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Knowledge Management, Creativity, and Innovation: Part 1

“Knowledge Management, ho hum, who cares? I have more important things to worry about than some esoteric discussion about knowledge. I have a job to do.”

I know that’s what they’re thinking with the glazed-over look in their eyes as they search around the room to see who else is around that they can talk to.

I’m not going to tell you why you should care; I’m going to tell you why I care.

I like to make connections, meet new people, learn new things and I like to share what I know with others. I like to make my job as easy as possible, and I like to help others do the same thing. I like to learn from my mistakes and not make the same mistakes repeatedly.

So, you’re probably thinking, where is she going with this? This isn’t knowledge management; this isn’t creativity; this isn’t innovation.

And to that I say, “ah, but it is.”

One definition of creativity says:

  • It is the reorganization of experience into new configurations;
  • A function of knowledge, imagination, and evaluation.

In other words, the use of knowledge. Knowledge is about holding information learned through experience or study. Knowledge management wants you to do something with that knowledge.

Sometimes that “thing” is something routine, like an answer for someone who’s called a customer support desk. Sometimes it’s something non-routine, like solving a problem, completing a project, or creating a strategy. Sometimes it’s something brand new, like improving out-patient experiences at a hospital by the whole process. Or like the creation of the iPhone.

Knowledge management behaviours are actions that support these activities. They are the left-brained processes that enable these things to happen, whether they are routine, non-routine, or brand new. Knowledge management is not technology, it is not esoteric, it is practical and necessary to live our lives, and to do our jobs.

I am an accountant by training. This training (and subsequent experience) helped me develop my left brain — it’s a lot of process, and numbers, and guidelines. It also introduced me to the idea of knowledge management. We didn’t call it that at the time, but we were expected to re-use the previous year’s audit or tax file: we had checklists to follow to make sure we didn’t miss anything, and we were supposed to talk to whoever had worked on the file the year before, if possible. Another knowledge management activity was the need for time to learn and plan: learn from last year’s file and plan for the current year’s. The knowledge management strategies made us quicker completing the current year’s audit/tax than the year before, which meant the fee to the client stayed the same (client happy) and our earning power went up (boss happy). Efficiency and effectiveness.

So where do the creativity and innovation come in? TIME.

TIME is what is necessary to create new knowledge. The reorganization of experience into new configurations through the use of knowledge, imagination, and evaluation are right-brain activities: creativity and innovation practices. Designing time into our processes and activities to create new knowledge or finding existing knowledge is the key success factor.

And time is what we’re run out of, more on design in Part 2.

 

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Is Knowledge an Asset at your Organization?

I used to be an accountant, we know all about financial/monetary assets and keeping track of them, but what about knowledge? A lot of which walks out the door at the end of the day in the heads of your staff.

A lot of organizations don’t think of knowledge as an asset, so don’t manage it appropriately. Here are some things to consider to help you figure out if knowledge is an asset at your organization. (Thanks to Nick Milton for the list and the idea.)

  • If your organization requires good knowledge based decisions, then knowledge is one of your key assets.
  • If you are a consulting firm, a contractor, or an educational or professional body that creates and deploys knowledge on behalf of customers and clients, then again knowledge is one of your key assets.
  • Knowledge will also be a key business issue for you if your staff turnover is high, and you need to transfer knowledge to new employees.
  • Knowledge is a key business issue for you, if much of your core operational knowledge is held by people approaching retirement age.
  • Knowledge is a key business issue for you, if you are involved in repeat activity, where knowledge from the past can help improve future performance.
  • Knowledge is a key business issue for you, if many dispersed parts of the business are performing the same process, with varying results (in other words, some parts of the business know how to perform operations better than other parts, and that knowledge needs to be shared and re-used).
  • Knowledge is a key business issue for you if your budget is being challenged and you have to contemplate delivering ‘more for less’, or (in the words of the business cliché) “work smarter, not harder”.  Working smarter means making better use of your organisational knowledge.

