| 11/05/08 | | The difference between knowledge and information |
"Not that old chestnut" I hear you cry.
We have written a whitepaper on this subject and blogged on it a few times. It keeps the KM list serves across the planet pre-occupied for a few months each year.
I recently had coffee with a client to get an update on the implementation of the knowledge strategy we did for them a while back. The client described good progress in many areas but highlighted one of the things holding them back was the continuing confusion/uncertainty about the difference between information management and knowledge management. This was despite an extensive education campaign to get a consistent 'language' in place across the organisation on order to minimise the roadblocks to implementation.
This reinforced to me that we should just stop 'pushing the proverbial up a hill' on this one. My suggestion to the client was to stop talking about knowledge management. It is much easier to grasp concepts like 'better information management' on the one hand, and 'improved collaboration and learning' on the other. This conception makes it much clearer that there is a big 'people' and 'process/practice' component to the task.
Knowledge strategy = Information Management + [Collaboration and Learning]
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| 13/04/08 | | 2020 Summit |
Andrew Leigh went to the 2020 summit warm up yesterday in Canberra. It was the ACT 2020 summit and the lesson he will be taking to the big event on the 19-20th this month is, "... any idea with less than 90% support on Day 1 is going to get killed." I can just imagine it, 300 people clamouring for their big ideas to be heard by 299 others and only 16 ideas making it to the end of the day. This is idea decimation in the original Roman sense of the word.
How did the successful ideas emerge? Were these successful ideas merely part of the community zeitgeist and would have survived regardless of what the participants did? How many were presented as a list of facts, a presentation of the evidence? I would be willing to bet many of the successful ideas were presented as a story illustrating the idea in a way that helped it stick in the minds of the participants. Once the idea took hold, it grew.
I worry about the upcoming 2020 summit. I want it to be a tremendous success but I can see 10 groups of 100 egos clashing and the largest voices smothering the quieter best and brightest. The success will depend on two factors: how the event is facilitated; and whether participants can tell stories to engage their fellow summiteers.
Facilitation, techniques and physical space
From what I can tell the summit organisers plan to run small group sessions and large plenary presentations. The warning bells should sound if we see rooms arrange in seminar seating styles, the favoured arrangement for one-way information transmission. I'm hopeful that the organisers know about techniques like open space, world cafe, or even something like jump-start storytelling to help the group be more collaborative. But maybe my hope is misplaced. These techniques foster real dialogue when in fact these two days will be a gladiatorial contest of whose ideas win. Physical space and technique are important but both are trumped by the skill and attitude of the facilitators. At one end of the spectrum is the facilitator who already has in their mind a picture of what good looks like and regardless of what's been said this person hears their version and heads the group in that direction. At the other end of the spectrum is the facilitator who is totally focussed on process and helps people be heard. I'm hoping the 2020 team of facilitators fits in this last category.
Storytelling
Each participant will have very little time to engage the group in their idea. Cognitive science show that if someone has a strong opinion on a topic and you provide an alternative opinion, it only serves to reinforce the person's original strong opinion. It's called a cognitive bias.1 However if we tell a negative story to grab attention then a positive story to illustrate what's possible, we have a much greater chance of changing someone's mind and engaging people.2,3 It's only after hearing the stories are people open to hearing the reasoning and evidence.
There are three reasons why these stories work:
- stories are memorable and can be retold. This is powerful if your story embodies your big idea and is the told and retold at the Summit.
- stories convey emotion and, regardless of what all the hard-headed rationalists would have you think, we make decisions based on the emotions we feel
- stories provide context and therefore are more meaningful than disembodied facts and figures. Of course some of the best stories are laden with facts and figures.
Summiteers need to find their negative and positive stories this week and resist the urge to start with facts followed by examples and flip their sequence starting with the stories followed by reasoning. The people who can will increase their chances to be heard and understood. And perhaps more importantly telling stories will help relationships form among this elite group and hopefully is followed by collaborations that will make a difference to Australia.
Kevin Rudd understands the value of story. We have seen it in his election campaign and on Sorry Day. And on reading some of the background papers for the Summit I found this warning:
"These background materials aim to tell an evidence-based story about how Australia is faring. They are not intended to be definitive or comprehensive, but were put together to stimulate discussion on the main challenges and opportunities facing the country and the choices to be made in addressing them. They do not representgovernment policy."
The summit organisers understand the power of stories. Now it's time for the participants to embrace this big idea.
Why not join one of our storytelling for leaders workshops.
1. D. Westen, The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation (New York: PublicAffairs, 2007).
2. S. Denning, The Secret Language of Leadership: How Leaders Inspire Action Through Narrative (San Francisco: John Wiley & Son, 2007).
3. H. Gardner, Changing Minds: The Art and Science of Changing Our Own and Other People's Minds (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2004).
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| 12/03/08 | | KM Australia is coming |
This year I will be speaking at KM Australia in two capacities: running a workshop on knowledge strategy, and speaking with Greg Marsh from BAE Systems about the community of practice work we are doing together.
The conference is held in sunny Melbourne (well, it was sunny yesterday), 21-23 July.
The workshop is called Involving your Organisation in Strategising Knowledge. Here is the description:
You can request a brochure for KM Australia here. It will be great to see you there.Most times we know what to do. We know about the lack of communication across our organisational silos, we know we are constantly reinventing the wheel, we know that it’s hard to find expertise when we need it, and it’s even harder to find relevant information that’s buried in the labyrinth of file system hierarchies. What’s surprising is that we even know how to improve these issues, yet nothing changes. Consequently, we view the development of a knowledge strategy as a change project to help the organisation set a clear direction for change and develop a resolve among employees to take action.
