Following is a recap and concatenation of my speeches to the C2:
Connect & Collaborate conference and the CRKN annual conference (and welcome to attendees of these conferences):
I began by telling the story about how I came to be Canada's first CKO,
and the value propositions, strategy, and content format that most
companies had adopted for Knowledge Management (KM) in the mid-1990's:
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1st
Generation KM
1995-2005
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2nd
Generation KM
2005-2015 |
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Reduce cost,
Improve customer relationships,
Accelerate employee learning,
Improve technology ROI,
Increase employee retention
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Find, contact
& contract with people more effectively,
Tap the wisdom of crowds
(close info gaps, improve quality of decisions and accuracy of
predictions, improve business processes, assess causalities),
Facilitate
virtual collaboration,
Improve the context & understandability of information
Understand why things are the way they are
Improve K-worker effectiveness
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Users contribute best practices
to large central repositories for re-use to reduce costs
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Stories
and conversations automatically canvassed from shared personal
repositories for learning and
discovery
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Mostly text, organized by
subject (taxonomy)
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Graphic
& multimedia, organized by application (ontology)
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Acquire, store, add value, disseminate (Just in Case)
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Connect,
canvass, synthesize (Just in Time)
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The graphic at the top of this post illustrates the old and new KM models.
Why did we largely fail to achieve the first-generation KM value propositions?:
- We set unreasonably high expectations
- We over-relied on voluntary user contributions to
repositories
- The content we harvested was largely context-poor
- The Tragedy of the Commons (no one took pride of
ownership in shared repositories)
- We
allowed technology companies to co-opt the term KM for software, to the
point many companies started to think that is all KM was about ("which
KM solution software should we buy?")
As a consequence, in recent years:
- Many KM business conferences have been canceled for lack of interest
- Some KM departments have been folded back into IT, HR or marketing
- Private sector KM budgets, headcounts have been slashed in many companies
- There has been a drop in new content, user satisfaction, and use in some companies
- And online, the frequency of mention of KM peaked two years ago
I
remain surprised at the number of companies that are just now taking
the plunge into KM and seem fated to make the same mistakes -- focusing
on aggregating contributed content and 'integrated solutions', instead
of on connection to people and on their knowledge in context in simple, intuitive, stand-alone apps.
In
our rush to achieve illusory cost savings and productivity improvements
from first-generation KM, we failed to take into account very human
'information behaviours' that impede the sharing of knowledge and
collaboration. From the original list of a dozen or so such behaviours, my KM colleagues and blog readers have suggested many more, and the list now stands at 23:
- Bad
news rarely travels upwards in organizations (shoot the messenger, and
if you do tell the boss bad news, better have a plan to fix it already
in motion)
- People share information generously peer-to-peer,
but begrudgingly upwards ("more paperwork for the boss"), and sparingly
downwards ("need to know") in organizational hierarchy -- it's all
about trust
- People find it easier and more satisfying to reinvent the wheel than re-use other people's 'stuff'
- People only accept and internalize information that fits with their mental models and frames (Lakoff's rule)
- People
cannot readily differentiate useful information from useless
information, and feel overwhelmed with content volume and complex tools
(info overload, and poverty of imagination)
- The true cost of
acquiring information (time wasted looking for it) and the cost of not
knowing (Katrina, 9/11, Poultry Flu etc.) are both greatly
underestimated in most organizations
- People know more than they can tell (some experience you just have to show) & tell more than they can write down (composing takes a lot of time) (Snowden's rule)
- People
grasp graphic information more easily than text, and understand
information conveyed through stories better than information presented
analytically (we learn by analogy, and images and stories are better
analogies to our real-life experiences than analyses are)
- Most
people want friends and even strangers to succeed, and enemies to fail;
this has a bearing on their information-sharing behaviour (office
politics bites back)
- Managers are generally reluctant to admit
they don't know, or don't understand, something (leads to
oversimplifying, and rash decision-making)
- People are averse to sharing information orally, and even more averse to sharing it in written form, if they perceive any risk of it being misused or misinterpreted (the better safe than sorry principle)
- People don't take care of shared information resources (Tragedy of the Commons again)
- Internal
competition can mitigate against information sharing (if you reward
