Knowledge Management Thought of the Day #KMTOTD

This is an archive of the first series of #KMTOTD. The second series is here and the third series is here.

The paper is flat

[Wed 18 Knowvember 2020] When people see me on Zoom or Teams calls they see a selection of M C Escher pictures behind me. Escher did those paradoxical pictures of things that can't exist in reality - like Belvedere which has a ladder that starts on the inside of the first floor, slopes naturally on the floor and wall but ends up on the outside of the second floor window. Escher's been with me probably since I was about ten. One thing he's always trying to say is "the paper is flat". We see a drawing of, say, a building, and we naturally see perspective, depth, weight. Escher goes to great lengths to show us it isn't deep, but flat, and just an illusion. Today's thought is pretty much the opposite, and it's this. It can be really difficult to represent complexity of knowledge or of how to do things. Methodologies present simple left-to-right step-and-stage processes, but we shouldn't be fooled just because the representation looks flat that the method cannot be used in the more complex real world: Practitioners know there's more to it than is explicitly captured on paper. There are unseen eddies and whorls in real-life practice that are perhaps best passed on by (a) a reminder that the representation is idealised, and (b) some stories about the real-life application of knowledge. We don't need to try to draw an Escher.

Your intranet can make your organisation visible to itself

[Tue 17 Knowvember 2020] Large or even medium sized organisations can be invisible to themselves. Most of the people in an organisation work in one part of it and they may grow to know this part of it very well, or to know the whole organisation from that one perspective. An intranet can expose every part of an organisation to itself for greater shared insight. Just what do they do in Procurement and how do they do it? The intranet can be a place to show that to all.

Which content types are most useful?

[Mon 16 Knowvember 2020] A useful way to open up (and often a useful way to represent) a knowledge area is to understand its knowledge subjects, knowledge content types and then other properties that are vital to the use cases. Subjects is easy to understand - what's the breakdown of the subject-matter? By 'other properties that are vital to the use cases' I mean understanding how does the user (lets stick with that as a shorthand term for all kinds of roles that might exist) want to access and apply the knowledge? For instance, they need to see it in different phases or time periods, or in different geographical (etc) settings: It helps define everything else that's practically useful to know about the subject. But today's thought is about knowledge types of content types. What I mean by these are the forms, formats and channels that the knowledge subject matter may most usefully be embodied or accessed. In terms of knowledge artefacts, some of the most useful types are: overviews, 'how-tos', learning (aka training) material, examples, templates, guides and 'further reading'. Imagining a grid with the subject-breakdown on one axis and these 'types' on the other, one could audit or prioritise for development each 'cell' of knowledge required. These are some of the most consistently useful knowlege content types. Beyond that, each domain has its own - for example on sales, whatever the product (subject), it could be useful to have sales presentations, brochures, case studies, price calculators, sales aids and competitive 'battlecards' (the key arguments vs competitors and objections).

Know the customer

[Fri 13 Knowvember 2020] There are many different layers and slices to 'customer knowledge'. Knowledge of the individual mortal customer, knowledge of the customer organisation, knowledge of the customer segment, more abstract knowledge about your customers and also about customers in general, knowledge about customer knowledge ... so on. Static information, instance/event/experience-based information and knowledge, customer processes and roles, theories about customer relationship ... again, so on. If one were to say "focus on customer knowledge" ... that still leaves many decisions about what to focus on.

Is more slack a smarter investment than more knowledge capture?

[Thu 12 Knowvember 2020] Well, 100 posts on from the one that kicked it all off ("We talk about 'capturing' knowledge ... I prefer 'liberating' knowledge", way back in May), #KMTOTD returns to the subject of knowledge capture.

The conventional, orthodox world of business life still talks a lot about 'knowledge capture' and it's easy to see why the culture that is so materialistic would want to make knowledge a 'thing', almost a physical asset, something that has been 'securitised' and can then be handled and counted, because that's how you do things and make things work in that culture. But to what extent does that work and make business sense?

Many times experts want to 'record' their knowledge and make it available to others, self-service-wise, to save their time answering the same old questions again and again. To some extent outlining the main issues and aspects of a subject like that, recording the FAQs and so on, makes real sense. But you can't eradicate the need to ask the expert (or practitioner) altogether. There will always be some level of time and effort you have to put in to help others do their jobs vs doing yours – but it doesn't make sense to just keep going in an effort to 'capture all the knowledge' in order to head that off. In fact, it's probably impossible seeing as knowledge is generative (keeps making more of itself) and fractal (just gets bigger the more you cut it up).

Would a better alternative strategy be to recognise the inevitability of needing time set aside to help others (vs doing your own work) and that allowing some amount of 'slack' like that makes business sense vs the huge cost and probably futile effort of trying to capture everything? The math is complicated. However, the orthodoxy is to allow so little slack (or none at all) and to place so much trust in knowledge capture (and other information/document-based approaches), despite all evidence to the contrary, that I feel that, for most, allowing more slack is almost certainly the better bet. There remains the need (in corporate life) to account for time and to satisfy that there may need to be a lend and borrow model for time, cross-charging between cost/profit centres to make this slack time possible in the orthodox businesses of today - because it's the lack of accounting for that time and the fear that it will be 'lost' that holds businesses back from working this way. Where does the sensible vertical red line lie?

100 thoughts - 100 ideas

[Wed 11 Knowvember 2020] Well, according to my list (but I'm not going to count again!) this is KMTOTD #100. My current list of future KMTOTD is 82 long. In reality, I most often think of new ones and just push the existing ones further down the list. It's really not hard to have 100 ideas about something once you get into the flow, and it's what you need to be able to do to prevent a brainstorm becoming a light drizzle. The idea of brainstorming is to generate lots of ideas quickly, without the reticence or judgement that might hold you back, so that you can then go on to look at them to see if any look worth pursuing. If you self-censor and apply judgement or evaluation before stating the idea then you'll cut off the supply at source and it's hard to generate ideas. If you just generate them without that filter you can quickly come up with lots, which is good because when you look at them again they often acquire a new meaning more valuable than the original, which would have been lost.

To generate ideas I think you just keep looking at the subject from different angles: what do people conventionally say about this thing - and what new ideas come from the contrarian pov? How would the thing be changed in a different setting? If I look at it through the 'beginning, middle, end' filters what does it look like? What are the people aspects, process aspects etc.? In one sense "ideas into value" is the process of KM, starting with ideas.

What is Community Enablement?

[Tues 10 Knowvember 2020] Community Enablement is focused on the realisation of benefit via one core KM strategy - Communities of Practice (or ~of Interest, and so on). In CE we design and maintain the organisation's 'global' model for communities which is the 'map' of which communities there are or could be; and the tools, models and collateral that are common to all communities. We localise this by helping enable each community to leverage it via chartering and planning, providing development support and providing services in areas such as engagement, events and evaluation. More on What is Community Enablement?

What is knowledge enablement?

[Mon 9 Knowvember 2020] Knowledge Enablement (KE) is the internal service delivery of KM and the KEs are the internal consultants of KM. KEs may be specialised in the different areas of KE/KM such as change management, content, IT or business process, or they may be generalists - depending on the needs, appetite and capacity of the organisation. More on What is Knowledge Enablement?

Managing projects vs doing project management

[Fri 6 Knowvember 2020] I like methodologies when they are vessels that carry forward valid learning and experience to benefit others. But one of the traps is to end up 'doing the method' rather than using the method to do what you intended. Nowhere is this more clearly illustrated than in the case of project management. Now, I've worked with some fine PMs who could get the job done and who were proficient in using the tools and techniques to help them do that. But there are other cases where project management turns more into 'doing project management' in the sense of following the method (e.g. PRINCE) than getting the project done. Project management becomes a parallel effort to and a burden on the team actually doing the project work. Methodologies are great if they give us models, methods, tools, techniques, guides and templates that embody real knowledge about how to best do things that we can use to help get things done quickly and well. They're less good when they become the master rather than the servant and dictate what you do, taking your eye off the real goal. The methodology gives you a normative path, but you have to tune how you follow that to the actual situation. As I said two days ago, experienced practitioners have more strategies - so if an inexperienced practitioner needs help selecting from and tailoring a methodological approach then that coaching should be provided. It could be one of the best ways of accelerating both the project and the learning of the individual.

Chief Knowledge Officer

[Thu 5 Knowvember 2020] I've never referred to myself as a 'CKO'. As far as I can remember this new 'C-suite' role first appeared in the 1990s but I've seldom heard it used for over a decade. Having a CKO signalled that an organisation was taking KM seriously by appointing a senior exec. to dedicate themselves to leading it. For some of them it was just that - another posting, not their actual career nor consuming passion. But I don't think a role is a 'chief officer' of any kind without it being a permanent seat at the main board or at least operating board (nomenclature varies). So, two thoughts on CKO: First, what does its demise as a role signify? I think it signifies that KM, and knowledge, became, for many, a small and operational issue to do with information content and IT (and maybe some other things) rather than a factor of strategic importance (this was probably always true in many of the cases of when there were CKOs too). My second thought, though, is that the work of KM isn't to be done at the boardroom table but on the shop floor and with the customers: The work of KM is where the actual value chain work is done, and in directly supporting that. So not being a CKO is necessary for that kind of work, because that's not where chief officers are usually to be found.

BTW, if you are a CKO - I have no problem with that. Use your high position to secure the strategic focus on knowledge that will enable knowledge managers to do their best work.

Experienced has more strategies

[Wed 4 Knowvember 2020] I am very keen on methodologies, guides and templates. Equally, I'm aware that these kinds of support interventions are most applicable for apprentices to learn and journeymen to practice. Masters can extemporise since experience has taught them more strategies. Methods tend to appear simple and linear - but I recall that the master-teachers always added that of course there would be iteration and feedback and so on. It's the difference between theory and practice. The theory may appear linear, but there's a meta-theory that says, of course apply this sensitively in real-life practice. Acquiring that sensitivity may take time and experience in order to become a master, with a greater range of strategies for how to select, combine, apply and switch approaches.