This workshop will teach you how to tap into emotions and demonstrate why you need to broaden involvement when strategising how knowledge will be created, shared and used. This is not about creating a pristine document, but rather marshalling the energy in people to make a difference. You will learn about the Three Journeys process, how to use stories to communicate with impact, and find out what’s really happening in your organisation.
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| 20/12/07 | | Strategy and the Fat Smoker |
I’ll remember Strategy and the Fat Smoker (SATFS) by David Maister for two things: helping me realise that creating a resolve in a group to take action is more important than merely creating insights into what should be done; and putting me on to the weight-loss analogy as a way of talking about facilitating change in a business context.
I’ve put both ideas into practice. First, I’ve recognised that our storytelling work is an important way to create resolve in a change initiative, such as developing a knowledge strategy. Second, we have incorporated the weight-loss analogy in our workshops and seminars to help people to think more deeply about what’s required for people to change.
I have to admit, when I received my copy of SATFS I was in two minds about the book. I admire David’s work and I’ve read most of his papers, listened to the podcasts and watched the online videos (is this a little too obsessive?). So when I heard that SATFS was a compilation of articles written from 2005, I thought, “Oh well, I guess it will be nice to have all the articles in one place.”
So I was pleasantly surprised by just how fresh the articles felt and how many good ideas I rediscovered. David creates an appealing flow of topics reinforcing the main theme of getting people to take action. This action-oriented approach makes tremendous sense because, as the business environment becomes even more complex and the issues we try to solve don’t have clear answers (even defining the problems will become more illusive), a good way to proceed is to take action and see what emerges. Then nurture the good and disrupt the bad.
There are two specific writing habits David employs that I really enjoy: first he gives the nitty-gritty details and even provides examples of what you might say in a given situation. For example, when talking about being a trusted advisor and helping clients find a professional service they need when you are not best placed to provide it, David suggests saying something like, “We are not your best choice for that new need. We can do it if you insist, but you may be better served to go to a specialist who can focus on providing the particular client benefit you seek.” And then take the next step to help your client find that needed specialist.
I also like the way David peppers each chapter with questions that prompt us to think differently about strategy. Here are a couple of examples:
“If so many people have offered such practical wisdom, and their work has been so well disseminated, publicized and understood, why do so many managers fail to actually apply all this practical wisdom?”“The essential questions of strategy are these: ‘Which of our habits are we really prepared to change, permanently and forever? Which lifestyle changes are we really prepared to make? What issues are we really ready to tackle?’”
Because each chapter was originally written as a standalone article, it’s easy to dip into the book at any point. I found myself reading from the beginning to about the middle of the book and then I jumped around following my current interests.
My only suggestion for improvement would be to add end notes so we can follow up references more easily.
David’s passion and field of focus is the professional service firm but this book has a much wider appeal and relevance. Personally, I was able to immediately translate many of the ideas in what we are doing in the field of knowledge management and the application of business narrative techniques. Strategy and the Fat Smoker has the main characteristics that I look for in a book: a good read, new ideas, practical, thought provoking, and most importantly, helping to create new conversations. I thoroughly recommend you to pick up a copy.
| 6/12/07 | | Follow That Feather |
A strange recurring pattern involving pigeons seems to have emerged in my life recently.
A pigeon walked into my house the other day after I had left the back door open. It caused a bit of a ruckus when my dog realised what was going on and started chasing it all around the house, bouncing off the furniture and trying to climb the walls to catch it. Relating this incident to a friend a few days later triggered childhood memories of Dastardly and Muttley in Their Flying Machines. Anyway, I digress.
Yesterday morning while having coffee with a colleague, we talked about the often inappropriate use of the 'target' metaphor so often used in business, and ended up having an interesting discussion about how pigeons find their way home. I'm no expert on pigeons, so intrigued, I decided to do a little research. Here's what I found:
When reared in a particular loft, a young pigeon can be transported hundreds of miles away and successfully find its way home from the release site. Because it requires the pigeon to pinpoint a specific location, this behavior necessitates more than the compass orientation system of migratory birds. Instead, the pigeon must be able to determine its position relative to the location of the home loft in order to orient itself in the proper direction. In doing so, pigeons use a variety of external cues such as the sun, visual landmarks, olfactory cues, and the earth's magnetic field. Depending on the weather conditions, where the pigeon was raised, and the nature of the release site, pigeons use a combination of these cues to determine their flight path. [1]
After exploring this in more detail, it seems like this might be a useful alternative metaphor for exploring strategy and objective setting, particularly in the complex and rapidly changing environments in which organisations operate today where linear thinking is mostly inappropriate and ineffective.
1. from a copy of articles published by Cornell University: http://albertaclassic.com/suncomp.php
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| 21/11/07 | | Knowledge Strategy - an emphasis on action |
We have long advocated the importance of action over analysis in both our knowledge strategy and community of practice work and I blogged about the 'ready, aim, aim, aim' phenomenon in 2005. Maybe it is because I am conscious of this issue, but in the past few months I have noticed many voices emphasizing the 'do something' theme, starting at the AIM Annual Convention in Sydney in September.
Here are some of the comments/quotes I have heard recently on this theme. I have heard all of them before, they just seem to be more prevalent recently.
- "Ready...Fire...Aim" - attributed to Ross Perot
- "You only find oil if you drill wells" - unknown
- "You miss 100% of the shots you don't take" - Wayne Gretzsky
- "Plan a little, implement a lot" - Etienne Wenger
- "Do-think, not think-do" - unknown
- "You cannot think your way to success, you have to 'do' your way to success" - related by Tom Peters at the AIM Convention
Does anyone know of other similar quotes. More interestingly, have others noticed a trend toward action/experimentation over lengthy analysis in recent times?
