Knowledge Management Thought of the Day
KM Though of the Day is now KM Thought for the Day and continues here: https://kmsource.org/category/km-thought-for-the-day/
Whether a community lasts or not
[Tue 4 Jan 2022] From experience and from what I've seen, and comparing notes with others, I observe that, when it comes to running communities of practice, many people are willing to help, few willing to lead. My reflection is that this is because we have worked out that being a helper or supporter is negotiable, being the leader is not. Helpers or supporters can duck out for whatever reason. But if you're the leader, you have to be there. Every time.
So what I see is that communities very often depend critically on someone with the dedication to stand up as the leader. The person who ultimately takes on all the critical actions. These people are admired, but not envied. And many time, because of this, even an apparently thriving community can founder or even die (whether quickly or, more often, slowly) if that key individual departs or relinquishes the mantle.
This might be fine. It might be just fine that a community lasts for so long but then fades. But quite often I think it's really not fine and the community would have still been valuable had someone else taken up the leadership or had the community not depended so much on a single key figure.
So my thought today is either have a succession plan for community leadership, or find another way to do it that doesn't depend on that single key figure.
Mysterious experience
[Wed 22 Dec 2021] I was working with some colleagues to write a description for a new job role recruitment. I resisted the usual "n years of experience in x" and "excellent x skills" statements at first, but, in the end, they both made it in there! No issue with that. It's interesting, however, that someone who had made it through n years in a job would almost certainly have to have skills in x - so did we have to ask twice for the same thing? It made me think why we ask for some period of experience at all, and wouldn't we be happy with the skills whether or not the person had so much experience? How much experience did prodigies of art such as Picasso have or need?
When we're asking for experience we're asking for some unknown richness, depth and familiarity in a domain. We might also specify the kind of experience we want - not only in terms of roles and skills and subjects but perhaps also in terms of scale and scope as well: international experience, large-firm leadership, that sort of thing.
The benefits of experience are confidence, practical, post-theory learning, learning different contexts, learning to extemporise and to vary your strategy. The more and more varied the experience the more resilience there is in a skill. As I've got older I've realised that these benefits sound theoretical to the person early in their career - you can only appreciate and feel experience with, well, experience. Near the start of my career I learned all the models, methods, tools and techniques I could and was keen to apply them (I still believe they're under-applied, but that's a different Thought). The older, more experienced consultants I went out on assignments with would say "Yes, yes, Robert. Let's go and see what the client has to say first". And that's much closer to where I am now. I can see it now, couldn't then.
And experience is mysterious. Beyond "n years of x" it's hard to say what your experience actually is because it's compiled in your tacit knowledge - only to be provoked into consciousness when you recognise a matching scenario that demands it.
And child prodigies like Picasso? I have an inkling that art genii might make terrible employees (and another inkling that he'd actually painted thousands of times before his big debut anyway).
Ideal self and knowledge behaviours
[Tues 14 Dec 2021] There's a keen focus in KM on desirable knowledge behaviours such as collaboration, caring about content and so on. It leads to a lot of discussion about how to "get people to" do something that I feel takes us down the wrong track. It feels a bit manipulative - even if it's not meant that way (and I don't think it is) - nor do I think it very much works either.
On the other hand, I'm sure that one of the strong motivators for high-level and discretionary behaviours such as those we care about in KM is the drive to be true to one's image of the "ideal self", or at least to demonstrate to oneself that we are, indeed, that caring, helpful, diligent person we'd like to think we are. And I'm not cynically saying we're only faking it and deluding ourselves when we do this. I find it quite valid enough and okay that this is part of how we are. We want to demonstrate to ourselves that we are the people we think, and also, probably, show that to the world.
How can we use this? Well, being aware of it as a factor for one thing, rather than racing in other directions for answers (such as extrinsic rewards, which we don't believe work, either). Consumer products use branding to make an association that people can identify with. We buy the brand that validates the identity we aspire to, or believe we have. We might think about the influences we can take from that. We might think of the different kinds of participants in our KM system as different market segments that we need to appeal to in different ways. Operations with its focus on resource efficiency, Quality with an eye to checking every point, Sales valuing closing the deal and so on. It might be part of how we present and talk about KM solutions in each situation and for each audience. Sure as hell just always talking about it in "KM terms" isn't going to hit the mark, most times.
A day in the life of the Head of Knowledge
[Mon 13 Dec 2021] This is an old file that I've shared before but I've cut it down a bit for today. I think 'day in the life of' (DILO) is a great tool analysing work. It's used here both as an example of the technique and also as a container for some actual KM content. Beyond a job role description and so on, DILO also conveys some of the tacit knowledge about what it's really like to do a job.
I guess Blackberry gives the age away even without the date! Yes this was from 2014.
Storytelling bridges the gap in the benefits measurement chain
[Fri 10 Dec 2021] Measuring or validating the benefits of knowledge management is a topic that concerns KMers very much and that keeps getting brought up again and again. One aspect that concerns people is tracing the links in the chain from the KM services, solutions and interventions that have been implemented to business and real-world outcomes and impact. People worry about drawing an unbroken line from KM to outcomes in order to really validate that KM has a positive impact; and then they worry about attributing the right amount of 'credit' for the outcome to KM vs other factors and inputs. There could be a variety of answers to this. Under some circumstances you can approximate well enough the effect of KM in a logical and numerical way. But this thought today is about an alternative answer that applies in many other cases and that answer is "don't worry".
The reason not to worry about all this in some cases is that it's just too complex to trace and, even if you could, would likely consume all the savings made in so doing. And in this situation KM is not unlike many other interventions about which we worry a lot less. For instance, having the electric lights on. It's a cost to a business, but how often do we worry about how much light does us how much good? If you don't like that example, think of one you do. I do believe that knowledge sharing is pretty much of the same order of importance as factors we'd baulk at questioning such as having the lights on so we could do our work. So what's the alternative?
