conversation matters

Do We Really Need So Many Kinds of Social Media?

I recently spoke at the 2009 Army Knowledge Management Conference. In preparation for that event I had the opportunity to spend some time looking at the way the Army is using social media including:
• How CompanyCommand is using milSpace
• The new process in place at the Center for Army Lessons Learned (CALL) to disseminate lessons learned as well as new techniques for collecting and analyzing those lessons
• The wiki where Army doctrine, in the form of ATTPs, is available for soldiers’ input
• Teams of Leaders (ToL) used with the Stryker Brigade Combat teams that are known for their speed and agility
• Blogs that Generals as well as soldiers have been writing
• The sixty Battle Command Knowledge System (BCKS) Professional forums that have been so successful
• Synchronous chat rooms where Generals are available to the frontline
• Army strong stories for recruiting
• And much more

The Army has a lot of social media efforts going on and my preliminary look really only touched on a small portion of those efforts. The question many Generals are asking is, “Do we need all these different forms of social media?” It’s a question I’m asked a lot and one I tried to address in my presentation at the Army KM Conference and reiterate in this blog post.

I addressed the issue, not by concentrating on social media per se, but rather asking, “What ways of engaging knowledge are important to the Army right now?” and then backing into the question of what that means for the types of social media that might be useful.

My preliminary list of the ways of engaging knowledge include:
• Seeking/providing Authoritative Knowledge
Authoritative knowledge is knowledge that has been vetted and has a stamp of approval on it, for example, the kind of knowledge CALL provides, or the Military Review. We go to these sites when we are seeking an answer that is known - it’s a matter of looking it up.

• Exchanging Knowledge Sources
This is a efficient way to find informative articles, useful websites, interesting blogs, and pictures, based on the recommendation of others. Flicker and Technorati are good examples.

• Sharing and Learning from Others’ Experience
BCKS, CompanyCommand, CAVNet and other community forums do a great job of making the “how to” knowledge people have gained from their work experience available to their peers.

• Dealing with Ambiguous Knowledge
Dealing with conflicting information, or information that could have several possible meanings. On A-Space some one would get wind of a conversation between two individuals who were supposedly enemies and ask their peers from other agencies, “What do you think this means?” “Is this dis-information?”

Reformulating a problem – help in seeing an issue in a new way. I might ask you how could you find the ROI on this initiative, and you might respond, “I think that’s the wrong question.” Embedded in any question are the assumptions of the person doing the asking and if those assumptions are incorrect, then the most useful response is to reformulate the question.

• Collaborating on a Task
There are many joint tasks where knowledge needs to be pooled or coordinated to get the task accomplished. This is additive knowledge rather than the ambiguous knowledge discussed above.

• Creating New Knowledge
This is about creating knowledge - ideas that have not existed before but are generated in a conversation between people who come at an issue from different perspectives. There are lots of examples in the corporate world, e.g. Apple was able to bring together ideas from the ipod and the cell phone to create an iphone. It is the confluence of different ideas that creates something never before considered.

The second step in my thinking was to identify what factors make each of these ways of engaging knowledge work effectively and further to identify what social media tools exist that allow for those factors. The chart I created to look at that question lists three factors in the rows as a place to start.

Factors that lead to effectiveness of different social media:
• Weak vs. Strong Ties
Strong and weak ties are about the depth of relationship that exists between users. Up until Granovetter’s work in the early 1970s, it had been taken for granted that strong relationships between people were always beneficial. Granovetter wrote a classic article called, The Strength of Weak Ties. He said you have strong ties to people you are in contact with on a regular basis - people you know a lot about and intentionally cultivate. You hold weak ties with people when you know who they are, but may not know them personally. What Granovetter discovered was that weak ties produce greater diversity of thought than do strong ties. You and the people you work with every day tend to have the same information and draw on the same information sources. Strong ties require time and energy to maintain – you can have only so many strong ties. But you can have many more weak ties and with much less investment of your time. For some ways of engaging knowledge, strong ties are necessary. But for many types of on-line knowledge engagement weak ties are sufficient. Of course the strength of ties is a continuum, not an either or but the strength of ties is important in thinking about social media.

• Similarity to other users
How similar users are depends on the context in which they work and on their ways of thinking, often born out of the discipline they engage in.

Cognitive diversity, as Scott Page illustrates in The Difference, implies something different than how we generally think about diversity. Our general meaning of diversity is differences in terms of race, age, gender, or status. But cognitive diversity relates more to differences in thinking, people who have a different perspective and use different rules of thumb in making decisions. Page describes an amazing on-line site called InnoCentive where companies post difficult technical problems that they have been unable to solve themselves. It is often a team of two or three people from different disciplines, like a biologist, a structural engineer, and a chemist who work together to solve those problems. The problems are so complex that they seem to require diversity to solve – which makes sense because if people from one discipline could solve them, the company would already have an answer.

There are other ways that people can be dissimilar that are important to knowledge engagement. One is the context in which the person functions. There are also differences in level of expertise, and differences in jobs or interests.

• Facilitation or Support
This factor is important for two reasons. First both are cost factors and second, facilitation is often a key role in increasing the strength of ties when that is needed.


I’ll discuss several of the columns in the chart using these factors. I’ll start with one of the most familiar, Sharing and Learning From Others’ Experience. For this kind of engagement to be effective users need to have a similar task or job that they are interested in doing well, but they need to have different experiences related to that job or task. If all the users did the same task in the same way with nothing new happening, like people on an assembly line, there would be very little need to share. So Sharing and Learning From Others’ Experience is most useful, in fact critical, in a context where the environment is continually changing such as occurs in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Users in a community forum don’t have to have strong ties – I put medium ties in that column - but the relationship does need to be strong enough to engender a belief that users have good intentions toward each other – that others won’t intentionally steer each other wrong, or think poorly of each other because of a response made to a question. It actually takes some doing to encourage to that level of trust. Which is the reason active facilitation is so necessary in community forums - to set the tone and create the esprit de corps among users.

There many forms of social media in which weak ties work well – that is so with Seeking & Providing Authoritative Knowledge. Users themselves don’t need ties with each other because their trust is not in each other, but in the system. They know that the information on the site has been thoroughly vetted – has a stamp of approval from subject matter experts or higher ranking officers. Even with Wikis like Intellipedia, it is well understood that if something goes up that is incorrect the “crowd” will quickly correct it – so wikis, like Wikipedia and Intellipedia are also viewed as authoritative, but that authority derives from a different source.

Let me contrast the Sharing and Learning From Others’ Experience column with the Creating New Knowledge column. One person can write up their experience and share it with others in a community forum – that’s a kind of one to many exchange. If it is new knowledge that is needed then the users have to be in conversation. And that is a very different kind of exchange, not just the turn taking familiar in community forums of, “here is what I did” and then, “We did something similar.” In a conversation that Creates New Knowledge each person has to actively question the other to gain deeper understanding of that person’s reasoning. They have to share their own reasoning and explore where the differences lie. To get that kind of depth you need a synchronous medium – ideally face to face. We are getting better with media that may have those characteristics. Cisco’s Telepresense is getting pretty close, and Second Life may get us there – a format the Army is considering for it’s Virtual University.