Logical vs realistic

[Tue 3 Knowvember 2020] Many times, solutions to KM needs are proposed that may appear to be perfectly logical and feasible to the proponent, but that are unrealistic and infeasible in actual fact. What I mean are the kinds of solutions that are logical and feasible when framed in a controlled, ordered, linear 'information' world, but that fail in the real life case of how knowledge really works - which obeys a different logic. Lets take the case of Customer Relationship Management (CRM). No doubt some people have seen this work exactly as intended - all the information about every customer and prospect and all customer contacts (I mean meetings and events - contact points rather than their contact details) recorded faithfully and in detail and maintained up-to-date; others referencing and reading that information to inform them and make them knowledgeable about the customer and able to act accordingly. Some may have seen that work. Many more, I suspect, will have experienced being on some supplier's (e.g. a utility company) CRM system where they just don't seem to be able to grasp even the basics of your needs and situation, which products and contracts you have, what was the true story of your boiler break-down and so on. Those utility company-like B-to-C CRM failings are simple failings of pure fact not being properly recorded. What hope then for the B-to-B promise of shared insight and understanding of the customer? I'm not saying this cannot work at all but what I am saying is that the logic of knowledge is different - and if we recognise that then we can make sensible choices about how far to go with CRM strategies and how to complement them with KM.

For example... The person who had the customer contact-event doesn't know what the future need for information about that event will be. They don't know what it will be helpful to record. The actual questions might be anything from "How did <person> seem to you?" or "Did you get the impression that <person> was a supporter of <proposal>?". But what actually gets recorded is "Met <person> to discuss <current project>". The person with a future need for insight about a person or contact-event will likely still have further questions of their own no matter what is recorded in the CRM. The logic of knowledge here is to 'know who' to talk to find out more (i.e. the owner of the relationship)... not to expect to learn everything they need to know from reading a record written at the time.

Today's #KMTOTD isn't about CRM per se, but about these kinds of situations where the real-life knowledge logic isn't the same as the default information logic so often applied. We just have to be realistic.

DIKW again

[Mon 2 Knowvember 2020] In the 1990s, when KM made its first impact, one saw the DIK/DIKW pyramid all the time. It's that pyramid with Data at the base, Information in the middle and Knowledge at the top ... and then someone put Wisdom on top of that. What it was trying to do was position 'knowledge' (a common abstract noun, but one that needed an introduction if we were going to make something new about it) as "not just data or information" so that people didn't all think that their databases and information technology were "knowledge management". Few of us in the field liked it, I recall. I confess I probably used it back then at some time because there was a demand to talk to it and it was an opportunity to try to make the point, but if it's used now it's kind of a marker for someone who's not quite up to speed. And lots of people think databases and IT are KM still.

There's much more of an acknowledgement now that all of these terms are a bit squishy, that they're more like roles that meaning-holding/signalling entities can play rather than categories of them (one woman's information is another's data), and that knowledge in particular is (in terms of the pyramid) the enabler of the transform of raw data to usable information and the ability to make sense and determine action more than anything else.

The appeal of DIKW is easy to see and it mirrors 'levels' models from cognitive psychology and linguistics. For instance, in vision, the rods and cones in your eyes detect light; at some other level the mind perceives edges and whole shapes, way further in the processing you recognise a scene - a room, tables, chairs, so on. In language the ear picks up vibrations in the air, the mind recognises speech and language sounds in the general soundscape, recognises sounds that signal meaning in a specific language, recognises words, phrases, understands propositions and interprets their significance: "Take a seat, please" your host says gesturing to a chair. All that happened was that the air was disturbed by this person's vocal apparatus but I know that (a) I'm being invited to sit, and (b) there's an expectation that I will do so as this is a step in the script for 'meeting' (etc.)

However, in the knowledge space we're pretty much entirely working in the semantic and pragmatic layers of meaning and interpretation - understanding the logical meaning and real-world significance of raw data and more refined information - and using our real-world insight and experience, the mental models and concepts in our minds, to do that. The exposure to new data and information will affect your knowledge, may change your understanding of the world, but it's much more of a web than a hierarchical pyramid.

In vision and language it's not just a linear, one-way process, either. It's clear that the higher level mind predicts the next scene, the next word and that may cause it to see or hear what it expected rather than what then occurred - or to register surprise to find itself mistaken. That's knowledge - an understanding based on a familiarity with the world. It can be mistaken - but pathology is often where we learn about how things work properly.

DMAIC for KM

[Fri 30 Oct 2020] In KM we should learn from the outside, just as would advocate others do. Lean Six Sigma (LSS) is the application of a scientific approach to the improvement of processes and services for the benefit of users, customers and all stakeholders. There's a lot of discussion in KM circles about proving the benefit of KM interventions. One thing from LSS that could help is the 'DMAIC' approach to doing 'the study' that precedes the project because it helps you frame the problem, the causes and the solution in a manner that will make it easier to appreciate the change you've made and your impact:

• D is for Define: Define the problem clearly from the user/customer's point of view. The problem could be an opportunity as well. As good KM people of course we would go look to 'learn before' and draw in prior art and preexisting experience with the problem area. When I started in consulting as a young whippersnapper all my clever ideas were usually met by the response "what's the problem we're really trying to solve here, Rob?" from the old guys. It's the best question in consulting, and that discussion liberates so much insight and direction. Spend time on it.
• M is for Measure: This is clever, I think, to remind us to measure the baseline - because that way you'll have something against which to assess the improvement made. Because measure forces you to frame the problem in terms of something measurable you may well iterate between Define and Measure to really focus on what the real problem is. Outside LSS practice, when people tell me about what they're improving and I ask, "well, what was the starting point in comparison?", nine times out of ten turns out there's no record of where we started from.
• A is for Analyse: Analyse the root causes that are driving the bad situation. To correct the problem you need to get to the true root-causes which could be factors in the processes, structures, rules, culture or organisation. Loom broadly and deeply for root causes.
• I is for Improve: Because you now understand the drivers you know which are the pressure points to focus on and so you can design improvement interventions. Sometime you find just the spot to apply to hammer - like if it's the lack of a time charge code for community activities in an organisation with tight time accounting that's holding back communities. More often it won't be so complex as that, but a more complicated situation.
• C is for Control: And this is about designing the measures that will be needed to manage and assess the improvement (this is where you prove the KM benefit) and make sure that what's one time fixed, stays fixed. It will be important to design the future bau state for maintaining the intervention.

And now you've done the study and you're ready to go execute the project you've designed!

There's a couple of common confusions with this I can help with. First, some people say the process is too linear but that's just a confusion between the inference logic, which is D-M-A-I-C, and what activities you do in real life: For instance, you may well start with a Control issue - you can start anywhere - and logically you'll ask yourself what the logical theory behind it is (DMAIC). What you do and how you think about it logically are different aspects of the same situation and not in conflict at all. Lots of LSS people are confused about this as well - quite a few think D-M-A-I-C is literally a rigid phasal approach you have to do exclusively in that order. You don't have to stick with that, believe me. And as you execute the project of course you'll keep course-correcting and revisiting your model and assumptions - and the good thing is you'll actually have some.

The second confusion is about knowledge being something mystical and intractable and so how could you approach it with an engineering mindset. Well, DMAIC won't be the one-and-only-approach for all needs, for sure. I'm equally content with more imaginative and emergent approaches as well - I use both together. But I don't buy into the validity of the 'knowledge is different' argument. Everyone and everything is different, but KM is not the management of knowledge - an abstract entity you can't actually 'manage' anyway - KM is management for knowledge - and that means changing structures and rules and processes and roles and ... real world stuff ... to lower barriers and enhance enablers to increase the chances of the better situation happening.

KM is not a very clever idea

[Thu 29 Oct 2020] I've often said it. KM is not a very clever idea. It's really a very simple idea. Use the best-known ways to do things and sometimes try new ones; learn from that experience; share what you know and what you've learned about it all; and work with others to advance the 'state of the art'. But, like 'people being nice to each other', for all the simplicity of the idea, it's jolly hard to bring about. We don't need to make it sound any more clever than it isn't - and certainly no more complicated than it is. So speak about it simply. And be more interested in learning how to get things done than in other stuff, because that is what's really difficult and in high demand.

KM is open source

[Wed 28 Oct 2020] One of the joys of KM is that it's an open movement rather than a proprietary methodology. During my career I've had a continuous track of knowledge-related work, and also shorter and longer periods of doing other things: IT, project management, operating model, sales management, marketing, communications, infrastructure, banking, insurance, transport, FMCG ... it's a long list. The gateway into these experiences was sometimes KM, but more often it was an underlying capability that was transferable - planning, management, design, leadership. All of these experiences then taught me something about a new domain but also gave me back something I could bring into my KM practice.

Student of ...<your subject here>

[Tue 27 Oct 2020] I love the idea of a sales representative or customer relationship executive being a 'student of the customer'. KM promotes learning and knowledge sharing and so the idea of being a 'student of <your subject>' makes complete sense. Be a student of as well as an SME (subject matter expert) in your customers/clients, markets, technical subject, process etc.

When is it a community?

[Fri 23 Oct 2020] How many of the things called 'communities' really are that? In KM we're very keen on communities of practice (CoPs) [and other kinds]. CoPs bring together and connect people who care about the same thing to share and develop that knowledge and practice. Very often I hear websites or regular monthly calls referred to as 'communities' and they may well actually be that .... but often I think they're just websites or regular monthly calls. So how would you know, and does it matter?

I think there must be a continuum of intensity of CoPs. At the low end of intensity they're like those websites or regular monthly calls. A 'true' CoP is going to have greater intensity and I think the hallmarks of that include things like:

• does the CoP connect its members to each other such that they get to know each other, can call on each other, share knowledge and experiences peer-to-peer, and help each other?
• does the CoP (i.e. its members) steward and develop their body of knowledge and practice; and provide resources and services for its members?
• does the CoP have a positive culture that includes people and makes its members feel that they belong, that they value belonging, that they recognise and appreciate each other; where they feel psychologically safe; where they learn?

Anything claimed to be a CoP is going to need and have these kinds of features to different intensities. Even the website / monthly call might achieve some of this, but the feel of a full-fat, thriving, involving CoP is going to be quite different.

I think this matters because most of the high value only comes from being much more of a developed CoP. A CoP helps me in my professional life if it connects me with fellow travellers; where we all feel safe to share our ideas and experiences, know we can call on each other and expect to be called; and care about and participate actively in developing our collective knowledge and practice.

Otherwise, people who only tried the ersatz version will feel CoPs aren't all they're cracked up to be.

Tell your project’s story

[Thu 22 Oct 2020] We know that stories convey a lot of knowledge and the stories that we hear consciously and subconsciously inform - for better or worse - our understanding of the world. But the orthodox world of work promotes rather anodyne stories of incidents, events and projects. They're not the same stories that the people who were involved actually tell, which are often far more personal and interesting. Well, many organisations today have great platforms that could make it easy for participants to share their version of the story - whether that's a blog, video or audio recording. So why not enable and encourage people to "Tell your project's story". Give them a good example and a few obvious rules (good manners, respect privacy and confidentiality, nothing libellous/slanderous ... so on) and encourage people whose great stories you've heard to lead. Some of the best stories are not the whole story of a project but the story of a critical incident within the whole project where there was an issue, conflict and learning. Another approach could be to record an interview with someone to get them to open up: "what was the hardest part of x?", "what's new about y?", "what's the story behind z?".