The alternative way to bridge the gap from intervention to outcome is storytelling, just as much as it is logic. We often rely on a logical explanation to fill the vacuum left when we have no quantitative data on this matter. And it is indeed logically sensible, as I said, that just as we need the lights on, we need knowledge sharing. But we can do better still if we can tell a real-world story about how some business or real-world outcome was achieved, and how all the elements came together, including KM, to enable that to happen. Stories can bridge the gap where it's just to complex to give a quantitative account of the benefits case for KM.
Meta-community
[Wed 8 Dec 2021] The 'meta-community' (or community of communities) is the community of practice for community of practice leads and others who care about ... communities of practice.
Mostly, communities of practice are started from a shared subject matter or practice interest - from a focus on the subject matter, not from the idea of community per se. I find that most people believe they automatically already know how to run a community - and I think this is 50% true. The trouble is, they think it's 100% true. It's 50% true because there's a naturalness to the idea of community that plays to many things we know from our normal life experience. Unfortunately, the other 50%, in which people are wrongly convinced of their competence, is usually filled by the wrong learned tropes: For example, the idea that a community is a monthly meeting featuring a guest speaker.
Usually, other ideas will be expressed and tried over time and here is where a new competence is being learned - how to run an effective community. For those who care enough a 'meta-community' can be a way to develop this new body of knowledge and practice to really make communities of practice a distinctive competence in the organisation and the multiply and supercharge their effectiveness.
Recipe cards
[Tue 7 Dec 2021] I like the idea of 'knowledge content artefacts' - specifically designed kinds of documents used to convey a specific type of knowledge. But it's a rather abstract concept and so I used to use the example of a recipe card - something most people will be relatively familiar with - to convey the idea.
So what is a recipe card designed to do and what does it have to do that? It's designed to give you the know how to be able to cook the dish. What does it give you to do that:
It's so well known and so universal that you might think it always had to be so, but, just think of all the other options that might have been used such as flowcharts, step-by-step pictures and so on.
Valuing the time saved
[Tue 30 Nov 2021] One of the things we want to be able to improve through KM is to save people time from searching needlessly for, or, worse, recreating work they ought to be able to easily find and reuse. If you can do that, then how should you value that time?
A sales director I worked with had already done some research when he came to me. He already had some figures for how much time was wasted in his sales team for want of easy access to sales collateral and sales guides. If we took that figure and multiplied it by the average fully-burdened time cost we could work out what was the cost of the waste, and what could be saved - which would be roughly half that, based on process improvement wisdom.
Well the project was, as ever, more involved than it may at first appear because it needed a whole business system behind that content to make sure it was provided and maintained, but it was very successful and all the required content was now served by a functioning solution. So we might say the value of the time saved was that figure we first calculated, lets say half a million dollars p.a.
But I think the true value was what that time cost could be turned into. So if we looked at how much revenue and profit the sales team could generate when time was used productively, and not wasted in looking for inputs they couldn't find, as before, then we could work out what the saved time could now be put to. And that turned out to be more like $25m in sales and $2.5m in profit.
I believe we always have to evaluate the benefit in terms of the context of the specific system being improved, and if we look at how time saved can be turned into value we can likely see the true prize more clearly than as just as simple saving.
Realisation
[Fri 26 Nov 2021] Realisation. Again. Yes, I know, but I think it can be the hardest part so always worth thinking about. Even if we've developed our KM services and solutions in collaboration with all parties, with all stakeholders, when it comes to 'go live' it's likely you still face the installation vs realisation situation.
On the one hand, the 'installation' part at least should go to plan by now if you've done all the work to get here right. The new process, the new policy, the training, the decommissioning of the old thing and so on. Here it is! Day one of the new innovation process, for instance. Everyone who needs to has agreed. Everything's been tested. What can go wrong?
What can go wrong is mostly not the mechanics, but the motive, and also the persistence of the past, because cultures and societies resist change and have a tendency to inertia. So here's a mini example of what I mean. Let's suppose that in your new innovation process there's a part where the legitimate owners of the current business processes (say, the function heads or their delegates) need to review the new ideas being proposed by the staff and decide the next action. The point here isn't whether you think this is a good solution - just hypothetically, let's say this is what has been implemented. What can happen is - they just don't do it. Or they do it in a perfunctory way. Maybe they just cut and paste a stock answer to every idea proposed: "Thank you for your idea, which we have reviewed with interest. Unfortunately ...". That sort of thing. The point here isn't to get hung up on the example - the point is that even the agreed, deployed solution likely needs further close, detailed work to snag it - and this will likely take some time and pain to work through. The change management part.
There are many things that we can and should take account of up-front. All the while that we're working on developing the solution with all the stakeholders is when we should be flushing out these issues. "Will you, Function Head, require, expect and enable your delegate to carry out this vital step in the new process? What could go wrong to prevent or frustrate that and how can we lower those barriers?" Of course, yes, we don't leave this to the end. But sometimes they're going to be brushed off at the early stage only to become more pressing much later on. There's a tendency to focus on the material thing in projects - drafting the comms, for instance, - at the expense of focusing on the true nature of the inner, motivational change that is entailed. Change management is still in the blind spot for many organisations and teams.
So what I can say is: [1] expect these problems and try to budget and plan time, activities and resources to deal with them; [2] always bring forward as much as you can the work to flush them out and deal with them in advance; [3] agree some pattern for the ongoing monitoring and course-correction of newly-installed initiatives so that these issues get called out and addressed; [4] always bring your focus and others' foci back to the intended outcomes every chance you get.
Point [5] is a tough one. Point [5] is don't start unless you mean to see it through. And a related point is trust your nose for the 'sponsor' who isn't going to see it through either. Just leave it.
I reflect that as a consultant, rather than a staffer, you don't often get to do the full realisation - and it's a key point of difference between my experiences as a KM consultant and KM function leader. The latter's much harder, but I prefer it. So many consultants want to do strategy or thought leadership. I promise you, real implementation and service leadership are far harder, but it's where the outcomes and impact are really to be found; and your strategies will be changed, and your thoughts will count for little.
Picture: Some would criticise an apparently linear waterfall model, but I think the misunderstanding is theirs because this is a logical structure, not the real-life path. That will be iterative and fractal and so on. But that will always be different each time and can't be usefully drawn. The arrows? Ah yes, you see just one direction - don't you know that the arrowhead pulls?