Cognitive Diversity is the real key to Creating New Knowledge. It is putting together ideas in a way that is new to both parties who are thinking about it – and it is the clash of those ideas that leads to new knowledge. That kind of conversation demands strong ties. Although social media does not yet provide participants that kind of environment, what it can do is make a problem that needs solving visible to those that have potential solutions. And then it can help people find others with diverse perspectives to work with them on that problem. So imagine if a General said, “I have a problem with IEDs in Iraq that do xyz” and he was able to post that problem behind the firewall, where clever soldiers might see it. Then those clever soldiers could gather a small team of diverse perspectives that could address that issue in ways none of them would have been able to do on their own.

Understanding Ambiguous Knowledge demands medium level ties. But this kind of tie is not so much about trust, as it is in a community forum where experience is being shared. In a community what is being shared is, in fact, a part of me, what I have learned often through bitter experience. I don’t share that easily. But with Understanding Ambiguous Knowledge, the knowledge I need from others calls on their intellect - their analytic ability that is much less personal than the lessons of experience. With Understanding Ambiguous Knowledge it is credibility rather than intention that is paramount. In A-Space users build a reputation of expertise both by what they write and by having their bona fides available. By reading responses from a recognizable person and by being able to check that person out, a sufficient level of connection is created.

On the bottom row of the chart I have suggested social media that would meet that need and factors described.

I’m just at the beginning of looking at this issue so don’t have a lot of advice for the Army at this point about what social media to invest in, but I will make one suggestion that I think is critically important.

The Army has always been a leader in transferring and sharing knowledge. I think way to lead in the world of 2.0 is to create a culture of social software experimentation.

One of the difficulties of trying to figure out what social media to use for what purpose is that purpose is not built into social media tools. Rather purposes emerge as users develop a need and see a way that a specific need can be met through a type of social media. Twitter, which was initially seen as a way for friends to keep up with each other’s daily activities, is now a major factor in conferences. Attendees use it to keep others informed about what is happening, and, by using hash marks, twitter provides a permanent record of the interaction at a conference. EUCOM has used twitter in this way. It is also being used effectively for speakers to alter what they are lecturing about in real time, based on the tweets that are coming to their iphone or PDA. The developers of twitter could not have imagined how it might be put to use.

Likewise Facebook, which was conceived as a way for college students to stay connected to friends, served as an organizing structure for protest movements in China during the Tiananmen Square anniversary. The way intelligence analysts are using A-Space goes beyond even what the developers of that software conceived.

The use of Twitter by the U.S. State Department during the coup d’état in Madagascar occurred only because that agency was experimenting with the social tools before they “needed” them. You can’t experiment with what you don’t know about which is why General Caldwell’s emphasis on social media in the Command and Staff General College is so important. Major Pat Michaelis created CAVNET because he had been a part of CompanyCommand – he knew how communities worked – but he created a new kind of forum with CAVNET.

When you create a culture of social software experimentation you certainly get some behavior you don’t want, but you also gain capabilities you hadn’t dreamed of. Make available social software and give people the freedom to experiment and amazing things will happen.

A Wiki for Generals

Previously I wrote about the process and benefits of having Soldiers update doctrine through the Army’s new wiki. Eventually there will be 230 manuals up on the wiki. There are 100 additional manuals that won’t be put up. These manuals contain the fundamental approach and language of the profession – the Army’s enduring principles. Here are a few examples of the kind of knowledge in those 100 manuals.

Fundamental Principle 3-2. The Army's operational concept is full spectrum operations: Army forces combine offensive, defensive, and stability or civil support operations simultaneously as part of an interdependent joint force to seize, retain, and exploit the initiative, accepting prudent risk to create opportunities to achieve decisive results. They employ synchronized action-lethal and nonlethal-proportional to the mission and informed by a thorough understanding of all variables of the operational environment.

Definition:
5-6. While command is a personal function, control involves the entire force. Control is the regulation of forces and warfighting functions to accomplish the mission in accordance with the commander's intent. It is fundamental to directing operations.

Construct:
7-7.1. The Army conducts five information tasks to shape the operational environment. These are information engagement, command and control warfare, information protection, operations security, and military deception.

If having soldiers contribute to a wiki in order to keep Tactics, Techniques and Procedures (ATTPs) up-to-date, then there surely is a corresponding benefit for the Generals to keep the policies and enduring principles up-to-date in those 100 manuals that will not become ATTPs. In this time of accelerated change any organization’s principles and strategies require constant examination and challenge.

Too often in organizations senior leaders view KM initiatives including new social media as something they need to provide for the frontline – but do not see it as something they need for themselves – a process that would enhance their own ability to develop new ideas and knowledge among themselves. But the opposite is true, it is at the policy and strategy level that organizations are in most need of the kind of on-going involvement and engagement that the new social media provide.

The Army has a many great examples of Generals participating in knowledge management activities, like Major General Michael Oates holding open chats with the troops, and Admiral Stavridis who blogs regularly and participates on Facebook.

There are even more examples of Generals actively supporting knowledge management activities. The strategic communication that General Caldwell has embedded in the Command and General Staff College is excellent, not to mention General Dempsey’s instigating putting the ATTPs up on the wiki.

These examples show, that as in the past, the Army is leading the way in its knowledge management initiatives. Generals are involved in KM through their efforts to learn from the front line. However none of the examples are about the Generals learning with and from each other.

All Generals have colleagues and trusted advisors with whom they exchange thinking and ideas. That is the one-to-one exchange that is necessary, but that we have learned is not sufficient when dealing with issues of such complexity. With complex issues there is a need for in-depth discussion that makes use of cognitive diversity that can only be achieved by engaging in an on-going dialogue among those most impacted by the issues.

It may be that Generals in the Army already have a top-secret web-site where they hash out the principles of how to fight this new kind of war we are in. But if they do not, then having a corresponding Wiki up where the principles that guide how the Army fights OCO available for an in-depth discussion that might result in a change to doctrine, would seem to be of equal importance to the frontline addressing ATTPs.

This is an issue, not just in the Army, but across most organizations. The task for KM professionals is how to design systems and initiatives that could assist those at the top in creating much needed new strategic knowledge and to share with each other the knowledge they have learned from their experience.

If the Army Can Put Its Doctrine Up On a Wiki, You've Got No Excuse

A few weeks ago I had the privilege of watching an astounding event - a room full of Soldiers typing Army doctrine onto a wiki so that Soldiers in the field could make changes as they were discovering new and better tactics in the midst of fighting a war.

There were a couple of amazing things about this event. One was that it was happening at all, because to the Army, doctrine is close to sacred. It is written by doctrine specialists and then verified and authenticated at many levels within the hierarchy. So opening doctrine up to Soldiers is a very big deal. The second amazing thing was how quickly it happened – just three weeks after the General said, “Make it happen.” the first eight manuals went up. A hierarchical organization, of one million plus employees, just shouldn’t be able to move that fast!

But let me begin at the beginning of the story.