So, is knowledge an asset at your organization? What are you doing to take care of it?

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ColaLife Documentary

I will write more about this later, but I wanted to get some initial thoughts down tonight, while it’s fresh in my memory.

I was lucky enough to be invited by a friend to attend a University of Waterloo Alumni event this evening. At the event they were screening the Canadian premiere of ColaLife a documentary about an organization that is “is working in developing countries to bring Coca-Cola, its bottlers and others together to save children’s lives by opening the distribution channels which Coca-Cola uses, to enable ‘social products’ such as oral rehydration salts and zinc supplements to use similar routes. We began with the concept of using space in Coca-Cola crates – but have extended into a range of innovations, some based on Coca-Cola’s expertise and networks – but many based on questioning the status quo.” (This comes from their webpage, here https://www.colalife.org/about/colalife-about/)

It was a fantastic story about trying to save the lives of children, but for me it was also a story of creativity, innovation, and knowledge management and design thinking. Why? Because ColaLife wasn’t afraid to think outside of the box, to say who is getting their products into remote regions in Zambia and how are they doing it? CocaCola, that’s who. How? Shopkeepers want to carry their product because they can make money selling it, so they transport it “the last mile” from a distribution centre to their shops. (Knowledge management–sharing knowledge/best practices from CocaCola.)

ColaLife then designed their packaging to fit in the space between the tops of the bottles in the case, so that they can be packaged together. They also had some innovations in how the oral hydration salts and zinc were packaged to make it easier to mix and taste better for the children who had to take it (design, creativity, and innovation).

What you also need to know is that it took 20+ years to get this made. Why did it take so long? It needed social media to get the word out and get the right parties involved, that’s why. (Knowledge management, and innovation).

When I heard the 20 years and social media part I thought: serendipity, everything coming together at the right time at the right place. But what if you could make “serendipity” happen more often? What if by taking a more purposeful approach to creativity, innovation, and KM you could help your organizations and all organizations generally, make connections quicker? Wouldn’t that be a good thing?

What are you doing to make that happen?

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Knowledge Management by Design, part 2

Design thinking seems to be everywhere lately, but it seems to me that KM has always been “by design,” at least it was if it was done successfully.

Design thinking is characterized by being purposive; human centred;  a balance of analytical and creative; uses abductive reasoning, i.e. inference from best available explanation; and iterative, it uses prototyping and play testing to achieve success.

How are these principles applied in knowledge management?

Purposive: we look at the organization’s strategy, goals, and objectives and assess how knowledge management best supports those activities. The knowledge management strategy outlines how the organization’s goals and objectives are furthered through the application of knowledge management activities.

Human centred: the best knowledge management implementations consider the people of the organization, e.g. how they work, what makes their work-lives easier, what the culture of the organization is like and works with those requirements to make the organization more efficient and effective in its knowledge processes and activities.

A balance of analytical and creative: KM should be a balance of analytical and creative. It should capture knowledge and make it reusable, but it also needs to leave space, ba, to allow for knowledge creation. This space can look like lots of different things, e.g. giving employees 10% of their time for projects they want to work on/explore, foosball tables, basketball courts, gyms, art/creativity space, and communities of interest; activities that encourage different connections to be made.

Abductive reasoning: this sums up the belief in KM in general. It can be very difficult to prove a causal link between improved knowledge activities and improved organizational performance, metrics and ROI continue to be a significant hurdle for many organizations. However, anyone who has experience with implementing knowledge management successfully knows that efficiency and effectiveness in an organization are improved through the use of knowledge management activities.

Iterative: successful KM starts small and grows. It starts with an over-all strategy and plan, but then moves to pilots, which bring in small parts of the organization, so that lessons can be learned and adjustments made as the people, process, and supporting technology are implemented across the organization.

Is your knowledge management by design?

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Why Joyful KM?

