone down another route. And if for some reason at some point you want to explore that either, in the organisation, or in a team, or if you just want to go through a thought experiment, go to this conversation that happened around here and have a look at what was said. Because it is about knowledge management, it is about keeping the knowledge there. And it's not just for the moment, because that's the whole point of async is that we can refer to it later.
Ana Neves 20:16
Yes, these platforms… that's why I was saying this is just a golden opportunity for knowledge management, because all of a sudden, we're getting people to register what they're thinking, although not as much as we would like, because there's still a lot of synchronous communication, but there's obviously more asynchronous communication. And that is gold in terms of documenting the decision making, the reasons for making a decision or not. And the other thing, which is a very simple and sometimes forgotten thing, it is sometimes as much about knowing what was decided or what was the report, which was written as it is about knowing who was part of the conversation. If you're lucky enough, you can go back to your colleague two years down the line and hear what he or she thought at the time, because that's really invaluable.
Pilar Orti 21:13
Okay, so that reminds me then that we were going to record about the conference. Listeners, this bit might be in, might not, I might split this into two episodes, I don't know what's going to happen. However, you're talking about this. Part of the conversation we had on facilitation stories, you talked about a kind of a peer learning exercise, maybe you didn't… Did you? Was that the term you used or did you use a specific….
Ana Neves 21:39
Peer assist.
Pilar Orti 21:41
Peer assist! And there, you talked about how sometimes before we start a project, we go and gather information about people who've done it before and stuff like that. So this is also a great way of doing that when you're going about to maybe try something new. But someone else has done something before you can look for them and talk to them. We're all for synchronous communication as well. But you can also maybe dig out someone who left six months ago, and they had a really good experience. And they had to document it in some way. So great.
Ana Neves 22:14
Yes, that's exactly.
Pilar Orti 22:16
Okay. Great. So let's pull back then and go back to the conference, Social Now. And all of this makes sense as well. So, I'm gonna ask you first what the content is, well we've got this, but then what kind of content there is, and then you can tell us about the focus of it. So Ana, tell us about what is Social Now about?
Ana Neves 22:42
So Social Now is really about the use of enterprise social tools inside the organisations and the different ways it can be used, and specially the different ways it can be weaved into the way your organisation's work. So that's the core thing, or the core topic, of all the additions of Social Now, with every addition as a specific focus. And this year, especially because of the reasons we were talking about earlier, it's going to be about enabling, engaged, and high performing teams. So the stuff we were talking about earlier. And the conference is going to offer advice for this fictitious company on how they can improve the way their teams work, to make them more efficient, effective, but also to ensure that the members are engaged with the vision and the values of the company. So that's going to be the focus of the conference this year.
Pilar Orti 23:51
And I don't know if we've told listeners how you are approaching this. You've got a blog by a fictitious character and you've created a fictitious company, and just a reminder.
Ana Neves 24:03
yeah. So there's a company called Cabling, which is a company that produces electrical equipment. And the company has a team that I've created fictitious characters, Anna McLear. She's the head of comms. She's the main character, and she writes a blog. And she tells the pains, the ups and downs of life at Cabling, and her blog is the way we get to understand the problems they're going through. And that's against those issues, those challenges that the presentations will happen during the conference.
Pilar Orti 24:46
And she's new in this company. It's been really interesting.
Ana Neves 24:50
Yeah. So all the onboarding thing and one of our first challenges is she gets into the company and all in her first week, she hears that the company is opening a new factory in a different country. And she's in charge of the comms plan, both the internal and the external comms plan. And her first action is, I need to learn what was done when they opened the other factories in the past. And there's no one around who's been part of the comms plan at the time. So she struggles with tapping into existing knowledge from day one.
Pilar Orti 25:33
There we go, prove a point. So listeners, if you're like me, and listen to podcasts, and like to look up stuff as it comes up, the URL for the conference is socialnow.org. So tell us a bit then about the structure of the conference and how this fictitious company is incorporated into it.
