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Creativity and Knowledge Management, part 3

Picking up from the idea of art as a metaphor for knowledge management…

Could we use the creation of art to demonstrate the importance of knowledge management? Yes, I think so, I think it might make workshops more enjoyable and lead to better outcomes.

Would doing some right-brain activities possibly help the left-brain do its job? Probably, it seemed well accepted at the conference that both right-brain and left-brain are necessary for innovation, i.e. the diverge/converge cycle.

What shape all of this takes in the Knowledge Management Consulting I do remains to be seen, but I am quite excited by the possibilities.

P.S. two last things from MindCamp:

  1. I met Dimis Michaelides of “The Art of Innovation” there and loved the workshop and simulation he did.
  2. I also met Whitney Ferre of Creatively Fit and loved the workshops that she did as well as the time I spent talking with her outside of the formal sessions

Whether either of them know it they provided pieces to the puzzle for me to discover the intersection of art and knowledge management, thank you both of you!

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Creativity and Knowledge Management, part 2

Okay, so back for part 2 of Creativity and Knowledge Management, picking up where we left off.

We were talking about left-brain and right-brain and the different KM activities that fit in each area, and that’s fine, but what about right-brain activities that aren’t knowledge management activities that use knowledge management activities in their creation?

For example, one of the experiential exercises we did at the conference was recreating  stylized watercolours of a frog and a spider. We each got a piece of the picture, which had been cut up into squares and we had to reproduce our square onto a bigger, rectangular piece of watercolour paper. Both the squares and the rectangles were numbered on the back, which made putting them together again easy. This was collaborative, it used meta-data (the numbers on the back) and we had the opportunity to go back and add additional detail to any of the pieces after we’d seen them all put together–all KM activities, but with art as the content matter.

Are there other KM activities that could be demonstrated through art? Lessons Learned? Peer Assists? Content and Document Management? Communities of Practice? Innovation?

So art becomes a metaphor for knowledge management.

Next post…Creativity and Knowledge Management, part 3

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Creativity and Knowledge Management, part 1

I went to MindCamp last week (August 23-26, 2012). MindCamp is a creativity and innovation un-conference organized by a dedicated team of volunteers; this was its 10th incarnation and it was fabulous!

I went to investigate the intersection of knowledge management and creativity/innovation and I was not disappointed. Certainly, innovation comes up in KM, and is an outcome of sharing knowledge, whether that knowledge is shared in a documented form or in a community of practice (I have even done presentations on KM and innovation), but where does creativity and art fit in? Creativity isn’t necessarily the same as innovation.

As some of you know, I am an aspiring artist in my non-KM time so have been toying with how to incorporate my art into KM–The Art of Knowledge Management, and I came away from MindCamp with some ways I could do that.

The starting point for me was how to reconcile the left-brain (logical, sequential, rational, analytical) with the right-brain (random, intuitive, holistic, synthesizing). It’s funny looking at these descriptions now, it doesn’t seem that hard to reconcile the two halves to make a whole.

The left-brain of KM focuses on the processes, workflows, and information architecture of KM. The right-brain of KM focuses on search activities, and the sharing that happens in communities of practice and mentoring, not-to-mention the creation of an over-all strategy for KM.

I think I will leave this post here for now, and do part 2 in a few days, after we’ve all had time to think this through a little more.

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LawTech Camp, KM Technology discussion

A few weeks ago, I participated in LawTech Camp in Toronto. Connie Crosby and I were launching our beta-test for our Law Firm KM assessment tool, so we had an opportunity to do a demo presentation and talk about KM, I’ve posted the slides on SlideShare, click on the <demo presentation> or <about KM> links to see the slides.

There was a lot of discussion both during and after the presentation about one of the slides, so Connie wrote a blog post about it, which you can see here: https://www.slaw.ca/2012/06/11/km-101-more-on-technology-complexity/#top.

 

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KM helps you be lazy!*

Imagine this scenario: you’re working hard on a project or task, you’ve got a deadline you’ve got to meet, but you’re stuck, you don’t know how to finish.

What do you do?