Any plans for Knowvember?

[Wed 21 Oct 2020] 70. Knowvember has been growing as a KM movement. It's an opportunity to promote KM and knowledge sharing activity in your organisation during the otherwise dull month of November. A couple of years ago, in a previous job role, I did a daily blog, every day during Knowvember, each one promoting a small thing people could do that day to enhance KM and knowledge sharing. There's still time to plan your Knowvember!

Information we can trust

[Tues 20 Oct 2020] It's World Statistics Day and that's worth a KM thought since, correctly used, statistics create knowledge from data - much as our minds create knowledge from experience.

One of the biggest dangers for KM 

[Mon 19 Oct 2020] ... is undoubtedly distraction into other duties. This is somewhat related to the issue of what do the people in the organisation think KM should be about. If they think it should be about managing IT, or managing external information sources, or document and record management, or CRM, or helpdesk or whatever then there's a danger that what the KM will be asked to do. The result is that the organisation gets some, what I would call "knowledge services", but doesn't really get near to trying KM itself. What do I think that is? I think it's about helping the organisation learn from experience, innovate and try new things, share knowledge and build distinctive knowledge-based capability, and apply ever-improving standards and practices to its work. Yes, to do that we may have to get involved with IT and information management, but the starting point was knowledge, not those things, and the result is very different.

What's knowledge for?

[Fri 16 Oct 2020] By listening to and observing people you may be able to see what they think - consciously or subconsciously - knowledge is for:

• Red - An advantage - Knowledge is power
• Blue - Something to be organised and ordered
• Orange - A means to an end - a tool for achieving
• Green - For the common good of all
• Yellow - Not for anything in particular but something that is

Many people will proclaim the Orange or Green views, but look more carefully and you'll find quite a lot are driven by the Blue in real life. The lesson is that you have to match their programme, or level up - yourself or them!

[More about this: "Towards Integral Culture Change" (Goodall, Pollack, Taylor) in: Buzan, T. and Edvinsson, L., 2004. "Leveraging corporate knowledge". Gower Publishing, Ltd.]

Teaching, coaching and leading others to KM rather than doing all the KM yourself

[Thu 15 Oct 2020] I think there's yet another sense in which there might be two flavours of 'doing KM' - Teaching, coaching and leading others to KM rather than doing all the KM yourself. By "teaching, coaching and leading others to KM" I don't mean teaching them to be professional KMs, but embedding it in their total working practice. However, both meanings are different from, as the KM, just doing all the KM yourself as a service offering!

Get in at the start

[Wed 14 Oct 2020] Try to get in at the start of things so you can help those involved do the 'learn before' thing (taking account of prior art so that they adopt best practices and lessons learned and load up on the knowledge resources available) - and to make a KM connection with the front line of where stuff is happening - rather than languishing in the 'back office'.

This might mean doing things like intercepting the project initiation process in your organisation, or following up the key contacts in company announcements of new programmes. Get KM in at the start of things.

Automate email filing

[Tue 13 Oct 2020] Yesterday I mentioned signing up to email newsletters. Some of these you want to read when you get them. Others you want to get to when you can, or have them to refer back to. Tools like Outlook allow you to automate the filing of email into folders you have created for that purpose. Usually I'm not going to recommend using your email system as a content store, but in this case this is easy to do and might help manage email overload as well.

In Outlook, create the folder where you want to store some kinds of emails. Then set up the rule to automatically file emails from particular addresses into that folder from 'Rules and alerts' under 'File':

In this example my email newsletters from NNG go straight to the NNG folder.

The daily drip-feed of knowledge

[Mon 12 Oct 2020] I believe that our individual mental models of the world - our knowledge, in effect - are formed from our accumulated experience, including the information we receive, for good or ill. We can all learn a little each day from a daily-drip feed of small knowledge inputs. It probably matters to get good quality input. One source I really like for this are the free Harvard Business Review email newsletters that you can sign up you. For example their 'Management tip of the day' is five minutes'-worth of insight on a particular aspect of management thinking, research or practice. Over a 200-day year of five minutes-a-day of learning that's like 2 extra days of management training and knowledge development.

KM raises business questions

[Fri 9 Oct 2020] I reflect that any piece of KM work, whilst taking its cue from and following on from strategy, always raises business questions back up the chain. That must be because of the inherently strategic nature of knowledge. Downstream, yes, knowledge solutions and services are an operational issue. But upstream there are decisions about 'exactly what is our knowledge and what role does it play' that become strategic.

Working with sales; they want to have all their portfolio information ready at hand when they need it. And what products are in the portfolio? Just give me the list. We had to develop the list.

Working with risk; they want to manage their risks. Good. What are the facts and data you need to record about risks? Yeah. Let's develop that model.

It's almost never that the knowledge is well known and just needs some intervention to make it perform. It's always defining what that knowledge is first as well.

Less is more

[Thu 8 Oct 2020] Create less content; provide less content; share less content - to be more efficient, to provide a more helpful service.

We all know that the rate of new data and content creation is just incredible. We probably see the same thing in our own organisations, projects and personal lives. Well, personal life aside, it may sound revolutionary or ridiculous but organisations and projects should just make fewer documents. I know this is so off-beat as to not get a second thought, probably, but it ought to be possible to specify which few documents a project, say, really needs and just focus on those. The problem is that the tools we have now for document production have just industrialised the process so much that it would be far harder to not make excess documents than to continue to do it.

Similarly, provide less content. If a novice wants a guide, a template and an example in order to help them do a task they don't need ten guides, three different templates and 24 examples ... or one really good instance of each? It's obvious which is more helpful.

Can we go faster? 

[Wed 7 Oct 2020] Whilst there are often quick wins to be made, and agile delivery means not having to wait a long time for the 'whole thing' in order to start getting value early - despite all that - KM is a long haul. Can we go faster? Should we go faster?

We could probably bring forward and accelerate projects and tasks to do with IT and content with greater resources. But at a certain point, when integrating with processes and all the other changes likely going on across the organisation as well ... well ... there's a bandwidth and capacity issue that can't just be addressed by throwing more resource at it. For a start the interdependencies and complexity of change increase the more that's going on in the same patch. Then there is a call on SME (etc) time to participate in change - leaving them less and less time for 'today's work'. It's an "explore vs exploit" paradox.

Then there's the lag in cultural and behavioural adaptation - "installation vs realisation". We can speed up installation, perhaps, but true realisation may be more difficult.

We can do more, and quicker - but eventually there are limits.

'New to us' is as good as 'brand new'

[Tues 6 Oct 2020] I know that many people are put off 'innovation' because they don't feel their ideas are really innovative - sufficiently new and 'out of the blue'. But let me say that if there's a good idea that's only a small idea, or that is just a slight change on something you've seen elsewhere, or that is general practice elsewhere but just not adopted by 'us', then it's as good as a really 'brand new' idea - and it might be less risky and easier to adopt as well. So celebrate 'new to us' equally with 'brand new' because what matters in innovation is gaining the value of ideas - not just the ideas themselves.

Empty head theory 

[Mon 5 Oct 2020] Funny thing is, 'empty head theory' is about your head not being empty. I remember Steve Denning describing this (on at least two occasions) and I knew exactly what he meant. Under 'empty head theory' you explain everything to someone. Lots of presentations and explanations go like that. It's like they think your head is empty and has no ideas in it so they have to put them all in. I want to fast fwd because I've got it already, but, no, they have 37 more slides enumerating the benefits of whatever it is they're proposing.

Not subscribing to that theory means recognising that people have ideas, experience and imaginations of their own. Just a few data points may be enough to make your point and their not-empty heads can fill in the rest for themselves. Magic tacit knowledge transfer! KMTOTD works like that. I don't feel I have to explain every aspect of an idea I have. I just give you a thought and you do the rest.

Mind you, there are lots of problems with the approach that I'm taking and I'd like to explain them all to you just in case you're not able to work them out for yourself ... er...

Operationalise advice

[Fri 2 Oct 2020] Organisations produce lots of policy, guidance and advice documents telling their people how things should be done. It's good KM if that advice is kept fresh by reviewing what happens in real practice ... but that's not enough. I always say that that 'review' and 'taking stock' part is just the 'lessons' part of 'lessons learned'. The 'learned' part is putting those lessons back into real practice. So organisations should seek to operationalise advice, and here's just one example of what I mean by that.

You could have a document about how a new project should be set up in its early days to maximise the chances of success. Organisations tend to like these 'theoretical' kinds of documents. Your first version might be based on 'received wisdom'. And it would be great if the organisation then studied its real practice and success, or not, in executing projects and refined the advice based on that. But to operationalise the advice you have to take practical steps to make sure that those who ought to follow it (project managers) know about it, read it, understand it, believe it, and can and actually do it. You need an education and comms plan for that. A complementary strategy, and a short cut, is to just make it unavoidable to follow the advice. So, instead of just having a guidance document that lists all the things a project needs to define at the start (e.g. roles and responsibilities), also have a template form that projects managers are always given that has the structure with all the fields needed to define roles and responsibilities, and includes the advice and guidance in the right fields, that will make them define those things. They'll be more likely to use that document alone and only ever refer to the guidance document if they really do want to read the theory*. Of course, that not all that you have to do about it, and it's not the only thing you can do - but you get the idea.

* They really don't. "Repo man is always intense" yeah? - you want to try project management. Ain't nobody got time for that.

Giving away knowledge

[Thu 1 Oct 2020] There's a place for copyright and IP protection, of course. But consider this (just one example of my point): One of the free feeds I subscribe to is Nielsen Norman Group's free newsletter. They're the "World Leaders in Research-Based User Experience" and they have short videos and articles you can get for free on all areas of Ux. I recommend them! Now, you have to pay for their reports and courses and if you want them to do some work for you ... but they give away heaps of good information for free too. I don't think they lose anything by doing that .. it just convinces me that they're the experts, and, if I had a need and a budget, I'd want them.

Just in time, just in case

[Wed 30 Sep 2020] We should learn, shouldn't we, because this much we know:

Just in time: People are generally very willing and proactive to offer input, advice and assistance at the point and time of need. They'll dig out and send examples and information that can help the other person, for instance.

Just in case: The same people, asked to dig out and share examples and information that might, at some future time and other place, benefit someone else in their time of need ... are less likely to respond, or as enthusiastically.