TRADOC, the US Army Training and Doctrine Command, has the task of writing and maintaining more than 600 field manuals that specify how the Army is to fight as well as conduct the many support tasks needed to keep soldiers going. Everything from how to drive a humvee to how to throw a grenade has doctrine that specifies the approved way to do it. TRADOC oversees the doctrine, but it is the Proponents, each of which has responsibility for some vital process (Fires, Armor, Acquisition, Chaplin, Field Artillery, etc.), that have the SMEs with the in-depth knowledge. So they have the last word on doctrine about their subject.

Conditions change very fast in Iraq and Afghanistan so it has become increasingly difficult to update the manuals as quickly as change occurs. Faced with overwhelming change as well as diminishing resources, the newly appointed Commander of TRADOC, General Dempsey, made a bold stroke. He declared that not all of the 600 field manuals needed to be doctrine produced by professional doctrine writers. Many of the manuals, he suggested, contained tactics and procedures that could be more easily kept current by the soldiers in the field. And the best way to do that was with a Wiki! The Army had recently developed a trio of social media, milWiki, milBook, and milBlog – so had already got their feet wet with Enterprise 2.0.

General Dempsey assigned the Combined Arms Doctrine Directorate (CADD) the task of determining which of the 600 needed to remain as field manuals and which could go up on the wiki as Army Tactics, Techniques and Procedures (ATTPs). CADD was able to differentiate the “how to” knowledge, for example how to set up a checkpoint in Iraq, from the more conceptual knowledge that provides enduring principles for the Army. CADD quickly determined that 230 of the 600 field manuals could become ATTPs and be available on the wiki for Soldier input.

So then the question was how to get the ATTPs up on the wiki and more importantly how to get Soldiers contributing. The answer, a cooperative effort between The Battle Command Knowledge System (BCKS) and CADD, was a series of Kaizen events. The Kaizen events were a focused, intense, week-long change initiative where change in the organization began to happen during the event.

Business as usual for the Army, or for that matter for most organizations, would have been to pull together a tiger team to identify the issues that needed to be resolved, figure out how to fix them, and then handover the solution to Leadership to be implemented.

The Kaizen events the Army ran were not “business as usual,” rather they were “learn your way to the answer.” The event brought together the people who would ultimately have to implement the solution – the TRADOC and Proponent doctrine writers. They knew more about where the problems would crop up than anyone in the world, so it was that group that spent the week identifying the issues and making a list of what they and the leaders they reported to needed to do next to get the ATTPs working on the wiki. Top leadership including Lieutenant General Caldwell, Commander, Combined Arms Center, and General Dempsey were there - but for guidance and support - it was the group of implementers that did the heavy lifting. Doctrine is interwoven with nearly every part of the army – a classic example of a complex adaptive challenge. There are legal issues about records management, exceptions to policy that will have to be made, implications for having hard copy for a Soldier to take into the Battlefield where there is often little computer access, how to do search, and on and on.

During the event, legitimate concerns were raised about the feasibility of Soldiers changing doctrine. There were many “What Ifs” brought up: What if the ATTP says, “Be at least 15 feet away from where the grenade lands” and some Soldier decides to change it to 5 feet and then his comrades die because of his change? What if some Soldier that didn’t graduate from high school, writes in something with poor grammar and spelling? Or worst yet, what if that Soldier has important knowledge to contribute but doesn’t because of embarrassment about his/her writing skills? “What Ifs” are not to be taken lightly, but for many of these concerns the Army will have to “learn its way forward.”

While all this was happening, in a nearby room Soldiers were busy putting the manuals up on the wiki – the idea being, we won’t really know what the problems are until we start using the wiki. General Dempsey dubbed these first ATTPs as a pilot, to give everyone the freedom to make mistakes and to learn from those mistakes as they went along. The beauty of not having a perfect plan is that you don’t have to stick to it - it can change as you learn.

The second Kaizen event, with another group of Proponents, occurred three weeks later and at the end of that event there were 16 ATTPs up. And one more event is planned so that every Proponent will have at least one ATTP up. They will have all experienced how long it takes to get an ATTP up on the Wiki – before the event that was a great unknown. And as the weeks go by Proponents are beginning to learn how to monitor changes and what kind of monitoring is needed. The complex issues raised at the events are beginning to be addressed by the many parts of the organization that own them.

Being the Army, of course there was an AAR at the end of each event. The comments were not surprising, but were clearly heartfelt. One Colonel said, “Those of us who write the doctrine and manage the process are here in this room, being asked for our thinking about what would work and what would not work – and that puts us way head of the game.” The event uncovered how very many parts of the system this change will impact, which was helpful, if a bit overwhelming. Most importantly, the implementers in the room left with a clear perception that Leadership, because they were in the room, had a clear understanding of the complexity of this change effort and of the difficulties the Proponents will face – Leadership was learning along with everyone else.

One of the open questions is whether Soldiers will take the time to go to the wiki to enter a new tactic or procedure they have found helpful. I asked Jim Benn, Deputy Director of CADD, whether the soldiers in the field wanted a voice in the doctrine. Had they been asking for a wiki or some way to participate in changing doctrine? His response was that soldiers recognized that what they were doing in theatre was not what they were taught in the schoolhouse based on the current field manuals– so thought TRADOC ought to do its job better – but didn’t think of themselves as needing to be the ones to change it.

Since the beginning of July there have been 15,000 visits to the site – so Soldiers are curious and coming in to see what’s going on. There have been about 80 content changes across the 16 ATTPs that are up on the Wiki. And there have been some 40 discussions.

Those figures raise the question, Is that enough? If you look at the typical participation rate of communities and wikis, that is, 90% readers, 9% users who contribute periodically, and 1% making most of the contributions – it seems okay. But the Army is hoping for much more participation than that. However, my guess is that most Soldiers will not contribute from the battlefield; they’ll wait until they’re back. They’ll think of something that ought to be changed while writing up their AARs or attending training between deployments, or even when they look something up and see that what they read doesn’t match their experience. I do think they will contribute, but the Army may have to put some active knowledge management process in place to facilitate contributions.

With doctrine on the wiki the Army will achieve two major benefits. Deputy Director Benn gave voice to one, “If the process works as we conceived it, we will have a body of professional military people that are more engaged in codifying their operational principles - taking some ownership. We will get all the benefits from that expanded involvement, that is, we would become a smarter and more educated force.”

And the second benefit will be the Soldiers’ increased confidence in the viability of the ATTPs they are reading because their colleagues, just back from deployment, wrote them and those guys know what they are talking about.

And I predict the Soldiers will find other ways to benefit from having the ATTPs up - benefits not yet conceived of by General Dempsey or Deputy Director Benn. Because that is the nature of social media that once it is available, uses for it emerge that the promoters would never have imagined.

This has been an amazing change initiative to watch. Each time I reflect on what the Army is doing, I am brought back to the conviction that if the Army, with the all inertia it has to overcome, can make this change happen within a few weeks, then all of us ought to take a hard look at what we can and cannot make happen in our own organizations. Certainly this initiative has a lot going for it, the Army’s strong commitment to transformation, a General who had the courage to commit his organization to a course of action in the face of some legitimate concerns, and a group of very savvy change agents in BCKS who knew this could not be just a top down effort.

