Category: Creativity

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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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What are the outcomes of taking a creative approach to knowledge management?

I have been talking a bit lately about the intersection of KM and creativity, I had a coaching/workshop session yesterday that helped me focus on that intersection and start to figure it out. I am very excited about this activity, and can honestly say this is the most excited about KM that I have been in my 14 years of actively doing it. I am still working on scoping it out and incorporating it into my services but in the meantime I will blog about what I’m figuring out.

Adding creativity to KM solves an employee engagement problem.

Adding creativity to KM results in the following outcomes:

  • innovation
  • productivity enhancements
  • collaboration
  • engaged employees (happy employees)
  • thought leadership
  • patents (when used in R&D)
  • decreased cycle/process times
  • improvements to work-life balance
  • a sense of community among stakeholders

All of these things give your organization a competitive advantage with customers/clients and in attracting and keeping staff.

I’m excited, are you?

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Creativity

Some of my time away from my business and knowledge management is spent being creative, painting and creating art. I keep looking for ways to incorporate art/creativity into the KM consulting that I do.

In the fall I used scribble drawings to start and end some requirements workshops that I was running for a client and it worked really well, helped people relax before and after the intensity of the work of the workshops. I think it helped the workshop results.

I also have some creative/artistic activities that help illustrate in a quick and easy way the power of collaboration, although I haven’t had the opportunity to do them with any of my clients, yet.

What I continue to search for is a more concrete way to bring more creativity into my KM consulting.

I know taking breaks to “exercise” the right-brain helps come up with new and innovative ideas and connections, and certainly innovation is one of the benefits of KM–sharing knowledge, making new connections between and among people, but how to be more creative as a regular part of my KM consulting, that is the question.

Maybe the answer is to focus more on the innovation side of KM and bring creativity in that way.

Thoughts?

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Knowledge is the network

One of the themes at KM World in October 2012 was that the value of knowledge management is in the network, i.e. the value comes from the connections and the collective whole, rather than individual people, activities, processes, or technology. This was a shift from previous years where there was more focus on technology.

That the value of knowledge is in the network, is something we have known for a long, long, time. There has long been acknowledgement that “it’s who you know,” in business and in life. What has changed in the last 10 years is the ability to stay connected to people and to connect with people in geographically diverse locations through the use of technology, but it’s still about, “who you know.”

Our networks provide access to opportunities that we might not have been able to discover on our own. They pass along interesting articles, books, and other pieces of knowledge and information. Someone says something and that makes us think of something else or ask a question that’s not been asked before. Someone else builds on our ideas, it becomes an iterative process and suddenly we have created something new, some innovation that didn’t exist before.

When someone in our work network moves to another company or role, we all-of-a-sudden have to fill the void left in our knowledge network: who else knows what that person knew, how long will it take their replacement to learn the things we need them to know, what do we do until the gap is filled?

Organizations that go through down-sizing/right-sizing/lay-offs/retirements all have to figure out what to do about the impact on the knowledge networks of their organizations. Those that don’t take the loss of knowledge and the disruption to the network into consideration are negatively impacted by the loss/turn-over.

So what can organizations do to try to keep some of that knowledge when people leave the organization or create opportunities for innovation? Knowledge management activities like communities of practice, mentoring programs, lessons learned processes, after action reviews, expertise location activities, to name a few, and the technology that supports them all help to capture and share knowledge as well as make connections that might not happen otherwise. Knowledge management activities also give the knowledge longevity that it might not have otherwise.

Once the knowledge management practices are in place there is a need to make sure that it remains relevant through regular review and updating processes. This relevancy check could be as simple as reviewing documents and knowledge bases, or sending staff to conferences and training courses. It all becomes part of the learning and continuous improvement that the organization desired by implementing knowledge management in the first place.

This was also published in the Knoco January 2013 newsletter, which can be accessed here https://www.knoco.com/Knoco%20newsletter%20Jan%2013.pdf

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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!