Many times knowledge managers press for people to invest their time and effort in 'just in case' knowledge initiatives ... we might do better to focus more on capturing all the good stuff that flows more freely and naturally whenever there's a 'just in time' need.

Doing world, thinking world

[Tues 29 Sep 2020] You can think of knowledge management as existing in 'doing world' and 'thinking world':

Doing world: Applying best practice; Innovating to meet challenges; Collaborating; using information resources; creating new knowledge and assets; learning by doing; projects; exploit over explore; performing; having impact; delivering services, results and outcomes.

Thinking world: Learning from experience and continuously improving process and capability; curating knowledge assets; learning longitudinally across many 'doing' experiences to further the 'state of the art'; sharing experiences in communities; reflecting, preparing, building IP value.

The two are, of course, linked and interdependent in a well-functioning knowledge system or ecology. Sometimes KM spends too long 'offline' in the back room of thinking world and needs to be brought 'online', into the value chain, front-line activities of the organisation.

We must bridge the knowing/doing gap.

Knowledge sharing methods

[Mon 28 Sep 2020] Today's KM Thought of the Day (KMTOTD) is ... what other knowledge sharing methods, approaches, tools or interventions could I use?

Here's an extract from a list of such methods I made a long while ago:

And ... also a note about how I find things like this work, well, for me, at least. One mode they work is I actually see an idea that I think I could use and maybe hadn't thought about, or not in a while. But, more usually, presentations and explanations and lists of ideas usually make me think of another new idea not on the list.

That's a magic tacit knowledge share, isn't it?

Connecting islands of content

[Fri 25 Sep 2020] The third of three 'thoughts' about the three connections in this diagram:

Connecting content <=> content - or, "connecting islands of content", as I always put it. (We already looked at the people <=> content and people <=> people connections a few weeks ago). Most times the content people want to access will be in different places, and the issue is how to link that content so that it's all navigable and findable for users. Typically, content will be in different IT systems: in various, central document systems, in business and data systems, in email and on personal computers, or anywhere in the outside world beyond the company boundaries and networks ... maybe even in an olde worlde physical library. There's an important task to do to look at all their needs from the users' points of view and develop menus and catalogues and indices to help them link to the knowledge content they need. Enterprise-wide and federated search can help bring back results from different sources without the user having to know about and go making separate searches in all those different sources. I know that often we seek to develop the 'one place' where all the knowledge and content can be found (users and project sponsors often ask for it *sigh*). The only one place we're ever going to find all the knowledge is in this one universe, not in a particular tiny corner of it. You're going to have to build those bridges, draw those maps and do what you have to to make a connected whole.

The KM ISO standard and little km

[Wed 23 Sep 2020] As I wrote on Wed 19 Aug 2020 I welcome the ISO Standard for KM (ISO 30401:2018(en) Knowledge management systems). But I promised a second thought about it and it's this.

I sometimes talk about there being "two KMs" - 'Big KM' which is about re-thinking the industrial era entirely for a knowledge economy and 'little km' which is about "doing KM stuff" but without changing the system, the framework, fundamentally. It's 'doing things better' (little km) vs 'doing better things' (Big KM). Well, the ISO standard is firmly about 'doing things better' - it's a 'little km' play. I still welcome it, though, for what it is.

KMTOTD has been on a long break and may well be more sporadic for a while. The list of 'thoughts' continues to grow, though. It's generative - each time I consider one 'thought' it spawns several more. Knowledge really is fractal - the closer you look at a small part of it, the bigger it gets.

Why measure clicks?

[Wed 26 Aug 2020] Many people are interested in the numbers of clicks or downloads or whatever quantifiable, online activity is easily recorded (posts, posts with replies; volume/change in volume of content or chat and so on). Some are also interested in the measurables that are less easily captured and less reliable, such as the number of people who attended an after-work community get together. Why? Well, most obviously because this activity data is easily recordable, countable and reportable - unlike business outcomes which are typically more challenging to evaluate. But it betrays something that may be conscious or unconscious - and we ought to be curious which it is.

It may be a conscious or an unconscious belief that (a) these things really are the things that matter; or (b) these things in themselves may not be the things that really matter but they are a good indication of the things that really matter. And I wonder if they're really either?

The aim of KMTOTD is not to provide an answer, but a thought ... and there's plenty to think about in this all-too-common scenario!

Connecting people to content

[Fri 21 Aug 2020] Today's thought is about the second of three connections the picture below describes: people <=> content (we thought about people <=> people a couple of days ago). How does KM connect people <=> content?

There's all the obvious ways that this picture usually makes people think of first, of course: providing access to content (internally shared and externally sourced) and search. Next we think about the fact that we're not just consumers of information but also producers, so we think about the content that people need to provide (and how they need to do that). Top marks, I think, if you also thought of the roles that link people to content: authorship, ownership, subject matter expert, cybrarian, reviewer, approver. Each bears examination: what are we doing in this area? What should we be doing?

Even a really simple picture like that can spark a thousand ideas for KM.

Communicating in complexity

[Thurs 20 Aug 2020] Some research I did a few years ago showed that, in the complex world of today, and in complex situations in general, the orthodox approaches to organisational communication may not always be sufficient. The top-down, central messaging; the orthodox appeal for 'clarity' - these ideas may not work the best. What is recommended instead is a more open, ongoing, participatory dialogue involving all levels, where diversity of analysis and opinion is accepted; where meaning emerges rather than is given.

I felt there was a strong connection with KM here, in the sense that it is this knowledge era that is the time of complexity; and it is precisely this ethos of participation and learning together that fits best with KM.

The KM ISO Standard - what it says, what it means

[Wed 19 Aug 2020] There's an ISO Standard for KM (ISO 30401:2018(en) Knowledge management systems). Unfortunately you have to pay to read it - but I can tell you at a high level what it says and what it means for you.

What it says: It defines and describes KM by analysing it into its different elements in a fairly orthodox way that you would probably recognise. It outlines the generic activities the organisation should address for KM (they're fairly generic to management per se, to be honest) and the responsibilities of top management. It says there should be a plan and suitable support, documentation and operational processes including evaluation and improvement. As with all such standards, it's the documentation of precisely how your organisation will instantiate it, and then the recording of proof that you have implemented that, that really matter.

What it means for you: There's a first ISO standard for KM at international level (following on from much earlier antecedents such as PAS 2001 (from 2001)). It's very broad and open and generic which I think is suitable at this stage and means it's unlikely to present you much practical difficulty (you may or may not like the fairly mechanical language, or there may be one or two points you take issue with - I personally don't like that it's equivocal about organisational learning - but nothing in it really restricts what you do with it). What I think it means is not so much that you now have a guide that you've been somehow lacking, but that you now have a formal document you can use to engage engineers, operations managers, HR and any other 'technical' organisational function that usually respond better to something coming 'from outside' and that looks pretty formal. Seriously, I think that's the value - if it helps get people with influence involved, then that's good. If its existence means you can get a formal agreement documented as to how KM will be implemented; and then use that leverage to actually garner the focus, investment and action needed to do that, and are then able to record and show you're doing it and what the results are in a way that has been generally agreed inside the organisation - then that could be a big help.

I have a further, and rather different, thought on the ISO standard to share in a few days ...

Connecting people to people

[Tues 18 Aug 2020] So, today's thought is about the first of three connections this picture describes: people <=> people. How does KM connect people <=> people? People finder/expertise locator; through their shared profiles; communities; collaboration tools, channels and events; through their complementary roles in processes and the interfaces and hand-offs between them; by always providing a link to a person (an author, owner or SME) as part of any content or service information. Innovations such as Delve and Cortex in Microsoft 365 are going to connect people <=> people by suggesting and surfacing content, activity and, yes, people to each other. I always say that finding a person to ask is the "first best, not second best" way to get knowledge - so follow up the author when you find useful content.

This picture is one of the few that are truly my originals. It's always fun to see it used by others. If I revised it now I might want to include more than just content - maybe services as well? Or are the services just the ways in which we connect people to content?

Use the 4-layer business architecture model to check over your KM

[Mon 17 Aug 2020] I like the 4-layer business architecture model* and we can use it as one lens through which to check over our KM to make sure it's all covered and integrates:

• Top layer: Strategy: KM strategy and measures that marry with the business strategy.
• Second layer: Process: The policies and processes that we need just for KM; KM embedded in other policies and processes
• Third layer: Applications/services/data: All the resources and services required by the processes.
• Fourth layer: Infrastructure/culture: Assurance in the infrastructure and support required; interfaces, boundaries and agreements with other infra./etc. providers. The underpinning organisational culture.

[* other versions are available]

Agile KM

[Fri 14 Aug 2020] I like the Manifesto for Agile Software Development very much. Always have. It's about values and principles that are very 'KM'. Reading it, I always think that I was Agile before Agile - as I expect many of us were. It's a nice reminder also that 'Agile' is not a software development methodology (which is a common misunderstanding that I dislike). Sometimes it's a mistake also to take things 'out of context' ... just as sometimes it's a very creative way of thinking to take an idea from one place (say, software development) to see how it helps us better understand another (say, KM). I'm not ready in any way to declare a Manifesto for Agile KM, but the thought sparked these ideas:

"We are uncovering better ways of enabling learning from experience, innovation, knowledge sharing and applying best practice; and helping others to do it. We have come to value:

• Collaborating with, interacting with people as individuals and in communities ..... over processes and tools
• Outcomes, results, services and solutions ... over comprehensive documentation
• Customer collaboration ... over contract negotiation
• Responding to change ... over following a plan
• Working 'in the flow' and at the front line where the actual value-creating work is done ... over working in a back-room, supportive role

That is, whilst we see value in the items to the right, we value the items on the left more highly."

Yeah - some of those were straight from agile or adapted.

What are the roots of your KM?

[Thurs 13 Aug 2020] KM is a multi-disciplinary subject so it's not surprising that we came to it by different routes. For me it was via artificial intelligence and carrying out 'knowledge acquisition' for developing knowledge-based (or 'expert' - never liked that term!) systems (KBS). I, like others, found that the answer to the need wasn't always going to be some AI tech. I still remember telling a banking client that their commercial lending would be better supported by a graphic algorithm printed on a mouse mat than by a KBS. Many have come in via library and information sciences, some from IT and other transferred into KM from first being domain experts, and recognising the need to organise their domain knowledge support better (for example, professional support lawyers). I started calling it "KM" probably in 1990, but it was five or six years more before I started hearing a lot more about it from Japan and the USA and decided what it really was and that it was me. But today's thought stems from this interesting article from Patrick Lambe "The unacknowledged parentage of knowledge management" that I just re-read today. The article traces the origins back to the 1960s and 1970s - but it's doubly interesting that these earlier sources were hardly mentioned at all in the headline-grabbing KM books of the 1990s.

