Category: Decision making

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Three Often Overlooked Benefits of Arts-Based Interventions in Your Organisation

Three Often Overlooked Benefits of Arts-Based Interventions in Your Organisation:
1. Strategic Decision Making
2. Talent Management
3. Adapting to Technological Changes

You might be wondering how incorporating arts-based interventions into your organization can enhance these areas. Allow me to enlighten you.

Arts-based interventions (ABIs), when integrated into regular practices, unlock dormant skills and abilities that have been overshadowed by years of traditional education and societal expectations. Our conventional educational systems emphasize logic, rationality, rigid processes, and hierarchical thinking—a pedagogy centered around control, seeking the right answers, earning good grades, and perpetuating the past, rather than exploring and creating the future.

ABIs reignite our curiosity and playfulness, fueling a continuous desire to learn and evolve. They guide us to take measured steps, reflect on outcomes, and then take the next leap forward. By appreciating the interconnectedness of things, we start recognizing the significance of systems, networks, and connections.

Specifically, the utilization of ABIs enhances strategic decision making. When ABIs become an integral part of your routine, they enable you to see the bigger picture and the interconnected nature of things. They amplify curiosity, prompting better questions and uncovering more possibilities. ABIs facilitate diffuse thinking, enabling you to forge more connections and make decisions that align with strategic intent.

In terms of talent management, ABIs foster teamwork, communication, and collaboration. They inject fun and enjoyment into the workplace, reducing stress and boosting resilience. ABIs also empower individuals to solve problems more effectively, enhancing employee engagement and reducing turnover. Moreover, they contribute to the development of leadership skills and core transferable skills such as communication and critical thinking, while nurturing personal growth.

Lastly, ABIs help individuals adapt to change, be it technological advancements or other shifts in the landscape. By bolstering resilience and adaptability, ABIs cultivate flexibility and curiosity, enabling employees to seamlessly incorporate new technologies and ideas into their work.

Does all of this sound like some sort of magical solution? Well, ABIs indeed possess these remarkable qualities and more. We have long underestimated the potential of our brains, focusing excessively on the analytical side while neglecting the importance of balance between analytical and creative thinking. It’s time to rectify this imbalance and unleash the full power of our minds.

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Radical KM, Published Article

One of my articles on Radical KM has been published by the GfWM (Gesellschaft für Wissensmanagement) or Society for Knowledge Management here in Germany as part of a collection of articles celebrating the 20th Knowledge Camp. You can download the PDF or read it online, here.

I have another version that will be published in 2021, it’s a bit longer, and a third version that I keep adding to, and which is heading towards being a book, although it has a long ways to go.

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It’s Time for Knowledge Management to Evolve

There is no value in knowledge management, the value is in the learning and experience.

When I started out in knowledge management 20+ years ago, I defined knowledge management as the people, processes, and technology that allowed people to have the knowledge they needed when and where they needed it. It encompassed all three of people, process, and technology, not one or two of those things, and technology was an enabler, not the goal. Change management was a significant component as was having a strategy, working cross-functionally, and involving the various users and stakeholders that were involved and affected by what we were doing.

These ideas still hold true, but there has been a significant shift, because over the last 20 years what has become important isn’t finding the knowledge that has been written down and somehow codified, it’s not even about finding the person who knows what you need to know—although again, these are still useful and necessary, they are, however, not enough.

With the pace of change, and the constant evolution of what we know, as well as the uncertainty and, dare I say, chaos, that exists in our lives today—whether work life or personal life, what is necessary for knowledge management is knowing how to learn; knowing how to question; knowing how to discover.

Knowledge is no longer as static as it once was, and it has become increasingly context sensitive. We need to have the confidence to jump into the void and figure out what we need to know. That can, in part, be through referencing explicit knowledge, or finding the tacit knowledge, but it is increasingly through trial and error. Using what’s we know as a launch pad and iteratively discovering what works in our given situation.

Knowledge Management in 2020 is not about big programs and investments in technology, it is about how to take what you know and get started, discovering what you need to know as you go, one step at a time. The investment is smaller, and you’ll get there faster and more sustainably if you adopt these behaviours.

