The Dangers of Objectifying Collaboration

In a recent McKinsey Interview, Don Tapscott said: "Knowledge management has failed. We had this view that knowledge is a finite asset, it’s inside the boundaries of companies, and you manage it by containerizing it."

Well, not ALL knowledge management has failed - primarily those that focused on thinking of knowledge as an asset and over "engineered" efforts to manage it.

A recent Harvard Business School blog post titled Collaboration as an Intangible Asset written by Accenture's Robert J. Thomas references the very often spoken of challenge of measuring intangible assets, and positions collaboration as an intangible asset. Applying Tapscott's perspective, viewing collaboration as an asset will doom related initiatives to failure much like KM.

I think we have to stop thinking of social process as assets or objects that should be weighed and measured. Some of the outcomes can and should be be captured and managed as assets, as they are often re-useable results of good work, or evidence of business activity.

Let's spend more time trying to encourage, facilitate and remove cultural, structural, managerial barriers collaboration, knowledge sharing and learning, and less time trying to mange "assets," tangible or otherwise.

A "News" Opportunity for Knowledge Elicitation

Outsell, in a recent Insight report,  were discussing the rapid and significant changes underway in the print media business on all continents including layoffs, printing plant closures, modifications to news paper formats, sizes and publication frequencies.All in favour of moving more digital.

Certainly a significant transformation for that industry (reminds me a bit of Charles Handy's Sigmoid Curve).  But in the context of knowledge management, in particular knowledge elicitation - helping people make explicit the "deep smarts" gained over years of experience and practice - who better than people in media, particularly reporters to tease out the knowledge gems.

Might the changes in the print media industry be an opportunity for organizations to improve the capture / sharing of knowledge?

3 Questions That Kill Collaboration

What does he/she really mean?  What is she/he not saying? What are his/his real motives?

What these questions all have in common; the presumption of something hidden, the undercurrent of a lack of trust, and most importantly the time considering dealing with them take away from getting work done.

How many times have you been in conversations and got the sense that the listener(s) were running you through a mental MRI machine because they mis-trusted your words and/or body language, and were not taking what you were communicating at "face value?"  How often have you been in conversations and did the same to another speaker?  How often have you been involved in hallway conversation after a meeting where people were trying to "get to the bottom" of what was said in the meeting?


There is no shortage of literature / evidence about the role of trusting relationships has on performance / productivity in work / team / group settings.  Yet, as Larry Prusak, in The One Thing That Makes Collaboration Work points out, trustworthiness is rarely explicitly rewarded in most organizations. 

Of course, if you are thinking appreciatively, you could see these questions, if asked explicitly, as an opportunity to improve collaboration. Provided you can ask them in a non-threatening way and provide some positive reinforcement, and that they they are answered honestly.

Challenge yourself as well.  If you find you are asking these questions of others, consider why, and if they are warranted. Perhaps a bit of time invested in relationship building prior to critical meetings could improve the value of the interaction in them. 

Typical Knowledge Problems

I've been asked by colleagues recently - "What business problems does knowledge management solve?"  Obviously a good question, but it also caused me to reflect on how much of what is written about knowledge management is from the solution perspective - knowledge management definitions, tools, techniques, methods  and approaches - and less about how to recognize a business problem for which a knowledge management "solution" is appropriate.

So, here is a business problem for which knowledge management is a solution.

We all work in complex environments, where no one person knows the answer, in particular to a never before faced situation/problem or issue, or a completely new context for a known problem. Not only that, but as every situation and context is different, even the best of "best practices" (a misnomer in my opinion) need to be adapted if they are to be at all useful. The nature of the problem could be any business process, management challenge, technical hurdle etc. Imagine anything from "How can I best evolve my talent acquisition process?" "How do I adapt my financial management processes to align with new international reporting standards?" to "How can I stimulate the generation of more profitable ideas in our research and development group?"

Seems logical, then, to tap into external thinking and learning to try determine the best course of action. The approach / process used to tap into this external thinking / learning is considered, in today's context, a knowledge management solution.

McKinsey's article titled Using Knowledge Brokering to Improve Business Process positions seeking external thinking as "knowledge brokering," and uses process / open innovation as the broader business problem/context. But you may have heard this learning before doing process referred to as a peer assist process as defined by Collison / Parcell in their book Learning to Fly.  Regardless the name, using an explicit, disciplined process to identify knowledgeable people and tap into their insights and knowledge is a knowledge management solution. 

To maximize value from the knowledge brokering / peer assist process, the context must be the business problem.  It is not enough to ask people about their experiences / lessons learned, then be saddled with the challenge of applying that learning to the problem.  The problem itself should be the context for the conversation and drive the learning - the people who have experience and knowledge to offer should themselves apply it to collaboratively defining the problem and building solutions. That is the real power of knowledge brokering / peer assists.

(If you're looking to identify your own knowledge problems, a great starting point is the KM Diagnostic Cards available from Straights Knowledge.)