Re-imagine your events 'virtual first'

[Wed 12 Aug 2020] We're familiar now with the idea of 'mobile first' - designing apps with mobile in mind from the start rather than, as was the case in the early days of WAP phones. as a second, additional channel. In that same vein, with many 'all hands' get-togethers being replaced by virtual events, don't just try to do the same thing as you would if you were all together, but substituting online for the stage. Instead, design events 'virtual first' to get the most from the experience. Break all-day events into shorter sessions across a longer period. Build in networking sessions - the coffee breaks are often the best bit of conferences: Online you'll need hosts and moderators for this. Lots of presentations can be covered by delegates as pre-work at their own pace (but make sure they do have that time), leaving plenty of time to discuss them both asynchronously online and live in the event. The best news? Some of those participative apps such as polls that you've struggled to introduce to in-person events will be natural in the online experience. Bring the in-house experience you gain into client interaction as a positive capability and differentiator.

One size fits all

[Tues 11 Aug 2020] It's around 23-25 years since I started offering KM services at Unisys and then at KPMG. One thing I used to say to clients then was "there's no 'one size fits all'", meaning, of course, an approach needed to be tailored to their needs. It's equally true to say that, in KM, we didn't have 'a product' and, in these relatively early days, we were learning on the job - we didn't really know for sure what the right approach was or that any one approach would always be appropriate.

Then over the years, working across very varied sectors, I came to see many repeating needs. I've checked this with other people in KM and I can't remember anyone who hadn't had the same experience. I still don't want to say 'one size fits all' - far from it - but at some level there are many common needs, including: a strategy, roadmap and organinsation. technology and governance for content and collaboration, communities, embedment, effective search including a way to locate colleagues. I don't agree with those who say that KM is now mature - but I do think we've moved from 'ad-hoc' to a first level of maturity, and are getting secure in that.

When you answer someone's question, update the FAQs as well

[Mon 10 Aug 2020] When I can't find the answer on the website, I end up calling the contacts. This happens in personal life, for example dealing with utilities or planning a trip, and also in an 'at work' situation, trying to navigate a company's processes. Most times you do get to speak to someone eventually and do get your answer. Most all of the time, though, if you check back a while later, the vital bit of information you had to call up for has not been added to an updated, improved website. This is a failure of learning and an easy opportunity to illustrate what would be "the KM way" which is this: That customer query was a signal and a learning opportunity. The lesson was that there was something the customer needed to know that was unclear in or missing from the published information. But there is no learning without making an improvement. Make your websites and intranet work hard for you by answering the questions users search for quickly and easily, and if the user still has to call you, take that as a signal; help them right away, and help all the future users as well by improving the content to address the need identified.

"That's not KM, that's just ..."

[Fri 7 Aug 2020] "That's not KM, that's just..." I've heard this sort of thing often over the years in discussions between KMers. The sentence usually ends with something like:

• "...IT / an IT tool / a website"
• "...information / content / records management"
• "...internal comms"
• "...project / change management"
• "...OD"
• "...Agile"
• "...a meeting / an event / a discussion"

I call it "the disappearing KM." There's a thousand cuts you can take to KM but what do we imagine is the carcass that's left behind that is the true KM? So, some perspectives:

• KM is eclectic, weakly-typed and open. And hurrah for that! It's a mix of many skills and approaches applied as if knowledge mattered. It's the recipe or the dish, not the ingredients.
• Doing an actual job of work and incorporating a regard for sharing and stewarding knowledge, learning and innovation is one thing - - - whereas providing the solutions, services and capability that allow that to happen, is another. Different senses of 'KM' - we might call them 'knowledge work and 'knowledge services'.

Socio-technical

[Thurs 6 Aug 2020] We have to understand KM as a socio-technical domain, with a people, society, culture and change side and a systems, rules, structures and processes side (which includes the IT side of KM but is wider than that too).

Question the numbers, question the received wisdom

[Wed 5 Aug 2020] I'm a big fan of BBC Radio's "More or less" show and podcast, and of Tim Harford, the FT's 'undercover economist', who is its main presenter. On the show they examine statistics used in the media, news and by politicians (etc) to question if they're right or not and what they actually mean or signify. My impression is that the stats. often turn out to be questionable: misleading, unreliable, baseless, or, often, just meaningless or hard to fathom what they mean. Sometimes they're correct and useful as well - but how can you tell which is which? My fascination in this was boosted when I studied measurement systems analysis as part of learning Lean Six Sigma many years ago. You need to ask deep questions about what was actually measured and how before you can really tell what the numbers mean. We have the same issue in the non-numerical world as well with 'received wisdom' often passing unquestioned. and this is where we need to apply critical thinking to really test the validity, reliability and applicability of the purported truth. These issues have been starkly relevant during this Covid-19 crisis in which we've been bombarded with statistics and claims about the disease. What does it mean to compare mortality rates between countries? Mask-up or not? Is there room in our KM to help highlight information in a way that makes clear how reliable it is, or isn't, and where it is and isn't applicable?

Thread, stream and static

[Tues 4 Aug 2020] The 'stream' style for online discussions appears to have won out over the old 'thread' style: It dominates social media such as Facebook, LinkedIn and the rest, and is also now found in corporate tools such as MS Teams. Despite the search capabilities of these platforms, it remains difficult sometimes to re-locate some information you seem to recall seeing in a discussion somewhere. Remember some of the good things we had in threaded discussions that allowed us to 'anchor' information within topics and themes; remember how we learned to administer and organise them over all the years of experience since the early internet. Some of these learned and refined patterns might be useful if brought back into our new 'stream' discussions ("best answer" in MS Yammer is a nice example). Also make it a point to record information from the stream that ought to form part of the persistent, easy-to-access knowledge base in a well-defined, static information place.

Respond to the pull

[Mon 3 Aug 2020] A lot of the fuss with content management can be avoided if you simply create or supply the content that users are actually looking for rather than just what you happen to want to push out there. One of the clues is search - what are they actually looking for? Respond to the pull. Be lean.

Digital workplace as a 'Digital Twin'

[Fri 31 Jul 2020] There's a renewed interest in business modelling in the shape of building 'digital twins' - digital models that mirror the real-world entity can be used for many purposes including scenario simulation and impact assessment. I've always liked the idea of the intranet as a synthetic model of the organisation from a knowledge pov. When you're going to change the organisation/the intranet you can see the impacts in terms of communities, roles, content and so on. Now that we're moving from the monolithic intranet to the digital workplace, it may be interesting to consider the potential for digital twinning to help inform the optimisation of the fit between the online and 'real' worlds.

Search dependence vs skills

[Thurs 30 Jul 2020] Users' dependence on and proclivity to search are not matched by their search skills. It's a quandary. I've been watching search a long time. In the early internet there was search but also some of the major sites such as Alta Vista were browse-able catalogues of topics as well. We knew more people were searchers than browsers (I was a browser). Search won. Over the years I've become unsurprised to see that most popular intranet searches are single term - just one word - or near to it. Very few (and I mean very few) people use search filters or refiners, modify the scopes or use booleans or anything else to improve their query. Across organisations and over decades high numbers of users have been disappointed by the search results they get. It's a quandary. You rely on search, you don't like what it gives you, but you don't learn how to do it better. You could lookup 'search skills' or 'how to search' or learn from resources like this one from Google - but I know that's obvious and the reasons people don't do it still escape me. Trying to improve search skills with education, campaigns and on-screen nudges might be worth trying. Overall, though, we have to accommodate to the facts - users aren't going to learn to search better - we have to recognise that and do the extra work to make content findable for them.

Emergent taxonomy

[Wed 29 Jul 2020] I sometimes use emergent taxonomy. We usually develop taxonomies to help us organise, label and 'tag' content items to make them more naturally findable for users of content. Usually there's at least some degree of a 'model' or 'obvious' tagging scheme to use - but very often there isn't, or at least we should be sceptical about our own certainty. That's when I often use 'emergent tagging/taxonomy' alongside the proposed scheme. It can be as simple as allowing free-form keyword tagging, but the important part is to go back and look at the terms people use, alongside other evidence such as search terms, to see what pattern emerges - and then you can start to apply that as a formal taxonomy with more confidence.

Lessons for me, for us, for all of us

[Tues 28 Jul 2020] There are three "Lesson learning levels" that are equally valid:

• Lessons for me - what the individual 'I' draws from reflecting on information, events and experience.
• Lessons for us - what the 'we' group discusses and decides together to do differently.
• Lessons for all of us - the lessons that the individual or group identifies which are relevant to the wider 'we/they' practitioner community organisation.

Fractal knowledge

[Mon 27 Jul 2020] In the 80s I was fascinated by the emerging field of computer graphics and esp. by the people trying to create images in a synthetic way that mirrored natural processes (such as ray tracing to get the light on the image rather than just painting it on the surface). I was doing AI and very interested in computer vision. Alas, I didn't have the grasp of maths needed! But it's where I first came across fractal space - ideas such as 2.5D and self-similarity (the way a part of a tree looks like a whole tree). Does an ant live in a tiny world? No - they live in a world of vast forests. OK, it's just your lawn but at the same time a vast forest for an ant. I think knowledge is like that. The closer you look - the bigger it becomes. One tiny subject, once you get close to it as when you speak with the people who are real specialists in it, opens out into wide, unending vistas. Knowledge exists in fractal space there will always be more to learn. By the same token, am I concerned that I'll run out of thoughts for the day? No, it's infinite. I have the next 90 listed ... but don't worry, I'll take a break from it soon!

Content engineering

[Fri 24 Jul 2020] Content Management? Of course! But what about Content Engineering? Many different roles have a part to play in content management and when it comes to rules we must all adhere to (GDPR, records, confidentiality etc) then we all do. But only certain specialists will engage in Content Engineering - because it is an engineering discipline now, to manage the underlying structure, surface presentation, management process, quality and searchability of content.

Explore or exploit?