Ana Neves 25:54
Okay, so the conference for this topic of enabling, engaging, high performing teams, what I tried to do was to look at the different elements and different ways of making that happen. So I invited different speakers to cover different aspects, so we're starting with Perry Timms. I really like his positive, yet very grounded take on work in a hybrid context. So he will be kind of giving us a sense of a new form of work in this hybrid context we're living in, then we'll have Silvia Rivela, Marcel Kampman, for instance, they will be talking about the idea of creating space for happiness, and creating memorable moments for teams to feel engaged. And yourself, Pilar, you'll be kind of showing us, or giving this fictitious company very practical tips on how people can feel connected. And then we will have some very short sessions on how to improve team meetings. For instance, if you really have to have those, how can they be better, or how can you make the content of posts in your internal platforms be more impactful and get more engagement for employees. So the other thing is, for instance, in the morning of the first day, we're going to have a hands-on session. And we'll be using liberating structure and inviting all participants to share their experiences, maybe negative, maybe positive stuff that they've tried. And we're going to tap into their existing knowledge and experience to identify good practices to boost team's performance and engagement. So it's an icebreaker because they will be working together. But it's contextual to the fictitious company, because what they're going to do is to tap into their experience to draw some practical advice for the fictitious company.
Pilar Orti 28:20
And what we were talking about, when we're recording for the other podcast for facilitation stories, is the fact that we are going to be focusing on this fictitious company means that we don't turn around to our neighbour and advise them. But, we've got a great focus where we can share the stakes… very well, there's no stakes. It doesn't matter if we give them c**p advice.
Ana Neves 25:54
It's really interesting, because the characters in the fictitious company, they're very memorable. Their names are very memorable. So you've got John McChief as the CEO, you've got Louise McGeek. She's the CIO, you've got McCash from finance, you've got McMann from HR, you've got McTable who is the head of engineering. So these names are really memorable, which means that even participants who have never attended in the past, after one or two presentations, they will know these names by heart. And at least if they hear them, they know what the person does. And they start asking questions. There's lots of time for debate and q&a and all these hands-on and practical sessions. So they refer to the characters by name and sometimes they imagine that I'm McCable, so they kind of ask questions on behalf of the fictitious company, which ends up with us making up different characters. We had one one year. It was a hilarious comment from one of the participants and he said, imagine that I'm McFired. And I am taking all my knowledge with me because I'm annoyed with the company. So it introduces a touch of humour, and makes it tangible. Everyone will know someone like McMann or someone who has been McLear at some point in their life. So it just makes it very relatable and very tangible.
Pilar Orti 30:31
Yeah, and sometimes I just think of how I would bring this back to my team, the next time we are trying to figure out how to get our way out of something or that we are troubleshooting, we might have that, we might say, “Okay, if we were advising another team, what would we say?” And so it's another technique that we can take back, just a little aside, you mentioned liberating structures, which I'm just going to tell listeners, if they haven't heard of it, Google it. It's lots of different ways of structuring meetings so that they have a different feel to what we're used to. They're incredibly participative. It's about creating structures where everyone's voice can be heard and where everyone is involved in creating, planning, etc. So what else do we need to tell listeners about this?