Because I think knowledge management has gotten too left-brained, too driven by technology and away from its knowledge sharing and organizational learning roots.

Knowledge Management is not about technology, it is about making connections that would not be made otherwise, it is about sharing what you know to help someone else, even if you do not know them.

Knowledge needs space to grow and spread and create and innovate, not processes that stifle it before it takes root.

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Joyful Knowledge Management

Joyful knowledge management.

Yes, knowledge management is joyful, at least it is to me.

I enjoy it when I can find what I’m looking for: the answer to the question, the person who has done a project before and can share her/his experience and lessons learned with me. I enjoy pulling together the pieces to make a new picture, creating new pieces where necessary.

In fact, I think the creating is the best part, whether we’re talking about something that is completely new, something that is new to the organization, or something that is an improvement on something that has been done before (partly new).

How do we do that creating?

We can take a left-brained approach and use knowledge management activities, like expertise location systems, communities of practice, enterprise content management–processes and technology to help us find things that may be similar or provide a piece of the puzzle, activities that help make new/different connections.

We can take a right-brained approach and create space for knowledge creation activities like painting, drawing, photography, playing foosball, running, walking, swimming, playing squash. Activities that let us do something new, different, unexpected. Activities that create the space for us to make different connections and have different experiences rather than the “same old thing”.

I revel in the joy of finding a solution to a problem; I especially revel in it if it’s something new, different, unique. Something that someone else says, “wow, I’ve never thought of it that way before” or “I’ve been trying to figure that out for ages”.

I find things that I learn painting, helps me in my consulting, whether it’s to remind me of the importance of balance or giving things the time and space to develop into what they’re going to be.

This is joy, balanced, right-side, left-side, joy.

Joy with watermark sm

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Knowledge by Design

I have been doing some more research, reading, and thinking about this creativity-innovation-knowledge management area and am coming to the realization that to a certain extent KM by design is what I’ve been doing all along, I’m just becoming more aware of it and kicking it up a notch.

Let me explain…

What I have been doing is knowledge (management) by design, and I say that because, I’ve always believed in looking at what knowledge activities were need to meet the needs of the organization  I’ve never said, “you need xyz technology, or you need a lessons learned process,” without understanding what the organization was trying to achieve with knowledge. I’ve always focused on the left-brain activities, the process, the activities, the technology, the information architecture, etc.

What I’m incorporating now is more right-brain thinking, which takes me and my knowledge management consulting into the innovation and creativity arena and making space for knowledge creation–ba, to use the term made familiar in Nonaka’s knowledge management work and writing.

How am I going to do that? Through having people do right-brain activities in the workshops that I run, but also by working with organizations to include more of these kinds of activities in their daily activities.

Opening up space for knowledge creation and innovation leads to enhanced productivity, collaboration, employee engagement, thought leadership, and sense of community.

This isn’t to the exclusion of lessons learned, and information architecture, etc. it’s a balancing out of both sides of the brain: the detailed, tactical with the strategic, problem solving.

Knowledge by Design.

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Engaging in Knowledge Management an Artistic Work

As I continue to develop my ideas around the intersection of knowledge management and creativity, I picked up a book called Engaged Knowledge Management by Kevin Desouza and Yukika Awazu as I believe that being creative leads to greater engagement, plus a client had recently had an email exchange about some engagement issues he was having with the KM program at his organization. The book was really meant to give me some more ideas of things to suggest to him, other than change management and alignment with processes–pretty left-brained stuff.

I started at chapter 2 and was immediately caught by the metaphor the authors use about KM being a balance of tensions, much like a work of art and I thought, “ah ha, I love this book already!”

The authors describe knowledge management as both art and work because of the balance that has to be struck between having imagination and vision about what a knowledge-based organization should look like–identifying its attributes and its dimensions and how all the pieces fit together and how to construct/execute that vision.

They talk about what happens when the balance isn’t balanced and the dysfunction that results and the failure that it leads to. They say we (knowledge managers) need to promote  the art side through creativity, decentralization, and looseness in control. Then to enable the work side we need to control the process, and centralize.