[Thurs 23 Jul 2020] We need to always check for the right balance between explore and exploit:

• Explore - find, create new knowledge; new ideas and enhancements ... and ...
• Exploit - apply and gain the value of the knowledge we already have

Personal benefits

[Wed 22 Jul 2020] We're advised to consider "what's in it for me?" (WIIFM - 'for me' meaning 'for them') when we want to engage a target audience in an activity. From a KM pov, here are the key issues people would probably see as good WIIFM that we should seek to appeal to:

• Being part of a supportive, knowledge sharing and stewarding professional community where you feel safe and appreciated ... that is
• engaged in a meaningful and motivating cause, mission or purpose ... where you can
• apply and develop knowledge and skills with professional autonomy

Energising KM through personal benefits

Knowledge Services vs. Knowledge Management

[Tues 21 Jul 2020] Often what is called 'Knowledge Management' is more like 'Knowledge Services' in the sense of it being about providing solutions, services and capability to enable someone else to do the more hands-on 'Knowledge Management' - rather than doing that work - the working with people on learning, innovation, content and methods improvement and so on - itself.

Disambiguating KM

Answers at the time and place of need

[Mon 20 Jul 2020] In KM, we should seek to provide 'answers at the time and place of need'. But when and where is that? The time and place of need is most likely in the future and elsewhere, so we should think about who will be trying to do what, when, where and under what conditions and performance standards ... then - and this is the important bit - we should be looking to embed the knowledge support right there, in the flow of that activity to meet that need. Making a separate knowledge resource, service or system that means the customer/user had to come out of their flow to get the answer they need in some parallel stream that isn't embedded and right at their fingertips is always going to be a second best to what we should aim for.

KM existed before KM

[Fri 17 Jul 2020] There was KM before it was ever called 'KM'. When I first went to work there were staff handbooks that told you all about the company policies, processes and contacts - long before intranets. The best of these was in a ring binder with section dividers, and when there was a change, the changed pages or sections were issues with detailed instructions about how to replace the old pages. When I first went to work there were lunchtime briefing on subjects of interest, groups you could join to learn about and contribute to service and market knowledge - but we weren't yet talking about 'communities'. There were standard ways of doing things, senior people you were expected to ask for help if you needed it (they expected this). And when we got the first two PCs, one was dedicated to project write-ups and one to CVs - you could write yours up or go take printouts for use in proposals (they were hand written and given to Typing to produce!).

What can be reinvent or reinstate from the KM we had before KM?

The different senses in which we 'share' knowledge

[Thurs 16 Jul 2020] There are different senses in which we 'share' knowledge: We normally think of it in terms of the 'give and take' exchange of knowledge. But we also share knowledge in the sense of holding it in common and sharing in it. And large organisations have to 'share out' knowledge across the different functions who each have to develop their own distinct capabilities - then to re-combine them and share them when the complementary knowledge is needed to all work together to achieve a goal or purpose.

Is KM vulnerable to job cuts?

[Wed 15 Jul 2020] Over the years we've seen many waves of hiring and firing of KM teams in organisations and many good people lose their positions. With the predicted economic fallout of the pandemic threatening widespread job cuts across all sectors, some in KM may feel vulnerable. I've calculated the return from KM to be 10x to 100x the cost - so why has it often been seen as one of the areas to cut back on in hard times rather than invest in?

It's simply this: Many companies are poor at managing their costs in normal times and then make distress, short-term decisions when they're brought to the brink. That's the reason that good activities and good people's roles get cut. We know this because the term 'cost cutting' has a negative connotation - because it's often done badly. Done well it would be seen as a good and positive thing to reduce costs and waste and make the business more effective for all. You probably think of it as a good thing when you reduce your personal or domestic costs - like getting a better utilities deal, for instance. But at work, many dread 'cost cutting' because of a fear that the axe will swing indiscriminately on people's jobs rather than on waste activities. It's a far easier cut to make if you haven't studied and continuously improved the processes up to now.

There's no statutory need to have KM and companies won't suddenly be unable to function in the short-term without it, so, like other, similar areas, it's in the sights of a manager who needs to hit a budget and doesn't have time to do anything other than make simple-minded decisions in big handfuls.

We can't suddenly change the reality. But this knowledge can inform the right action to take which is this: move your KM more towards front-line, essential, 'in the value chain' activities; count and publicise the tangible, financial benefits; cultivate the right decision-maker stakeholder relationships.

Sometimes it has worked.

No such thing as intuitive

[Tues 14 Jul 2020] We all want the KM IT systems that we provide to be 'intuitive' so that users can adopt them naturally without undue training or experiencing failure or unexpected behaviour. But in this game there's no such thing as intuitive. What you can do, however, is make applications as much like other popular applications as you can; follow de-facto design standards and best practices and make sure the tool fits the task. It's not intuitive, none of it, but it is pig-a-backing on already learned patterns.

CoP Strategy

[Mon 13 Jul 2020] In thinking about Communities of Practice (and also ~of Interest) you can think about improving the ones you have, OR also about whether you have the ones you need or not; and about precisely the kind of interventions and support you should provide. You don't have to leave it to chance - you can have an active community strategy.

You *can* deal with culture

[Fri 10 Jul 2020] Many times people are quick to say something to the effect that KM is "all about culture", but far from that starting a really deep inquiry into culture, instead it almost always signals a dead-end. It's culture, dude, nothing we can do about it. It seems almost fatalistic.

I've written about the aversion there is to dealing with knowledge culture before and what I want to say is that you can deal with it and, if you believe it's such a significant force, then you have to deal with it, dude.

Materialism and orthodoxy

[Thurs 9 Jul 2020] If you just want your KM to be things, or if you just want it to be like before ... it's unlikely that you really want KM.

I wrote about materialism and orthodoxy as challenges to KM before here.

There's tacit then there's tacit

[Wed 8 Jul 2020] I often read about organisations wanting to 'capture tacit knowledge'*. I get it - I know what they mean. It's either about articulating something that was never said before and getting it into some physical, transferable form for others to access; or it's about writing something down that was said before, just not written down (or even was written down but just not in a shared way). Usually the latter.

But something is lost. It's still potentially a worthwhile exercise, but the magic of tacit is that there's always more of it because it's 'generative' (it makes more and more of itself the more you delve). It's like dark matter (I have actually referred to it as 'dark knowledge') because we must posit there is much more knowledge than has been made explicit in order to account for what we see. The weight of tacit knowledge must be the bigger part of all knowledge.

So consider the knowledge that is really tacit and possibly yet to be even consciously thought, vs all the other states of knowledge that we might call 'tacit', but are really just different degrees away from fully articulated and recorded. And if you have five minutes more to think about this - then a long while ago I wrote about Five kinds of Tacit Knowledge .

[* Yes, I wrote before about how I prefer 'liberate' to 'capture']

The way ahead for KM

[Tues 7 July 2020] Which of the different kinds of future for KM do you expect ... and which do you hope for? During Covid lockdown there has been a rapid uptake of virtual technology. Big Data and AI march onwards. Are the breakthroughs to be found on the tech route, or, as some would have it, in a more organic, human-centred approach?

Or can we have the 'best of both'?

Defining CoP purpose

[Mon 6 July 2020] When defining the purpose of a Community of Practice, forge a community purpose from the melding and balancing of business goals and member goals*.

Many times people want to go straight to how the community can support the business, but you need to approach this more obliquely. The way to engage that discretionary effort and engagement from the community members is to first deliver to their passions and needs.

[* More subtly, I think, it's about interior motivations and exterior manifestations.]

Start with KOB

[Fri 3 July 2020] I learned about 'Knowledge Of the Business (KOB)' by spending some time with trainee accountants in a previous stint at one of the 'Big N' audit firms many years ago. It was the first step in their audit process - - to learn about the business they were going to audit. It's one of many, many ideas I've borrowed on long lease from elsewhere and taken into my KM and consulting practice. Your customer will have an idea what they want from you - and of course you have to get involved with that. But the lesson of the KOB is, first learn about the business: it's shape, size, markets, measures, operations etc. Sometimes people say "what do you want to know that for?". The true answer is "not for anything in particular, but because I know that having knowledge will give me greater insight and understanding and allow me to do a better job". Well, isn't that how knowledge works?

Big KM, little km

[Thurs 2 July 2020] Big KM, little km:

• "Big KM" - management for the 'knowledge economy', concerned with the change from an industrial economy to a knowledge economy. The greater part of value is now 'lite' and based on intellect, ideas and creativity; the sharing and exploitation of knowledge.
• "little km" - the stuff of Big KM. The implications of Big KM are tied up with content and tech; and, equally, making changes and adaptations to the norms of business and working life.

The issue is, for me, just starting at the "little km" level without the "Big KM" context, because then you get a dissonance, with the old economy trying to wear the clothes of the new. That's one place KM has got a bad name.

Reckoning the value, #1

[Wed 1 July 2020] Many times people worry about reckoning the value of KM - the net business benefit. I'm sure this is because 'knowledge' itself is an abstract thing. But it's a misdirection if you focus on that. What you need to focus on is how would you reckon the value added to the thing you're improving, not the KM itself - but then reckon what is the KM component of that added value. So, if you're trying to improve sales performance then you're going to focus on measuring the improvement to sales metrics: deal size, win rate/ratio, cost of sales, sales velocity, account wallet share and so on. If you were trying to reduce costs through KM then you'd focus on the reduction in costs, not the KM itself. This also gets us away from tedious input or activity measures and focuses us more on what the customer or the business really cares about - the what rather than the how.

Yeah, just "#1", I'm afraid as we're bound to return to this topic - as we always do.

KM Thought of the Day is back after a staycation break.

Where to put KM?

[Mon 15 June 2020] Because of its broad, interdisciplinary nature, it's often hard to know where to place KM in the organisation. From what I have seen, where you place it will colour the emphasis - whether that's (and these are some common examples) in HR, in IT, in Operations or wherever. You get a different flavour. Only the biggest and most visionary organisations have been able to establish a significant and well-defined KM function in its own right.

My tip is, wherever it's placed, its place is closest to its Executive Sponsors, Senior Stakeholders, partners in other service delivery areas, and, closest to those doing the company's actual business and using KM services that it can be.

Because that's where the knowledge is.

What roles are there in the KM team?

[Fri 12 June 2020] I won't repeat here what I wrote before at length about who is in the KM team. My thought is simpler and it's this: The KM team isn't just the team with that label - the content, collaboration and community specialists - it's equally the sponsors, user groups, SMEs, community leaders and others. Your team is bigger than it is.

What a community doesn’t do

[Thu 11 June 2020] What a community doesn't do is today's work. Of course, it's risky to generalise, and that statement is a generalisation, but it's far more often right than wrong. What the community does do is enable today's work to be done in the best way we know up to now. It does this by collectively sharing and learning from different people's and teams' experiences, developing and bringing in new solution ideas to address the issues and opportunities it has seen or imagines, and providing the current 'state of the art' best practice and guidance that we can have up to now, today. I know it can be confusing sometimes because the same mortals are actually doing today's work as are involved in these community activities - but they're doing these different activities in different roles.

