Common Organisational Blockers of Knowledge Flows

This is PART III in my mini-series on Generating Business Value by unlocking Knowledge Flows - what my independent business KnowFlow Value specialises in.

Part I: Generating Business Value by unlocking Knowledge Flows

Part II: The importance of Culture to eliminate Knowledge Flow blockers

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Organisational blockers come in many shapes and forms and are often unintentional but still prevalent and with severe (negative) impacts on Knowledge Flows. Obviously the more unintentional such blockers are, the harder they become to identify, acknowledge and address, simply because leadership- and management teams are not aware. Or (do not want to) believe that they exist, and that the organisation is on the contrary well defined, aligned and functioning across geographic- and/or business areas.

It’s easy to be blind-sided by reality, when designing an organisational structure with the best of intentions, and efficiency, productivity and profitability as the main (only?) objectives.        

Too often too much effort is put into measuring direct contributions to revenue and P&L, and qualitative, in-direct metrics are not given enough attention, although oftentimes they can have a bigger impact on P&L over time, as side effects are multiplied and magnified when left unattended and unmanaged.

When I talk about Organisational Blockers, I work with teams to discover aspects of how the organization is structured, that actively blocks Knowledge Flows. Those can be intentional but the ones I look the hardest for, are the ones that exist for no reason other than oversight, lack of objectivity, or lack of (self-) awareness.

It is easy to forget that humans are fairly quick to adapt and find work-arounds when things are not functioning well. We tend to compensate or even over-compensate as this is sometimes the path of least resistance.         

Examples of organizational blockers are:

• Lack of clarity around leadership vision, or vision not being accepted and reinforced by middle management.
• Misalignment between business divisions creates overlaps, and competition, vis-a-vis synergies.
• Low sense of purpose, or low sense of belonging, amongst individual contributors and middle managers, due to unclear vision & goals.
• Performance metrics are only connected to productivity and P&L and other quantitative metrics like productivity, efficiency and cost (savings), or not even aligned properly with company goals and objectives.
• Management does not measure employee wellbeing, or take action to support it, which leaves innovation and motivation out of the score card altogether.

The main thing to keep in mind when addressing those types of organizational blockers, is that middle management has to be involved and their values and business objectives aligned with the all-up vision. If they are not, the KM initiative like any other transformational effort, will eventually fail.

The company values on the poster on a wall, and the inspiring talk from leadership at the annual kick-off, will remain nice words and inspiring talks only, because people will execute on what the person setting their salary and impacting their annual bonus asks them to do – before they do anything else.

<<< Please find the next chapter in this mini-series here: Identifying Systems Blockers of Knowledge Flows.

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