Let's (not) reinvent the wheel
[Thu 25 Nov 2021] The call "let's not reinvent the wheel" stands as one of the drivers and great hopes of KM. It's that whole idea of applying the already-established, most effective approaches to doing any kind of work rather than always starting each thing as if you were the first people on Earth ever to do it. The idea of reusing work that's already been done to give you a head start. The idea of having a "practice", in fact maybe even a "community of practice" where this kind of established knowledge is shared so that the members/community have an advantage over anyone starting from scratch - - an advantage that's then shared with the customers, consumers and users of the project, because they get it faster, better, cheaper, easier. As long as people are using that "let's not reinvent the wheel" phrase, then KM has a toe-hold to build on.
However. I love the paradox posed by innovation. Because sometimes yes, absolutely you have to "reinvent the wheel". Maybe even quite literally as in the case of China's hi-speed Maglev train which, yes, quite literally, swaps in magnetic levitation in place of wheels (although - and this is a point for a longer discussion! - that precise technology and application have been well-known for a very long time). And sometimes the 'established' can be quite blind-sided by the innovative - as in the way that upstart Tesla is now valued more highly than a whole bunch of the biggest-name, longest-established car manufacturers.
So it's at least worth thinking which mode are in we now? Is this a "let's not" or a "let's" day?
What have been the great successes of KM?
[Mon 22 Nov 2021] I heard this question asked recently and I had a think about it. Two thoughts came to mind instantly. First, it's an odd kind of question. I mean, imagine asking the same question but substituting in some other discipline, say, Human Resources? Suddenly it feels more odd. I take from that that there's probably a degree of scepticism in asking the question.
The second thought I had was that the answer is going to be diffuse because the boundaries of 'KM' are arguable. KM is a movement, not a defined practice. I mean, in contrast to say, the Finance function in an organisation, where the processes are well understood and known, KM is still at an early stage of development - which is what I always say, not joining with those who claim it's now very well established and mature.
So my answers may well be things that the instigators didn't identify as 'KM', although they might have. So number 1 is The Internet. It certainly came from the desire to connect people, researchers, to share ideas and speed up innovation. And number 2 is the World Wide Web which added an index to that to make it more widely usable. Sure, The Internet and the Web are now about a lot more than knowledge and collaboration, but they were there at the start and are still in there. I'm not sure we really need much more than those two to answer the critics, but there's more.
Allowing myself The Internet and the Web as KM achievements, one might ask why not claim the Gutenberg press, the monasteries, the guilds and so on as well? I guess the point is that the drive to share knowledge and ideas has been an abiding one over history. Then some things happened in economies, society and technology in the developed/western world from the mid-20th century that drove it to a more focused identity which we would recognise as the roots of KM today.
Beyond those two, then, but vitally connected with them, one might be forced to mention internet search, dominated by Google today, and Wikipedia and other social / content platforms that have demonstrated the more democratic, user-driven models. Which leads on to a shout-out for communities of practice as the novel organisational model that followed from matrix management and that KM has taken to its heart. But telecommuting, or 'virtual work' as it has become, was a grand vision that took a pandemic to really finally push into the mainstream.
I'd like to be able to say that some other things like learning organisation and intellectual capital / intangible assets are also amongst the great success stories of the KM movement, but I feel they're still a work in progress. In many of the 'outward' aspects, the nature of value in business has moved towards a more knowledge-based, intangible reality. But in its heart society is still influenced strongly by industrial era thinking - and we feel those forces daily trying to bend what we are creating back to their path.
Unknowns that make KM fundamentally difficult
[Fri 19 Nov 2021] Google's famous mission statement to "organise the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful" is a pretty hard thing to do -- although they're having great business success on the way, of course. Well, knowledge isn't quite the same as information, but swap the words in Google's mission and you'd have a reasonable starter for a discussion on what is the mission of KM. Something like "Organising so that the key knowledge anywhere inside the community is accessible and useful to all the community."
But there are some unknowns that make this fundamentally hard - perhaps even wicked. For one, whilst there are predictable, well-established needs, subjects and types of knowledge involved in any enterprise, there's also a heap of unexpected, unpredictable needs. The well-established ones should be served by a well-organised system. For the unpredictable ones, you can only create the platform and environment that has a broad capability to identify answers as best it can to whatever question comes up. Second, there's tacit. Well, on the one hand it's that vast reserve of tacit knowledge that's going to help address the unexpected needs when they arise - if you have the capability to identify and leverage it. But on the other hand the fact that the vast majority of everything we know is not explicit, and not even the minds it sits in consciously known what they know, well ... you have a problem of both unpredictable demand and unpredictable supply.
Hands-on with subject matter
[Wed 17 Nov 2021] I love working hands-on with the subject matter. Working with experts and practitioners to understand their knowledge, working with the knowledge content at the level of its actual meaning and usage. I guess it stems from where I started - with artificial intelligence and in particular with knowledge-based systems as we called them in the 80s and 90s. Yes I started with AI programming, but pretty soon found I was more engaged with the expert interviewing and knowledge acquisition: helping them understand their thinking and knowledge so that we could then model it.
I think in KM, in one sense, we can do two main kinds of work - although most KMers focus pretty much on just one of them. Those two kinds of work are (1) working with the 'process' of knowledge and (2) this one, working hands-on with the actual knowledge. I think it's in the nature of KM to be primarily concerned with implementing structures and processes for everyone to be able to learn, share and use organisational knowledge - without really getting much closer to the actual content of the knowledge than the 'meta-level' (tagging and so on, for example). But I still include that knowledge analysis aspect in my work - eliciting, shaping, modelling and then supporting the thinking. It's real fun!
What the ant sees
[Tue 16 Nov 2021] What the ant sees has implications for how we describe and discuss subject areas. As humans walking around, we might easily think the tiny ant lives in the grass with other little bugs. But that's not really true. The ant lives in a world of tall, dense forest, inhabited by huge, fierce predators.
The ant is the subject-matter expert, who knows very well that what any outsider might see as, say, "just communications", for example, but equally any subject area they don't really know about, is not a small, tidy corner of garden, but a jungle of complexity.
