 Dave
Snowden has a lot of nerve. The founder of the IBM Cynefin Centre
doesn't stop at saying that collecting 'best practices' and most other
accepted Knowledge Management activities are largely fruitless (he
makes an exception for standard practices in highly prescriptive jobs,
and proven, authorized practices in high-risk and high-security
situations). He is almost as disdainful of many of the idealistic goals
of Personal Knowledge Management -- helping front-line workers to do
their jobs more simply and effectively and to find experts they can
draw on and network with. If the tools to do PKM aren't adequate, he
maintains, the answer is to create better tools, not show people how to
use deficient ones (and creating tools is IT's job, not KM's). One of
the things he thinks KM should be doing is helping management
understand and lead their organizations more effectively. Management
is, after all, the group paying for organizations' KM activities, and a
group that is, in most organizations, far from happy with what KM has
delivered. Snowden argues that the best way for KM to help management
is to be a kind of 'cultural anthropologist' in the organization you
are working in or advising.
One of the ways anthropologists study and understand tribes is by
listening to and gathering stories. Analogously, Snowden says, it's
important that KM people get out and spend time on the front lines
really understanding what the organization's real stories are -- not the ones that appear in the mission statement or the company newsletter, which say what management wishes
the company culture was, but the peer-to-peer stories that truly define
the organizational culture, drive what people really believe and do and
how they act, and make the company, for better and
for worse, what it truly is. To gather those stories, you must be as
honest as an anthropologist, not try to do it surreptitiously, because
people only tell the real stories to people who have gained and earned
their trust. Snowden has developed very sophisticated and rigorous
processes for doing so, which he details in his 'masterclass' called Using Narrative in Organisational Change,, which you can now buy on CD-ROM.
In Thomas King's book The Truth About Stories,
King argues that if you want to change a culture, you need to change
its story, because that's all a culture is. I don't know that Snowden
would disagree, but he would argue, I think, that changing an
organization's real stories is not so easy. That's why mission
statements don't work -- they're wishful thinking, myths that
management would like to believe everyone buys and is motivated by, but
really aren't. If you're in management, he says, you don't change the stories, he says, you understand them, then you act on them, and then you make them your own,
retelling them in your own way so that you show the people in the front
lines of the organization that you understand the real culture of the
organization (and the real problems of front-line workers). In so doing
you harness the astonishing power of 'true' stories.
Snowden is acutely aware of the overt class distinctions in Britain
that make trust, and hence collecting stories, hard to achieve. While
some of us in Europe and North America might argue that our class
distinctions are not as formidable barriers as they are in the UK, I
think this would be a mistake. Americans, I have observed, make a great
effort to pretend that class distinctions don't exist or are permeable,
by allowing everyone to use first names, for example, when in fact the
hierarchies are at least as strict as they are in the UK. The only real
difference is that the determinants and clues of status are subtler --
a bit more tied to wealth and the circles you move in and a bit less
pre-determined by heredity. But trust is still deepest peer-to-peer and
extremely hard to earn and sustain between management (or their
henchman consultants and head-office lackeys) and front-line people.
That is perhaps why management is in a constant quandary over
decentralizing -- it clearly improves productivity, innovativeness,
morale and work effectiveness, but it allows people that management
doesn't really trust more control and autonomy, and perhaps even allows
them to develop -- heaven forbid -- their own
organizational culture. The reality, as Snowden argues, is that
management is never in charge of organizational culture, that people
behave the way they do partly because they've learned it's the most
effective way to do their
unique job and partly in their own self-interest, and not because it's
in the procedure manual or the role description or aligned with the
mission statement or the strategic plan.
Once you have collected the true stories in an unbiased manner (Snowden
carefully explains how to remove bias, so you don't get 'fed' just what
you want to hear or put your own personal 'spin' on the story), the
next step is to act on them. Stories tell management important
information about what works, and, more importantly, what doesn't work,
in the organization. A lot of stories are about how people have solved
problems that management hasn't addressed, or which management has in
fact created. These are often
very comical or very heroic stories that not only have important
messages for management, but illustrate exemplary behaviour that
management may not realize it's not rewarding, or actually inhibiting.