Looking for a New Edge in Knowledge Management?

Have you picked up your copy of The New Edge in Knowledge: How Knowledge Management Is Changing the Way We Do Business yet? If you've had interest in knowledge management over the last "x" years, you know that knowledge management is challenging subject area / management practice to understand, and within which to develop and implement practical, impactful initiatives that provide individual and organizational benefit. It is also often a difficult subject to have management conversations about, in particular when some managers don't understand that part of their responsibility is managing social processes for learning and knowledge sharing inside their organizations.

What I really liked about The New Edge in Knowledge, and why I think it should should occupy first place on your book shelf or e-shelf, is that it brings significant clarity and resolution to all the key KM challenges and questions such as: What is knowledge management? What is its relationship to information management and corporate culture? What type of initiatives comprise knowledge management? Where do social / collaboration technologies fit in? How do I measure success? How do I enable change? What should we do next?

Most importantly, this is not a practitioner's bible. It is a business oriented, practical view, based on solid research and best practices, that will inform effective strategic thinking and decision making about how to best improve the processes and practices people to create, share, and learn from information and from each other in a business context. That this is an excellent resource is not a surprise given the authors (Carla O'Dell and Cindy Hubert) and the organization (APQC).

I think this book fills an important void. There is lots of very valuable academic research and practitioner information about knowledge management, but a notable absence of business oriented, jargon-free material for managers/decision makers.  "Edge," like it's predecessor by the same authors, is an excellent business read.

Buy it. Learn from it. Use it. Then consider leveraging other APQC KM resources.  You won't be disappointed.

"Who Will Care When I'm Gone?"

Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, Ottawa Canada, War Memorial

I was reflecting on a series of conversations I had a while back with a work colleague (let's call him "Lloyd") who was soon to retire. He had agreed to be the focal point of a proof of concept "knowledge transfer" approach.

Lloyd was a long serving employee, and was involved in a number of the organization's key functions and major corporate initiatives. He was a very good communicator, very well respected, and was able to think objectively enough to contribute to the design of how he was going to share his knowledge.

First, he and I had a series of conversations reviewing his career, experiences, accomplishments and some interesting key learnings.  Within the context of the organization we identified 5 key "knowledge domains."  We then identified 2-3 thought leaders in each domain, and I sent these people a number of probing questions intended to uncover what they thought they would like to learn from Lloyd in their respective knowledge domains. Using the responses to these questions I began to design a series of "talk show" like events, one for each domain, which would feature a host, Lloyd, and guests, all of whom would have a conversation in the knowledge domain, seeded by the preliminary questions received from the thought leaders. Anyone in the organization could attend in the audience.  After the conversation was well started on the stage, anyone in the audience would have the opportunity to ask questions and get involved in the conversation. (Dare I say Johnny Carson meets Jerry Springer?)

I was also planning on recording these events, segmenting them, and making them available via our intranet at some point on the future (I was also working on promoting the creation of a section on our intranet for "legacy pages" - profiles, histories, interviews (videos / transcripts), projects, documents etc. for retirees.

Part way through the design of the talk show events, Lloyd came to me and said that he had changed his mind, and no longer wanted to participate. I was stunned, given how active he was in the conversations / process to that point. Of course, I asked him why.

He told me he was reflecting, in large part because of my probing, on his experiences in the organization and concluded that no one would care about what he had learned or had to say. Despite my best efforts, I could not convince him otherwise.

Clearly, there is a direct relationship between the degree to which people choose to volunteer what they know, and the recognition / appreciation they will received for their effort.

Emergence of Social Business Design

I’ve long been a fan of the work of XPLANE for visually explaining complex concepts and ideas. I recently received a broadcast email from them announcing their acquisition by the Dachis Group. (Dachis has also acquired Hinchcliffe & Company, and Headshift.)

“Social business design” is a fundamental element of the Dachis Groups’ offering and approach to serving its customers. They define it as “Social Business Design is the intentional creation of dynamic and socially calibrated systems, process, and culture. The goal: improving value exchange among constituents .“

Now, I'm sure you've all heard of “social engineering”, which often has negative connotations linked to individual, group our large scale manipulation. Social business design is, by contrast, more closely linked to what Ram Charan refers to as “Shaping the way people work together by leading the social system of your business” in his book KNOW-HOW :The 8 Skills That Separate People Who Perform from Those Who Don't.

(It also sounds remarkably like facilitation in the context of organizational development / management consulting in an emerging social networking / “Enterprise 2.0” context.)

I find this a very interesting, and exciting, development. I’m looking forward to seeing how this concept evolves.

Is this the new “knowledge management?”

Stoyko on the "The Lump of Knowledge Falicy".

Peter Stoyko has composed a great essay titled "The Lump of Knowledge Falicy" wherein he very articulately distinguishes between the stock/flow view of knowledge and KM and the learning /social view, and points to some of the problems associated with an unbalenced focus on the former.  Well worth the read.

