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This is the 23rd article in the?Profiles in Knowledge?series featuring thought leaders in knowledge management. Nancy Dixon is a leading consultant, writer, and speaker. She wrote one of the essential KM books,?Common Knowledge: How Companies Thrive by Sharing What They Know.

I have known Nancy for a long time, and have great respect for her expertise in conversational techniques and her skill as a facilitator. We have enjoyed spending time together at many KMWorld, APQC, Midwest KM Symposium, SIKM Leaders Community, and Columbia University events. We have both been?guest lecturers in Columbia’s IKNS program.

Profiles

1. LinkedIn

I work with organizations to create conversations where knowledge transfer/sharing happens, where knowledge is created, where innovation arises. I believe trust is the bridge on which knowledge travels between people so I focus on ways to create trust and a safe space for conversation, whether online or face-to-face.

I help groups in organizations have more productive conversations to address on-going problems or to more effectively share their knowledge, whether those conversations are in a team meeting, a conference setting or the retrospect of a project. The key is not a better meeting agenda, it is in creating an environment where members feel safe to offer ideas or lay out concerns. I design gatherings where trust is prevalent.

I work with managers who want to open up the conversation in their unit and who are ready to involve their employees in problem solving. If you are planning a meeting in which you want the organization dialogue to provide new answers, then you need more than a facilitator. You need a conversation Architect, that is, someone who can strategically design the format, space, time, and environment to achieve the results you want.

How to design the space
How to configure the size of groups
How to frame the issue so it is open for new ideas
How to build a culture of trust
How to harvest what is learned or created

My work takes me around the world and I love the travel. I have come to know China, Singapore, Hong Kong, England, the Netherlands, Sweden, and many parts of the African content.

2. Common Knowledge Associates

A lot of people talk about “knowledge sharing” but that’s only half the task. It doesn’t make any difference how much knowledge is shared, if nobody uses it! So I focus on knowledge transfer, which includes both ends of the exchange -?the knowledge originator and the receiver.?In order to design those processes, I’ve had to learn a lot about the science of learning, because both ends of the transfer require learning.

Originally, I got interested in learning because I had a young son who was dyslexic. I could tell he was a capable learner, but not the way the schools wanted him to learn. I had to figure out how to help him get the knowledge he needed using very different methods than the public school offered.?So I did graduate study in neurology, psychology, and learning theory. I had the opportunity to learn first-hand from some of the greats, Chris Argyris, David Bohm, Reg Revans, Don Schon, and Karl Weick. They helped me gain an in-depth knowledge of how, not just individuals, but groups and organizations learn.

Organizational Learning became my life’s work, first as a researcher and professor at the University of Texas, then later at the George Washington University and for the last fifteen years as a consultant using that knowledge to help organizations build effective knowledge transfer processes. And to this day how groups learn and transfer knowledge remains a totally fascinating subject for me!?

Focusing on knowledge transfer I get to wear a lot of different hats:

Frequently I’m asked to design a knowledge transfer strategy for an organization,?
Often I facilitate knowledge transfer meetings between two teams or between an expert and those that need that expertise,?
I’m asked to conduct knowledge assessments to find out what knowledge is the most critical for an organization to focus on.?
One of my favorite requests is when I’m asked to design retreats and conferences where the leaders want to take advantage of all the knowledge in the room, in order to address a difficult issue the organization is facing.

Examples:

At heart I’m a writer and have written eight books and over 80 articles about how to make transfer happen in organizations. I’m also a runner, a biker, a committed yoga practitioner, a mother of two and a grandmother of three. I have the great privilege of living in one of the most exciting cities in the US - Austin, Texas - the live music capital of the world!

3. Salzburg Global Seminar

Dr. Nancy Dixon is a former academic turned consultant. Before starting her own company in 2000, Common Knowledge Associates, she was a tenured professor and Department Chair of Administrative Sciences at the George Washington University, and before that a professor at the University of Texas. She has a passionate interest in creating conversations that exploit the collective knowledge of an organization in order to address difficult organizational issues and to spur innovation. Her research has focused on how to create psychologically safe environments for both large and small group conversations. In her consulting practice she facilitates small and large scale learning events that involve cross-boundary stakeholders who are facing complex issues. She helps organizations move beyond a series of presentations to engage people in active learning processes. She has worked with a wide range of corporate, government and non-profit organizations, including Huawai Technologies Ltd., Bose, ConocoPhillips, Ecopetrol, Netherlands Railroad, the US Army, the Defense Intelligence Agency, USAID, United Way World Wide, The World Bank Group and NASA.

Her facilitation skills and processes are able to bring together disparate groups and individuals so that they can find common ground and achieve breakthroughs in performance.?

4. KM4Dev

5. Lucidea’s Lens

6. Extended version of this article

Background

Education

Ph.D. North Texas State University, Denton, Texas
M.A. East Texas State University, Commerce, Texas
B.A. University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas

Experience

2000 to present Principal, Common Knowledge Associates
2012 to present Adjunct Professor, Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
1992-2000 Professor, Administrative Sciences Program, The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, The George Washington University, Washington, DC
1997-2000 Director Administrative Sciences Program, The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, The George Washington University, Washington, DC
1988-1992 Associate Professor, Human Resource Development School of Education, The George Washington University, Washington DC
1980-1988 Assistant Professor, Human Resource Development, College of Education, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas
1979-2009 Consultant to corporations, not-for-profit and government on organizational learning and knowledge management
1983-84 Internal Consultant, Tandem Computer Company, Cupertino, California

Posts

1. Twitter

2. LinkedIn

3.?SIKM Leaders Community

KM Solutions:?I think too many KM programs get set up without a clear understanding about what specific problem KM is supposed to solve. Starting with the problem is always the right step. That was my initial discovery that I wrote about in Common Knowledge - what kind of knowledge is involved: tacit, implicit, or explicit? Is the task it serves the same every time it is implemented, or is it?in a different context each time? This cube shows the possibilities.