individuals for outperforming peers, they won't share what they know
with peers)
- Some modest people underestimate the value of what they know so they don’t share
- We
all learn differently (some by reading, some by listening, some by
writing down, some by hands-on), and people won’t internalize
information that isn’t in a format attuned to how they learn (one size
training doesn't fit all)
- Rewards for sharing knowledge don't work for long
- People
won’t (or can’t) internalize information until they need it or
recognize its value (most notably, information in e-newsletters is
rarely absorbed because it rarely arrives just at the moment it's
needed)
- People don’t know what others who they meet know, that
they could benefit from knowing (a variant on the old "don't know what
we don't know" -- "we don't know what we don't know that they do")
- The people with the most valuable knowledge have the least time to share it
- People seek out like minds who entrench their own thinking (leads to groupthink)
- Introverts
are more comfortable wasting time looking for information rather than
just asking (sometimes it's just more fun spending 5 hours on secondary
research, or doing the graphics for your powerpoint deck by trial and
error, than getting your assistant to do it for you in 5 minutes)
- If important news is withheld or sugar-coated, people will ‘fill in the blanks’ with an ‘anti-story’ worse than the truth
- People
will find ways to work around imposed tools, processes and other
resources that they don't like or want to use (and then deny it if
they're called to account for it)
We're just starting to
identify some ways to compensate for these dysfunctional information
behaviours (numbers in brackets refer to the behaviour numbers above,
that these work-arounds address):
- Flatten the organization, and devolve decision-making authority (1, 2, 13, 21)
- Develop mechanisms for anonymously communicating bad news (1)
- Use ‘red/yellow/green card’ type mechanisms in meetings to convey disagreement and misunderstanding (1, 10)
- Provide staff with informal places to meet and exchange information with peers (2)
- Use templates to make reusing knowledge easy, and other mechanisms to make sharing knowledge exciting and fun (3)
- Provide
more information in graphic, dynamic model, mindmap, single-frame and
story formats, and in weblogs and other context-rich 'containers‘ (4,
5, 7, 8, 15)
- Use stories and other formats that convey the
facts but accommodate the users’ personal context and let them draw
their own conclusions (4,15,20)
- Develop better filters for information, and better ways of organizing/indexing/archiving it so it for later re-use (5)
- Keep information tools simple and intuitive (5)
- Find better ways of abstracting and canvassing for information (5, 17)
- Expand risk management programs to assess the cost of not knowing (6)
- Tap the 'wisdom of crowds' (10)
- Study complexity theory to understand how oversimplification can lead to disastrous decisions (10)
- Personal productivity and communication skills coaching (10, 18, 21)
- Replace centralized repositories with mechanisms that securely search users’ hard drives (12)
- Change reward systems to recognize group rather than individual contributions (13)
- Find processes to draw out wallflowers whose voice is rarely heard in organizations (14)
- Eliminate
reward and performance evaluation processes that encourage people to
hoard or fight over credit for information and ideas, or interfere with
collaboration (16)
- Use social network maps to pinpoint key knowledge connectors and info transfer bottlenecks (16, 19)
- Employ ‘knowledge stewards’ to transcribe knowledge of busy SMEs (19)
- Develop mechanisms to record, index and archive conversations (19)
- Err on the side of over-communicating rather than under-communicating (22)
The key message here:
The challenges we face today in getting people to share what they know and to collaborate effectively are not caused or cured by technologies, they are cultural
impediments. It's extremely difficult to change people's behaviours
(they usually exist for a reason), so the solutions we find have to accommodate these behaviours, and these cultures, rather than trying to 'fix' them.
As
we strive to achieve second-generation KM value propositions we will
need some very different types of knowledge resources (tools,
techniques, processes) than the ones that are predominantly in use
today. This table contrasts these resources (with links to more info,
screenshots etc.):
In short:
First-generation
KM has vainly sought one-size fits-all integrated enterprise solutions,
which are complicated to use and expensive to change, and which focus
on content + collection; Second-generation KM must look instead to
simple, lightweight, cheap, intuitive, stand-alone apps, which are easy
to use, add or change, and which focus on context + connection. In the
shift from first to second generation KM, the holy grail changes from
cost savings to improvements in knowledge worker effectiveness.
I'd
like to thank the C2 organizers and CRKN for the opportunity to speak
at these events. I think the theme of improving collaboration in the
workplace is a critical one for the future, and C2 is on the right
track with this new program. And CRKN has demonstrated how effective a
focused, well-coordinated KM program can be (improving access,
especially electronic access, of academic and scientific researchers
across Canada, to published scholarly content). I look forward to
opportunities to work with them again in the future.
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MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