In conclusion Peter states: "It’s time to recognise the true nature of knowledge, which has a lot to do with human psychology, socio-political relations, and the anatomy of the brain. Data and information are important for organisations. But some knowledge can’t be shoe-horned into portable and pliable documentation. We have to avoid the lump of knowledge fallacy because it’s causing managers to ignore important sources of insight and creativity. And it’s causing managers to fund learning activities that promise a quick-fix instead of those which produce the long-term intellectual growth of employees."

Why KM Initiatives Fail

Yes, this topic has been "kicked around" many times before. But something occurred to me this morning that I thought I'd share.

First, if you subscribe to the idea that organizations are complex unordered systems, and cause-effect relationships are un-predictable, then perhaps the complete, detailed picture of why KM initiatives fail is to some degree unknowable and unique to every situation and organization - or at the very least too costly to determine.

Perhaps that is why most causal discussions seem to present factors that contribute to failure, or report against the critical success factors presented in the KM initiative business case or project charter.

So, here are some of the factors I think contribute to a KM initiative's success (v.s. failure) - and I'll try and avoid the more popular ones.

• strategic / enterprise-wide orientation
• willingness to have the status quo challenged in a productive / meaningful way
• recognition of the link between knowledge and the human learning process, which will help ensure that the "solution" is not overengineered with a rigid implementation plan
• proper positioning of the value and purpose of external and internally created information in the learning process
• recognition that a significant amount of learning takes place every day in the workplace, and the importance of this learning on knowledge work/workers
• understanding that knowledge management initiatives are learning initiatives in and of themselves, requiring frequent after action reviews to adjust plans, evaluate and revise overall direction, or perhaps even stop completely and move onto another focus area

Let me balence these success factors with some challenges rooted in many of the characteristics of adults as learners as they apply in the context of decision making.  The implementation success of KM initiatives are often hampered by: 

• a lack of an imminent crisis (life changing) event to trigger consideration of a change action
• need of decision-makers to forsee some form of immediate, tangible value in the initiative
• lack of decision-maker comfort with an initiative that is radically/dramatically outside the current thinking/mental models or what is already known
• being overly complex / multi-facited / multi-dimensional
• being led by experts using a prescriptive engagement model, rather than providing opportunities for those affected by the proposed changes to be involved in determining priority actions
• perceived personal risks to decisiion-maker reputation, self-esteem and personal ego in:
• admitting that the current situatuation, that they may have played a role in creating or sustaining, can be improved on or is in some way insufficient
• acknowledgeing that they don't know the answer / solution already

All this leads to what I think the real value in a "start small" / pilot approach that is often recommended in KM articles and literature - low risk, experential LEARNING. This notion goes well beyond the "proving value or ROI" benefit of a small pilot.  A real learning approach enables key stakeholders to participate in a low personal risk setting, make sense of underlying concepts and principles, gain comfort with approaches/methods and tools, and participate in designing and affecting organizational change. For this learning to happen, it is mandatory that the project plan include frequent opportunities and events (after action reviews/restrospectives) to alow time for reflection, sense making, and learning.

What is still required, though, are decision makers with the willingness to experiment and provide support and access to the necessary resources for the learning pilot, and a "client" with the strategic foresight and avilable attention to offer their problem or opportunity for the pilot.

With the prevalence of crises to manage every day, willingness, resources and attention are difficult to find for a learning pilot. And crisis management, which drives tasks and actions to deadlines, offers few opportunities for good pre-and post action learning..

Bridging Organizational Silos

Gems from Karl Albrecht's white paper titled Organizational Intelligence & Knowledge Management: Thinking Outside the Silos.

• Albrecht's Law: Intelligent people, when assembled into an organization, will tend toward collective stupidity. (Who hasn't experienced this one?)
• Intelligent organizations are those with Strategic Vision, Appetite for Change, (internal) Alignment & Congruence, “Heart”, Shared Fate, Free Flow of Knowledge, and Performance Pressure.
• Enablers of organizational intelligence are Thought Leaders, Communities of Interest, (judicial use) of task forces /ad-hoc teams, and knowledge platforms to support knowledge deployment.

One element I think is missing from Albrecht's list is rewards and recognition. A very smart colleague and friend once said that you can't expect an individual to be an effective team member if they are rewarded/recognized more for solo effort than team contributions and playing a role in team success. I think bridging silos is also about ensuring that implicit / explicit reward/recognition systems and actions do not reinforce a siloed model, despite our very human tendency to think of "me" and "we" before thinking about the broader "us."

No More Consultants! According to Collison and Parcell

Not sure how I missed it, but just came across a reference on Chris Collison's blog for No More Consultants, co-authored with Geoff Parcell.

Interesting premise.. why spend money hiring external consultants without (perhaps first) tapping into the knowledge and experience of staff / employees? Great question. 