4. Blog

The early thinking about how we should manage this knowledge asset, was to use technology, taking advantage of the growing capability of intranets. There was an effort to collect all the important knowledge that an organization possessed into one database. The analogy was of a warehouse or a library. People were to put knowledge in the warehouse and those that needed it could take the knowledge out and use it. And much like the contents of a real warehouse, knowledge was thought of as stable. That is, you could put knowledge in the warehouse today and get it out in six months or even two years later without any degradation of its value. In this first era of knowledge management, knowledge repositories were the strategy of choice and they contained best practices and lessons learned as well as technical documents.

Repositories were so ubiquitous that in many organizations the term “knowledge repository” was synonymous with “knowledge management.” And since IT necessarily built the repositories, KM was frequently placed under the IT department.

There was one further assumption, which was that employees would seek out the captured knowledge and use it. But of course, in many organizations people did not readily submit knowledge nor were they inclined to take it out of the warehouse. Managers determined they would have to incentivize employees to get them to use the knowledge. Lots of schemes were put in place, from offering frequent flyer points for input to requiring teams to go through the database for ideas before starting a new project – and checking a box in the project plan to prove they had looked the ideas over.

For the most part these databases, even with incentives in place, did not produce much improvement. Front line workers had little interest in putting things in or taking things out.

Ten Big Ideas of Knowledge Management

Connection before Content
Circles Connect
Knowledge is Both Created and Shared in Conversation
Asking Opens the Door to Knowledge
Small Groups as the Unit of Learning
Learn in Small Groups – Integrate Knowledge in Large Groups
We Learn When We Talk
Learning From Experience Requires Deliberate Reflection
Different Types of Knowledge Need to Be Shared in Different Ways
Knowledge Sharing is Sustained by Reciprocity

5.?AOK STAR Series Dialogue, June 2003: The Creation and Reuse of Project Knowledge

Articles

1. Combining Virtual and Face-to-Face Work

2. Speaking Truth to Power: Nurturing a Reflective Culture at the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency Reflections, Society for Organizational Learning, July 2011 (with Adrian Wolfberg)

3. CompanyCommand: A Professional Community That Works

4. Don’t Just Capture Knowledge—Put It to Work with Kate Pugh

5. Common Knowledge - How Companies Thrive by Sharing What They?Know

"The third myth… is that the exchange of knowledge happens only in organizations that have a noncompetitive or a collaborative culture.?It follows that the first thing you have to do is to fix the culture and then get people to share.?But I have found that it's the other way around.?If people begin sharing ideas about issues they see as really important, the sharing itself creates a learning culture… It is a kind of chicken-or-egg issue: Which comes first, the learning culture or the exchange of knowledge? Given many organizations' rather abysmal success rate at changing their culture, I would put my money on having the exchange impact the culture rather than waiting for the culture to change.”

6. The Oscillation Principle

7. Learning together and working apart: routines for organizational learning in virtual teams, The Learning Organization, April, 2017

8. Argyris & Revans on Holding Meaningful Conversations, Action Learning: Research & Practice the International Journal for Action Learning. Summer Issue 2014

9. Participant Skill or Skillful Design? Which Makes Conversation Effective, iKnow, May 2014, 4:1, pp. 14-18 - Blog

10. Harvesting Project Knowledge, ASK Magazine, NASA Spring (30) 2008

11. Developmental Stages of CoPs, Develop 2006

12. Functioning At The Edge Of Knowledge: A Study Of Learning Processes In New Product Development (with Marianne Doos, Lena Wilhelmson, and Thomas Backlund) Journal of Workplace Learning. (17) 8, 2005

13. The Powerful Question, Management First, Emerald Group Publishing. Jan 2004 - Blog - There is a Powerful Question you can ask that will turn almost any conversation you're having into a knowledge producing exchange. Surprisingly, this Powerful Question is not the one you ask at the start of a conversation. Rather, the Powerful Question is always asked in response to a conclusion or fact that a colleague provides.

14. The Changing Face of Knowledge, The Learning Organization. 6,5, 1999, 212-216

15. The Neglected Receiver of Knowledge Sharing, Ivey Business Journal, March/April 2002

16. Does Your Organization Have an Asking Problem, Knowledge Management Review, 7,2, 2004

Knowledge sharing begins with a request, not with a solution. No matter how much knowledge is presented at conferences, held in databases or emailed to colleagues, knowledge won’t be reused unless a team has a need, something they are struggling with.
Managers sometimes tell me that people in their organization have a problem with sharing knowledge; but more often than not, people aren’t “asking.” The organization has an asking problem, not a sharing problem. When people ask, the sharing problem becomes moot.
How organizations talk about “asking” is critical. When company officials say to professionals, “Don’t be afraid to ask for help,” their words actually work against asking. Asking for “help” denotes helplessness. No competent professional wants that image attached to his or her performance. What professionals do need is to be able to tap into organizational knowledge that is growing and changing – to tap into what others are learning from their ongoing experience. I have labeled this step “scanning,” which connotes an active seeking for something of value.