Where Knowledge Management Has Been and Where It Is Going- Part Three

In this three part series I‘ve classified the evolving landscape of knowledge management into three categories. The first category is Leveraging Explicit Knowledge and is about capturing documented knowledge and building it into a collection - connecting people to content. The second category is about Leveraging Experiential Knowledge and it gave rise to communities of practice and reflection processes. It is primarily focused on connecting people to people. The third category is Leveraging Collective Knowledge and it is about integrating ideas from multiple perspectives. Its medium is conversation in both its virtual and face-to-face forms.

Although I have suggested dates for each category, the dates are intended to represent the rise of new thinking about organizational knowledge, not necessarily when those changes occurred within any organization. In each section I identified some of the authors that have led the new thinking. My premise is that KM professionals, who read these books and blogs, are influenced by this thinking and then use those ideas to create new KM strategies within organizations.

I speak to the third category in this post. I lived through part one and two thus have some confidence in the summation I wrote for each. For part three, I am in the midst of the journey, as we all, and dealing with the changes as they arise. It is harder to get a perspective on a conceptual frame in the midst of a change than it is to look backward – but here goes.

Leveraging Collective Knowledge
Collective knowledge is not a new term to knowledge management, but in the past it has been used in an additive sense, as in “all the knowledge an organization has.” I am using it in quite a different sense here, to mean the knowledge that is derived from the confluence of diverse perspectives and data from across an organization and that is brought to bear on important organizational issues. But unlike the hierarchical process of passing everyone’s ideas and data up the chain of command to someone at the top who would then made sense of them, with collective knowledge the sensemaking is done jointly by those who hold those many perspectives and who own the data. It is the joint sensemaking that is a hallmark of Leveraging Collective Knowledge.

A second hallmark of Leveraging Collective Knowledge is that the knowledge that results from joint sensemaking is created or constructed. Unlike scientific truths, which are there all along, just waiting to be uncovered, collective knowledge does not exist before the conversation that gave rise to it. It would be a mistake to think of this knowledge, constructed through sensemaking, as being the right answer because collective knowledge is continually being adjusted as new data and new patterns in the data come to light. Collective knowledge is not a definitive answer, rather it is understanding that is adequate for the organization to plan and take its next action.

Just as all organizational knowledge cannot be thought of as explicit or experiential, not all knowledge can be thought of as collective knowledge. Collective knowledge is simply another type of knowledge that we as knowledge professionals need to be able to address under specific circumstances. There are three factors that are creating the need to add a focus on collective knowledge to the existing types of knowledge organizations already attend to:
• Dealing with increasingly complex issues
• Erosion of cognitive authority
• Failure to apply knowledge management to the work processes of top and middle management

What these three factors call for from knowledge management professionals in response is the:
• Inclusion of cognitively diverse perspectives
• Integration of the organization’s knowledge, and
• Increased transparency

I will start by describing the three factors that are moving us toward Leveraging Collective Knowledge and then turn to the responses that are emerging.

Dealing with increasingly complex issues

The need for Leveraging Collective Knowledge arises out of the increasing complexity that organizations face. Globalization, the speed of technological change, and the accessibility of information all impact the level of complexity and increases the number and diversity of players that must be taken into account in many organizational actions.

With increased complexity organizations have to deal with issues for which there are no scientific answers, and often are not even past experiences to draw upon. Heifetz calls these issues, adaptive challenges. Many other theorists (1) have written about such challenges, calling them variously, wicked problems, messes, and puzzles. For simplicity I will use Heifetz’s terms here, adaptive challenges and technical problems.

Characteristics of adaptive challenges are 1) their unpredictability, 2) the lack of agreement on exactly what the problem is, and 3) differing views about what constitutes an acceptable solution. Examples of adaptive challenges are, organizations that have merged and now must create a new and joint culture; hospital systems faced with an interminable nursing shortage; the anticipated retirement of thousands of workers in the government sector; and companies that, in order to survive, must change from selling products to service.

Heifetz contrasts adaptive challenges with technical problems that are predictable and solvable. Technical problems can be addressed by methods and tools that the organization has already developed. If, for example, a well is to be dug in a new oil field, there are established procedures; if a special issue of a journal is to be published, there are steps outlined that will put the issue out on schedule and within budget; if a new cell phone is to be developed, there are well defined phases of the development process. Technical problems have a solution that can be objectively evaluated as right or wrong, which adaptive challenges lack. Technical problems do not require a fundamental change in methods or tools. More importantly, the people who solve technical problems can function within a known set of assumptions about how work gets done in the organization, as well as what kind of behaviors are needed to make that work happen.

With adaptive challenges existing assumptions, methods, and tools are useless. They may even get in the way. Dealing with the complexity of adaptive challenges requires altered assumptions, different methods, and yet to be invented tools. And beyond that, adaptive challenges often necessitate that employees learn and practice new behaviors. Because they are so difficult, many adaptive challenges remain unresolved for years. In some organizations each successive senior management team repeatedly invents solutions for the challenge – solutions that the rest of the organization is unable to implement.

In most organizations KM efforts have been successful in solving technical problems using the processes developed for Leveraging Explicit Knowledge and Leveraging Experiential Knowledge. However KM professionals are becoming aware that there are critical organizational issues that these processes are not effective in addressing. GM is a good example. GM had an excellent KM program that resulted in significant process improvement but did not deal with the very complex issues that brought GM down. For KM professionals to deal with the strategic issues of organizations, they need a very different set of knowledge management tools.

The Erosion of Cognitive Authority

Within organizations and more generally in society, we have experienced an erosion of cognitive authority, that is, a reduction in the belief that those in positions of authority have some understanding or capability that the rest of us lack - that they have knowledge we can trust. We have certainly had adequate justification for this erosion; in medicine - the increasingly awareness of medical errors; in religion - the sex scandals in the Catholic Church; in politics - senators who break the public trust; and of course, in the field of management - CEOs who have shown they had neither the interest of stockholders nor employees at heart.

We have paid CEOs huge salaries, justified in large part by the belief that they had some unique knowledge that the rest of us did not have – a belief in the hero leader who alone would make a difference to an organization’s success. Since 2000 that assumption has increasingly been called into question. Ken Lay (Enron), Bernard Ebbers (WorldCom), William Aramony (United Way), Bernie Madoff (Cohmad Securities Corp), and a host of others have shown us that not only the justification for huge salaries was misplaced, but even among CEO’s whose integrity is unquestioned, there is the growing recognition that, as individuals, they lack adequate knowledge to deal with the complexity of organizational issues.

Failure To Apply Knowledge Management To the Work Processes of Top And Middle Management

Knowledge management processes have largely been focused on the frontline. Middle management for the most part has been ignored, as has senior management. These levels have had few, if any, processes designed to learn from each other or through reflection.

We, as knowledge management professionals, have somehow assumed senior leadership did not need to be concerned about how effective their own knowledge processes were. It is as though their positions somehow made them immune from the needs that were so clearly evident in the frontline. The role senior leadership has played in knowledge management has primarily been to provide the resources needed to apply knowledge management to the frontline, but not to itself.