Learn, Innovate, Share, Apply (LISA)

[Wed 10 June 2020] I often say that if we can Learn from experience, Innovate by bringing ideas to reality, Share our knowledge and Apply best practices, well, then we have good KM. LISA - other acronyms are possible!

What do you do on KM day 1?

[Tues 9th June 2020] Other questions have a different answer, but here's the answer to what you do on day one of KM. Find out if there's anything urgent or important that day and help. As KM, it's clearly your bag if it's content, collaboration or community*.

When the Covid19 lockdown was announced the thing that was urgent and important right then where I was stood was to enable virtual collaboration so that business meetings and operations - including those co-ordinating the wider response - could continue remotely. This meant moving more than 100k people online and making sure the training, support and assistance were there. This was clearly our bag as we were the people evangelising about content, collaboration and community. If that had been my KM day one that might not have been a planned activity and certainly not a smooth take off - but getting stuck into what matters, matters. It was a moment of truth.

As I say, other questions have a different answer. How would you initiate KM in a new organisation? How do you start up in KM? Yes, these have more nuanced answers. But the answer to what to do on day one is this. [* I'd go further and say "as a member of the team, pretty much whatever needs doing is your bag"]

KM maturity - how can you tell?

[Mon 8th June 2020] There's a lot of interest in some quarters around maturity models. How could you quickly tell your KM maturity?

Well, if being able to know something depends on (i) you already do, or (ii) you personally just happen to already know precisely who to ask or where to look but most colleagues wouldn't - then your KM maturity is low. Generally speaking, if a piece of knowledge that isn't accepted to be really rarified expertise depends on you getting to the one specific person who knows it - then your KM maturity is low. If you always have to invent or research processes and knowledge that really you ought to have ready om tap, then you're still at an 'ad-hoc', low level of KM maturity. As KM maturity grows, your organisation's differential knowledge becomes more generally accessible and reproducible: More people know it, know about it and practice it, and more consistently; at first, locally, and, later, 'globally'. At the highest levels of maturity all of that is true, very broadly and to some depth; plus, your organisation is rapidly, continuously and effectively improving knowledge and effectiveness; creating better knowledge and better knowledge processes, tools and methods.

But. aside from the areas that properly belong to 'new innovation', so long of you need to get to the one special person to get the answer to something that shouldn't be that hard; so long as you seem always to be making up ways to do things as if you were the first person ever to do it; well, you're still in the low maturity levels.

Whither the intranet?

[Fri 5th June 2020] The fate of the intranet as a 'thing' may well chart a course for knowledge management too. Since the late 90s, when intranets were still pretty new, this new medium was adopted either by internal communicators as the new company magazine, or by the new 'knowledge managers' as a platform we could see added to groupware (an old term for collaboration and discussion tools) and document systems as part of the foundation for our new vision. The "knowledge-enabled intranet" I myself was talking about around the turn of the millennium - - where content, collaboration, community, news and information all took place together - - took far longer to come about than I imagined and is today's emerging "digital workplace". But is there a place still left for the intranet itself in all this? With flattened information architectures are we now far more in a self-organising peer-to-peer network of teams and content, rather than a hierarchically-designed "single source of the truth" (how often have I heard that!)? I don't know. I think there will still be a place for an intranet providing unified, personalised and customised news, static information, comms, tools, search and jump-off to everything else. Sounds quite a lot like that other old idea - the 'portal' (which was never meant to be a content source itself, but an aggregator - -it didn't turn out like that!). These 20 years gone, the intranet has been both a blessing and curse to KM at the same time - an enabling tool we've exploited, but one that also brought with it many other chores and responsibilities that were the price we paid to play. If the intranet does live on, will we in KM still want it, or will we, at last, wish to relinquish it ... to play elsewhere in the new landscape instead?

What is the value of Records Management to Knowledge Management?

[Thur 4 Jun 2020] On the face of it, Records Management and Knowledge Management are poles apart. Records Retention is driven by chiefly legal and also, to a lesser extent, operational needs - the legal need to be able to produce documentary evidence (e.g. of agreements, transactions, proceedings, compliance etc.); and the operational need to reference the correct details of, say, a transaction. Both Records Management and KM are going to utilise information and document management - but in different ways and to way different ends. But there is a real relevance of Records Management to KM, as I found when I was responsible for both at BAE Systems for several years. Unlike KM, Records Management is a legal and regulatory 'must do' - so people need to be engaged in specific IT systems, processes, roles and activities to meet its requirements. All of these can provide 'double benefits' if they also support KM - for example if departmental Records Managers also recognise the KM contribution they can make as responsible content and information owners. Effective Records Management also implies the need to 'weed out' ROT content so that the true records stand out clearly and misleading or unhelpful documents are not erroneously retained - something very relevant for KM too, where we want the best, distilled, repeatable knowledge content and exemplars to stand out, say, in search, for example. When Records Managers and KMs work together they often agree to define a third category to stand between the 'Records' on the one hand and the 'Work in Progress' on the other, and that is the enduring Knowledge content, and, in so doing, find their common ground and cause. If you're a Records Manager or KM make sure you hook up with your opposite counterparty to succeed together.

What does your organisation's "values" statement say about KM?

[Wed 3 Jun 2020] I'm fascinated by organisational values - the descriptive, prescriptive and, what I'm focused on here, the "brass plate" statement kind. Don't get me started - this is only a short "thought for the day"! What do they say about KM and what can we do about or with that? Well, a clue is that they're unlikely to talk about "knowledge management", but they might well speak about innovation, collaboration, continuous improvement and being 'the best'. There's something to work with in that. Another starting point for a KM conversation.

Altruism and delayed gratification - selfless KM

[Tues 2 June 2020] Two of the problems with the way a lot of KM approaches work is their dependence on altruism and delayed gratification. The approaches I'm thinking of are the ones that depend on a 'knowledge donor' doing something 'just in case' a future/remote 'knowledge recipient' might benefit - typically those approaches that depend on the 'donor' recording their knowledge or insight in some clerical IT systems for later/elsewhere retrieval by a beneficial 'recipient'. To a greater or lesser extent these often depend on the altruism of the donor and/or their ability to delay gratification (since there may be little or no pay-off for them right then, or possibly for them at all). Of course, fixing or improving these approaches isn't the only thing you could do - -you could consider entirely different approaches. But as far as fixing or improving them goes it's worth recognising the situation for what it is, since that will point in the direction of what to do. Could the donor receive some affirmation that they've done the right thing or some gamified benefit right away? Some way of showing appreciation or recognition? Perhaps a way of seeing how other recipients have benefited from similar actions? Think of how charities use such stories to encourage you to donate - we can use that psychology. People like to feel they're doing the right thing and being true to the person they think they are - and that motivation can be used. Thinking about this issue in this way will yield other solutions as well.

How I came to gamification in KM

[Mon 1st June 2020] I had been interested in gamification for a long while but it was only when I felt it that I committed.

A colleague, off his own bat and as a personal project, had developed a pilot leaderboard app that ranked participants in online discussion boards in the company according to the number of times they commented on a topic. What grabbed me right away, though, was that I showed up only as 'Silver' for knowledge management, not 'Gold': Surely I was the very most active commentator on this subject across the whole company? I dug deeper and found that it was something to do with how comments were counted (yes this was a pilot app and could have been improved) so I made sure from then I commented in the right way to get counted and was soon 'Gold'.

It was then that I reflected just how powerfully the system had 'gamed' me and engaged my action to get the reward I wanted. Previously I'd read a lot about gamification and been enthralled, but this was the tipping point because finally I felt it.

Our first gamed app was a profile completeness score which made a tangible difference to participation, was a talking point across the company, and, curiously, users who spoke to us actually loved!

Well, that was about gamification and also a reminder about story telling too.

Taxonomies - not just for tagging

[Fri 29 May 2020] At the base layer of knowledge sit the concepts that make up a subject matter. I often say learning the concepts is a good place to start learning a body of knowledge, or acquiring knowledge of a business.

Taxonomies are used chiefly to tag documents for categorisation and retrieval. But it's worth a moment to remember what they are: they've the fundamental description of the business in terms of the concepts and elements of which it comprises: customers, markets, products, services, the organisation, its processes, and so on. If they have naturalness as well as utility, and are well-known to people in the organisation and reflect how they think about the business; and are applied not only in document tagging but also in other language and comms in the business then the whole organisation will have more consistency and intelligibility.

Negative brainstorm: How could we kill off KM?

[Thu 28 May 2020] I was introduced to the -ve brainstorm many years ago by Victor Newman (Thanks, Victor). It was a fun and illuminating experience*

What you do: You select a -ve idea - one you don't want to achieve - and brainstorm how you might do it. Have a go with "How could we kill off KM?" You can do it as a reply - or reply with just your single best idea.

Why it works: Our education has honed us to be good at picking holes, finding fault and generally sniffing out the weaknesses in things - not building on and improving ideas. Sad, but true. -ve brainstorming works more with the grain (natural or learned) of our minds. What it does for you is quickly identify the factors you need to counter in order to resist the negative outcome.

*We did something like "How could we prevent knowledge sharing?" with a group of about 40-50 managers at Henley. We were very productive and generated lots of ideas. Then suddenly we all laughed at once - - those ideas described exactly the situations we were all dealing with!

Remember knowledge is but one component of capability

[Wed 27 May 2020] If the knowledge is the organisational learning and experience, IP, methods and insights; then there are also the skills and experiences of the individuals; and the tools, facilities and processes of the organisation; all, together, form the capability household.

Innovation – "new to us" is as good as brand new

[Tues 26 May 2020] We may as well recognise the fact that the world we live in prizes "brand new" innovations and inventions above the adoption and repetition in a new place of an idea that's already been successful in another. The really "brand new" sometime has the chance of being legally protected as IP so that the innovator/inventor can derive exclusive benefits from it. But in KM we're a little different as we prize repetition of a good idea over and over, because it's by sharing and applying the best knowledge as many times and as many places as we can that we achieve the most savings and the next advances. I'm speaking, of course, about ideas that aren't someone else's protected IP. As knowledge managers we should stick up for "new to us" adoption of ideas from elsewhere and make sure it's encouraged at least as much as "brand new" innovation.

Best practice: is the model or the data driving organisational learning?

[Fri 22 May 2020] At the start, organisational learning can't help but be based on experience. It's "data-driven" (the data being the actual experience of doing the work - the actual observations of which approach seems to be best). At the start there's no model. But once ideas start to get fixed, once we feel we've learned enough, a model may become formalised and this may give you the 'best practice'. But it's important to keep learning from the data, from the experience, to improve the model. In this way organisational learning and performance rotate between data/experience-driven and model/best practice-driven modes. The model, the science, is never the final, ultimate knowledge. It's provisional. The 'best practice' is the understanding that best describes the data, the experience, that we have at any time.