Several times I've been involved in creating capability models or skills models for organisations and the 'ant-scenario' always comes up. If you know a subject area or process well, then you can probably break it into many smaller parts and possibly to several levels. You know there are different schools of thought, different models, established and emerging ideas. You know the history, the players and so on. On the other hand, an area you know little about (maybe actually know far, far less than you think you know about) you might easily dismiss as being relatively simple. "That's comms.". So when you work with people to develop capability or skills models, quite commonly each discipline specifies its own area to a high degree, but also finds the detail in other areas (and in the collected set of inputs) too much. The same people as made their area into two dozen lines also want to see the overall model reduced and simplified.
We have to find a way of doing both, and we have to be able to learn the lesson - the very simple and obvious lesson - that this experience is teaching us. For humans who think ants are small we have to use the reduced, hi-level set of sub-categories that they can relate to - preferably because they already know and use them (and then we should usually use the terms that they use, not the more 'correct', 'expert' ones). We need to think about the user experience and the use case. If the need is for people to basically know there's a thing called 'brand' (they've heard of that before), that is intelligible, that they need to be able to find the guidance and expertise for; and that it's part of that thing called 'comms', i.e. that's where you go for help with this thing. Humans need that gateway - they can't just dive straight into the depths. And then, for the ant-specialists, at another level, we can introduce the many varieties and aspects of brand and branding: reputation, voice, visual identity, recall, employer brand ... so on.
We have to present, label and describe the subjects we know very deeply at different levels of abstraction for different audiences.
The (content) hoarder next door
[Fri 12 Nov 2021] As I often say, in KM we're not about document management, records management, information management, content management per se ... but we use them. Amongst the things I care about when it comes to content is that we focus on developing, maintaining and using really good knowledge artefacts. Part of that usage is findability and part of that focus is not being distracted by the vast morass of other content (we're all accustomed now to the mind-boggling figures for just how much content there is and how quickly it's growing).
But people are seldom keen to delete old content. They'd rather keep it as an 'archive' or perhaps in a folder labelled "old". They're worried about the risks - the potential damage - of deleting something they later wish they hadn't, far more than they are about the actual damage of always keeping everything. So they never put out the trash. Year after year they never put out the trash. They're content hoarders. Just consider that. Isn't it a bit clearer now what a problem for good KM that is?
Preparing to WOL
[Thu 11 Nov 2021] I'm very keen on the basic idea of 'Working out loud' (WOL) as opposed to spending a lot of time and effort (often soaked up by PowerPoint) preparing something separate and special, aside from the actual work you did, to talk about the work you did. I say I like the basic idea and equally as much I'm not advocating any particular methodology: I just like the idea of "show the work - narrate the work".
When I encourage people to take this approach - people who might otherwise spend hours of their time agonising over PowerPoint and what to say - I say, yes of course spend a few minutes thinking about what you'll say and assembling the work products to illustrate it, but don't do any more than that. What you say should be the story of what you did, and what you show should be the actual work-as-it-is/was-in-progress.
So, with a colleague we just launched a little project we did on a new intranet and I thought it might be mildly interesting to tell that story, and also it might serve as an example of WOL itself. Here's my experience of it.
It took about 15 mins to think through the story, recalling key moments as I did. And as I did that I made brief, hand-written bullet-point notes, not a script, on a couple of small pieces of paper. On a column by the side of those bullets I noted which work product I would show at each stage of the story:
[yes, you could do this neater but I'm WOLing]. Those notes (in the code that is my handwriting) are good enough to talk from. The work products I planned to show at each stage I opened, each one in a separate browser tab on my screen. In this case I recorded it as a 'no frills' 15-minute, one-take video. Usually WOL will be more productive with live participants but I have a particular plan here to use this more as an example of WOL than for anything else. So it's 15 mins of thinking, a few mins of prep, 15+ mins of recording and then the publishing and clearing up. It's a job you can do in an hour. ...the point being, less time and effort spent on the dull stuff, and more time, at least in a live session with participation of others, for getting more into discussion. Again, you don't need notes because you'll be talking about what you know very well from having been the person who actually did the work, faced the doubts, made the decisions. And those are the kinds of things that are more interesting to talk about than the more orthodox, polished story of "there was a huge problem, we came in with our skills, now it's all great". The actual WIP tells the truth about the trade-offs and set-backs which are far more enlightening.
A habit that you'll know if you have it
[Wed 10 Nov 2021] I'm talking about reflection. Quite often KMers are discussing how to 'measure' or assess their organisation's KM performance or status. This might be one simple test:
We talk a lot about learning from experience, and this can be quite an involved and structured process at an organisational level - but at least this process of 'lessons for all of us' could, as a consequence, be quite visible to assess. On the other hand we may never really know the extent to which individuals, quietly in their heads, in a 'lessons for me' sense, pause, reflect and resolve to improve their practice on a daily, weekly etc basis. But we ought to be able to see how consistently across the organisation teams do it in a 'lessons for us' sense, because each time they set a plan, do we see them, whoever and wherever they are, across the whole organisation, just do that quick check-in together to say: How did that go? What do we need to do about it?
Say, a team of a dozen people agrees to co-locate once a week with the idea that that will facilitate the informal networking and check-ins that easily get lost in a virtual/remote working mode. Come the day, half turn up. It's just an example of the scale of thing I mean. This is the scale of item that a team could very quickly check in on all together: How did that go? What do we need to do about it? You'd know how well the habit of reflection was embedded, at least at this meso level, if more than one member of that team thought it quite natural to initiate that quick check. And you know if nobody did, that we weren't there yet.
So, as a peripatetic KMer, look out for this, listen for this, ask people you meet if this happens. Then you'll know.
Squaring the 'just in time' / 'just in case' circle
[Tue 9 Nov 2021] Investing in building the knowledge capabilities and content in preparation, ahead of the need ('just in case'), or, spending time and effort to meet the knowledge need when it arises ('just in time'). Which is best, and is there another way?
Well, there are pros and cons to each one. Principally, the 'just in case' approach has to fight the hard battle for budget and resources and risks focusing on the things that turn out, in the end, not to be the need. The 'just in time' approach causes peak overloads on people to meet a sudden need, when they were probably already flat out, and may not in fact even be available.