There are lots of good resons to hire consultants; validation, "sober second thought," expertise etc. But certainly this should go hand in hand with tapping into the experience and knowledge of the people inside an organization.

The book, and the Ning site, look like excellent resources. Learning to Fly certainly "set the bar pretty high."  I'm looking forward to seeing how much higher No More Consultants takes it.

Is the Time Finally Right for a Knowledge Market Model?

I was just reading Leon Benjamin's KnowledgeBoard article titled Social media on the inside in which he writes about the transformative nature of social media platforms, the value of "flat" communities and networks as structures for building and maintaining intangible assets and getting work done, and the conflicts between these and traditional management approaches - a good, pithy article.

One phrase in Leon's article jumped out at me - "markets are conversations."

In 2002 I was fortunate to have had a number of great conversations about knowledge management with Leigh Weiss and Tim Shavers from McKinsey. Many of the conversations revolved around the concept and applicability of a market model for knowledge. This concept was succinctly described in Making a Market in Knowledge written by Lowell Bryan, McKinsey Quarterly 2004.

In a preamble to describing the concept, Bryan explores a number of "KM" approaches that have failed to generate the required returns, including:

• big investments in document-management systems, shared servers, and other technology solutions that most often result in large volumes of outdated documents, making it difficult for users to locate the best few "just in time" relevant, quality and timely documents
• "push" strategies where centralized staff provide knowledge to users that does not meet user needs
• letting organizational units solve their own knowledge problems, which often results in knowledge silos and solutions that are non-scalable across the organization

I think most medium to large organizations have felt at least some of this pain. Though I don't whole heartedly agree with Leon's assertion in the KnowledgeBoard article that "It should be obvious by now to most people that social software changes people’s behaviour," I do think that social technologies, if fluidly interconnected and highly customizable, can create a "knowledge platform" that will allow natural human behaviour to emerge - productive conversations and knowledge markets.

Critical, though is the need to build a true learning and collaboration culture, else these markets / platforms will remain underutilized.. Many knowledge and information initiatives I've heard about focus on enabling the knowledge / information owner capturing and making their "stuff" available, or pushing it on overworked knowledge workers. The focus needs to be more on the learner / consumer. (Nancy Dixon wrote a great article titled The Neglected Receiver of Knowledge Sharing a while back - one of the few on the topic.)

We all learn before doing (from information content, friends, colleagues, experts etc.) as part of doing knowledge work, and as a result, often create new / improved /evolved knowledge and information. We need to remove the many organizational and social barriers to learning and knowledge seeking, recognize and reinforce these forms of behaviour in ourselves and our colleagues, and create a demand for knowledge and information in all its forms.

That demand, the learning needs, will create the context and the markets that are critically important for learning from and benefiting from the experiences of others. Learning is evidenced in changes in thinking and behaviour. And the change comes from the learner (demand side of the market) not the knowledge / information transmitter (supply side).

Nurturing the evolution of this type of learning and collaboration culture is not an easy task, given the power of the human ego - "I'm different".. "my agenda above all else".. "I can do it better".. "I'm afraid to let others know I don't know something" - or the time pressures we're all under - "it's too hard to find what/ who I'm looking for.. so I'll just recreate it.." Nonetheless, a culture that values experential and serendipitous learning is a critical success factor for knowledge markets and platforms.

I'm beginning to think that the evolution of knowledge management thinking, the growing promise and potential of emerging social technologies, demographic shifts in organizations, behaviours of newer generations of techno-savy employees, and the growing acknowledgement of the need to systematically go about connecting people to each other and to information, may be creating a more generalized readiness for "knowledge markets" of the type McKinsey was writing about earlier in this decade.

As I mentioned above, Leon writes "markets are conversations." I'd like to flip that and say "conversations are markets." Thinking back many of my conversations, they are often highly dynamic markets where knowledge and information are exchanged in a complex web of interactions across multiple communications channels, with each participant assessing value of the exchange based on their own criteria.

Imagine elevating the level of conversation at an organizational level.

Role of Marketing and Communications in Knowledge Management

The implementation of organization-wide knowledge programs or strategies are often plagued by the same challenge - finding interested / willing partners or clients. This is less of a challenge when a new core technology like a document or content management system is being implemented and driven by a central "owner" with funding, authority and control. But as numerous case studies published in various journals demonstrate, many KM- related initiatives are change initiatives launched after looking at how work is done (process and practice) through the "lens of KM." Examples come to mind like evolving a more knowledge sharing culture, globally instituting practices such as peer assists, after action reviews, and project retrospectives, or integrating various social/collaborative tools in the workplace that fundamentally affect how people work and require effective collaborative practices and behavour to deliver value.

Voluntary change in any form must be driven by a desire to move away from an undesirable current state and / or a desire to move towards a desired future state. This requires recognizing and acknowledging that the current situation is undesirable on one hand, and the ability to envision a more desirable future on the other.

