Was reading Nick Milton’s post on KM Governance this morning and it triggered something in my mind regarding something I read yesterday, a quote by Jan Carlzon, the former head of SAS:

“An individual without information cannot take responsibility; an individual who is given information cannot help but take responsibility.”

In Nick’s post he states: If you are a manager and you want to get something done in your organization, you need to set three things in place. • Firstly, you need to make it very clear what you want done. • Secondly, you have to give people the tools and the training to do it. • Thirdly, you need to check that they’ve done what you want.

Based on my interpretation of Nick’s words and the rest of his post, Nick goes on to indicate that KM governance is needed in order to ensure KM gets done within an organization. I’m not quite sure I agree with that.

I’m trying to find the integration of Jan’s statement with Nick’s. I’m getting a sense that Jan’s statement assumes an adult to adult level of human interaction, while Nick’s gives me the sense of an Adult to child interaction.

I believe that what gets measured doesn’t necessarily get done, it’s really what gets reinforced that gets done. Saying you measure something, does not mean that it will change behavior. It’s only the potential for consequences that changes behavior, and sometimes not even that! (I have an 11 year old son and can provide proof!)

And then I think about Bob Buckman’s talk on KM that I found on David Gurteen’s website (where I first heard about Jan’s statement). (Bob Buckman was the CEO of Buckman Laboratories and truly embedded a knowledge sharing culture into his organization.)  Bob basically says that based on his research over about 2 years, that in fact, giving people direct access to information (knowledge) will result in their taking responsibility and doing what needs to be done a good 75% of the time. Then there’s this statement by Bob:

“Our approach (to KM) is far more than stick or carrot. We say, “Knowledge Sharing is your job. Do it!” As a reward you may keep your job.” Bob Buckman President & Chairman, The Applied Knowledge Group

Which takes me full circle to Nick’s more recent post about IBM’s social computing guidelines where their last guideline (IBM’s) states that you shouldn’t allow social computing to interfere with your job or client commitments. In other words, sharing knowledge through social networking occurs outside your “day job”. Which is something that really boggles the mind to me (and to Nick), because we absolutely believe that it cannot be de-coupled from your day job, especially if you are considered a “knowledge worker”. Knowledge is your day job!

So here’s the question, if the tasks and activities related to sharing knowledge truly are embedded into your “job”, then why would you need KM governance. I’m going to suggest that you will find a need for KM governance in organizations that are still in a “control information” culture vs an “open information” culture like Buckman Labs. If an organization truly wants their leaders and employees to have a knowledge sharing culture then there must be a drive to get all information to all employees regardless of the job in that organization. Thus creating an environment where every leader and employee can do nothing but take responsibility for getting the job done.

I’ll also suggest we need to change the language of our stories to represent adult to adult interactions, not adult to child interactions. I tell my son over and over, I’m the adult, you are the child, over time, I expect your behavior to move towards adult behavior and take responsibility.

Within organizations, collaboration technologies are dictated by the most powerful person involved in the collaboration.

That really made me stop and think.  It was one of those v-8 slaps to the head… that’s why organizations have such a difficult time adopting new collaborative technologies.  We always establish the use cases for the field employee and rarely for the senior leader.  I bet if we started at the senior leader level to get them to adopt the new technologies, the requisite follow along by employees would be a cake walk… 

So what do you think of McAfee’s hypothesis.  read the full article here http://andrewmcafee.org/2009/10/mcafees-hypothesis/

 Rendering Knowledge

I may have finally broken a writing block. Aside from two book chapters in the last couple of months I more or less completed a paper length opinion piece for a report ARK are producing on KM in the Legal Profession. The title includes one of those words which has multiple and different meanings namely render which is allowing me to play games between the poetic meaning and that of rendering something down to fat. As a part of that paper I updated my original three rules of knowledge management to seven principles which I share below.