There's one more element to this and it's an element that might point the way to how to transcend the paradox. Because of the 'in distress' mode of the 'just in time' situation, it's likely that what is produced is also dropped wherever and however it ends up, for want of time to leave it in a final state and final place most appropriate for future re-use. I have seen this so much. Because the boilerplate standard text for whatever doesn't exist (and you might argue for a 'just in case' effort to produce it as a result of this situation), there's a 'just in time' effort to make one when needed. But in fact this happens many times, and the original lack of the item is never fixed, but the work to re-create it is executed many times over by different teams.
So here's my squaring of the circle: Some things you can be sure you need and so produce them 'just in (certain) case' from budgeted resource, but keep a bit of that budgeted resource back as well. Other things that are less predictable should be made 'just in time'. Allow people a bit of slack for those unpredictable demands. And use that bit of 'just in case' effort that you kept back to collect whatever is made 'just in time' and finish the job of polishing it, integrating it, and putting it in the right state and place for the next team who might need something like it. Because the team that made it has already moved on, but we can still harvest the goods.
Strategic alignment
[Mon 8 Nov 2021] Often at this time of year, organisational functions are developing their plans for the coming year. And often these plans, whilst they may be very good and sensible and even innovative in terms of advancing the capability, risk becoming disconnected from, or misaligned with organisational strategy. So I'd say go back to the organisational strategy before you decide which direction to take your function in. The company's strategy should speak about business lines and markets - what new does it plan to do and for whom? What big bets is it placing and what are the key programmes. As knowledge managers, in fact as leaders of any function, we ought to be able to draw a line - an alignment - between strategy and what we are proposing to do. Our response should be in support of strategy. Not necessarily isomorphically with a specific set of responses to each new strategy (although that can be a way to drive it out), but, in toto, an aligned set of supporting developments.
Gauging knowledge maturity
[Fri 5 Nov 2021] A few years ago I implemented a simple system to gauge and compare the maturity levels of different knowledge based capabilities. I'd defined a set of about 220 professional capabilities that underpinned the organisation's ability to do its professional work, which were organised under (and developed with the leaders of) about 20 communities. With those numbers, how could I meaningfully keep tabs on how well each was developed and was performing, and also give them clear guidance as to how to take their areas forward? I borrowed from various maturity, competency and capability models and developed a model something like the following which was agreed with all community heads (who were the capability owners):
I'm sure we'd do better if we had another go at it today, but the approach still has some nice features that recommend it, I think:
This isn't the whole story of evaluating capability levels and performance, of course, but I still find it a useful approach.
KM evaluation questions
[Wed 3 Nov 2021] Some questions you can use to evaluate how well you're doing at KM / where you're at with KM. You could just ask yourself, have a focus group, have a staff survey, or develop metrics to measure factors like these.
Who's in the KM Team? Content Engineer
[Tue 2 Nov 2021] Your KM team might benefit from someone focused on?the system of content?who I'm going to call "Content Engineer" (CE). Organisations have got used to using SEO (search engine optimisation) capability for their websites but they're generally less used to investing in similar needs internally for managing an effective?system of content.
There are five main areas of activity involved in making an effective system of content which are the domain of the CE:
1. Underlying structure: Information works better for users and organisations if it's well structured and labelled. Browsing and search work better. And, more than that, when we label things?consistently?and?correctly?we?know what we're talking about?- and that's best for collaboration. The CE maintains and applies consistent termsets, catalogues, metadata tags, categories and keywords.
There's also the aspect of "what goes where" in logical and physical storage senses under this heading.
2. Surface presentation: Having the information within a sensible underlying structure enables a great deal of flexibility and creativity in how it is presented at the surface, and this is another area of work for the CE: developing information products, personalisations and aggregations, as well as developing information and content templates.
3. Process: The CE is the executor of the company's information processes: information management, yes, but also the provision of information-based services.
4. Search: The internal SEO of content so that it is easily discoverable and addresses and responds to the clues in how people are trying to find it are also aspects of the CE's work.
5. Content quality: Aspects such as developing templates for knowledge content artefacts and collections - what is complete, correct, up-to-date in terms of a collection or an artefact on a subject, that make it a quality offering to a user?
Invariably these are tasks that users will benefit from but probably not want to undertake themselves. Even if they do, they may never become as proficient as someone who is focused on developing these skills and delivering these services. The Internet and modern IT have ushered in a great wave of 'self-service' - but I think here is an area ripe to be rethought.
The empty head hypothesis
[Mon 1 Kno* 2021] I have to thank Steve Denning (the storytelling one) for that phrase. It's interesting, isn't it, how learning a term, a label, can make clear, more explicit, an idea you were already aware of but hadn't previously been able to conceptualise? The "empty head hypothesis" was one of those for me. In part it's just my disposition. When I hear a presentation I'm less persuaded by the logic, the other supporters, the story, and so on, and much more persuaded by my own ideas it makes me think of, by whether they make sense to me. It's a mysterious kind of tacit knowledge transfer: having ideas as a result of what you heard, but that were not actually present in the explicit content of what was said. So the "empty head hypothesis" is the situation of acting as though the other person has to have every little detail explained to them, because they have no ideas or experience of their own, and their 'empty head' has to be filled with what they need to know. Denning's point was not so much that this is a belief that anyone actively asserts, but that it's a hypothesis for explaining why so many people act as if it were the case. In contrast, Denning was saying, a story sparks all kinds of ideas and associations without them having to be spelled out. Lovers of radio drama joke that the pictures are better on radio than TV. It's the same idea - imagination, plus relating, I think. Of course, sometimes we do need all the detail - it's just that we don't always and especially when it's about conveying ideas.
It's one of the ideas that underlies the #KMTOTD - the idea that I don't have to explain my thoughts in great detail, because you can fill in the gaps, or have a better idea, yourself. For instance, there's a lot more I could say about, hmm, well, even the "who's who" solution I mentioned before. There are lots of design features I've learned. There's a lot I could say about maintaining the data. But I don't have to. You're not an empty head. For me the lesson of the empty head hypothesis is that we don't always have to say everything. Trust the tacit.
