APQC’s knowledge management podcast featured Stephanie Barnes talking about the future of knowledge management, and it’s radical!
Check out the podcast here: https://www.podbean.com/ew/pb-5ex4h-11134a5
Integrated Whole
First, a bit of context. I have spent the summer (July and August 2021) listening to audiobooks and reading a few that weren’t available as audiobooks. Adding to my thinking on Radical KM and filling in some gaps that I have recognised in talking to people over the last year, since I came up with the name. I’ll put a book list at the bottom of this blog post.
The bits and pieces have been interesting and provided new insights and “ah-ha” moments, but I have struggled to make sense of how they fit together, even though it was clear to me on an intuitive basis that they did. Then this morning, upon waking, I had the insight I had been waiting for.
What Radical KM is, is a model for an integrated whole.
Western thought and philosophy divided things up, separated mind and body, the analytical and creative, science and the arts. It was efficient and effective, it was rational to do it that way. Emotions, and intuition didn’t get “in the way”, we could focus on the really concrete things, the things we had data and logic to support. It separated us from nature and has lead to the environmental and climate catastrophe that we are now facing.
In separating these activities and putting them in their own box, we have lost a lot of behaviours:
Sustainable mindset
- A sense of purpose
- Enlightened self-interest (considering others as well as ourselves)
- A Long-term orientation
- Presencing (achieving highest potential while staying in the present moment)
- Courage
- Integrity
- Open-mindedness
- Transparency
Systems Thinking
- See the bigger picture
- Appreciate the details
- Maintain a balance
- Keeping things simple
Relationship building
- Understanding across cultures
- Appreciate and embrace diversity
- Network
- Meaningful Dialogue
- Empower stakeholders
- Measure improvements
These are all behaviours that ideas and models like Agile, Design Thinking, “The New Work”, bringing your whole self to work, and authenticity, seek to re-ignite and bring into the workplace. They are what gets lost when we separate whole into the parts, they are the magic that happen in the space in-between the boxes.
As the world become more VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous) these are the skills we need more of.
These are the skills we learn by tapping into our inner artist, whether that art is painting, or cooking, drawing or gardening, theatre or jogging. Art helps improve our attitudes around being curious, what we are passionate about, our confidence, and our resilience. By having an artistic practice our abilities to perceive, reflect, play, and perform are all improved.
Radical KM is about tapping into our inner artist to re-ignite these skills and abilities that have been ignored in favour of focusing on the concrete and rational. It’s about making us, our organisations, and ultimately our Western society whole again. It’s about making an integrated whole.
Appendix: Book list
- A New Culture of Learning: cultivating the imagination for a world of constant change by Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown.
- Artistic Interventions in Organisations: research, theory and practice; edited by Ulla Johansson Scöldberg, Jill Woodilla, and Ariane Berthoin Antal.
- Artful Creation: Learning-tales of Arts-in-business, by Lotte Darsø.
- Artful Making: what managers need to know about how artists work, by Rob Austin and Lee Devin.
- Creative Company: how artful creation helps organisations surpass themselves by Dirk Dobiéy and Thomas Koeplan.
- The Value of Arts for Business by Giovanni Schiuma.
- Orbiting the Giant Hairball: A Corporate Fool’s Guide to Surviving with Grace by Gordon MacKenzie.
Additional books, from July and August 2021
- Play: How it Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul by Stuart Brown M.D., and Christopher Vaughan
- A Whole New Mind: why right-brainers will rule the future by Daniel H. Pink
- Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative by Ken Robinson
- The Master and his Emissary by Iain McGilchrist
- The Lost Knowledge of the Imagination by Gary Lachman
- Invisible Women by Caroline Criado-Perez
- Leading from the Emerging Future: from Ego-system to Eco-system Economies by Otto Scharmer and Katrin Kaeufer
- Dance of Change by Peter Senge, Art Kleiner
- Spiral Dynamics Integral by Don Beck (abridged audiobook)
- Thinking in Systems: A Primer by Donella H. Meadows
- The Knowledge-Creating Company: How Japanese Companies Create the Dynamics of Innovation by Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi
- The Wise Company: how companies create continuous innovation by Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi
- Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential Within Us All by Tom Kelley, David Kelley
- Manifesto for a Moral Revolution: Practices to Build a Better World by Jacqueline Novogratz
- How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett
- Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett
- Power of Not Thinking by Simon Roberts
- Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art by Stephen Nachmanovitch
- The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety: Defining the Path to Inclusion and Innovation by Timothy R. Clark
- How the World Thinks: a global history of philosophy by Jullian Baggini
- The Silk Road: a new history of the world by Peter Frankopan
Radical KM, article published, course launched
My article on Radical KM was published on July 13, 2021 by the academic journal, Frontiers in AI, AI in business, in their research topic on Knowledge and Innovation Management. You can find the article here.
