Category: Innovation

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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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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.

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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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Topics and Trends from KM World 2012

I attended KM World 2012 in Washington, DC last month, for the first time since 2006 (when it was still in San Jose, California). Let me first just say that I enjoyed the new location very much, not just because it’s a much shorter flight for me, but it seemed more intimate–easier to meet and talk to people and find my way around. I did miss being able to visit all my friends in the Bay Area, but I will get out there again.

Okay, so on to what I learned and observed at KM World 2012…

I think one of the big things I observed was a shift away from all the talk of technology, don’t get me wrong, people still talked tech, but I found less of an emphasis on it this year and much more emphasis on the value of the network, i.e. the people-to-people connections. Certainly any of us who have been doing KM for a while know that this is the case, that technology just enables and supports the activities of the network, but for most of the last 15-20 years we have had to fight against the idea that technology was the silver bullet in KM, that if an organization implemented the right technology they would find a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

Other themes:

  • Mobility and Internal Social Media
  • Internal Communications (consistent and repetitive communications via multimedia channels)
  • Strategic Alignment (km must always align with the business strategy of the organization to be successful)
  • Measurement and Value (everyone is measuring trying to determine value, but everyone is also still measuring things differently, but that’s OK.)
  • The importance of
    • Governance
    • Serendipity
    • Complexity/interconnectedness of KM
  • The DIKW pyramid is dead. Or is it?
  • Don’t fall prey to echo chambers in your organization
  • People’s knowledge goes beyond their job description which is untapped capital
  • The power of influence by friendship through peer networks is real
  • Seek forgiveness, instead of permission
  • Ask yourself daily what your km clients would answer to the question, “What’s in it for me?”

Some of the presentations and keynotes are posted on the KM World website, https://kmworld.com/Conference/2012/ and Dave Snowden’s closing keynote is on his website, https://cognitive-edge.com/library/more/podcasts/km-world-2012-washington-dc-closing-keynote/

Finally, I have to thank Daniel Lee for his notes/thoughts on KM World, which I have incorporated in this post as well as in a presentation I did for Knowledge Workers Toronto and is posted on Slideshare.

 

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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.