Ideation is not innovation

[Thurs 21 May 2020] I mean it's not the whole of innovation. Innovation is turning ideas (technology, insight, endeavour, imagination .. so on) into value. Ideas into value. Or 'knowledge into value'. Just having the ideas, the 'ideation' bit, isn't enough. I have enough first-hand experience with innovation programmes to know the ideation bit usually gets disproportionately more attention than the rest of the process. I can see why - it's instant, it's leading-edge, it's at the point that the thing is all optimism and possibility. It's not the hard slog of developing, testing and introducing the new idea and sticking with it until it starts to pay off. But that's the path of innovation.

With all the talk of 'learning the lessons' of Covid-19, what are the lessons and what is the learning?

[Wed 20th May 2020] Just to say this:

The 'lessons' are the intellectual part - the analysis, the decisions, the insight, the retrospective.

The 'learning' is the change you make as a result - the actualisation of the lessons.

Without the learning, there is no lesson learnt.

Without learning ... is to fall into the "knowing - doing gap".

Define knowledge twice - once to satisfy your intellect, and once more for pragmatic reasons

[Tues 19th May 2020] KM is a magnet for the intellectually curious. That's wonderful ... and also we have to move on from that to practicalities, since this is a very practical, not theoretical, area of work. Some love to discuss what knowledge is - even though 3,000 years of philosophy hasn't yet concluded this matter. My favourite "definition" of knowledge is something like "insight (or familiarity) gained through experience". I'm happy to discuss that but I need a different 'definition' as well, one more fit for practical action. So for your second definition chose one that speaks about what knowledge it is that you're focused on - know how, company products and services ... so on. Have both kinds of definitions - each has its right occasion.

The lock-down has a negative effect on tacit knowledge transfer

[Mon 18 May 2020] Ah! Tacit knowledge! So often dangled enticingly as a key insight of KM, so little usually said about it! We say that knowledge transfers between people tacitly when one person acquires knowledge from another with nothing being said - no theory, no explanation, no discussion. One key mechanism for this is observation. Just by observing how a person works another person can intuit, extrapolate or analyse for themselves what the knowledge and skill is. We mostly get this from actually being together during the work process. In lock-down, and in increased remote working afterwards, this will be compromised. We need to consider how we can hold problem-solving and review sessions together with remote collaborative technology in order to recover the opportunity for tacit knowledge transfer.

Why ‘not’ hierarchy any more …

[Fri 15 May 2020] At one time it may have been thought that all the important knowledge was held by the few who had the best understanding and so made all the decisions. They had more information, intelligence and better networks than the general person. They were at the top of the tree directing everyone else whose job it was just to execute their orders. The intensity, complexity, diversity and spread of all the knowledge needed to operate a large organisation in the knowledge economy inverts the traditional pyramid: There's far more knowledge about how to operate at the traditional 'base' and middle of the pyramid, and those at 'the top' probably know little about how the work is actually done. There are other good reasons for having decision-making processes and structures, but they don't include the old-hat idea that all the insight, intelligence and knowledge is 'at the top'.

Share your knowledge by showing your work and narrating your work

[Thurs 14th May 2020] Most people have heard KM's exhortation to 'share knowledge', but often they're not really sure how to do that beyond advertising what they could help with, helping when asked, taking an active role in events, filling in various registers and populating libraries. I'm inspired by the UX world's cry to "show rather than tell" and also by the working-out-loud (WOL) movement. There's certainly a place for well-curated knowledge artefacts, and also for polished presentations. What I like even more, however, is to see the WIP and to hear the path that led there, and especially the problems as well as the breakthroughs, and also the current dilemmas. You shouldn't have to produce separate 'reporting' and 'presentation' artefacts different to the actual work to do this. Make it OK for people to expose what was and is difficult in their work, to expose their thinking through narration, and to then engage in discussion and collaboration with those with different experience and perspectives. During lockdown this can be done equally well with live or recorded video as in person. But keep it okay to share the rough-cut because the polished item loses the most interesting bits.

Too much IT responsibility in KM programmes risks there being no KM at all

[Wed 13th May 2020] If KM teams own too much responsibility for IT architecture and apps (procurement, development, deployment, maintenance and support) then the focus on that work risks there being no bandwidth left to focus on knowledge itself and knowledge processes themselves.

I've written before and in some depth about the relationship between KM and IT. Because, as a knowledge manager, you advocate for users and the mission of the business, then you have to be prepared and able to 'go deep' into IT to make sure the provision is as needed. But ideally you're an owner of a requirement and advocate for that rather than someone whose whole bandwidth is consumed with the intricacies of IT. You'll never have time left to help the knowledge itself along if it is.

As knowledge managers we do two kinds of work ... have we got the balance right?

[Tues 12th May 2020] We do two main kinds of work in KM. First, and in real life this is the overwhelming majority of all KM effort, investment and focus, we do things to assist the flow, sharing and reuse of knowledge. Second, we work hands-on with knowledge itself.

So in the first category is everything to do with putting in and running solutions, services and interventions for knowledge. That's all the IT systems for content and collaboration, but also all the setting up of communities and culture change interventions as well. This area of work is about helping others to create, share and use their knowledge. In my experience of real-life KM this occupies by far the greater part of all KM in practice. It's "the pipeline" or "the plumbing" for knowledge.

But I'm waving a flag here for the second area, that usually gets far less focus and that is working with the knowledge itself: going out and gathering some lessons, taking them back into the organisation and making sure the lessons are learned by embedding them in systems and processes; working with subject matter experts to develop knowledge models and products that represent the actual knowledge content; taking a new idea from ideation through to benefits realisation. Considering that you, the knowledge manager, may be the person who best knows how to do this work, can you really afford to focus solely on the first area and leave this second area entirely to others?

Have we got the balance right?

KM and L&D work well together when they understand their complementarity

[Mon 11th May 2020] I often say KM is about Learning, Innovation, Sharing Knowledge and Applying Best Practice (LISA) ... and the one I'd save from the storm is Learning. Doesn't that tread a bit on the toes of L&D? You might think so, but over the years I've worked very effectively with L&D departments. The trick is to understand who does what. Based on the L&D and KM operations I've known (your experience may be different), the pattern is usually like this:

L&D: Rather more focused on providing programmatic, formal learning - whether that be company-internal programmes or pathways to access externally provided training that develop the individual. That's the '10' in the famous 70:20:10 model. Needs to get best value from training budget investment. Protects the organisation by providing common compliance programmes for all staff ("mandatory training"). Concern with training records keeping. IT: Learning management system.

KM: Rather more focused on learning from others in communities and learning from experience - the '20' and the '70' in the famous 70:20:10 model. Developing capability - a property of the organisation. IT: content management and collaboration.

Often there's a crossover, such as when what we learn from our experience and digest in our communities can then be codified and delivered as programmatic training. But when this is done in a KM context the content remains live and subject to further refinement by the community that stewards it, based on further experience of usage.

Returning to the office? ... whatever happened to "the new normal"?

[Thurs 7th May 2020] The world is still in the grip of the Covid19 pandemic, yet all the talk now is about ending lock-down and 'returning to the office'? Experiences of the pandemic are very diverse. However, a significant proportion of people have discovered, with the rush to modern, digital tools such as MS Teams and Zoom, that they can collaborate remotely quite effectively, and this even has some benefits in terms of flexibility and commuting time and costs saved, for instance.

First it was the harvest and then the industrial revolution that led us to congregating in large numbers in a single site to perform work. This was vital because the materials and machines were there and they needed large numbers of people to work them. As large parts of the economy changed to a knowledge model we kept up the habit of congregating, creating ever-larger 'desk factories'.

30 years ago, and in my consulting life, it was important to go see the client or move in to their offices. Yet even then half of my work was with organisations in a handful of Continental European companies. We communicated via email and got together once a month for a day and once or twice a year for a week. Over the following years a great deal of my work was with European and US-based colleagues, following a similar pattern. This habit of business travel has had years to get ingrained.

But in more recent years, whilst we still congregate, our business is even more global, and many people sit at their desks, yet are engaged day-long in digitally-mediated chats and meetings with colleagues who could be anywhere in the world - not with the people sitting around them. Why do we still travel to 'the office' each day? It's argued that it's efficient and effective - and it could be, I'm sure - yet shouldn't we admit that it's largely social, cultural and, well, just orthodoxy and habit too? And more than a bit moralistic.

At least some people have discovered a new possibility during the lock-down. What can we keep from that? The flexibility and savings? What can we keep from the office? A more 'heads-up' social space to have richer in-person collaboration and socialisation of ideas and experience rather than a 'heads-down' desk factory? KM held the vision of re-shaping the world away from industrial economy models and towards knowledge economy ones. Will we make that change?

Or will we try to step back into the same river again?

Cultures have a way of reasserting themselves. It looks like the post-industrial office culture may well survive even the pandemic - but it's one casualty I wouldn't mourn if it didn't.

Making KM groups responsible for Information Management risks there being no KM at all.

[Wed 6th May 2020] We are a literate society, and so we do pass on knowledge in written documents and information products. There is also much to be learned from the study of work product documents that can generate knowledge and insight. Often in organisations Information Management (IM) has fallen to KM groups to perform, but the sheer volume of IM work risks pushing out other, really distinctive KM activities such as learning from experience, knowledge sharing and best practices. In KM we like IM because we also value retrieval, but we're far more concerned with information that is being applied rather than simply retained as records, and the information products we're interested in are more likely to be domain knowledge models derived from experience rather than all the instances of the many document types IM is concerned with retaining. Have an IM department so your KM department can do KM.

We talk about 'capturing' knowledge ... I prefer 'liberating' knowledge

[Tues 5th May 2020] It's not that I don't care for 'capture' ... I prefer 'liberate'. And it's not just that it's a nicer idea ... although it is that as well. Really, it's that 'liberate' is more about value creation than 'capture': In KM we care about both the stock and the flow of knowledge, and both have value ... yet it's the flow, the knowledge in use, that produces more value than sits in the stock. Still I also like capture in the sense of 'embody' or 'embed'.

I'm a consultant and knowledge manager. As ever, all views are solely my own and not those of my employer. My other posts

#thoughtoftheday #thoughtfortheday #knowledgemanagement #knowledgesharing #km #KMTOTD

This is the first series of #KMTOTD. The second series is here and the third series is here.