I am also partnering with KMI (KM Institute) to offer a certification in Radical KM. The course is one of their Knowledge Specialist courses and is called Creative Knowledge Management (we called it that because we felt it was a bit more descriptive). You can find out about the course on their website, here.
Creativity, Scrum, Agile, and Design Thinking
In the spring I completed Scrum Master certification (PSM I), and right now I am taking a design thinking course. I had delayed both of these courses because they describe the way I work anyway, and I couldn’t see the point of wasting time and money on them. So, why am I doing them now? Because they keep coming up in discussions I’m having, so I thought I would see what all the fuss is about.
They’re both frameworks/methodologies, and useful, as far as they go, but what occurred to me as I worked on the Design Thinking course, was that they are both trying to teach people to be more innovative and creative, to be more curious, however, they have taken an analytical approach to innovation and creativity, to monetize it, I suppose. These frameworks have taken the space for reflection out, the space for emotion out, just like our education systems, they have taken the creative out of being creative and made it analytical.
If we really want to be creative, we need to engage the creative parts of our brains, not the parts that do analysis and process work. We need to engage the whole person, not just half, and that’s what Radical KM does. It recognises that the creative has been disengaged and forgotten, and it needs to be re-learned and re-engaged if we are truly going to be creative and change the ways our organisations function.
If we want our organisations to reap the benefits that agile and design thinking promote, we need to make space for true creativity, not just creativity that’s been analysed to death.
How is your KM Program Helping you Through the Chaos of Coronavirus (COVID-19)?
Do you see your KM program as a key partner in your strategy to deal with the chaos of Coronavirus or just an extra, a nice to have, a luxury, and not a serious component of your business and emergency preparedness strategies?
If you see them as a key partner, are they helping you with disaster planning/emergency preparedness? Are they making sure everyone has access to the same knowledge and information when they are working from home as when they are in the office?
Are they making sure people know how to use the tools at their disposal for collaboration, knowledge creation, and sharing?
Are they helping you map key knowledge resources within your organisation?
Are they making sure the knowledge that can be documented is? How about retention, are they helping you make sure that knowledge is retained and protected?
Are they helping you prepare for the time in the future, when all of this is a distant memory in a couple of years. The future of work is here, KM can take a lead and help facilitate the change.
Now is the time to be engaging KM in these activities, not later, not “when things calm down”, now. There is no good time, start now, take the first step now.
Brick Wall Chats
I have decided to start a new video series.
I’ve had nice/good/supportive feedback from the videos I’ve been doing with John Girard (the KM and Creativity series) and Paulina Larocca (the Creativity Chats series) but scheduling time to record them with John and Paulina has been come increasingly challenging because of our schedules and the timezone differences, so, I’m going it alone.
I’ve decided, at least for now, to call the new series: Brick Wall Chats because of the background I’m using in the videos. People seem to like the background because it’s colourful and different and interesting, which is why I liked it too.
Right now (June 3, 2019), I have recorded 15 videos and will release one per week. The topics range from the business to the personal: metrics and digital transformation to how I have come to be doing the work that I am doing.
If you have a topic suggestion, feel free to get in touch, the same goes if you have comments or feedback about any of the videos. You can subscribe to my channel here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCQHNT4UDtM4o-Dcqd9cLGw?view_as=subscriber.
Looking forward to sharing my thoughts and experiences with you.
What I do….in my own words
I have written this as a response to someone who is curious about what I do, but hasn’t been able to talk with me, I share my slightly edited response at his request.
First I have to start with a link to the videos on my website with a recommendation that you watch them, I’ll try not to repeat myself here.