Internal communications plays a vital role in most organizations by keeping employees informed of what is going on around them - events, appointments, jobs posted, announcements, and even human interest stories about colleagues. Vehicles tend to be internal newsletters, broadcast emails, RSS based news feeds, "ticker tapes" and content published on corporate intranets. And often, internal communications groups are involved in organizing hosting employee events for special occassions, whether social, like a holiday party, or business, like the launch of a new strategic plan.

In the context of a knowledge program or strategy, internal communications can play a more vital role well beyond the traditional, somewhat transactional role of communicating things of more immediate interest - that of marketing communications.

Looking at the strategic view, internal communications can assist knowledge programs / strategies by:

• helping identify, define and characterize target markets within the organization
• educating the market about key concepts and business drivers that underly the program or strategy, and increase receptiveness for further, deeper conversations about problem identification and resolution
• helping the target market become more aware of or identify their own explicit needs and opportunities / possibilities (creating intolerence of the status quo)
• encourage members of the target market to seek out represenatives of the knowledge program / strategy for assistance dealing with current or imminent needs
• assisting with positioning / differentiating / aligning the program/strategy/initiatives relative to other work in the organization
• reputation management (sometimes "KM" has a bad reputation based on misunderstandings or unusccessful projects)
• situating / orienting the program/strategy with new employees and newly minted key stakeholders and steering committee members
• promoting an internal services group that compliments work done at a strategic or programatic level

Another view occured to me in the context of the traditional sales cycle, of: suspect -> prospect - > educate -> propose -> close -> deliver. Communication can play a key role in enabling program / strategy representatives to reach out to receptive potential clients and offer solutions.

Mysterious Art of Collaboration

In a recent presentation about linking knowledge management and the Balanced Scorecard, a colleague pointed to "focussed dialog" as necessary for any effective business planning / management framework and process. Part of the conversation turned to the general observation of how a lot of planning and management activities arrange for the right people to be in the right room for the right reasons, but there often seems to be an implicit assumption that when the doors close "magic" happens - productive conversations take place, issues & problems are well identified, cause is effectively determined, decisions well made, and innovative thinking takes place.

Granted that some of this magic must take place, or we would not have the many successful organizations we've seen in the public, private and NGO sectors. It safe to say, then that in many cases the opposite is true and there are ample opportunities for improvement?
A few very interesting blog entries have touched on the topic of collaboration:

• Just what do you mean by 'collaboration' - Jack Vinson


• From the team at Anectode: Collaboration's resurgence, Developing a Collaboration Capability Requires more than Wishful Thinking, Collaboration Conditions, Three Types of Collaboration, Why People Don't Use Collaboration Tools
  
  Some thinkers/writers have drawn the distinction between collaboration and other forms of interpersonal/group interaction:


• From Dave Pollard - Will That Be Coordination, Cooperation, or Collaboration?
• Leo Denise, in this article titled Collaboration vs. C-Three (Cooperation, Coordination, and Communication) , Arthur T. Himmelman in his article titled Collaboration for a Change (Collaboration Defined: A Developmental Continuum of Change Strategies, and in Collaboration: What Makes It Work from the Wilder Research Center.

I think that for people to collaborate effectively they need the following:
A) Common understanding of what is meant by collaboration and what distinguishes it from other forms of interaction
Himmelman has some good basic, incremental definitions:

• Networking - Exchanging information for mutual benefit
• Coordinating - Exchanging information for mutual benefit, and altering activities to achieve a common purpose
• Cooperating - Exchanging information for mutual benefit, and altering activities and sharing resources to achieve a common purpose
• Collaborating - Exchanging information for mutual benefit, and altering activities, sharing resources, and enhancing the capacity of another to achieve a common purpose
• Co-Evolution - An interesting term I stumbled across after discovering "Beyond Partnerships" report on the Really Learning web site, it defines Co-Evolution as "... the ‘deepest’ form of partnership. It can consume considerable time from key players, so it is not for the fainthearted! It should, therefore, not be attempted if one of the other forms is more appropriate. It requires new thinking, new insights, new generosity about opportunities or problems, and these problems or opportunities are as yet unarticulated or not understood. As the outcomes aren’t at all clear, neither party can simply pursue their existing goals; they will need to be prepared to develop new goals as they become apparent. Thus it will be important to be able to examine assumptions, invert thinking, acknowledge where things (or thinking) have gone wrong, and where partners may need to let resources go in order to achieve the greater good. "

Dave Pollard also defines collaboration as "... finding the right group of people (skills, personalities, knowledge, work-styles, and chemistry), ensuring they share commitment to the collaboration task at hand, and providing them with an environment, tools, knowledge, training, process and facilitation to ensure they work together effectively." A fairly holistic view.
B) A reason to collaborate - where there are issues / problems that cannot be tacked by a single group acting alone.
C) Defined, explicit, facilitated group processes roles and responsibilities for fundamental processes - planning, cause analysis, decision making, issue identification & prioritization, and innovation / idea generation.
E) A collaborative attitude (you could call this principles / values), which I suggest comes directly from Roger Schwartz' work on Facilitative Leadership, specifically:

• seek to collect and share valid information. Valid information includes all the relevant information you have on the subject (whether it supports your position or not)
• seek to encourage free and informed choice so that people agree to do things because they have the relevant information and because they believe the decision makes sense, not because they feel manipulated or coerced into it.
• seek internal commitment to the decisions, which often flows from the first two values—with this level of motivation, people will do whatever is necessary to implement the decisions.
• value compassion, which means temporarily suspending judgment in order to appreciate others’ perspectives. It means having empathy for others and for yourself in a way that still holds people accountable for their actions rather than unilaterally protecting others or yourself.

Robert Hargrove's work in Mastering the Art of Creative Collaboration includes a Collaborative Model that points to key collaborative behaviours including:

• designating new possibilities, seeking creative & entrepreneurial results
• building collaborative networks and new patters of relationships and interactions
• showing authenticity and vulnerability
• showing attitude of learning, and equating success with questions
• balancing advocacy of views with inquiry into own and others' thinking
• listening to understand others
• acknowledging talents and gifts of others and providing an enabling environment

Collaborative-oriented competencies in areas such as active listening, written & verbal communications, coaching, facilitation, negotiation, empathy, analysis, synthesis, creativity, and too many to go into here.
I think that improving how people interact, both the processes and the way people work together (approach, attitudes, principles, values), are fundamental to meaningful success in knowledge management. Its also fundamental to ACHIEVING success in KM and any other change initiative.
And yet, it seems to often be the last thing considered. I expect that's because, since we humans are involved, it's complicated, challenging, time consuming, frustrating, difficult, often requiring somewhat different skills and perspectives.
But in terms of outcomes, the rewards are "priceless."
(BTW, Collaboration: What Makes It Work from the Wilder Research Center includes a Collaboration Factors Survey/Inventory that is well worth a look.)

Can't Do KM Until You Get IM Right - Truth or Misconception

I've often seen an interesting perspective from a few information professionals in conversations about knowledge and information management. They sometimes categorize information management as the "hard stuff" and knowledge management as the "soft stuff." I've seen a few of them assert that you can't do the "soft stuff", often pointing at their heads, until you get the "hard stuff" right, pointing to or holding a piece of paper. (The implication there perhaps is that our heads are soft ? )

At first blush, that premise seems to make sense. In many respects good information is very important to creating and sharing knowledge; we are what we read (or don't), information about people's location, experiences and competencies can help us decide with whom to initiate a conversation.

There are couple of alternate perspective that are worth considering.

First, if you subscribe to the metaphor of the knowledge "iceberg," (where knowledge that is codifiable, or codified (information) is the tip of the iceberg above water, and the knowledge that is below the waterline is much larger, and is only accessible during exchanges between individuals), then does it really make sense to think of a linear progression from IM to KM? If, for example, you attribute 20% to what is above the water and 80% to what is below, then you have to ask if devoting 100% of your resources for %20 of your value/potential is a good decision?

And secondly, if you consider "IM" to include developing principle based policies, developing information standards /guidelines / practices, capacity building across a diverse community, generating awareness and encourage compliance & use, you probably know that none of these are possible without working collaboratively with colleagues and stakeholders across multiple perspectives and disciplines. This requires negotiating and agreeing on common objectives and outcomes, the process for achieving them, sharing information and knowledge through the collaborative process to enable effective/efficient teamwork, and sharing in the risks / rewards.

To me, that sounds a lot like knowledge management, which is as much or more about "how" people work, than what they do. So it would seem that you can't do much of IM without using KM approaches to accomplish IM objectives.

So, should you start and finish IM, working on the "hard stuff," before you do the "soft" KM stuff? I'm not so sure.

How Knowledge Management is like Golf

• the "sweet spot" though obvious, is often illusive
• it's not all about technology, though it helps
• upgrade opportunities abound
• it's not enough to look good doing it
• collaboration is required across multiple systems and disciplines
• though you may be able to see the goal, the hazards are always in play
• there are many tools to choose from - the challenge is picking the right one, and using it effectively
• there are many ways to get to the outcome, which is often different depending on who you talk to
• everyone has advice to offer
• it is both humbling and educational to see the "pros" do it
• anyone can do it right once, often by accident, but there is only a very small portion of the players who do it right consistently
• opinions and perspectives abound
• there are tons of books and articles on the subject
• not everyone can see the value in playing
• no two courses (organizations) are alike

... anyone have any other pithy ideas?

Forget "Just The Facts"- Gimme the Knowledge!

I recently came across reference to a famous line from Sgt. Joe Friday on the 1950s series Dragnet, typically used when he was interrogating people. "I Just Want Facts 'Mam, Just the Facts" (or something like it) .