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| 31/10/07 | | Knowledge sharing principles |
I'm currently helping a client develop their knowledge strategy. We've decided to include knowledge sharing principles. I believe principles should be clear, unambiguous and emphatic and everyone should know whether they are adhering to the principles or not. More importantly the organisation should decide together what should happen when the principles are transgressed. Are there any biggies I've missed? I probably should keep it to 7 or so.
- We will share what we know with our colleagues.
- We will take time to help our colleagues learn
- We will encourage open and rigorous dialogue, discuss and exploring assumptions, and speak our mind respectfully.
- We shall see if what we are about to embark on has been done before rather than create things from scratch.
- We will borrow ideas shamelessly (with attribution) and not suffer the ‘not invented here’ syndrome.
- We will take time to learn from our successes and failures.
- We will promote cooperation, trust and active participation in project teams, task forces and networks.
- We shall actively look outside our discipline in search of ideas, concepts and approaches that can be adapted and applied to meet our goals.
- We will recognise others for their intellectual effort and willingly share the kudos.
| 17/10/07 | | Factors affecting your knowledge environment |
One of the aims of a knowledge strategy is to design a set of activities to enhance an organisation’s knowledge environment. The knowledge environment includes all the factors, both within and outside an organisation, which might affect the creation, sharing and use of knowledge. The list of factors is potentially limitless but experience has shown that many of the important factors can be clumped together under 7 headings.
1. Support - what support does knowledge management have within the organisation? Do the executives believe it's valuable? Are resources set aside for knowledge management? Are roles established to support knowledge management initiatives? Is there a clear link between the business strategy and the knowledge strategy (better still, does the organisation have a knowledge focussed business strategy?)?
2. Technology - what technology is available to support the creation, sharing and use of knowledge? How well is this technology used? What technology should be introduced? Are the practices to use the technology well developed?
3. Organisation and people - How are people organised? What structures exists? What characterises the organisational culture? What types of people are employed? How much churn is there? Is knowledge management a recognised and desirable competency?
4. Routines, rituals and recognition - Are their processes and systems in place that regularly connect people, engage them in conversation and help share what people know? Is it normal to conduct after action reviews, peer assists and lesson learning sessions throughout the life of projects? Does the organisation celebrate good knowledge behaviours?
5. Information - Are information principles well known and followed? Is information well managed, findable, accessible and meaningful?
6. External - What drivers outside the organisation might affect how knowledge will be created, sourced, shared and used?
7. Spaces - How are people and workplaces arranged? Are there physical barriers to knowledge flow? Are their places to collaborate, think, focus and socialise?
Are there other questions you think should be asked?
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| 12/10/07 | | Space and tools impacts thinking |
We've been running a series of knowledge strategy projects for natural resource management regions across Australia. The activities culminate for each region in a two day workshop where participants design a set of projects and interventions to improve their knowledge environment.
To guide people through a process of designing their projects we divide up a sheet of butcher's paper (also called flip-chart paper) into steps for small teams to work on to help them plan their project. I've noticed that the way we divide up this paper and the tools we provide seems to have a big impact. This is not evidence nor proof, just an observation.
Here is an example of one way I've divided up the paper and what the small group of participants wrote.
Now here is another example where I provided a much larger space for brainstorming (a separate page) and suggested they use post-it notes to capture their brainstorming ideas. We also gave them finer tipped felt pens.
Their 'Organise' section spilled over into another sheet of butcher's paper plus there was yet another sheet dedicated to brainstorming. This change toward more detail seems to hold for all the groups in the workshop.
It seems people will fill the space you provide and as a result the second group engaged in a more rigourous and deliberate thinking. Mind you, it could have just been the people in the room.
Technorati Tags: facilitation
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| 29/09/07 | | Why have a knowledge strategy? Emotions count |
The Democratic party in the US has had a pretty rough trot in terms of the number of Democratic Presidents that managed to secure a second term. In recent history Roosevelt and Clinton are it. Professor Drew Westen puts this down to the Democrats being too smart for their own good. They have a tendency to provides the facts, dazzle the electorate with ideas and craft intellectual arguments to garner support. But one thing is missing. Engaging voters' emotions.
Here is a good example from the Bush Snr and Dukaikis campaign from one of the debates.
BERNARD SHAW (MODERATOR): Governor, if Kitty Dukakis were raped and murdered, would you favor an irrevocable death penalty for the killer?
DUKAKIS: No, I don't, Bernard. And I think you know that I've opposed the death penalty during all of my life. I don't see any evidence that it's a deterrent, and I think there are better and more effective ways to deal with violent crime.
And the audience thought, “What a heartless bastard. He didn't even mention how devastated he would be if his wife was raped and murdered.” Instead Dukakis gave the rational, intellectual response and according to Westen lost the debate at this point—in the first minute.
It turns out that 80+% of our decisions on who we vote for are based on our emotions not rational analysis.
You can fall into the same trap with your knowledge strategy. Your strategy report, which should be the result of extensive participation but often isn't, can easily be a rational account of what needs to be done having the emotional content of a wet tea towel.
Stories help. You can illustrate why your organisation needs to take action now and why a systematic approach to managing knowledge is important. You can use stories in at least two ways: including anecdotes throughout the report like this one:
“If we tried to find stuff on landholders beforehand you may have had to have made 15 phone calls, 14 emails, you know, try to track all that info down.”
And you can preface the report with a short history (3 paragraphs) on what brought the organisation to this point. This helps people understand why the strategy is being done and puts the activity in context. And if the story is strong people will recount it when explaining why the knowledge strategy is being done. Now there is some emotional content to what you are saying
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| 23/09/07 | | Chasing cool |
Who is prescient enough to be able to consistently predict the future? These researchers think they can.