Knowledge management isn’t knowledge management, it’s continuous learning. It’s flexibly pivoting to adjust to a new environment, a new context, a new set of circumstances. It’s not being stymied by change, it’s embracing it. It’s experimenting to learn new behaviours and techniques and transferring those skills to new areas.

We do this through not just knowing, but through doing/making/experiencing, and, most importantly, through playing and engaging both the analytical and the creative.

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Transformation Through Creativity

I have 3 courses/programs released into the wild, the theme through all of them is: Transformation Through Creativity. Details follow

1. Transform yourself:
A Creative Pause: mindfulness through art https://coursecraft.net/courses/z9269
Do you crave a pause during the day to re-energise you and bring you focus? A Creative Pause: mindfulness through art gives you that pause. We will lead you through creative activities that will bring you back to the moment and give you that break you need.

2. Transform your meetings:
Creative Activities for Virtual Work
https://coursecraft.net/courses/z921g 
Would you like to learn some ice breakers to improve the experience in your online meetings? “Creative activities for virtual work” will teach you seven ice breakers that will make your meetings more engaging.

3. Transform your organisation:
Applying Creativity to Business
https://www.realisation-of-potential.com/acb/
Applying creativity to business engages the whole person, thus enabling the development of solutions to transform your organisation.

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What do I Do: the box I fit into

What do I do?

I get asked this question all the time; for years I have been asked this question. At the beginning of my career I could say I was an accounting student, or an accountant, and people understood this. However, the more education and experience I got, the more difficult it became to say precisely what I did. 

When I became self-employed, I used to say that I did knowledge management consulting, and I did, but people (mostly) didn’t understand what that meant, so I tried to explain. I could give examples of projects that I had done and the impact that it had had, and they sort of understood, but not really. They smiled and nodded and we moved onto another subject.

I have been self-employed for 16 years, my consulting practice has changed and evolved, the “how” of what I do has changed. I now incorporate artistic methods/thinking into what I do (the truth is, they was there all along, I just didn’t have a name for it, much like the agile, and design thinking practices I incorporated in to my methodology, without having a name for them either). But, honestly, no one cares about the “how”, they care about the results. 

What are my results? 

I stop you from failing with your big, unwieldy projects and programs. Your big, cross-functional, cross-organisational initiatives, that don’t neatly fit into a box. Those initiatives that have lots of stakeholders, lots of moving parts, lots of conflicting objectives. They have technology, they have processes, they have people.

Examples: One organisation recognised an ROI of 165%, while another was prevented from throwing out a million dollar (Cdn) IT investment and starting over.

In the current environment, these projects are called digital transformation, and up to 95% of them fail. When I first started, they were mostly called knowledge management, and somewhere around 50% of them failed. Certainly, one of the first KM projects I did had failed twice previously under different project managers, and I came along and did it using an iterative, collaborative approach (what might be called agile and design thinking now). Not only did I have a successful pilot with 100 people, but eventually had almost 7000 people using the platform, which increased to 10,000 on the momentum of what I had started even after I left the organisation. 

Since going out on my own, I have helped other organisations do this—well, at least the ones that trusted me. There were some that were uncomfortable with my cross-functional, collaborative, iterative approach, and so shelved my work, which is their prerogative. 

My success is built on experience, trial and error, persistence, collaboration, communication, curiosity, critical thinking, leadership, and a willingness to admit that I don’t know the answer but I’ll find out. There is no course that teaches these things, only experience. 

Courses and certifications teach theory, they teach best practices. But as anyone who knows about best practices will tell you, best practices are dependant on the organisation, the situation, the culture, the people, the technology, and the processes. Best practices from one situation/organisation will not necessarily give the same results somewhere else. 

Experience takes best practices and asks the question, how do we take that and make it work here, in this environment, with this technology, with these people?

What do I do?

I ask the questions, and I successfully plan and execute big, unwieldy projects.