When I read these words, I reflected on projects that have been successful and those that have not, and realized that the ones that were successful were the ones that were okay with this balancing act between loose and tight, decentralized and centralized, left and right brained.

I am on the right track with thinking about KM like this, in this creative context and am excited to find that some others have gone before me with some of these thoughts, so I can build on their ideas and take them another step further.

 

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KM in Law Firms: compare and contrast

(this is a slightly longer version of an article that I published in the Knoco March 2013 newsletter, one of 5 flavours of KM that were discussed)

In many law firms knowledge management starts in the IT department, and in a few cases, the library and like in many other organizations is focused on document management and technology. Also in common with other organizations law firms are dealing with pressure to reduce costs, be more efficient and effective for their clients, address issues of an aging workforce, and the technology demands of freshly minted lawyers who expect near instant access to knowledge.

There are also differences in KM inside a law firm. While in many organizations KM focuses on not just access to information/knowledge but on learning from mistakes, e.g. after action reviews and lessons learned processes and databases, this seems almost totally absent in law firms.

As I prepared to write this article, I wondered if I had just been missing something because of my limited exposure to KM in law firms. Maybe there really was a learning focus that I was missing out on; but in the research scan I did to supplement my experience, I didn’t find what I was looking for.

Now, don’t get me wrong, there is KM being done in law firms, but it focuses on documented knowledge. A fine activity, and definitely about connecting people to the knowledge they need to do their jobs, but not specifically learning focused and not focused on innovation as is often the case in other organizations.

It seems lawyers see knowledge management as a way to:

  • Give the firm a competitive advantage since the firm’s know-how becomes more easily accessible
  • Increase productivity: lawyers don’t waste time searching for information
  • Improve practice support by fostering collaboration
  • Speed response time to client requests
  • Provide an on-ramp for junior lawyers to get up to (billable) speed more quickly
  • Help integrate the “practice of law” and the “business of law”[1]

Now, I have done work with Steven Lastres, the author of this work I’ve just cited, and have the highest regard for what he is doing in his firm, which is leading the way for KM in law firms, but by not including the learning aspect of KM it seems to me that law firms are missing something.

One of the presentations that I attended at KM World 2012 was Eric Hunter’s, “Innovation, Change Management, & Business Optimization.” Eric Hunter is another leader in the law firm KM sector. What they are doing at his firm is moving towards that learning objective through collaboration and social technologies[2].

If law firms are lagging behind other organizations, the question that comes to my mind is why? In my experience law firms are conservative and risk adverse. They believe that only a lawyer understands their business, which has resulted in people with a CKO (Chief Knowledge Officer) type title at law firms being lawyers, and the main people on their teams are other lawyers and librarians. This lack of diversity on their teams and lack KM specialists specifically, I believe, has led to the focus on documented knowledge.

There is a shift happening, however. Law firms are starting to look outside their industry to see what lessons they can learn from other industries and from KM specialists. I have been doing a series of workshops and webinars for law librarians. The participants in these sessions have been engaged and interested to learn the lessons that I have to share from my experience in other industries. And I have been glad to share my experience and let them know that they are not alone, that the challenges they face are the same challenges that any KM leader faces; somehow there’s comfort in that knowledge.

Note: Connie Crosby and I have also just launched a KM Strategy assessment service for law firms, feel free to get in touch if you’re interested in learning more.


[1] Lastres, Steven, “Knowledge Management in Law Libraries: The Role for Legal Information Professionals” presentation at CALL ACBD Conference, from https://www.callacbd.ca/en/webfm_send/1274, February 28, 2013.

[2] Hunter, Eric, “Law Firms of the Future: Driving Intranet Evolution with Google+”  from https://www.bradfordbarthel.com/Eric/LM-JulyAug2012-ForwardThinking.pdf on February 28, 2013.