In previous generations, knowledge,
'know-how', was taught by the foreman, the professional, or the artisan,
to the apprentice or articling student, on the job. Most people learned by
following the example of the master or expert. In those days, performance
evaluation was easy, because the boss always knew more than his or her charges.
Today that has all changed. We live in such specialized times, with such
high staff turnover, that most employee 'know-how' has been accumulated
from a variety of sources in different organizations, and the boss rarely
knows as much about his or her employees' specialized roles and functions
as the employees themselves do. In today's world, the most common and
effective way for an organization to 'create knowledge' is to hire it.
The modern organization therefore uses three new, looser methods to standardize
how things get done, shown on the chart above:
- Tools & Technologies:
Forms and software can compel employees to do certain things in a prescribed
order. To the extent 'intelligence' is embedded in these tools and technologies,
some modest, mostly-generic learning can also be achieved from their use.
Of course, some technologies automate processes completely, obviating the
need for employees. Some robots can even 'learn' from their mistakes.
- Methodologies and Processes:
Although most organizations have scrapped SOP manuals, since there are
so few 'standard procedures' anymore, many organizations teach new recruits
standard methodologies. As employees advance to more senior positions and
move from company to company, these methodologies get diffused and tweaked,
and simply become, for each individual, 'the way I do this'.
- Culture Change Programs:
Communications, training, measurement systems, reward & recognition
programs and 'internal marketing' are the 'soft persuasion' techniques that
organizations use to try to teach people how to do things, and get them to
do them in a particular way. In today's workplace most in-house training programs
are soft-skills training. Except during periods when rewards are especially
high, these programs are usually ineffective at getting compliance, and their
effectiveness at transferring knowledge depends utterly on the need and motivation
of the employee learner, which is generally not very high.
So what you have is organizations where everyone is doing different
things, differently. It is therefore not surprising that internal knowledge
transfer in organizations is abysmally low, and most 'knowledge management
systems' designed to facilitate such transfers are spectacular failures.
Even 'best practices' databases, once sold by consultants for thousands
of dollars, have fallen from favour, as companies realize that business practices
are now so specialized and individualized that someone else's 'best practice',
which evolved in the unique context of its developer's work history and style,
is unlikely to be recognized as valuable, let alone usefully adopted, by
another company, division or employee.
And how about benchmarks? Many organizations say they want performance
and process benchmarks to see whether they are doing things the best possible
way, and the objective is a good one. But since every part of every business,
indeed every individual's job, is increasingly unique, benchmarks have largely
become meaningless even as they have become harder to calculate. In fact
trying to get department X of company B to achieve a benchmark
attained by the similar department of company A is likely to lead
to dysfunctional behaviour, to cause more harm than good.
So how does management function at all in such chaos? Increasingly, the
answer is by defining roles clearly, setting goals and objectives, and offering
help if wanted on how to achieve these set goals and objectives,
and then getting out of the way. Pragmatic managers realize that things
happen in most organizations for good reasons that are probably not obvious
to them, and if a goal isn't achieved it probably wasn't achievable. One
CEO I know calls it 'management by loose frameworks and constant communication'.
If the shareholders aren't happy with performance, the manager may try to
use one of the three techniques above to bring about behaviour change: New
technologies to automate something being done poorly or inefficiently (or
the simpler "if form XJ1 has not been properly completed after each job,
the employee's pay cannot be computed"); new methodologies to increase adherence
to a preferred process; remedial training etc. But for the most part, the
answer in business when things go awry is the same as it is in sports: change
the players or fire the manager.
What does this mean for the struggling, once-hyped discipline of 'knowledge
management' ? Here's a 7-point strategy for knowledge managers to cope with
what Peter Drucker calls the greatest challenge of the 21st century: Improving
the productivity of 'knowledge workers' (i.e. everybody):
- Focus knowledge and learning systems
on 'know-who', not 'know-how'. People get appropriate context,
get what they need more easily, and learn faster, by talking to experts rather
than looking for knowledge in databases or course curricula. If the front-end
of both your intranet and your learning programs is a well-organized list
of the company's experts, and their contact information, your people will
be well served.
- Introduce new social network enablement
software and weblogs to capture the 'know-who'. Corporate
directories are often obsolete and incomplete. Job titles and job descriptions
rarely tell the knowledge-seeker what their person really does. Organization
charts rarely reflect either de facto expertise or de facto
networks. The key is to get every expert in the company to capture as much
of what they do and know in a personal weblog or similar repository.
If it's personal, it's likely to be current, accurate, and complete, and
to convey the context of the user's expertise -- centralized repositories
rarely offer any of these advantages. Then use some of the leading-edge social
software now being developed to analyze the weblogs and construct
expertise finders and other tools to effectively connect knowledge-seekers
to experts.
- Keep only selected, highly-filtered
knowledge in your central repositories. The number one
complaint of employees in leading knowledge-driven organizations is "I can't
find anything I'm looking for". In central repositories, less is more. Get
rid of anything that isn't very current. Provide abstracts for all centrally-stored
knowledge. Summarize, distill, analyze, synthesize to reduce documents to
their essence. When in doubt, leave it out. Recognize the 80/20 rule and keep
only the best 20% of what is available. Keep it only if the re-use value proposition
is obvious. Index and organize it by potential (re)-use, not by subject
taxonomies.
- Don't overlook the value of plain-old
'data'. The mining of raw high-quality data about customers
and employees can produce extraordinary insights and opportunities. Data is
not knowledge, but much valuable knowledge can be extracted from it.
- The bibliography may be more valuable
than the document itself. The bibliography tells the reader
where the expert went to get needed information. It can be a roadmap for
others doing similar research, and can have a shelf life well beyond that
of the document it was used to prepare.
- Don't wait for people to look
for it, send it out, using 'killer' channels. Just because
people complain of e-mail and information overload doesn't mean they don't
want and need timely, valuable information. If you're a database manager,
before you store anything, think who might find it valuable now and
send it out. And send it out using the one or two 'killer' channels that
users prefer: maybe e-mail, IM, voice-mail, whatever people complain least
about in your company. And never broadcast -- send individual messages
to one person and start the message with their name. Personalized stuff gets
read.
- Create an internal market for
your offerings by giving valuable stuff away. Analyses,
research studies, trend studies, news synopses, surveys can be hugely valuable
to both internal and external customers, but they're hard to sell in the abstract.
Give one away free to a customer and they'll immediately see its value. It
seems counter-intuitive, but it works.
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