• Knowledge can only be volunteered it cannot be conscripted. You can’t make someone share their knowledge, because you can never measure if they have. You can measure information transfer or process compliance, but you can’t determine if a senior partner has truly passed on all their experience or knowledge of a case.
• We only know what we know when we need to know it. Human knowledge is deeply contextual and requires stimulus for recall. Unlike computers we do not have a list-all function. Small verbal or nonverbal clues can provide those ah-ha moments when a memory or series of memories are suddenly recalled, in context to enable us to act. When we sleep on things we are engaged in a complex organic form of knowledge recall and creation; in contrast a computer would need to be rebooted.
• In the context of real need few people will withhold their knowledge. A genuine request for help is not often refused unless there is literally no time or a previous history of distrust. On the other hand ask people to codify all that they know in advance of a contextual enquiry and it will be refused (in practice its impossible anyway). Linking and connecting people is more important than storing their artifacts.
• Everything is fragmented. We evolved to handle unstructured fragmented fine granularity information objects, not highly structured documents. People will spend hours on the internet, or in casual conversation without any incentive or pressure. However creating and using structured documents requires considerably more effort and time. Our brains evolved to handle fragmented patterns not information.
• Tolerated failure imprints learning better than success. When my young son burnt his finger on a match he learnt more about the dangers of fire than any amount of parental instruction cold provide. All human cultures have developed forms that allow stories of failure to spread without attribution of blame. Avoidance of failure has greater evolutionary advantage than imitation of success. It follows that attempting to impose best practice systems is flying in the face of over a hundred thousand years of evolution that says it is a bad thing.
• The way we know things is not the way we report we know things. There is an increasing body of research data which indicates that in the practice of knowledge people use heuristics, past pattern matching and extrapolation to make decisions, coupled with complex blending of ideas and experiences that takes place in nanoseconds. Asked to describe how they made a decision after the event they will tend to provide a more structured process oriented approach which does not match reality. This has major consequences for knowledge management practice.
• We always know more than we can say, and we will always say more than we can write down. This is probably the most important. The process of taking things from our heads, to our mouths (speaking it) to our hands (writing it down) involves loss of content and context. It is always less than it could have been as it is increasingly codified.

Posted by Dave Snowden on October 10, 2008 11:04 PM | Permalink

 Pasted from <http://www.cognitive-edge.com/blogs/dave/2008/10/rendering_knowledge.php>

Then, if you add to it the following principle from David Snowden:

• We always know more than we can say, and we will always say more than we can write down. This is probably the most important. The process of taking things from our heads, to our mouths (speaking it) to our hands (writing it down) involves loss of content and context. It is always less than it could have been as it is increasingly codified.

Knowledge Harvesting (KH) really doesn’t seem to be the most effective way of solving the problem.  And, of course I am assuming that the primary problem that KH is solving is brain drain from organizations – regardless of whether it’s boomers or Gen X, Y and Millenials moving around.  Wouldn’t it be cheaper to keep these knowledgeable people connected to your company for as long as possible?  Especially knowing that you can never really get their knowledge out of their heads in any valuable way for future use.  And, in light of the ever increasing change in technology and how we work, how relevant will that information be 1-2 years after it is documented. 

Why aren’t there more KM strategists in companies asking better questions about the knowledge in their company and establishing better ways to nurture it?  I like the agricultural metaphor, because nurturing knowledge growth, planting knowledge seeds, knowledge fertilizing, knowledge grafting… all really resonate for me.  But, harvesting just doesn’t work for me.  Maybe I’m reading too much into it, but it seems so final, cut, broken, pulled out, and we all know that as soon as we cut flowers, pull out a carrot, pick an apple, it’s on its way to total decay.  Hmmm.

If companies are really afraid of losing the knowledge in people’s heads, then why not just maintain a good relationship with that employee.  (Duh)  We share knowledge with people we like.  We share knowledge when people are in need.  How about playing up on that instead of thinking we can put a straw to people’s heads and draw out the good stuff.  Why not use social networking tools and communities of practice to maintain these connections?  Isn’t that cheaper and more efficient?  The more we can create the contextual opportunities for people  to ask questions and solve problems, regardless of whether they continue to get a paycheck from a company, the better we have reduced the impact when people leave.   

No, I don’t think I will be doing any knowledge harvesting.  I am going to stick with knowledge nurturing, knowledge seeding, knowledge fertilizing, knowledge pollinating….

Do we really need to establish a professional certification for knowledge management? Don’t get me wrong, I believe in professional certifications, but KM? Even project management doesn’t have the greatest of reputations for their professional certification of a PMP. Yes, I know many companies dangle that little certification out there for applicants to have. But the reality is, I can go and take the test and add those 3 little letters after my name and it still doesn’t mean I am an experienced practitioner. I admit, I am probably biased, since I followed the route that I recommend… take some training, read some books and then go do it!

Really, If you still think a professional certification for KM is needed, I would at least follow the HR Certification Institute model:  Separate training from testing for certification, allowing anyone to do the training.  Make every individual wanting a certification prove experience with proof of responsibilities.  (I would even require recommendations from leadership, though HRCI does not require this.)   Have the testing and certification process cost only a couple hundred dollars/euros, and require annual recertification through continued training.

Here’s the bottom line to me… If you are really experienced in KM, you know that this functional area will eventually be part of the company’s culture and just a matter of how a company does business – fully integrated into their business processes.   So any type of professional certification would eventually be useless.  And, when it comes to the corporate bottom line, a company shouldn’t have to hire additional people who have this certification to “do” knowledge management.  If they are going to survive in the 21st century as a corporation, the company better be training all employees on these concepts, as KM builds organizational effectiveness.

Just my 2 cents worth!