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Boxes I Fit Into

I have written/spoken a few times lately about how I don’t fit into a box, and that’s true, I fit into many boxes, based on my education, experiences, and areas of expertise. Here is a list*, in alphabetical order:

Abstract Expressionist
Accountant
Agile Implementer of Solutions
Analyst
Artist
Author
Big Picture Seer
Business Analyst
Business Process Analyst
Business-Technology Aligner
Catalyst
Challenger of assumptions
Change Manager
Chaos Organiser
Coach
Collaborator
Communicator
Community Builder
Connector
Consultant
Creative
Critical Thinker
Culture Changer
Decision Maker
Design Thinker
Digital Transformer
Executer
Facilitator
Financial Analyst
Follower
Gamification Consultant
Human’s First Advocate
Implementer
Influencer
Information Technology Process Consultant
Innovator
ITSM Master
Knowledge Management Expert
Knowledge Manager
Leader
Learner
Listener
Manager
Marketer
MBA
Mentor
Networker
Organiser
Painter
Planner
Problem Solver
Process Analyst
Process Designer
Process Thinker
Product Manager
Program Manager
Project Manager
Public Speaker
Questioner
Realiser of Potential
Sales Person
Solopreneur
Strategist
Strategy Developer/Creator/Implementer
Taxonomy Developer
Teacher
Team Builder
Technology Person
Technology Requirements Analyst


*I reserve the right to add to/edit this list

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Entelechy: a poem

Realise your potential.
Realise your team’s potential.
Realise your organisation’s potential.

Do you know how?

Engage the whole person: the analytical part AND the creative part.

Stop forcing people into boxes.
Engage the whole person.

They will be better off.
The team will be better off.
The organisation will be better off.

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Productivity, is that all there is?

(this blog post originally appeared on my Missing Puzzle Piece Consulting blog in April 2017, and I expressed similar thoughts in a chapter I wrote for KM Matters, which was published early in 2018. I am reproducing it here, because I will be taking my Missing Puzzle Piece Consulting webpage down, and this content is still relevant.)

We seem to have spent so much time in the last 100+ years trying to drive efficiency and effectiveness into our processes. How to do things faster, with more quality, with better outcomes, reduce waste, reduce re-work. These are not bad things, but in our push to be effective and efficient many of our organisations have removed time for reflection, for questioning, for considering alternatives out of the process.

That’s not to say that there hasn’t been a lot of innovation in the last 100+ years, there most definitely has been. Whole areas of study have been developed/discovered, new technology is being developed all the time, but what about the “smaller” things, everyday things. What happens when we take away the time to think and reflect? We do things by rote, not thinking about if that’s the right thing to do, we get tired and suffer burnout, we start to make mistakes and treat people badly because we have focused on efficiency and effectiveness to the detriment of the system as a whole (see United Airline’s complete failure to respect passengers  (https://fortune.com/2017/04/11/united-airlines-video/ and https://innovationexcellence.com/blog/2017/04/17/innovating-for-a-worse-customer-experience-insights-from-united-airlines/ and https://www.theblaze.com/news/2017/03/27/united-airlines-bars-teens-from-flight-for-failure-to-meet-dress-code-social-media-erupts/)

How do we bring that space for reflection, for some humanity back into our activities? By introducing time. Time for reflection, time for learning, time for asking questions, time for talking to other people, time for doing things differently, time for experimenting. Time.

Posted on

Productivity, is that all there is?

We seem to have spent so much time in the last 100+ years trying to drive efficiency and effectiveness into our processes. How to do things faster, with more quality, with better outcomes, reduce waste, reduce re-work. These are not bad things, but in our push to be effective and efficient many of our organizations have removed time for reflection, for questioning, for considering alternatives out of the process.

That’s not to say that there hasn’t been a lot of innovation in the last 100+ years, there most definitely has been. Whole areas of study have been developed/discovered, new technology is being developed all the time, but what about the “smaller” things, everyday things. What happens when we take away the time to think and reflect? We do things by rote, not thinking about if that’s the right thing to do, we get tired and suffer burnout, we start to make mistakes and treat people badly because we have focused on efficiency and effectiveness to the detriment of the system as a whole (see United Airline’s complete failure to respect passengers  (https://fortune.com/2017/04/11/united-airlines-video/ and https://innovationexcellence.com/blog/2017/04/17/innovating-for-a-worse-customer-experience-insights-from-united-airlines/ and https://www.theblaze.com/news/2017/03/27/united-airlines-bars-teens-from-flight-for-failure-to-meet-dress-code-social-media-erupts/)

How do we bring that space for reflection, for some humanity back into our activities? By introducing time. Time for reflection, time for learning, time for asking questions, time for talking to other people, time for doing things differently, time for experimenting. Time.