Coolhunting: Chasing Down the Next Big Thing
via Tom Davenport
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| 21/09/07 | | What's in a knowledge environment? |
In 2002 I wrote a paper called Crafting a Knowledge Strategy. Its basic premise was that a knowledge strategy should be designed for emergence: it should both encourage and cope with unpredictable things happening.
Part of the framework included something I called the knowledge environment, a container of sorts that enabled knowledge to be created, shared, lost and used. Every organisation has a knowledge environment and the role of the knowledge strategy is to work with what's there while incrementally improving it.
So what should you (ideally people within the organisation with some guidance from people like me) examine in a knowledge environment in order to make improvements? Mnemonics helps you remember lists so this is what we came up with.
Space—physical space has a significant impact on how knowledge flows
Technology—what's there to support knowledge work?
Organisation and People—organisational structures, roles, HR processes, rewards and recognition
Routines and Rituals—important business processes, rituals people talk about
Information—can you find the good stuff?
External—external factors affecting knowledge, job markets, industry trends, competitors, clients
Support—is KM supported by the executive? what are the tangible support structures
What have we missed?
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| 23/08/07 | | A short history of Anecdote |
On the weekend I created this presentation about how we got started and I describe some of the projects we've done.
There are five parts. Here are the other links:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOAtwhgSTf8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYuwumeWn_E
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BweLmKlTbnI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hd7WVri5aCI
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| 2/08/07 | | Evolving storylines to create your first journey |
Rick Davies, the creator of the Most Significant Change techniques, has posted a description of a story-based technique he experimented with that's designed to help a group of people imagine a set of future possibilities or, as Rick puts it, when embarking on a project we need “... a theory of change, and a theory of change when spelled out in detail can be seen as a story.”
Rick's experiment was conducted with a group of secondary students but it's clear this participatory process could be used in organisations. I'm particularly interested in how it might be used in our First Journey process. Here's my rewriting of Rick's process based on how it might work with a group of ten senior managers in the first journey.
- Give the ten participants some small filing cards, and asked them each to write the beginning of a story on one card about how the project we are about the embark will unfold. When completed, these ten cards are then posted, as a column of cards, on the left side of a whiteboard. This provided some initial variation
- Then ask the same participants to read all ten cards on the board, and for each of them to identify the story beginning they most liked. This involved selection
- Ask the participants to each use a second card to write a continuation of the one story beginning they most liked. These story segments are then posted next to the one story beginning they most liked. As a result, some stories beginnings will gain multiple new segments, others none. This step involves retention of the selected story beginnings, and introduction of further variation.
- Then ask participants to look at all the stories again, now they had been extended. Ask them to write a third generation story segment, which they add to the emerging storyline they most liked so far. This process is re-iterated for four generations or longer.
Rick then analyses the results of his experiment and explores different ways people could use the technique.
For me this approach would be ideal to get people talking about the possibilities of a project. It could be then followed by a pre-mortem to provide a reality check.
Technorati Tags: rick davies
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| 17/07/07 | | Communicating intent in a complex work environment |
One of the most useful books I own is Gary Klein's “Intuition at Work: Why Developing Your Gut Instincts Will Make You Better at What You Do”. Gary takes the mystery out of intuition and explains it as tacit knowledge we develop through experience. What I really like about Gary's books are the practical techniques and so I thought I would share this one with you which is a process for communicating executive intent, or to put it more plainly, how to give directions without telling people how to suck eggs.
In this case Gary Klein is building on some advice Karl Weick's gave on giving directions:
- Here's what I think we face.
- Here's what I think we should do.
- Here's why.
- Here's what we should keep our eye on.
- Now talk to me.
Klein translated this script into the acronym, STICC: situation, task, intent, concerns, calibration.
Situation. (Here what I think we face) Start with providing the context for the task. What has happened that lead to this need? Grab their attention in the telling. Use all the ideas described by the brothers Heath best seller, Made to Stick. It's important that the person taking on the task understand its importance and how it fits in to the bigger picture.
Task. (Here's what I think we should do) Keep it short and to the point. You can elaborate later. When describing the task avoid describing how it should be done and keep focussed on what needs to be done. People hate to be told how to do their jobs.
Intent. (Here's why) Here is where you describe the purpose of the task. Why the task/project need to be done. If you have a picture of what the end point looks like this is the time to share that vision. In a complex and unpredictable environment the best you might be able to do it describe some of the characteristics of a successful completion.
Concerns (Here's what we should keep our eye on) Chances are you have had experiences in these types of projects and you know the sort of thing someone should keep an eye on. If you don't you might want to get someone in the meeting who does have that experience. Running a mini pre-mortem could be useful.
Calibration (Now talk to me) This is the essential step. Now make yourself available for questions and follow up discussions. As soon as someone on a task new questions will emerge and patterns will arise. This might lead to tremendous insights and accelerated accomplishment or lighting fast pursuit of a white rabbit down a long and dark hole. Being open to get together during the task helps you act as an effective guide while enabling the person doing the task to keep on track to deliver a quality result.