* Knowvember is with us again. It's a great fun way to promote KM awareness. I've found people like the flimsy excuse to tell them about KM again but in different ways.
Who's who - a KM solution
[Fri 29 Oct 2021] A "Who's who" list can be a good KM solution, for instance, for an intranet. In an unimproved situation (I mean before any deliberate effort towards KM) it's likely that (a) different people around the organisation will have their own lists that they made and refer to (you might find office managers with their computer screen festooned with Post-its for their various contacts); (b) mostly, you learn "who's who" by osmosis and over time - people who've been around the longest will know best - which means the common "find who" approach is to ask someone who's been there longer. Of course the problem is that (a) those 'local' lists get out of date and are very selective, and, (b) you don't want always to have to bother someone else - this kind of information should be more generally available and democratic.
Who's who isn't just for the 'important' people. You probably want to map at least one contact point for each subject that is also relevant for each user. By that I mean, if your organisation is globally dispersed, fine to have a Facilities (buildings/services) contact, but maybe you need one for each location as well? For all subjects, for all users - that's the coverage needed.
A central list that you can then "slice and dice" to show different cuts of the data (e.g. for different locations and so on) will also help maintainability - because keeping the list up-to-date is a key challenge, but also a key selling point to users if you can do it.
"Best practice" - a rose less sweet?
[Wed 27 Oct 2021] I respect that some of my esteemed KM colleagues baulk at the term "best practice(s)". There are various objections and various suggested alternatives. Chief amongst the objections is the claim to be 'best' - best for what? for whom? in which context? best when? in whose eyes? by which criteria? They're all good thoughts and they're the same ones, amongst others, that I too bear in mind whenever I hear or use the term. Because any kind of superlative is likely to be a short-lived claim. Usain Bolt - world's fastest man. Well, yes, over 100 metres and for a while, and out of those who were timed, yes. I don't think we understood anything different when he was labelled that, did we?
Some of the alternatives suggested for 'best practice(s)' I think suffer some of the very same, or similar problems, if you scrutinise them as closely: Valued practice, leading practice, proven practice, standards. But I sometimes avoid using the term just to avoid this discussion because it's pretty fruitless. We don't sit on a committee that decides what language is and what words mean - that is done by speakers themselves in a complex, social process. We have a similar issue with "knowledge management" where some prefer other terms such as "knowledge sharing" and so on. I mean, we could propose, but speakers will dispose and they've decided that it's called knowledge management and it's just a label, not a theorem that can be dissected and analysed so that some coded meaning is discovered. And in the same way they've decided it's "best practice(s)".
What I mean by the term is, within all those contextual parameters that we understand, what is the current, established, most effective approach - the one that most often has the best outcome. So 'best practice(s)' is clearly a "know how" matter, for me. It sits in a nicely paradoxical opposition to innovation: One calls on you to replicate and follow a pattern in order to have the highest chance of a good outcome, one calls on you to try a novel approach in the hope that it might render new learnings that could raise our performance to the next level, or solve a different problem better than the current method. I like that tension!
Why it matters is to shift the mean level of performance higher, which may also mean making the range of performance narrower - hopefully by raising the lowest levels rather than reining-in the highest. So, whatever we want to call it, lets focus on that - something in doing-world rather than something in thinking-world, instead.
The motive, means and opportunity of knowledge sharing
[Mon 25 Oct 2021] A lot of knowledge managers want to improve knowledge sharing. But what is that? I believe if we analyse it we'll better be able to diagnose it and fix it. One perspective is to consider the "motive, means and opportunity" aspects of knowledge sharing.
Usually people go straight to the "means" - the approaches, methods and tools. There appears to be a feel that if only we had the right tools or techniques then knowledge sharing would be unlocked. I don't believe this is usually going to turn out to be right and we will have to consider the other two factors (at least) as well. But certainly it's valid to question the means and to seek to be innovative rather than just relying on different various of meetings/discussions or documents as means for knowledge sharing. What about, for instance, swapping roles for a short time in order to experience the knowledge of the other person in their content, first hand? It's just one idea. The point isn't that one idea but to have ideas about how else we could do it.
I think a better place to start than means might be "motive" because that gets us closer to understanding the spirit of the knowledge sharing and real-life factors that might determine whether and how any means at all could work. Is there a shared goal, a shared way of working, a shared language? What are the different cultures or personalities of the different sides that are to share knowledge? Are there IP ownership or competitive aspects that could hamper collaboration? Things like that.
And thirdly we should consider "opportunity". As we know, knowledge sharing needs time and space - in particular it needs some slack time, which may set it at odds with more orthodox drives for efficiency in the now. We can consider enablers and barriers in the environment and how we can create the opportunity for the motive to share, and the means to share, to finally materialise.
How can we gauge the success of knowledge sharing?
[Fri 22 Oct 2021] Measuring the outcomes (benefits, success, value etc.) of knowledge management continues to be one of those topics that comes up again and again. Overall, I still feel it's a bit of a misdirection and the main focus should be to evaluate the actual outcomes that you're aiming for, and then look at the contribution, effectiveness and efficiency of KM, and how well the organisation is managing to learn, innovate, share and apply knowledge: It's turning it around and starting from the intended outcome rather than starting from KM as a problem to be measured. Well, makes sense to me, but it doesn't always satisfy people as an answer.
So how about if you break it down and look maybe at knowledge sharing as an aspect of what you want to see happening. How can we gauge the success of knowledge sharing?
It helps if we really know what question we're asking. It helps if we know what success means to us, and what we think knowledge sharing is. I think if we know the answers to those two questions we'll likely discover what it is we ought to be measuring, or evaluating and appreciating pretty easily.
So, two kinds of success to illustrate the idea of being clearer what we mean and how that exposes what it is that we maybe ought to be measuring:
Once you know what you mean by success, and success or who, then what you might need to measure or appreciate becomes a little clearer very quickly.
But what about knowledge sharing? What is this thing the success of which we're trying to evaluate? It certainly has those two different flavours of "just in time" and "just in case":
Another way of looking at these two is a focus on the flow vs the stock of knowledge - and how well we share, and how well that sharing serves stakeholder needs.