Well, if you are experienced in the ways of knowledge management you:

  • ask your colleagues,
  • ask the Community of Practice you’re a member of,
  • search in your expertise location system or yellow pages at peoples profiles,
  • post something on your internal Q&A or social media application,
  • you search your corporate document management system, ECM system, or other such repository/repositories to find the answer.

And you find the answer, doing considerably less work than creating the solution yourself and you meet your deadline. With all that time you saved you take a couple of minutes to post the solution, so that someone in your shoes days/weeks/months/years from now can find your solution and be lazy too!

*Thanks to Kathleen Wilson for the idea for this post.

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Knowledge Management Mentoring

Would you rather learn how to implement knowledge management rather than have a consultant come in and do it for you?

I have just finished a project where I mentored/coached the main person on the client side through the creation of a Knowledge Management Strategy. She was knowledgeable and had, in fact started a strategy but got stuck. I have to say I enjoyed the experience, I wasn’t sure at first how it would go, and certainly it took longer than it would have if I had just done the work, but in the end she has a strategy that she can sell to management and she feels comfortable with how and why it was developed that way.

A win for all, I’d say.

I’m thinking I need to do more of these types of engagements, so watch for announcements.

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Update from Stephanie

Hi,

Sorry I haven’t posted anything in so long, I guess I have been busy with a project and business development and I actually fit some vacation in for the first time in 3.5 years. Why don’t I tell you about a couple of things I’m working on?

  1. I am going to be doing a course at the iSchool at the University of Toronto on March 2, 2012. The course is called How to Align People, Process, and Technology for Knowledge Management Success and is based on my Ark Group report from last year.
  2. An automated checklist to assess where to get started with your knowledge management initiative. This is still in development, but we’re expecting to release it in the next few months. We’ll be beta-testing it in a few weeks and already have  some small organizations lined-up for that phase. I’ll share more about this initiative in the future.
  3. I’ve also seen a couple of technology platforms that are quite interesting, not that KM is about the technology, but knowledge is social and these are two social knowledge management platforms. The first is Vedalis and the second is SpeechBobble, and if you consider that knowledge management is about connecting people to the knowledge they need to do their jobs, these two platforms will definitely enable that to happen.

That’s about all I can share for now, just wanted to share those few items and let you know that I am still out here completing puzzles.


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Knowledge Management Training and Technology

This past week I attended the CKM training in Toronto, hosted by the Knowledge Management Institute and Knowledge Management Institute Canada. I attended, not because I felt I needed training (although I don’t have enough ego to think that I know it all, I have been doing KM for 12+ years, and certainly know a lot) but because I was curious to hear about their model and their approach. KMI has trained over 4,000 people worldwide over the last 10 years so they are onto something.

Just to backtrack for a minute, I come to KM from a technology perspective, because that is how I first came to KM. The processes and people part of KM are absolutely necessary and critical, and are the hardest part of KM, but technology enables it all, and poorly designed and implemented KM technology is the death knell for KM in a lot of organizations.

Okay, so back to my training. I did training with APQC when I was first getting going with KM when I was at Hewlett Packard, it was what was available to me at the time. It talked about the phases of KM implementation and how to mature KM in the organization, something I still use/refer to in my work. KMI’s CKM training provides a much more comprehensive model for KM, it introduces a lot of concepts and ideas about KM that I have learned over my 12 years of doing it. But because KM as a discipline is based on the experiences of its practitioners, and isn’t mature enough to have standardized/coalesced its terminology I was frustrated with the descriptions by times.

As much as I enjoyed the course, meeting everyone, and hearing the experiences and challenges that they all face and have faced, I tired of KM technology being the great evil of KM and that is something that needs to be addressed going forward. I have no hesitancy in recommending the course to people just starting out in KM, it’s a great start. However as technology ever embeds itself in our lives (work-wise and otherwise) understanding how KM technology can enable KM activities is critical.

The poor implementation of KM technology is the reason why KM has a bad name in the minds of many, but it is a necessary component of the KM puzzle, ignoring it does not change this. The sooner KM practitioners understand this, the sooner it will get better.

Alas, I think I am a lone voice in the wilderness on this one.