The work I do is centred around helping people to rediscover their creativity. I work with organisations and individuals to do this.
With individuals we engage in a variety of creative activities and discussions about how they can be more creative in both their personal and professional lives. This conversation typically goes over a series of sessions during the course of a period of weeks or months.
In the case of organisations I work with them to look at ways to make their staff more creative, which leads to innovation so that the two are tied together in an organisational setting more so than in personal setting. We look at ways to bring these activities into the daily activities whether it’s in meetings or in the office environment in general– something they can do in their offices or cubicles or in a meeting room with some other people, we look at doing workshops on a regular basis as in an organisational setting it is more about culture change and employee engagement, which as we both know, studies have shown that increased/improved employee engagement has positive effects on the organisation and its profitability and success.
I come to this work through a path that started in accounting and information technology, then knowledge management. There’s more about that in the first part of the second video in the Creativity Chats series that I am doing with Paulina Larocca, so I won’t repeat that here, you can watch the video, here https://youtu.be/1jxUgHyTRDk
Our exchange started from your question about employee disengagement and ways to decrease it; usually people talk about increasing employee engagement rather than decreasing employee disengagement. I know I sent you a blog post from another site as well as the one on mine and that you are looking to put some dollars behind that. I think if you take figures from the Gallup studies that look at the consequences of increasing employee engagement by 10%, for example, it is going to give you the numbers you’re looking for its just that it’s the opposite of how you been thinking about it.
The creative leadership work that I talk about on my blog can be seen as a contributing factor in improving employee engagement so you may want to consider that too.
Anyway I hope this all helps let me know if you have questions.
Best Regards,
Stephanie
Creativity and Innovation for KM Programs
If you know me and/or have been following this blog, you know that since mid-July I have shifted my focus to creativity and innovation, something that I have been working on for the last six or more years.
As I have shifted focus I have reached out to some of you in my KM network, because I wanted to share the news with you and renew our connection. I also asked for a favour of some feedback on what I was doing or if you knew anyone who might be interested in what I’m doing. Most of you were happy to help, and a few of you admitted that you couldn’t, which was a perfectly acceptable answer.
Anyway, with that first round of feedback and conversations, I realised that I wasn’t doing a good job of conveying my excitement over my shift, and why I thought I was particularly relevant for KM programs. I’ve taken a few weeks to reflect on how to do this better and received some coaching about how to approach it and have developed a short slide deck, which you can see below.
I’d appreciate it if you have a couple of minutes (there are only 6 slides), to take a look at it and let me know what you think.
Thanks!
Collective Intelligence
Today (September 27, 2018), is the second time I have come across the term, “Collective Intelligence” in the last week. I liked it the first time I heard it and the first time I heard it was in reference to what knowledge management had evolved into at a large, international organisation.
The second time I came across it was earlier today, on the website of an organisation who seems to be doing work like I am doing: creativity, innovation, resilience, autonomy.
I am sure there are lots of other places that it is used, I’m sure the words aren’t new and the ideas expressed in both situations aren’t new. But what attracted me, was that they describe what I have done and what I am doing, which somehow reassured me that I wasn’t crazy for doing what I’m doing.
So, are you trying to capture, leverage, tap into the collective intelligence of your organisation? It seems that anecdotal evidence suggest using a combination of knowledge management activities, combined with creativity to give you innovative, unique results to help you realise your potential: Entelechy.
We need to talk, I can help you!
It’s been 4 weeks…
It’s been 4 weeks since my transformative conversation with Paulina Larocca, and what a month it has been!
I am ever so grateful that we connected, I have Kristen Peterson to thank for that, and I am grateful that the other coach I had asked to work with me refused, for reasons which are his own.
In the last month I have started a new webpage (you’re on it) as well as a new Facebook page. I have written several blog posts about the shift and what I’m doing now. I have spoken to a great group of women at a Future Females event here in Berlin, and have lots of people/organisations talking to me about doing workshops and coaching with them, I am so excited! I am also working on a series of videos, which will be created over the next few months to share my thoughts and experiences with creativity and innovation, so keep an eye out for those.
If you have questions about any of this feel free to get in touch, even (or especially if) you are not in Berlin, this work is definitely not tied to location!
Looking forward to sharing this journey with you!