Questions are often more interesting than answers, I think. Unpacking and understanding what the question is that we're asking reveals pathways to answers in a way that simply leaping to answers right away does not.
Secondary job roles
[Wed 20 Oct 2021] In today's world of portfolio careers and networked, project-based organisations, it may not be enough to have one job title - because you likely don't just have one, unitary job role: You probably have a main, formal role, but several other roles you also fulfil. In my experience you seldom entirely shed the roles you've held but instead they become part of your very own 'long tail' of experience. The different project roles you held; the client account roles; the product owner roles; the task forces you were on, and so on. Well, that's the historical dimension, but, beyond that, there's probably a very current dimension in which, Lord knows why, you're the touch-point, key holder, committee secretary and so on for a range of peripheral things. And then, of course, there's your role as a subject-matter expert, which may be close to your formal job role, but also goes beyond what you strictly do yourself and is more about curating and building capability.
The point here is that, peripheral though they may seem versus your one, single formal job role, all of these other connections are vital links in the network that your colleagues could use to advantage to short-circuit their search for advice, guidance and help. So we ought to be pairing with our HR colleagues to make sure all of these other, secondary, roles and responsibilities are acknowledged, noted and accessible/findable by the people who might be scratching their heads wondering, "well, there must be someone in charge of this!"
And another angle is continuity. Without acknowledging all these other links batons are dropped when a person suddenly leaves. Sure, their main job role is likely to be considered. But all of these other, very useful functions a person was fulfilling may only be discovered later as things, greater or lesser, start to fail.
Hiring questions for better KM
[Tue 19 Oct 2021] No, this isn't about what to ask your prospective knowledge manager at their job interview. No. This is about what to ask everyone at their job interview so that you get the people who will make knowledge really work for your mission.
I have sometimes heard of employees in some organisations who don't really help knowledge to flow and grow and create value. I know. And yet, aside from a few really obvious unlikelies, everyone I've ever met at job interview was full of how diligent they were, and, if asked, recounted their dedication to learning and teamwork and their calling to the company mission. Hmm, with so much great motivation and ability, surely we have only to set them loose and something as easy as trying things out, learning from that, sharing what they've learned and following the current best practices; building their own skills and knowledge as well as company capability, IP and results - well, like I said, they only needed the chance.
Perhaps it really is right there - right where we hire people - that we could look harder to work out whether these people really are going to do what's needed; rather than hire them for some other role requirements alone, just hoping they'll cotton-on to KM later.
So what might we ask them and what might we be asking ourselves about them if we wanted to grab the candidates most likely to make the organisation a knowledge giant?
"How do you go about starting a different kind of project to one you've ever done before; in an industry or for a client you don't know, or facing a problem or solution you're unfamiliar with?" ... might tell us whether they have the habit to seek prior art and experience, look for experienced people to learn from and comparable work to reuse or follow as a guide or template. And, of course, there's room to shine with a more creative answer as well.
"What do you do to help someone who is in that situation, but where you do have that knowledge and prior experience that they lack?"
"How do you personally learn from experience? What do you do?"
"What do you do to learn from experience as a member of a team?"
"How do you make sure the whole organisation learns and improves its capability as a result of your and your teams' knowledge and experience?"
"How do you lead or contribute to building capability in your areas of expertise?"
Of course, sometimes the clue to the answer is in the question. No bad thing to use questions to let them know.
"Yeah, good answer. That's what we'll be expecting you to do if you work here one day. No mistake."
"Do you have any questions?"
Lunch and learn ideas
[Mon 18 Oct 2021] I was asked to give some ideas for running a 'lunch and learn' session. Now, I'm not advocating that people should be spending their breaks doing yet more work, but many do sit and chat or sit and read in their breaks as it is, and so the format of learning about something during your lunch break, whilst you eat, is a popular one. Here were some ideas I passed on...
Maybe you can set up the session as formal L&D event in whatever calendar or LMS (learning management system) you have; maybe you can have it formally communicated by the comms. function.
Keep it shorter than an hour – maybe 45 mins? - and record it for future reference and for people who weren't there. In this age of Teams and Zoom we have many easy options for recording sessions, esp virtual ones.
It’s always good to first of all think who is the audience and what do they want from it? I guess it’s the general audience and they’re interested to get a general understanding, because they probably don’t know the project nor your kind of work, and they also want something that adds to their knowledge that they could use. So what’s a realistic scope that you could pass on?
?And second of all think whether there’s anything in particular that you want from it besides contributing to people's knowledge. You might want feedback, fresh perspectives, related opportunities.
?My overall suggestion is don’t over-prepare. Yes, note down what you expect to cover and what materials you will use and who will handle what, but I advocate “working out loud” – showing and narrating your actual work – over spending time to prepare something new for this event. So what I mean is that if you want to give project background, show the actual proposal and show the actual plan rather than producing more new slides. It’s less work, it’s more authentic and it provides a bit more familiarity with the materials you have. If you’ve done a lessons learned then refer directly to what you have decided from that. That sort of thing. Also don’t over-prepare because you’re talking about what you know, so you can react and answer the questions.
?So a nice idea you might use is to ask for questions at the start – collect them up rather than answer them individually, and try to answer them as you go (check at the end). Yes do have an agenda, and allow time for discussion as well as questions (ask your own open questions to spark discussion, e.g. “How do you think you could use any of the findings from this project in your own work?”), but be a bit flexible around the key points that you do want to make sure you cover. Sometimes it helps to someone ‘chair’ the session and manage the time, questions etc – the process - so that the other person or people can focus on delivering the content.
?And be realistic about what you can pass on. Give people just enough vital context and an overview but then maybe focus on one or two things they can really benefit from rather than everything. Remember drama – conflicts and difficulties faced are often more engaging than brilliant success.
?Last I’d say don’t aim to explain everything but do let people know what new knowledge and reusable work you do have from this project and how they can get it and use it – signposting the landmarks rather than the full guided tour. People are very interested in templates and approaches they can reuse as well as the details and outcomes of your specific project.