Many of us are preoccupied with information and data - facts and figures, dates, numbers, financial results, lists of accomplishments and that's all good but what about the "knowledge" behind it? The rationale, the thinking approaches, considerations etc. - the stuff more easily shared in conversation and stories, and rarely if ever captured.

I was reviewing my notes from Richard McDermott's KMWorld 2006 presentation, in which he shared some interesting perspectives and some good practical ideas on sharing deep knowledge and expertise.

He broke down knowledge into three types:

• Specific knowledge of systems, tools, clients, structures, contacts etc. - useful but degrades over time. Experts build this knowledge through intimacy over time.
• Analytic knowledge, gained through sensemaking of experiences - guidelines, processes, cookbooks - in essence "scaffolding" through which to understand the knowledge domain
• Intuitive expertise - the ability to handle situations, exceptions and quickly improvise in real time

He elaborated a bit on defining expertise as the intuitive ability to use experience to solve problems. It is embedded in experience and doesn't use decision trees or pros/cons - experts can't often describe how they know. When faced with a situation, experts size it up, intuitively applying various models and looking for clues - then they identify possible actions, go through a mental rehearsal, and examining potential outcomes - then they take action (sounds a bit like a good chess player, doesn't it?) .

And offered suggestions for transfer in for each of the types:

• To transfer specific knowledge, organize files, add metadata where useful, make existing knowledge more accessible
• To transfer analytic knowledge, articulate basic work processes, develop guidelines, decision frameworks etc. which will help people think.
• To transfer intuitive expertise, unearth how experts see the world and how they think

Richard suggested that one of the best ways to transfer expertise is through a "true master class", where the learners present their problems/ dilemmas, and think aloud about them - the expert listens and also thinks aloud - questions back and fourth draw out experts' lived experiences and allow learners to draw on them and build their own.

He reinforces that to build expertise, practice is critical. Learning through practice can include master classes, visiting masters coach on projects, collective reflection on different ways to approach a situation, simulations, serious games, cases and mini-cases.

If you'd like a simple experiment to try the "master class" approach, here is a simple "judgement-laden" example that I've tried with some very good success and feedback - improving fair and equitable application of managerial discretion in the context of corporate / business policy.

Many policies in a corporate environment are fairly straight forward and prescriptive, often based on legislation. Others are far more open to interpretation.

1) Bring together three groups in to a room

• the key policy makers / "owners" who are intimately familiar with the policy, the policy framework and rationale, organization context, and likely awareness of how the policy is being regarded and applied across the organization
• experienced mangers, who have much experience, good and bad, in the interpretation / application of the policy
• a full spectrum of less experienced and new managers (from inside our outside the organization) with varying degrees of experience with the policy, and a need to learn more

2) Compile and present a number of real-world scenarios and examples, in a succession of increasing complexity.

3) Have mixed break out groups consider each scenario and come up with a group decision on the application of policy discretion.

4) Have each group present their decisions (facts), and most importantly, also have them also share and elaborate:

• their thinking approach / process and why they used the approach
• considerations and non-considerations and why they were such
• contextual factors and external forces and why they were considered "in play"
• assumptions and what they thought were facts in evidence
• commonalities/convergence and conflicts/divergence during the group discussions

This is the "knowledge", or as Richard describes it, the "intuitive expertise." This simple approach exposes the experts viewpoint and thinking process in an interactive, dialogic way in the context of a meaningful issue / problem (or reasonable facsimile of one).

Final notes ..

I understand from Richard that he is working on an article based on the concepts from his KMWorld 2006 presentation. Watch out for it, it will be a good one.

And I see a strong synergy with the four quadrant model that Tom Davenport articulates in his book Thinking for a Living, and the concepts in Dorothy Leonard's book Deep Smarts.

Linking Facilitation and Experiential Learning

A colleague of mine recently attended a facilitation course I suggested to her, held by Institute of Cultural Affairs (ICA) Associates. She was talking about it, raving about it actually, and mentioned something she learned.

In the workshop, which is built on a foundation ICA calls the Focused Conversation Method, facilitators are coached through learning about and applying 4 important types of questions:

Objective - Begin with data, facts, external reality
Reflective - immediate personal reactions, internal responses, sometimes emotions or feelings, hidden images, and associations with the facts
Interpretive - meaning, values, significance, implications
Decisional - Bring the conversation to a close, eliciting resolution and enabling the group to make a decision about the future


I was coincidentally working on a document where I was linking experiential learning, (a feedback loop) to the using knowledge circle of learning before, while and after doing, as outlined in the Collison / Parcell book Learning to Fly.

So when I look at all three together, it strikes me that what Chris and Geoff were outlining was a practical approach to experiential learning in organizations. And when you look at both in the context of facilitation, blend in a bit of Ed Schein's Process Facilitation and Agyris' Double Loop Learning, it would appear that effective facilitation is the core competency / foundation for organizational learning and the creation of environments that support effective knowledge exchange. (Since they talk about the 4 stages of learning in the book - from unconscious incompetent to unconscious competent, maybe that's what Chris and Geoff were getting at in the book and I missed it - my bad.)