Yet many of our greatest organizational problems have occurred because accurate knowledge did not flow upward and because senior leaders withheld knowledge from those at the frontline. The inclination of employees to withhold or delay bad news and to distort the seriousness of problems is well known. Likewise the tendency of senior management to withhold knowledge from employees out of concern that it will distract them or reduce morale is all too familiar. The historical examples are legion, from Watergate to the Challenger disaster to Enron. Detert and Edmondson note, “Small, everyday failures [to speak up] have the potential to substantially harm organizational performance, especially when weaknesses in internal processes or changes in the environment go unnoticed.” These are knowledge management issues that knowledge management professionals have only now begun to address through Leveraging Collective Knowledge.

The Challenges KM Professional Face in Leveraging Collective Knowledge
As we move into this third category of knowledge management, Leveraging Collective Knowledge, KM professionals are faced with the reality of 1) a lack of tools and permission to address the knowledge issues of top and middle management, 2) increasingly complex organizational problems that existing KM processes cannot impact, and 3) a general loss of belief that management has answers to address the complex issues facing organizations – formidable challenges.

However, as in the past when KM professionals have faced new challenges, new ideas to deal with these issues have already begun to emerge. Theorist and leading thinkers are writing about these issues and about what needs to change to address them. The terms that are appearing with enough frequency to portent the future of KM are cognitive diversity, integration, transparency and the term that connects all three, conversation.

In leading edge organizations we see knowledge management professionals focusing on the:
• Inclusion of cognitively diverse perspectives
• Integration of the organization’s knowledge, and
• Increased transparency

Inclusion of cognitively diverse perspectives

The good news is that there is knowledge to address the complex, adaptive challenges that organizations are facing. The bad news is that the needed knowledge does not lie within the hierarchical structure, which is too limited in perspective to resolve such issues. What is required to address adaptive challenges is cognitive diversity, which by definition lies outside of any organizational stovepipe and often even outside of the organization’s boundaries.

It may seem odd to address problems of complexity by adding more complexity, but the much quoted principle of requisite variety holds as true now as when Ashby first stated it some fifty years ago; “The internal diversity of any self-regulating system must match the variety and complexity of its environment if it is to deal with the challenges posed by that environment.”

Scott Page, in his book, The Difference, distinguishes cognitive diversity from identity diversity. The latter is related to race, age, and gender; the former is about differences in perspective, interpretation, heuristics, and predictive models and it is the former that is required. Bringing cognitive diversity to an adaptive challenge means involving divisions that may be only tangentially related to the issue, as well as customers, suppliers, academics, and others external to the organization. Putting the best minds within a division on an adaptive challenge does not resolve those challenges because the people within the division share a similar way of thinking.

Page cites InnoCentive as an example of using cognitive diversity to address complex issues. InnoCentive is a kind of match-making organization that brings together complex problems that organizations very much want solved, with people who think they might be able to solve them. InnoCentive claims to make available “160,000 of the brightest minds to help you build a better product.” Organizations that pose problems pay only for success, but offer the innovators who do find solutions five to six figure rewards for their successes. The problems that InnoCentive posts are so difficult that only a third of them are ever solved, however Page notes that when they are solved it is because innovators, from several disciples, e.g. chemist, biologist, biophysics, work together on the problem. If the problems were solvable from a single perspective, then the organizations that pose the problems would have already found a solution.

KM Professional’s Role in Addressing Cognitive Diversity

One of the important new tasks of knowledge management professionals is to encourage the use of greater cognitive diversity in addressing adaptive challenges. That task begins with helping managers recognize the difference between technical problems and adaptive challenges and then educating them about the knowledge processes that most effectively addresses each. Heifetz’s book, Leadership Without Easy Answers is a good place to start as is his new book The Practice of Adaptive Leadership.

The value of cognitive diversity has been popularized in a number of books the most scholarly of which is probably Scott Page’s, The Difference, and the more readable, The Wisdom of Crowds, by James Surowiecki.

There are a multitude of organizational examples of bringing cognitive diversity to complex issues of which InnoCentive is just one. Other well known examples are, Threadless, Wikipedia, IBM’s Innovation Jams, Netflix Prize, Linux, The Open Prosthetics Project. MIT’s Center for Collective Intelligence has identified 250 examples of collective intelligence. The Center has an excellent white paper which lays out a framework that details when to use what type of crowdsourcing.

Conversation
To Leverage Collective Knowledge just having cognitive diversity in the room, whether virtual or face-to-face, is not enough. To create out-of–the-box thinking there must be some way to integrate the cognitively diverse perspectives – and that comes down to conversation. It is the give and take - the challenge and questioning - among people who are cognitively diverse that creates new knowledge. Johnson and Johnson (see Bringing the Flow of Knowledge to a Standstill by Speaking with Conviction), researchers who study collaboration, say that the synthesis of diverse perspectives comes from being able to hold both one’s own and others’ perspectives in mind at the same time. That necessarily means there has been enough conversation that each person understands the perspective of others well enough to have an intelligent dialogue about the different interpretations of the problem.

Conversation itself hardly needs defining. We have all been a part of many conversations where each of the parties involved is trying to understand the meaning that others are trying to convey. We don’t need training to hold that kind of in-depth conversation, but in spite of our natural ability, such conversations are rare in organizations. Roles, positions, organizational norms, formats for meetings, even physical space, all work against having the kind of conversations we need to have to integrate knowledge from diverse perspectives. What is needed in order to break the unproductive conversational patterns of the status quo is new conversational formats.

Integration of the organization’s knowledge

Convening the conversation that brings diverse perspectives together is a leadership task. Pascale, author of Surfing the Edge of Chaos says, “In such an environment, the task of leadership is to frame the challenge and characterize it in such a way that creates immediacy. Leadership must then draw the community that is affected into tackling the new challenge. By definition, leadership in these situations does not have ‘the answer’; it typically emerges piece by piece from the community as a whole.”

Convening the conversation in order to integrate the knowledge (see The Power of the Conversation Architect to Address Complex, Adaptive Challenges) involves four important leadership tasks:

1. Framing the question –
Framing the topic of the conversation requires posing a question rather than a solution. The question needs to be one that gets to heart of the issue, not just its symptoms. That may require the convener to name the “elephant in the room” – the issue that everyone knows about but no one talks about.

2. Configuring the physical space to serve the conversation-
Most large conference spaces are designed for speeches not conversation. Even conference rooms within most organizations’ walls tend to be furnished with rectangular tables that are more suitable for negotiation or adversarial discussions than conversation.

3. Identifying who needs to be in the conversation -
In considering who to bring together, organizations tend to err on the side of homogeneity rather than diversity. Thinking broadly about who impacts and is impacted by the topic of the conversation is one way to broaden cognitive diversity.

4. Design the interaction
The rule of thumb is that 80% of the time those who have come together should be in conversation with each other, leaving only 20% of the time for presentations and speeches. A design that alternates between small group and large group conversations is the most productive for integrating the organization’s knowledge.