It is critical, Snowden says, to make sure you understand the stories,
and to collect and organize and ponder a lot
of stories, before charging in and making changes that misconstrue the
organizational culture, impede rather than help, and destroy forever
the trust that the story-gatherer built up to capture this critical
information.
And finally, once management has acted carefully and conscientiously on the learnings from the stories, they can actually make these stories their own, not
by retelling them in the same words and context as they heard them
(that would be disingenuous, a form of intellectual property theft),
and not by appropriating them
and making models and heroes of their protagonists (that could make the
poor protagonists look like head office plants), but by conveying the same messages and lessons
with stories from their own personal work context. Crafting such
stories is a complex, rigorous and skillful process, and explaining
this process takes up much of Snowden's 'masterclass' time. There are
different types of stories, like fables, myths and viruses, each with a
different purpose and different construction (the course provides
templates of each). Even more important is the testing of stories by
telling and having others retell them until they are perfected. The
impact of an executive telling employees a real
story about the organization, credibly and powerfully, can be profound,
even transformational. Just imagine -- instead of the boss telling
his/her people what to do, and evaluating them on his/her perception of
their 'performance' in doing so, picture the boss explaining that
he/she understood exactly why his/her people were doing what they were
doing, and offering constructive ideas on how management could make the
employee's job easier and more effective. Management supporting the
staff instead of the other way around. Hey, I know it's a 90s idea and
is out of fashion again these days, but stories, properly collected and
interpreted by trained KM practitioners, can make it possible.
I hope Dave won't object to my sharing one of his stories to illustrate
this -- it's hard to write about stories without at least one example.
He describes a group of public service utility workers who are
subjected to a consultant's efficiency review, which leads to them
being given fewer work breaks and being given networked PCs to allow
them to save time travelling into the office for paperwork between
jobs. What the consultant didn't realize (and what the careful
collection of stories finally revealed) was that these workers shared
vital information about how to do their jobs properly during these work
breaks and office visits, and this information either couldn't (because
it's highly contextual and needs conversation to convey effectively) or
wouldn't (because of the lack of trust of how stuff posted publicly
might be used by management) be captured in databases or messages on
their new PCs. So the workers found a surreptitious place for
unofficial work breaks and a surreptitious place for 'offline'
documentation of information they wanted to share with peers, 'working
around' the consultant's well-meaning but wrong-headed and
dysfunctional change proposals. [Dave makes this into a long and
wonderful story with a brilliant punch line, a resolution in which
management finally learns from this mistake and turns it to astonishing
advantage, and since I'm not telling a story here, I won't spoil it --
get the CD-ROM to hear the story completely and properly.] But the
point is that the organizational culture is what it is, and usually for
a good reason, and it's vital to understand
that culture by collecting the stories that reveal it, before you try
to change processes or behaviour, or the change effort will inevitably
fail, as almost every organizational change effort does.
I got out of the KM business last December, and since then I've toyed
with the idea of becoming a new-age KM or PKM consultant, but then
decided I'd had enough of this well-intentioned but
endlessly-struggling discipline. But I recognize that there's still
important KM work that could and should be done. While I agree that PKM
needs better tools much more than it needs process improvement
consulting, I still think there is much promise in Personal Productivity Improvement
as an offshoot of KM. And now Dave has convinced me that the exercise
of capturing and interpreting and acting on an organization's real
stories would be worthwhile, especially for large organizations. But I
think calling it Cultural Anthropology or Story-Gathering is a
non-starter -- try to sell CEOs something with that woolly a name these
days and you'll starve. What could we call it that would be accurate
and still compelling to CEOs who don't, yet, get what it's all about?
|
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