Technorati Tags: karl weick, gary klein
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| 8/07/07 | | Have the large consulting firms trained us to do knowledge strategies the wrong way? |
I just returned from a week's holiday at Mossy Point in NSW and as usual I had a pile of books I was going to read and somehow managed to read a completely different set. This usually happens because my host often has a more compelling choice of reading or there's a good second hand book store nearby (in this case Mogo has a fine example). I started with the following:
- “The Myths We Live By” (Mary Midgley)
- “Orality and Literacy (New Accents)” (Walter J. Ong)
- “A Cultural History of Causality: Science, Murder Novels, and Systems of Thought” (Stephen Kern)
And ended up reading,
- “Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't” (Jim Collins)
- “Catch-22” (Joseph Heller)
- “The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell” (Bertrand Russell)
Good to Great captured my imagination. While I'm always a little sceptical of the approach, “let's compare some companies that have done well and learn their secrets and let's learn how we can apply those secrets to your company and also do well”, there were many unknowns and questions posed by Collins and his team of researchers. One of the points in the book was the supremacy of planning over the plan. While not a new idea in itself it came on the heels of another simple and fairly well known idea: what you measure will affect behaviour so think carefully about what you should measure (Collins was referring to the need to understand your economic driver).
This got me thinking. Why do so many organisations develop their knowledge strategies with a burst of energy over a short period of time? This puzzles me because we know that planning is more important than the plan. Understanding emerges over time through conversations. You can't have a couple of workshops and run some interviews to develop a good grasp of what needs to be done, where the focus should be. Organisations require a process that engages people at different levels in conversations that matter about how knowledge can be best used.
So while chatting to Mark this afternoon I suggested the short, sharp approach (which will definitely create a strategy but can't be the best way to strategize) might be partly due to how large consulting firms need to work in order to stay profitable. The large firms work on a profit per consultant basis. Within the firm this is called utilisation. The best way for a consultant to maintain high utilisation is to be billable five days a week. A project that's divided and spread over a couple of months with a couple of days here and there is unsustainable for large firm. So over the years after an organisation receives proposal after proposal from the large firms the organisation begin to tacitly learn that strategies should be created intensely over short periods of time.
And guess what happens when you get together highly paid, smart professionals to deliver a strategy to a tight deadline? Most of the time it results in a hefty document detailing many factors and features to consider but often merely succeeds in bamboozling. Last week I was talking to a senior manager in a government agency and she said they'd just received their knowledge strategy and they feel it's too complex and they're not quite sure what to do. Imagine, on the other hand, a group of people within the organisation working together on their knowledge strategy and all agreeing that the essence of their strategy is captured in a simple sentence. Because they all have been part of the process this sentence means so much that action can be taken to make it a reality. Sure, you need the implementation plan and more importantly a process so actions that move the organisation toward their objectives bubble up from everyone.
One fact that stood out for me in Good to Great was that on average it took a 'great' company four years to define their essential strategy (their hedgehog concept). And the strategy evolved through vigourous debate, discussion and listening. It's this type of process I'm advocating, and now large organisations are turning to specialists in small companies, they can served without the constraints of the large firm's economic model.
I think our Three Journey Approach to knowledge strategy is a new way to orchestrate these essential conversations.
- The first journey is with the leadership team and the aim is to create a broad direction for everyone. Rather than having a single workshop and interviews we would facilitate four conversations (or more) around the nature of their business and the role knowledge plays. The result is a small set of objectives for the knowledge strategy.
- The second journey is where the rest of the staff get involved. Their job is to help work out how the objectives might be achieved in reality. We know, however, that asking people what they know is a futile exercise because we all need context to remember what we know. So we use anecdote circles and collect stories as a way to find out what's happening and what could be done.
- The third journey is a simple improvement process whereby the knowledge strategy continues to adapt to the changing circumstances.
Technorati Tags: knowledge strategy
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| 3/06/07 | | When to use open source techniques |
Nicholas Carr has written a thought provoking piece in Strategy+Business on the limitations of open source approaches. In a nutshell, open source approaches work best when people are refining something that's already been created and where the problem can be divided into chunks so lots of people can work on it at the same time (e.g. fixing bugs in Linux). Creating the idea in the first place is best done by an individual or small group.
Technorati Tags: open source
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| 29/05/07 | | Knowledge strategy - from the bottom up |
For a few months now I have been proposing a new way to do knowledge strategy that involves everyone in the organisation. There are three journeys involved and in the last journey you help establish a process (described here and illustrated above) that encourages lots of people to make incremental improvements towards a set of common objectives. We have mentioned here that organisations have similar objectives so you don't need to create these from scratch.
This post is here to pull these threads together.
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| 10/05/07 | | Redundancy in storytelling |
I found a new blog this morning and while it's a newie I'm hoping it will have some more good posts like this one about Walter Ong and the issue of redundancy in storytelling. The blog authors are Jim Stahl and Nemola Kalo.
I found this quote Jim posted from Walter Ong very interesting:
“Since redundancy characterizes oral thought and speech, it is in a profound sense more natural to thought and speech than is sparse linearity. Sparse linear or analytic thought and speech are artificial creations, structured by the technology of writing.... With writing, the mind is forced into a slowed-down pattern that affords it the opportunity to interfere with and recognize its more normal, redundant processes.”
A while back I wrote a piece about the difference between storytelling and story writing and while I didn't recognize the issue of redundancy there I was quite aware of the reduced speed and second guessing that was introduced when a story is written.
Perhaps more importantly, redundancy is an important feature in a complex environment where contexts are continuously changing. Mark and I are in the middle of a knowledge strategy assignment and we are conducting some interviews to help the organisation choose the knowledge objectives they would like to focus on for the next 12 months. During those interviews I have been telling the same story about how we propose the conduct the 3rd journey (the continuous improvement process). On the forth telling of the story I get this confused look on Mark's face. It turns out that up until that point I was not conveying what I meant so this disconnect triggered a good conversation and we got our story straight. There was something different in the forth context and telling that triggered something for Mark. Redundancy is important.