Convening the conversation rather than providing the answer is a new and somewhat problematic role for leadership. Business schools and training programs teach managers that their task is problem solving, so to view themselves as conveners rather than problem solvers is a considerable adjustment.

Ecopetrol

The story I told in a recent post about Ecopetrol is an example of convening the conversation. Ecopetrol’s president, Javier Gutiérrez convened a two and a half day meeting of 200 people to develop a knowledge strategy for Ecopetrol. With the help of some savvy KM Professionals, Ecopetrol brought together a wealth of cognitive diversity in the form of representatives from companies that were known to have outstanding KM strategies.

None of the many representatives presented for more than 15 minutes. The conference as a whole followed the 80/20 rule with eighty percent of the time spent in small group discussion, first in a Knowledge Café format and then using Open Space Technology. President Gutiérrez was in attendance for the whole of the meeting, but not as the authority with a solution, rather as a participant in the many small group conversations where new ideas were being formed. His voice was one perspective among many that came together to create the final strategy. Like the President, all those from other companies who presented also were engaged in the small group conversations, where the real work of dealing with this adaptive challenge began to develop.

A-Space

In my own study for DIA looking at A-Space (a FaceBook-like social media) I describe the way analysts interact with their colleagues to test their own theories and modify their interpretations through on-line conversations they hold in the many workspaces they generate themselves. A-Space and Intelliipedia are making use of the cognitive diversity that exists across the sixteen US Intelligence Agencies to address the adaptive challenges the intelligence community faces much more effectively than any that single agency could do.

True to the concepts of Leveraging Collective Knowledge, Wertheimer, the Assistant Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Analytic Transformation & Technology, convened the on-line conversation by providing the software and support, and by thinking carefully about who to invited into the conversation, but not by telling the analysts what kind of conversation to have.

Convening the conversation takes place both through social media and in face-to-face meetings. Social Media alone will not serve to integrate the organization’s knowledge, because that would disregard the many hundreds of staff meetings, townhalls, and team meetings that occur within organizations where frequently it is adaptive challenges that are being addressed. Those meetings, as well, need to be designed in terms of 1) framing the question, 2) configuring the space, 3) identifying who needs to be in the conversation, and 4) designing the interaction. It will surely become too confusing to organizational members to experience the inclusion of cognitive diversity and joint sensemaking through the internal use of social media, yet within the walls of headquarters to still sit in meetings where managers think they alone must solve all the complex problems facing their units.

KM Professionals’ Role in Integrating Organizational Knowledge

If the leadership task is to convene the conversation, then KM professionals’ task is to help leadership design the meetings, retreats, and conferences, so that they fully leverage collective knowledge. Without assistance such gatherings invariably become a series of speeches or report outs with little conversation to integrate organizational knowledge. KM professionals are employing a number of well-tested designs to help leadership convene conversations.

Peter Block in his book Community speaks eloquently about both the need for conversation and the skill of convening it. In the post, Four Conversations to Address Adaptive Challenges, I outline some of his thinking.

There are, as well, a host of well-defined formats for large group face-to-face meetings such as the one I described at Ecopetrol. I have listed a few here, but it is by no means a comprehensive list.

• Knowledge Café is a conversational format where participants move from café table to café table, dealing with a significant question and gaining perspective on the issue as they encounter different ways of thinking about it. There are a number of versions of this conversational format including the World Café (Juanita Brown & David Isaacs) and the Knowledge Café David Gurteen, who has specialized this practice within knowledge management.

• Future Search is a structured participatory process where organizational members work in groups to scan through the turbulent environments facing the organization for desired outcomes and then generate a strategy for achieving the outcome they have selected. Future Search was developed by Weisbord and Janoff. There are other versions of this process including Real Time Strategic Change developed by Dannemiller Tyson.

• Unconference creates a market place of ideas where anyone can offer a topic for a small working group and participants select to participate in the topic of greatest interest to themselves. In this way the Unconference is self organizing. It is based on the concepts of Open Space Technology originally developed by Harrison Owens. In 2009, 500 people working with social media in the U.S. government, came together to hold the Government 2.0 Social Media Un-conference.

• Appreciative Inquiry is a methodology developed by David Cooperrider at Case Western Reserve. It brings the organization together using interviewing to identify examples of where people have already resolved the complex issue the inquiry is addressing, and then in conversation groups makes sense of why those examples appear to be working and finally finds ways to build on what was discovered through sensemaking.

Increased transparency

There can be no integration without transparency. Unless everyone, who is jointly attempting to make sense of an adaptive challenge, has access to the data and perspectives of others, there is no way to integrate those perspectives. If leadership convenes the conversation, but does not reveal issues like a pending merger or a plan to sell a division of the organization, any attempt to address the adaptive challenge will fail. Likewise if frontline employees are unwilling to reveal the problems and failures they have faced in completing their tasks, the attempt at integration will fail. One of the benefits of using tested formats for such meetings is that they establish an environment conductive to disclosure.

For a senior leader to convene a conversation about an adaptive challenge requires that that he/she be willing to acknowledge, “I don’t have the answer.” That is what Ecopetrol’s president acknowledged by convening the strategy meeting and by participating in it as a member. During the second era, Leveraging Experiential Knowledge, we achieved a kind of transparency between frontline peers. It became acceptable for peers participating in community forums to say, “Does anybody know…..” a tacit acknowledgement that “I don’t know.”

The willingness to ask for the ideas of others constitutes a kind of learning in public. Rather than being embarrassed about one’s lack of knowledge, it is okay to reveal it, knowing that in doing so others in the community will learn as well. Moreover there is a sense of reciprocity that comes from knowing that in another situation, one’s own knowledge will ask be asked for and given.

But there has been no such forum for CEOs or their leadership teams to acknowledge a lack of knowledge in a public way. More typically leaders express concern that being seen as not having an answer lessens their credibility with subordinates. What is needed now is a way for leaders at all levels to re-define their role as convener.

Social media holds great promise for creating transparency. Research indicates that people are more honest about their ideas and concerns when communicating over digital media, than they are in face-to-face situations. In many organizations, organizational members use blogs to talk about their concerns and ideas openly. Because a blog is, by definition, the writer’s own opinion about an issue, much of the need to be politically correct is removed. Where an employee might not send a criticism up through the chain of command, it may seem acceptable to discuss it in a blog or on twitter. And leaders as well are finding ways to test their ideas through blogs and using the comments to expand their thinking. For example, in a recent post on the SiKM list serve, John Hovell of ManTech International Corporation, noted that when ManTech’s new President/COO, who had just come on board, held his first all hands' meeting at Corporate HQ there was a flurry of conversation on Yammer around his vision, strategic direction(s), and the tactical approach.

The US Army has actively encouraged blogging to increase transparency. On MilBlogs alone there are over 2000 blogs written by soldiers – making the military much more transparent.

KM Professional’s Role in Increasing Transparency

KM Professionals need to support the internal use of social media (wikis, twitter, blogs, Facebook, communites) to increase the cognitive diversity brought to adaptive challenges and to increase transparency across the organization.

