Yesterday we participated again in an informal interdepartamental (governmental) KM community members, where the central theme was intervision. Intervision is a problem-solving technique where employees in a team or group can request their colleagues to collectively think about problems. It is analytical more than solution-oriented, because the participants in the intervision are not requested to bring solutions to the table but ask questions about the context, background and approach of the problem.
Intervision is mostly based on self-reflection and collective capability development. It is very practical.
In many senses intervision looks like work that is common practice in healthy (problem-solving) communities of practice - bring people together with a common interest or within a knowledge domain, focus on the communication between the members, address the reflection and support between the participants, the (management) dilemma of making intervision part of the strategy and HRM, issues with roles / responsibilities and confidentiality, the participation of management - or not, etc, scope and boundaries of the personal and collective, etc.
In the past I have seen several problems with just intervision as a technique within the knowledge management domain;
- Intervision is very much problem-oriented which limits it applications for (for example) knowledge stewarding. This also makes it hard to link up intervision groups to other groups, to form larger networks of people.
- Intervision is not typically not generative;
- Intervision requires the definition of an upfront structure by a leader. This makes it sometimes difficult (depending on the dominance) to distribute leadership;
- Intervision is aimed at the improvement and renewal of existing processes, but does not address innovation because the domain of participants is limited to those within a (set) group of experts or even team members.
- Intervision requires some sort of guidance (as argued by Jeroen Hendriksen, author of Intervision)
It can be argues nevertheless, that these weaknessess can be turned into positive qualities when the intervision approach is aligned with the strategy and implementation of communities of practice (bringing out some of the qualities and addressing most of the points above) and social network analysis (to support the point of group / team boundaries and overcome the limitation that intervision is more renewal than innovative. For example, SNA could show multiple intervision-group membership or informal intervision groups, similar to work done for communities of practice). The guidance aspect then remains an open-ended question, but it can very well be combined with a higher-level support that is typically also available for institutionalized communities.
This happened at 11:16:44 AM or
|
|
Weblog