Technorati Tags: knowledge strategy
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| 9/05/07 | | Focussing your knowledge strategy |
We have noticed that knowledge strategies tend to have a recurring set of objectives. We listed an initial set of core objectives here and have developed a longer set over a series of conversations over the past few days. The list is shown below. Unfortunately a strategy cannot tackle everything without losing focus - the 'boiling the ocean' effect.
During the 1st journey of knowledge strategy development we encourage the leadership team to identify a 3 or 4 of the areas on the list below to focus on as part of the project. These then guide the 2nd journey and the first 12 months of the 3rd journey. The three journeys are described here.
Our list of generic knowledge strategy objectives includes:
- Attract and retain the best people
- Minimise the impact of people leaving – or better retain our knowledge
- Build better relationships
- Enhance collaboration
- Build skills and know-how
- Improve innovation
- Improve how we learn from mistakes and successes
- Improve ability to find relevant expertise
- Better deal with complex situations
- Improve ability to search for and find information
- Avoiding reinventing the wheel
- Finding and applying good practice
- Encouraging people to call for help
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| 25/04/07 | | Knowledge strategy - three journeys |
Strategies should result in a set of actions making the organisation more valuable to whoever it serves. I learned this from David Maister Knowledge strategies are no different. The objectives of the knowledge strategy activity are fourfold:
- develop a common understanding among leaders and staff of where and how they should enhance their capability to create, share and use knowledge
- understand where to focus efforts and when to say 'no' to suggested activities
- inspire people to take action and work differently
- work out the actions needed to make a difference and get acting
We've learned that top down strategies don't work. For one thing they typically rely on extrinsic motivations (rewards—do this and you'll get that) which I'm learning from Alfie Kohn is an intrinsic motivator killer (I've got to share some of the experiments Alfie talks about in a future post). So our approach to knowledge strategy is to first view the activity more as a verb than a noun. That is, it is better to strategize that the develop a strategy. The get things moving in an organisation we've developed what we call the three journeys approach.
The first journey is designed to help the organisation's leaders develop a common understanding of what they would like to achieve and defining this end-state in broad terms, while knowing that detailed plans are unlikely to be achieved (the world is too unpredictable for a simple, linear view). We encourage the leadership group to develop a rough mud map of the journey from the current situation to this desired end state while resisting the urge to fill in the details. The staff fill in the details as part of the second journey.
The second journey involves the rest of the organisation (or a representative subset) planning how they will get to the desired state. This involves understanding the current knowledge environment—who's connected to whom, where are the important knowledge assets, where are the blockers, what are the enablers—and developing the best possible map based on current information and resources available that can be made to guide the third journey.
The third journey is when the organisation actually embarks on implementing the ideas developed in the first two imaginary journeys. Most importantly in the third journey, the organisation implements an iterative process they designed in the second journey that embeds new knowledge-related behaviours and provides opportunities for new ideas to be injected in how things are done. For an example of what this might look like please refer to our recent blog post on the topic (http://www.anecdote.com.au/archives/2007/02/redressing_the.html).
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| 14/03/07 | | Thinking strategically about communities of practice |
I have just returned from the UK and from co-delivering a training program for new CoP coordinators in a global company. It was a great experience and I learned much about communities of practice. In the week before, I spent some time in Brisbane looking at some of the company’s CoP success stories. A number stood out, including this one:
In early 2005 a CoP was established around the data and process standards used to manage physical assets across a multi-site division. The company knew that a new module of SAP will be introduced in late 2008 and that achieving agreement on data and process standards was a key to successful implementation. In early 2007, the CoP members took on the challenge of establishing the standard and, using a wiki, they did it inside 6 weeks.
Aside from the importance of this achievement, what stood out for me was management’s insight in establishing the community long before it was needed to tackle this key business issue. Using hindsight its obvious that the group needed to work on their social capital before they could be ‘tasked’. Building a capability in this manner is a great example of thinking strategically about communities of practice.
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| 12/03/07 | | Future stories |
A simple way to help people develop stories of how their organisation might operate in the future is to ask them to consider specific triggering events then explain what happened. It’s important the triggering event is specific yet representative.
For example, a triggering event might be Ron Wilson suddenly resigning from the investments section to join a competitor. The group might decide to tell the story of what happened from the point of resignation or sometime before that.
Another approach is to find examples of how you would like your organisation to operate from within your organisation or in other similar organisations. As William Gibson says, “The future is already here. It's just not very evenly distributed.”
So why are we interested in future stories? They help an organisation paint a memorable vision of what they would like to achieve and rooting it in specific examples that everyone can understand, recollect and retell. The provide a strategic intent for the organisation without being prescriptive.
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| 27/02/07 | | Redressing the balance in developing knowledge strategies |
Strategies should result in a set of actions making the organisation more valuable to whoever it serves. Knowledge strategies are no different but most organisations develop a knowledge strategy in the following way:
- the company engages consultants to analyse their needs
- the leaders are asked, "what result would you like to see at the end of the project?" The consultants capture this information as the project's vision.
- the consultants interview staff, conduct focus groups and compile an inventory of important knowledge assets
- gaps are identified between what currently occurs and what needs to happen to achieve the vision
- a report is written and there's considerable debate over the structure, format and wording of this document
- the knowledge strategy and associated implementation plan is presented to the executive group for their approval
- everyone is exhausted but pleased with the document
- there is little energy left for the actions needed to make the required changes
Don't get me wrong, a process like this is what’s mostly needed to undertake an effective knowledge strategy. It suffers, however, from a problem of balance. The weight of effort is on developing the document—the strategy or plan. Little energy or process is left for people to take actions that will change how things are actually done. The further the organisation gets away from the initial strategy development exercise, the greater the apathy to implement the original plan. The ideal situation is one where the top down focus on defining what to do is balanced with a process that enables people to do things that will make the organisation more valuable to whoever it serves.