They need to help leadership understand how social media brings value and the need to allow it grow organically rather than placing requirements or demands on those who use it. The success of social media lies in the conversations that arise out of a personal or team need to engage in a discussion about a particular topic. Even requiring people to join violates the implicit cultural contract to some extent and certainly attempting to control the content is counterproductive. As countless organizations have discovered that requiring people to share their knowledge only results in getting knowledge of questionable value

KM professionals can add value by conducting comprehensive and frequent analyzes of what is being said through social media in order to identify issues (elephants in the room) that are adaptive challenges that need to be addressed. And then making these analyzes available to senior leaders so they can convene the conversation. However, it is also possible for KM professionals to take the initiative to convene needed conversations as a way to demonstrate the value to be gained.

Finally, it would be useful to help managers and senior leaders find or build a community in which admitting a lack of knowledge does not threaten their authority. There are numerous roundtables where this is possible as well as coaching relationships.

The New of Tasks Knowledge Management Professional in Leveraging Collective Knowledge
What has always intrigued me about being a knowledge management professional is our expanding comprehension of what we need to take into account as organizational knowledge. Over the last fifteen years we have continually extended and broadened that understanding. In the first category, we saw knowledge as stable truths based on scientific evidence and we built systems to insure that experts provided needed answers to the frontline workers in our organizations. In the second category we expanded organizational knowledge to include the practical knowledge learned from experience and we built COPs and reflection processes to effectively uncover and transfer that knowledge between frontline workers. And now, moving into the third category we again find ourselves adding to the kinds of knowledge that are critical for organizations to deal with, now to include collective knowledge.

This chart lays out the knowledge management assumptions of each category. All three sets of assumptions are accurate and all are needed. But as our understanding has expanded, we have had to create new tools and processes to address the new type of knowledge we have incorporated. I have tried to avoid speaking of these three categories as eras, because we have not dropped any of the types of knowledge along the way. All remain necessary for knowledge management.

It each column it is the assumptions we make that guide the processes we create. As we attempt to deal with the challenges brought on by increasingly complex issues, the erosion of cognitive authority, and the failure to apply KM principles to the work processes of top and middle management, it is this set of assumptions (assuming I’ve got them right) that will guide us toward constructing the new processes we need.

Summary of Tasks for KM professionals
I’ve summarized the tasks here that I discussed more fully above. I recognize that these tasks are very different from much of the current work of KM professionals, but that has been so with each category. Those who were focused on building knowledge repositories were unsettled by having to learn how to build and support communities of practice, when Leveraging Experiential Knowledge became important.

• If the leadership task is to convene the conversation to address adaptive challenges, then KM professionals’ task is to help leadership design the meetings, retreats, or conferences, based on principles of collective knowledge.

• Encourage leadership to invite customers, suppliers, partners and other externals into the conversations to address adaptive challenges. The organizational tendency is to err on the side of homogeneity. Provide examples of other organizations that have benefited from involving externals.

• Support the internal use of social media in order to increase the cognitive diversity brought to adaptive challenges and to increase transparency across the organization

• Allow social media to grow organically rather than placing requirements or demands on those who use it.

• Conduct comprehensive and frequent analyzes of what is being said through social media. to identify issues (elephants in the room) that are adaptive challenges that need to be addressed. Make this analysis available to leadership. If leadership is not yet ready to convene conversations, KM professionals take the initiative to do so.

• Assist managers to design their regular meetings to be more conversational when they are facing adaptive challenges

• Help managers and senior leaders find or build a community.

The chart at the beginning of this post depicts the three categories along the knowledge management journey that I have talked about in these three posts. To incorporate collective knowledge we don’t have to give up on the scientific knowledge we have, or the experiential knowledge we have come to value, rather we have to accept that there are issues and problems which neither of those kinds of knowledge can address – which require collective knowledge.

There are four arrows at the bottom of the chart. The bottom three summarize the major changes we have experienced from KM’s beginning in the early 90’s to where we are as we move into the future.

• The movement from seeing learning as an individual’s task which is necessarily conducted in private to increasingly seeing learning as something that must take place in public. That there is benefit not only in the product of “having learned” but in the process of learning as well, because that is where new knowledge is created.

• The movement from a need to know to greater transparency. A recognition that knowledge cannot be segmented or walled off from those who are attempting to address the organization’s difficult issues – that everything is connected.

• The movement from seeing management as controlling what content people have access to, to users control of the content that is critical to their needs.

1. Many others have made a similar distinction, Reg Revans cite wrote about the difference between problems and puzzles in a similar vane. Puzzles, he said were problems about which reasonale men could disagree.” Jeff Conklin, in "Wicked Problems and Social Complexity"differentiates wicked and tame problems. Ackoff says,“managers are not confronted with problems that are independent of each other, but with dynamic situations that consist of complex systems of changing problems that interact with each other. I call such situations messes"

A-Space (Facebook-like) Is Making a Difference Across the U.S. Intelligence Community

I'm posting the Executive Summary of a study I conducted with the Defense Intelligence Agency. You can read the full study - all 30 fascinating pages here.

Executive Summary of How A-Space is Shaping Analysts' Work

This report provides an overview of an exploratory scientific, qualitative study conducted by the Defense Intelligence Agency’s (DIA) Knowledge Laboratory in April- June of 2009. The ethnographic study based on twenty in-depth interviews with analysts identifies how analysts are using A-Space and what impact that use is having on their analytic work within DIA’s Directorate for Analysis (DI).

The primary benefit that A-Space brings to analytic work is a venue for seamlessly incorporating cognitive diversity to address complex analytic issues. Research indicates that cognitive diversity, (e.g. different perspectives, interpretations, heuristics, and predictive models) when applied to complex problems, consistently results in more and better solutions.

• A-Space is an environment in which analysts collaboratively create new meaning out of the diverse ideas and perspectives they collectively bring to an issue. Through this collaboration, analysts have the potential to break through long held assumptions to provide new ways of thinking about complex problems.

Analysts talk about A-Space as a setting where they are able to test out ideas and theories. Analysts, faced with a stream of data from a multitude of sources have the task of finding patterns in that data that will be useful to decision makers. Sensemaking is the term used for that human ability to make meaning out of a stream of seemingly unrelated information. It requires creating hypotheses and testing them against the data and interpretations of others. And conversation, with analysts who have diverse perspectives, is the most effective means to engage in the testing and revision of hypotheses. The peer-to-peer environment of A-Space provides a conversational format to engage in joint sensemaking, which may be the most significant function of A-Space in terms of being a human intellectual force multiplier. As analysts experience the benefits of on-line sensemaking conversations, over time, such conversations could become more prominent in the everyday discourse of analysts.