So what does this mean?

Make facilitation a core competency throughout the organization by:

• explicitly including the skill in corporate competency profiles and dictionaries
• providing the opportunities, and ensuring everyone has the basic skill set to participate effectively in facilitated sessions or participative / collaborative work
• training managers across the organization on facilitative leadership and equip them to coach others, and ensure performance agreements reinforce appropriate effort and behaviours
• have a core group of skilled facilitators who can conceive, design, and run workshops of all types, and who have good relations with external facilitators to broker services on those few occasions when a true outside perspective is required
• ensure the core group of facilitators have access to resources, external networks and experts to ensure their skills and knowledge are always evolving

Facilitation - At The Root of it All

I've been thinking about the concept of "knowledge-conscious managers" for a while, though I don't recall exactly what triggered the line of thinking.

It could be an article I read on the Mospos blog titled The 18 commandments of Knowledge-conscious managers http://blog.mopsos.com/archives/000188.html.

It could be an Inside Knowledge Magazine piece titled A Knowledge Conscious Curriculum.

Perhaps it was a Knowledgeboard discussion I participated in titled Exact role of Knowledge Manager and some very thoughtful comments by Frank Guerino, CEO & Founder TraverseIT.

Nonetheless, if you subscribe to the notion that knowledge management is just good management, then the perspectives and behaviours suggested in discussions and articles about knowledge conscious managers resembles to me what I've read about facilitative leadership.

For example, in The Art of Facilitative Leadership: Maximizing Others’ Contributions by Jeffrey Cufaude, facilitative leadership is described as:

• making connections and helping others make meaning
• providing direction without totally taking the reins
• managing content and process
• inviting disclosure and feedback to help surface unacknowledged or invisible beliefs, thoughts, and patterns
• focusing on building the capacity of individuals and groups to accomplish more on their own, now and in the future

I see strong similarities and connections with many of the concepts of knowledge-conscious management, and ultimately I think it all boils down to managers doing whatever is required to facilitate effective knowledge work, as defined by roles and responsibilities in organizational context. This strikes me as being a very inclusive approach covering everything from making information easier to create, capture and access, to improving group and team interpersonal effectiveness and collaboration though the explicit, systematic facilitation of group processes.

Therefore, if you subscribe to the notion that a manager's role is to facilitate knowledge work, than facilitation as a fundamental mind set, and a key core competency, has even greater importance in today's knowledge based organizations than even the facilitation community has been promoting well over the last fifteen years. Perhaps organizational management and leadership development programs need to explicitly identify, bundle, include and emphasize facilitation and other knowledge-conscious/facilitative leadership capability development opportunities.

More on Project Management in Knowledge-Based Organizations

I've been thinking about this topic a bit more, and having some interesting conversations with colleagues about PM in KBOs. I even had a very stimulating conversation with someone involved in enterprise risk management and new organizational environments where this process takes place.

It could be that PM in knowledge-based organizations (complex, un-ordered, adaptive systems)is rooted in a very "mechanistic" view of an organization (that it's an ordered system where you can predict cause/effect relationships well into the future) and based on a resulting set of assumptions that don't apply in today's knowledge based/complex organizations. Assumpitions like "the project has a high probability of happening as planned," "desired project outcomes will remain static," nothing should get in the way of success," "the project WILL happen as planned because we planned it that way.. "

Project Managers are constantly challenged with "standing on shifting sand"... from the instant they start planning and executing change is constant - people (decision makers/project resources) change, budgets change, organizational context changes, even business needs, objectives and project outcomes change... this is life in complex, unordered systems. I wonder if traditional project planning methodologies, if followed as prescribed, truly account effectively for this - despite the profile of project risk management in the project plannaing and management processes. I see a lot of Project managers with major headaches dealing with unintended consequences, unexpected events internal and external to the project, and a lot of pressure and expectations around sticking to "the original plan".

Borrowing and building on some cues from noteable experts, perhaps something to try is to look at project plans more as living-breathing entities and plan for change. This might involve:

• ensuring a "change" mindset and expectations across the project team, clients, stakeholders etc.
• building specific activities in the project plan, and identifying specific roles and responsibilities, for sensing (even anticipating), and communicating consequences of project actions as well as contextual and environmental changes
• building in specific activities to bring all the right perspectives to consider the sensing data/information, along with other appropriate related information and make sense and learn from it (sounds a bit like an after action review, dosen't it?)
• bring that learning to the decision making table with the appropriate people around it to adjust the project plan accordingly - which could include adding new tasks to frame up sub-activities to innovate around newly surfaced challenges and opportunities.

Perhaps this doesn't sound all that different from traditional good project management. Maybe what is truly different is setting and managing expectations around project planning and management processes in organizations today, and building sensing and learning activities more explicitly in project plans.