This is an article that I wrote for the next Integritas newsletter, it’s posted now on their website https://www.integritas.ca/news-and-articles/articles/knowledge-management-and-itil/
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.
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.
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?
Agile and Knowledge Management, part 2
A couple of days ago I posted about Agile and KM, this is a part 2 to that post and is a result of a discussion I had at a meeting the day after the presentation.
In the meeting we were talking about the business case for KM and how to best get started once you have some basic level of approval and support, which is to move on to a pilot stage.
Being successful in KM is continually doing this agile cycle: business case, pilot, business case, pilot, each one builds on the success of the previous one, each one is a small, manageable piece of the KM puzzle. Each one matures the people, process, and technology a little bit more. You keep going until the whole organization has adopted KM as a regular and necessary part of its activities and operations and then you continue to evolve and improve your KM activities. While you’re doing all those business cases and pilots, you’re integrating those 10 lessons into the organization’s behaviour.
Thoughts?
Agile and Knowledge Management, part 1
At our Knowledge Worker Toronto event on January 23, 2013 our speaker, Gil Broza, spoke about the human side of Agile. Now, Agile, for those of you who don’t regularly interact with software developers, which I imagine are many of you who read this blog, is about iterative and incremental design and development of software applications. Gil was speaking about lessons that could be learned from the experience of software developers in this area and transferred to other areas of the organization. That activity in itself is a knowledge management activity: knowledge transfer of lessons learned, but I digress.
Gil spoke about 10 lessons that the rest of the organization could learn and apply:
- People are not resources
- Focus
- Nurture the joy of delivering value
- Take small, safe feedback-rich steps
- Mind the physical environment
- The social environment matters too
- Want high-performance teams? Be ready to invest
- Manage less, lead more
- Collaboration rocks
- Human conduct trumps “best practices”
There was a discussion after the presentation and Q&A ended about how this talk fit in with Knowledge Workers/Knowledge Management, this is what I contributed to the discussion: these 10 lessons are about how knowledge workers like to work. In the KM consulting that I do, I often have a section in the report about knowledge workers, especially when I’m working with an organization that is hierarchical. Knowledge work and knowledge management thrives in a flatter organization model, one where sharing and working together is expected, and the silos of a hierarchy are detrimental to achieving the goals of the organization.
Anyone else have any thoughts?
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?
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
Collaboration versus Command and Control
This post is about differing management styles and approaches to not just knowledge management but to business and ultimately life.
Do we believe there is a limited “pie” and so we need to compete and create hierarchies to control it (whatever “it” is in our own particular case) or do we believe in working together to make the pie bigger and be content with our own slice of pie, however big or small that may be?
As a small business person, I am not particularly interested in growing my business to be bigger than it is. I like doing consulting and giving focused, specialized service to my clients, I don’t need, nor do I want to grow my business to 25, 50, 100 or more people, I wouldn’t be able to do what I like to do in those scenarios. If a client or potential client wants services that I don’t offer, say development work for a particular software platform, I am perfectly willing to refer them to someone I know who specializes in that work rather than do it myself, or hire someone to work for me to do it for the client.
In my KM practice I often talk with people about what it takes to be successful with KM; people are often looking for that “magic bullet,” but there is none. It takes hard work to be successful with KM in any organization, but the more open and collaborative the organization is, the more likely it is to be successful.
Being open and collaborative is hard for a lot of people, especially for those who believe in a limited “pie” and hierarchy. Being open and collaborative goes against everything they believe in–command and control. They believe the worst about people, that people have to be told what to do, that without that command and control structure people will not do their jobs. They believe there is a limited “pie” and they are going to compete and they are going to win by whatever means possible, because that is the way the world works. Except that it’s not.
If you assume the worst about people, you get the worst; if you assume the best, you get the best, that is the way the world works. At least that is the way my world works, and the way the world that I want to live in works.
Being open and collaborative helps us all work together to produce a desired outcome, because we want to, because we believe in it, because we trust and respect ourselves and our colleagues. It makes a bigger “pie” possible, it also helps us to be content with the slice of “pie” we have.
Bigger is not better, more is not better.
So when I see KM people behaving in a command and control fashion, it confuses me. How can they be good at implementing and managing KM in an organization with behaviour like that? It smothers KM and sharing to be controlled. KM and sharing grows exponentially when it is given space (Nonaka’s ideas around Ba come to mind) and is allowed to happen; when it is supported and enabled, not controlled. Maintaining that openness is hard, it’s hard to have a lack of solid ground under us, we want the certainty of the rules and the ground, but to be successful in KM and in life we have to be okay with that uncertainty.
It takes a lot of self-knowledge and self-esteem to be okay with uncertainty and to manage in that way, but it’s the way to get the most out of your KM program and life.
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.