Lean machine - sweep and shine?
[Thu 14 Oct 2021] The Lean approach, from Japanese manufacturing, suggests several standard approaches to improving the flow of processes, one of which is "5s". Now, there are different versions of the 5s but they generally all include some of the following sorts of ideas which are all to do with orderliness and tidiness, for instance: "sweep, shine, sort, set in place ... etc." But the constitution of the 5s is not my question today. No, my question today is: Just how shiny and well-sorted do our KM solutions need to be?
It's easy to get carried away with being clean and tidy, setting an ever-higher benchmark. And maybe in the long run that is desirable. But in finite time I'd suggest to be more oriented towards what works for run-time execution rather than ship-shape readiness. Sometimes it makes sense to sort things (content, for instance) very precisely because lots of people are searching precisely for particular things every day. In that case, it could be that the cost of labelling and sorting every item is lower than the sum of the individual costs of leaving people to find what they need from a general dump. But many times, with knowledge, the needs and uses of knowledge are custom-shaped and arrive at unpredictable frequencies; In that case it probably makes sense to more roughly sort and tag items so that the cost and effort to find useful things is reduced, but not reduced to zero since the 'last mile' cost borne by each person's search isn't so great, whereas the anticipatory cost of investing in being prepared for all these varied needs - if you could do that at all in any case - would be too high vs the demand.
We're not archivists, great though they be, after all.
Answers to 'Tell me about your knowledge system'
[Wed 13 Oct 2021] A reflection today about the kinds of responses I've often (I mean almost always) heard from people, including KMers, in different organisations, when I ask them, out of curiosity and a desire to learn something new, as well as to calibrate my own?ideas, "tell me about your knowledge system".
You guessed it already. They start talking about IT systems and information management. "We have an intranet...", "You can find anything you search for...", "You just press a button and ..", "All of our knowledge is classified and tagged ...". Not too long ago I was told "Not all of our knowledge is in our knowledge system, you know!". So where is it then?
Where is it, "our knowledge", then, if not in our knowledge system? True, it may not be "in" the KM system, but surely it's in the knowledge system? And there is the central ambiguity in my question. It's not an ambiguity about IT vs every other kind of KM intervention, but an ambiguity about the knowledge system and the knowledge management system.
On the one hand the knowledge system is the natural system of knowledge - learning, innovating, sharing, applying and so on - in your context; and my question "tell me about your knowledge system" is asking about its particular features and condition: how do these process work at your place? But on the other hand the knowledge management system is the complete suite of interventions you've put in place as a KMer to improve the knowledge system - and it's far, far, from just being IT and information.
I think as KMers we need to be curious about the state of the knowledge system we tend, so that we can come forward with the best-fitting knowledge management system for the situation.
Company facts and figures
[Tue 12 Oct 2021] There are various good reasons, or 'use cases', for keeping track of the key facts and figures that accurately describe your organisation. The kinds of facts and figures I mean include things like: When was the company formed? Where are your locations? How many people do you have? Which industry accreditations or certifications do you hold and which industry bodies do you belong to? What are the bios of your key people? Who are your key clients? What are your financial figures? And then there is a group of reference information commonly needed such as the company banking details and so on.
As you can quickly see, each one of these topics spawns a whole host of supplementary questions of its own. For example, there is a lot more to know about the people in your organisations besides their total number, even remaining well inside shareable non-private data: Their key skills and accreditations, the breakdown of the number. So on.
To start with it's like doing a "Knowledge of the business" analysis of your own organisation, and then it quickly becomes more a case of collecting and curating the data used to address the main use cases, e.g. responding to tendering questions, where your prospective customer wants to know more about you in order to compare you to others and decide who to deal with; and informing prospective new employees. But, as with all knowledge, the information has a range of other, and possibly unexpected uses as well.
Doing this is going to mean setting up a mini-KM system of its own; so how do you do it? Most likely, if you don't already have something like this information in one place, you're going to find that some people have previously had to collate it in a 'just in time' sense in order to respond to a particular one-time need - perhaps a competitive bid. It could be that their original list is being circulated with a few of their closest colleagues, and perhaps it's being updated ... but probably not. It's often like this with different subject matter knowledge and information resources. The risk with these situations is always that the item becomes ossified and reused long after it has ceased to still be current. The positive first step might be to first grab what has been created in a 'just in time' mode and make it a central and official source ready for all future uses, 'just in case'. Then put it under a learning from experience process whereby it is updated and maintained each time someone uses it and learns something new to add.
It makes sense to end-users to collate the disparate sources of company facts and figures under one umbrella, and so that is how we should do it, in a user-centric way, rather than distribute the information for them to have to treasure hunt. However, this does mean engaging the different 'fact owners', e.g. HR for people facts, Finance for, well, finance facts, and so on. It systems will allow them each to look after their own parts whilst still presenting the overall whole to users as one source.
Privileged ideas
[Fri 1 Oct 2021] To me, a system or process of innovation is a business system or process that converts ideas into value. It's not about the ideation - the having of an idea, but about the development and implementation of the idea to produce a service or outcome of benefit to stakeholders. I'd say an organisation had such a system to the extent that it was open to ideas from all and invited participation from all. Some do have such a system, some have something that looks a bit like it (but really isn't), and I think I'd guess from experience that still, even now, most have no such thing at all in reality.
What does happen quite commonly in organisations, I'd suggest, is that those with the power to make resource allocation decisions, the most senior management, privilege their own ideas over others'. So this means that the chief executive, for instance, because she can make decisions about priorities, actions and resources (e.g. budget and labour) allocation, can easily launch a programme to develop an idea of theirs, and they commonly do. Yet at the same time the majority of employees' ideas cannot be given a hearing. If we're looking for diversity and inclusion in innovation we ought to recognise that employees who fill all the many different roles across the business must, surely, have many more and many more different kinds of ideas about how to improve matters; and we ought to look for a way to allow them to participate on an even footing with those who are privileged by position and authority. Otherwise we're probably missing the greater part of innovation potential.
?This is the fifth set of #KMTOTD. The fourth set is here. The third set is here. The second set is?here. The first set is?here.
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