So what if we put less effort into the knowledge strategy design and more into implementing strategic actions?
There are three reasons why we should shift the balance from viewing the strategy as a thing to redressing the balance towards the process for implementing the strategy.
- businesses are less predictable and long-term, linear plans rarely achieve their stated goals
- embedding actions in the day-to-day activities of the organisation allows new ways to tackle problems to emerge
- the process moves the responsibility for making a difference to how knowledge is created, shared and used to everyone in the organisation rather than a typically under-resourced knowledge management unit
So how might this look? The best solution is one developed by people in the organisation, one that develops the process for embedding the strategic actions into the day-to-day activities. To give you an idea of what it might look like here are some ideas adapted from David Maister's suggested approach for conducting a strategy.
The initial knowledge strategy design should result in some objectives, which might include things like:
- improve knowledge sharing
- enhance innovation
- reduce impact of people leaving (knowledge retention)
- build skills and know-how
- improve everyone's ability to find relevant knowledge when they need it
- improve how we learn from experience
Ideally, there should only be two or three objectives. Six is too many.
The process starts by giving each group within the organisation one sheet of paper for each objective. Each sheet has four columns. The group lists, for each objective, the actions they are going to take over the next three months to help achieve the objectives. A senior member of staff works with the group acting as a friendly sceptic or mentor. This mentor's role is to ask question, helping the group to stretch their plans or to reign in over enthusiasm. At the end of the session, the mentor sets a date to meet with the group again in three months where they will review how they went, what they learned and establish a new set of actions for the following three months.
The four columns to fill in for each objective are:
- the action to be done
- who is responsible for ensuring the action is completed
- the date the action will be completed
- a description of how the group will know the action has been completed
It’s important that the group focuses on actions and not goals. For example, if the objective is “improve knowledge sharing” then rather than provide a goal such as, “build better relationships with the policy division,” describe a tangible action like “organise 3 brown bag seminars with the policy division.”
By repeating this activity every three months the organisation begins to embed knowledge-related activities into their day to day business. It becomes second nature. The three-month time frame also feels achievable and tangible. It gives the groups something in the foreseeable future to aim for. One last benefit of a shorter time frame for action is that it enables the organisation to sense and respond to the changing business environment making it more nimble and resilient.
You might be thinking, “Yeh, but what about those initiatives that take longer than three months to accomplish?” Of course this will be the case. Sometimes the organisation will be able to identify longer-term initiatives, such as the adoption of communities of practice or an intranet implementation, in the initial knowledge strategy design which can be implemented organisation-wide. Here I am arguing for a balance between the more traditional approach to developing a knowledge strategy with a greater emphasis on embedding the knowledge actions.
Maister, D. H. “Ready, Set, Go: Fast-track Strategy.” Strategy in Professional Business Retrieved 27 February, 2007, from http://davidmaister.com/podcasts/4/45/.
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| 25/02/07 | | Knowledge strategy in Melbourne and Canberra |
There seems to be a renewed interest in developing knowledge strategies. We have been involved in three in the last six months and our narrative techniques have been well received. We now need to move people from seeing a knowledge strategy as a thing to a seeing it as a process. We also need to see a shift from developing knowledge strategies to engaging people in knowledge-focussed business strategies.
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| 21/02/07 | | Knowledge strategy - the core objectives |
I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that every knowledge strategy has the same objectives, which are:
- improve knowledge sharing
- enhance innovation
- reduce impact of people leaving (knowledge retention)
- build skills and know-how
- improve everyone’s ability to find relevant knowledge when they need it
- improve how we learn from experience
If this is the case, couldn’t a knowledge strategy activity move quickly to engaging as many people as possible in the organisation to work out what actions are needed to make progress on the objectives?
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| 20/02/07 | | Some more on slogans |
Have a look at this funny take on the recent election slogan adopted by the NSW Labor Party: “More to do, but we're heading in the right direction”
(hat tip to Victor Perton)
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| 20/02/07 | | Putting stories to work |
Over the last few months we’ve talked about the importance of having a short phrase or mantra to help everyone in an organisation implement the company’s strategy (here and here). At Anecdote we’ve had a few catch phrases over our relatively short life and we’ve never been totally happy with any of them. Here’s the chronology:
- complexity – narrative – knowledge
- narrative – narrative – narrative
- insight and empowerment
- learning and change
After reading Made to Stick we realised the problem. Each attempt was abstract and passive and the phrases didn’t really give us any indication about how to act nor tell our clients what we were all about. So here is our new tag line: Putting stories to work
Let us know what you think.
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| 30/01/07 | | Defining intent in a change management program |
A while ago I argued that the target metaphor was inappropriate for change projects. The idea that anyone could accurately define a change target, aim at it, and then hit it with a well shot arrow was, at best, an illusion. In most cases the possible, beneficial end states are wide and varied.
So the question is, how do you define an intent that provides direction, inspires action yet is not overly prescriptive? John F. Kennedy provides a good example.
In his now famous ‘man on the moon’ speech, Kennedy kicked off the US entry to the space race with the following goal:
First, I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.
This statement of intent is concrete (landing a man on the moon), active (landing, returning, achieving), simple, time bound (before this decade is out), and is in the form of a mini story (land the man and get him home safely).
The military are well versed in providing strategic intents for missions because they know that No plan survives contact with the enemy. Chip and Dan Health explain the military’s use of commanders intent (CI).