Ana Neves 31:27
Yeah, I guess there's a couple of things that I've not mentioned about the conference that are also important. So in terms of the advice that the fictitious company, not participants, because they don't need any of that. But this fictitious company is getting advice from the consultants. But they're also getting a live demo from vendors. So we're going to have five confirmed tools, we may have another one, but just no more than six essentially. So we're going to have mango webs, and lychee craft boards, and Microsoft 365, and Guru scan, and Swope analytics, so very different platforms. But what we're going to see is a live demo, they actually cannot even show slides. And they need to do a live demo for Cabling, as if they were telling us a day in the life of Cabling, the fictitious company, using that tool. And this is to address the challenge of allowing participants to get a sense of the impact these tools can have in our day-to-day work. Because, as we were mentioning before, the technology's there and it allows us to do pretty much everything we want. But we just don't know how to use it, how to push it to enable different ways of working. So that's what we get from the live demos. And if you're like people worried about “oh, now I don't want to see vendors presenting, they're just going to sales pitch mode.” As I've mentioned to you before, participants have flags on their tables, and they can raise them if they feel that the vendors are selling to them so two flags and you're out. And yeah, the other thing is the…
Pilar Orti 33:28
Yeah, one second Ana, because I did want to mention that you've got this context, that we're bringing the tech into the context of the team, we already know what the challenges are of the team, we know the characters as well, or we can make them up. However, this means that when we come to look at the tech, we know why we're implementing it, we know that it needs to adapt to the team. And we know why we're bringing it in and the technology, even one application has so many things we can do. But it's not about that. It's about what can it help us with? So I think that's really brilliant
Ana Neves 34:07
Yeah, actually, the vendors received access to the blog of the fictitious company, but I kind of digest all that for them. I highlight the key challenges. So if you go through the blog, which is freely available online, you'll see that there are four main threads. One is our challenges, if you want, one is the access and retention of critical knowledge, you've got employee engagement, and another one is internal communication, and finally teamwork and collaboration. So these are the four main threads and through the blog posts, the fictitious company, characters, and McLear, she will tell you about the comps plan for the new factory or her the challenges of her onboarding, or the too many meetings, and too many emails, and zoom fatigue, and balancing work life while working from home. So these are the challenges that will be anchoring the presentations. And I actually work with the vendors before the conference, to make sure that their demos are tied to the fictitious company, and I help them sometimes choose and identify which of the business challenges are more fit or suitable to showcase their tool, for instance. So it's not just showing the features of a tool, it's about showing out the tools, and how the tool allows the company to address these very specific challenges.
Pilar Orti 35:53
And is the blog accessible through socialnow.org?
Ana Neves 35:56
Yes, yes, it is. So it's called house of cables, which is the name of the blog. House of cables dot social now.org.
Pilar Orti 36:05
Okay, great, good. So just finally, to give us that final bit of information around what's happening, the kind of learning that you've curated for attendees, you were talking about the Peer Assist, which we've already mentioned a little bit.
Ana Neves 36:21
Yeah, so the peer Assist is a knowledge management technique it is something that organisations can and should do, at the beginning of a project, or maybe at the beginning of a very important stage within a project. The very basic idea is that you benefit from the learning of others who may be in other parts of the company, or even in other companies that have done similar projects. And just as a tip, when I say “similar”, it can be very flexible. And I always use this example, if you're making a new bridge somewhere, maybe you want to invite a farmer because farmers dig holes all the time to plant a tree. So you can be flexible and invite people who may not be very obvious choices, because that will allow us and give you space for the innovation spark to come. So that's just a tip. But the concept for the Peer Assist is basically the person or the team, starting a project invites these peers and says, “This is what we are about to start and we want your feedback or input rather, how should we go about doing this? And what are the things that we need to avoid and be careful of?” and basically, they shut up from there. And they just listen to their peers. And I brought this format as a session for Social Now. And for this year, Anna McLear, the fictitious character, wants to start a program within Cabling to get more teams to use the existing platforms in a more efficient and smarter way to really change the way they work. So she wants to drive adoption of these tools by teams. So she invites peers, they are real people from real organisations, and they will be giving advice on how and how to go about it. And I think the beauty of this, and that's exactly the feedback we got last year when I first tried this format, is that when these peers give advice, they're not lecturing anyone, they're just saying what they would do. And that comes from either trying it and it going well, or trying it and it going really badly. So this is what you should not do, but we don't need to know which one was a success or a failure in their case, or maybe they've heard someone tell them about it. Or maybe they've tried it in a different company. So this means that all the obstacles we usually have when we put someone on stage to share, like the case in their organisation. They're okay, nobody needs to know, and point the finger at the organisation because we don't know where the advice comes from. So it becomes really open and very true, very honest. And that's what both participants said they felt very liberated and free to give their advice last time, and participants really enjoy the kind of open feedback they got and the other thing is to really round things up, because I think it's very easy for us to go to a conference and then we get back to our desks the following day and we've forgotten everything. So after the peer assist, after we hear from the peers, participants in their tables draw together a list of the to do’s and not to do’s if they're about to start a similar project in programming their organisations. And that's shared for all the participants to take away with them.
Pilar Orti 40:20
Well, I'm really looking forward to it. I'm gonna come back listeners, and I'm gonna be full of inspiration. And the thing with this kind of thing as well is that there's so much opportunity to speak as a participant, that for me that always makes me think that I have the podcast also, because it helps me really to ruminate and assimilate and structure my thoughts as I am communicating them.
Ana Neves 40:48
Yeah, Pilar and the other thing is the speakers, if I invite you to come, and I've been really humbled, and happy, and honoured by the people who accept my invitation to present, I choose them not just because of all the wealth of knowledge and experience, they have practical experience, but also for their willingness to learn from others. So it's, unlike other conferences where people present and then they leave the room and nobody can benefit from their experiences any more, participants do stay and speakers stay. And, what I've been very humbled to have is people who are invited speakers then come back as participants afterwards. And I usually say that I'm really proud of all the people I have on stage. But equally as proud for the people, I have had as participants because you have like reference names, attending the conference and making sure that the debate and the learning is as rich as possible. So it's just a really good experience, like a celebration.
Pilar Orti 41:59
Sounds like that and something that I'm thinking and we're going to wrap up listeners is, that you give both participants and presenters common information right from the beginning, you've created this fictitious company with the characters, the blog is out there. I think there's great learning for whoever wants to have an engaging event across the organisation where everyone feels involved. Give them something that they will have, because very often we go to an event where we come as participants, and the presenters, or the people leading the meeting, or whatever, have lots of information, but we don't have it. And so just having that common point of context, etc. I think it starts to unite everyone together from the beginning as well. And then all the rules we put around presenting which are great. So yeah, congratulations. I'm really looking forward to it.
Ana Neves 42:54
Thank you, Pilar. Thank you.
Pilar Orti 42:56
So listeners socialnow.org If you want to join us, I would love to meet some more listeners in person that will be really lovely, 19th and 20th of May 2022. In Lisbon, so Ana if just wanna wrap up by saying, Ana Neves, which is the surname is N E V E S, we can find you on LinkedIn and is there anywhere else that listeners can say hello.
Ana Neves 43:20
Twitter, probably that's where I am mostly, LinkedIn and Twitter. That's the best place to find me.
Pilar Orti 43:27
Excellent. We'll put the link to your handles actually, if you can just tell us your handles now quite quickly.
Ana Neves 43:32
So it's Ana Neves both A N A N E V E S both on Twitter and on LinkedIn.
Pilar Orti 43:39
Fantastic, and if you speak Portuguese Ana has a podcast KMOL, is that right?
Ana Neves 43:45
Yes, which stands for Knowledge Management and Organisational Learning, it's very creative.
Pilar Orti 43:53
Well, at least people know that, you definitely attract the right crowd. So yes, if you speak Portuguese, you can have a listen to that seeing as your podcast listeners. So Ana, thank you very much for your conversation.
Ana Neves 44:03
Thank you very much for having me, Pilar. And as I said, I really look forward to meeting you in the flesh.
Pilar Orti 44:18
Well, listeners, I hope you enjoyed that. And once again, if you want to join us at the conference, you can use the code 2 1 C W L, so the number 21 C W L to access the early bird fee until the 8th of April, and the URL again for the conference is socialnow.org Thank you very much for listening.
Pilar Orti 44:46
A big thank you for listening to the 21st Century Work Life podcast produced by Virtual not Distant. If you have something to add to the conversation, let us know through the contact form over at virtualnotdistant.com I have been your host Pilar Orti, and I'm signing off now, wherever you are, whatever you're doing. Enjoy.