CI is a crisp, plain-talk statement that appears at the top, of every order, specifying the plan’s goal, the desired end-state of an operation. At high levels of the Army the CI may be relatively abstract: “Break the will of the enemy in the Southwest region.”
Gary Hamel and C.K. Prahalad suggest three key aspects of an effective strategic intent:
- Sense of Direction. "Strategic intent (...) implies a particular point of view about the long-term market or competitive position that a firm hopes to build over the coming decade or so". It should be a view of the future – conveying a unifying and personalising sense of direction.
- Sense of Discovery. A strategic intent is differentiated; it implies a competitively unique point of view about the future. It holds out to employees the promise of exploring new competitive territory.
- Sense of Destiny. Strategic intent has an emotional edge to it; it is a goal that employees perceive as inherently worthwhile.
These examples provide a sense of what a change management team needs to achieve, but we still need a way to develop a useful intent. As you might guess, my suggestion is largely participative, using stories and question-based. But I have run out of time to finish this post so I will write another making some suggestions on how you can create your strategic intent for a change management program. In the meantime any other examples or descriptions of how you do it would be appreciated.
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| 14/01/07 | | Why Command And Control Is So Bad |
Bruce Nussbaum over at BusinessWeek Online has written a short piece entitled: Lessons From Home Depot’s Bob Nardelli—Why Command And Control Is So Bad.
Autocratic top-down, command and control works great when you focus on process—cost and quality. Six Sigma measures all that stuff wonderfully.
The truth is that in the new global business culture, process controls and metrics are critical to any big company but they are now sediment, one of the things that is commoditized and laid down on the corporate structure to make way for the discipline and process of innovation.
It’s good to see commentators starting to reflect the need for leaders and managers to look beyond what can be easily measured and controlled. Sadly, most commentators, leaders or managers are still attempting to use the tools developed for command and control (such as six sigma and balanced scorecard) to address complex issues such as culture, customer service, sales, leadership and innovation. Warning, here comes some flagrant self promotion. You might think that it’s only fringe organisations that might use techniques like business narrative, most significant change, and complexity-based thinking. Not so. Here are some of the clients we have done projects for and many are global businesses.
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BHP Billiton
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Rio Tinto
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ANZ Bank
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National Australia Bank
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Australian Army
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AstraZeneca
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IBM
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The Treasury
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CSIRO
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DSTO
[via Bob Sutton]
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| 6/01/07 | | People don't leave organisations |
I was working with Tony High before Christmas when he made the point to the group that ‘people don’t leave organisations, they leave managers’. This is certainly consistent with my experience. Even if your job is fantastic, if your manager isn’t then thoughts inevitably turn to ‘what next’ and it’s a slippery slope once you start thinking about leaving an organisation. Conversely, I have endured lousy jobs because of a fantastic manager.
One of the areas that managers have a big effect is upon creativity and innovation. Teresa Amabile, in an article titled ‘The Power of Ordinary Practices’ in HBR’s Working Knowledge points out that if people are in a good mood on a given day, they're more likely to have creative ideas that day, as well as the next day. Below is an extract from the article:
The team leader's behavior is critical. I found that there are five leader behaviors that have a positive influence on people's feelings … One of these is supporting people emotionally. The second is monitoring people's work in a particularly positive way, and that has to do with giving them positive feedback on their work or giving them information that they need to do their work better. The third behavior is just plain recognizing people for good performance, particularly in public settings. The fourth is consulting with people on the team—that is, asking for their views, respecting their opinions, and acting on their needs and their wishes to the extent that it's possible. And the fifth category was a grab bag of things. But the most important aspect here was collaborating—that the team leader rolled up his or her sleeves and actually spent time collaborating with somebody on the work.
All this reinforces the importance of Bob Sutton’s ‘no asshole rule’.
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| 27/12/06 | | Why people do the things they do |
Christmas reading has help me stumble across two very different essays with the same theme: people are enormously influenced by their social ties. Anyone reading this blog won’t be surprised by that theme but these essays present two very different contexts. The first is called Knowing the Enemy by George Packer, which was recently published in the New Yorker. It’s a lengthy treatment on how social scientists are re-conceiving the way the US government might approach insurgencies. The “War on Terror” moniker has mislead policy makers and commanders in thinking primarily from an armaments and military force perspective. The essay suggests that in order to combat insurgencies we need information, influence and the ability to connect people in different ways.
The other essay is called Darwin on the Bounty: The How and the Why of the Greatest Mutiny in History by Michael Shermer. It’s a chapter in his book, Science Friction: Where the Known Meets the Unknown
What does this mean for organisations? Well I think one of the social scientists from Knowing the Enemy, Australian Lt. Col. David Kilcullen, said it best in his tips for company commanders (read, managers) about to be deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan:
Know your turf—Know the people, the topography, economy, history, religion and culture. Know every village, road, field, population group, tribal leader, and ancient grievance. Your task is to become the world expert on your district.
[thanks to Les Posen for the link to Knowing the Enemy]
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| 13/10/06 | | Tag lines for knowledge strategies |
We’ve been helping a few organisations with knowledge strategies lately and discovered the power of knowledge strategy tag lines. This idea first came to us while we were working on trust in one of the large Australian banks. They’d done a traditional mission, vision, values exercise (which are normally ineffective) but one of the values kept popping up in the meetings: “tell it like it is, no spin.” Whenever someone was pussy-footing around a topic someone would invariably blurt out this line and more often than not the pussy-footer would become forthright. We never heard the other values mentioned and when asked, people only seemed to remember this one. Colloquial language seem to be an important part of its effectiveness.
The relationship to knowledge strategies was drawn for me by Mark Bennett over at Rio Tinto. Mark was saying that he liked the tag line “Making colla