• Networked relationships on A-Space provide a stream of cognitively diverse information without the costly time investment that maintaining strong ties requires

Networking is highly valued by analysts because it provides access to new ideas and diverse perspectives. However maintaining networked relationships is a time consuming activity. The time cost limits the number of relationships an analyst can invest in. The most productive network relationships for gaining unique or novel ideas are not the close relationships among an analyst’s teammates (what sociologists call strong ties) because team/division members tend to have redundant knowledge. Rather the best source of new perspectives and ideas are colleagues in other directorates or agencies who have access to information from totally different sources or provide unique perspectives or interpretation of the existing data. But these more distant relationships (called weak ties) are the most costly to maintain because they require a planned interaction by phone/email/in-person. A-Space, however, reduces the time-cost of maintaining weak ties by providing analysts a way to establish and maintain relationships through frequent on-line interaction in an informal, peer-to-peer culture of mutual trust. A-Space also greatly increases the number of distant network members an analyst can interact with, again without increasing the time cost.

• A-Space is reinforcing the value of asking questions of colleagues, providing analysts the means to uncover flaws in their own data and reasoning

When analysts ask a question on A-Space they are making a tacit acknowledgement that, even if considered the expert on their topic, other analysts have perspectives and data that can add to their line of reasoning or uncover faults in that reasoning. This willingness to be shown to be wrong – to overcome the natural tendency to only seek confirmation - is facilitated by a culture of openness that analysts themselves have developed on A-Space. Through the on-line interaction, counterparts within and between agencies are coming to know each other as valued colleagues. There is a growing sense of trust and a willingness both to help and to receive help from each other.

• A-Space is providing analysts a set of new practices to: 1) build cross agency networks, 2) gain situational awareness, and 3) hold discussions of interpretation, that operate in parallel with the normal production process. These new practices constitute an emerging model that provides a level of cognitive diversity not previously available.

Analysts appear to be making use of A-Space for practices that were either not available or were very difficult to accomplish before A-Space was accessible – practices such as cross agency networking, situational awareness, discussions, and making available highly classified team products. However, practices like co-authoring and coordinating products, which are part of the normal production process are only rarely conducted through A-Space, even though the functionality is available to do so. Thus two models, operating in parallel, appear to be emerging. The challenge for analysts will be to merge these two models over time - bringing greater cognitive diversity into the normal production process and moving co-authoring and coordination more fully into A-Space.

• The non-hierarchal nature of A-Space, results in analysts feeling that it is okay to offer their thinking even if it is not completely formed or thought through, increasing the speed of product development by eliminating faulty hypotheses early on and quickly settling on those that are viable.

A-Space provides the means to test ideas and theories against knowledgeable others and to do so early in the formulation process. Early testing saves both time and effort that would have been spent on those ideas that do not measure up, and it lends support and expanded rationale for those that do. As valuable as offering thinking early on in the process is, it requires a safe environment in which to risk that thinking. A-Space provides such an environment by being peer- to-peer rather than hierarchal. Research indicates that peer-to-peer conversations are consistently more open and trusting than those that involve hierarchy. Discussions on A-Space can be vigorous and critical without being judgmental in tone. The informality of the language and the friendly banter create the feel of a conversation among equals.

A KM Strategy Built on the Collective Knowledge of Ecopetrol

Two years ago I participated in a meeting to develop a knowledge management strategy for Ecopetrol, the state oil company of Columbia, South America. I want to describe it because it has stayed with me as a good example of an organization making use of its collective knowledge. It’s not a perfect example, but it’s one I think back on often.

This was a meeting of the top 200 people in the organization who spent two and a half days talking among themselves about the real issues they were facing at a time of great turmoil at Ecopetrol. The company was moving from being wholly owned by the government to being a mixed stock-holding corporation. Out of that conversation came some amazing plans for moving forward, generated and supported by the participants themselves. Out of that conversation also came professional growth for those involved, new understanding about Ecopetrol and new insight for individuals about how to play their own role in the company.

The organizers invited two keynote speakers who had written books on KM, myself and Larry Prusak. But we were told before we came that we would only talk for 15 minutes! Now Columbia, South America is a long way from my home base in Dallas Texas and that was a lot expense to speak for 15 minutes. It would have been an unsound financial decision on the part of Ecopetrol, except the task I was given was to stimulate the thinking of the participants, not to provide them answers, because the planners for the conference assumed that the answers and innovative ideas they needed could only be found in the minds of those who were going to do the work – an assumption I heartedly agreed with. I had other tasks at the conference, to participate in the small group discussions, to comment on ideas others’ offered, to summarize what I had heard. But each of these tasks I fulfilled from my place in the group, not in front of the room, or as “authority” speaking. True to their intent, my role was not to inform, but to frame issues so that people would comprehend the opportunity and could talk through new possibilities.

Day one was designed to consider a wide diversity of ideas. Those ideas came not only from myself and Larry, but also from a number of speakers that represented organizations from varied sectors who had well-respected KM programs. The presentations of their ideas were also limited to 15 minutes each, but it definitely brought cognitive diversity into the meeting. Following each brief presentation small group conversations were held about the ideas – not the typical Q&A with the presenter, but a conversation among peers- an opportunity to make meaning out of the diverse ideas they had heard.

The morning of day two was convergent - a search for useable ideas, common ground, and limiting the many options they had heard the day before. These were multiple small group meetings using the world café format and focused around the question “What knowledge do we need at Ecopetrol that we don’t have?” The room was set up with 25 tables with a facilitator at each table with participants. There were several rounds of
discussion with people moving from table to table to talk with a new set of people about their ideas. Ecopetrol’s president, Javier Gutie´rrez, participated in the small group discussions. Like everyone else, he moved from table to table offering ideas and listening to others. This act of humility was significant to the participants, it said he was interested in hearing what others had to say and also was interested in giving voice to his own thinking, but not from a position of authority. He was willing to let his ideas rather than his position influence the thinking of the group.

The afternoon of the second day was about constructing actions that Ecopetrol could take. Open Space Technology was used for this section. The ideas from the knowledge café were summarized and posted and participants chose a small group they had the most interest in and worked with that group to identify improvement actions that Ecopetrol could to take to make KM a reality.

The morning of the third day brought it all together with the action summaries from the day before and comments from Larry and I on what we had heard.

Across the whole of the two and a half days, I would estimate 80% of the time was spent in conversation! That is a clear commitment to conversation that leads to change.

The setting for this meeting was as conductive to conversation as a setting can be – open spaces that could be easily re-configured– open even to the outside because of the wonderfully even temperature in Bucarramanga, Columbia. Beautiful views that invited participants to slow down and think together – which of course, is what a conversation is.

I’ve described the technique, the setting, the conditions, but of course what is most important is what came out of these conversations. Out of that meeting came a KM strategy that had the full support of those that had worked together to create it. It was clearly a better strategy than Larry and I, as consultants, could have provided because those who would now implement it had created it.

The Problem and the Fix for the US Intelligence Agencies' Lessons Learned

One of the fascinating task my consulting brings is the opportunity to conduct in-depth studies of complex issues about knowledge sharing in a variety of organizations. This post is about a recent study I conducted for the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) to look at the Lessons Learned problems across the Intelligence Community (IC) and within DIA specifically. Although the study was conducted within an industry that has been publicly taken to task for its inability to learn from its own experience (The 9/11 Commission Report and the Commission on WMD in Iraq) the challenges these agencies face are not unlike those many other government agencies and corporations have to confront.

In this study I examine some of the causes of those difficulties and make recommendations about how the IC might make better use of what they learn from their own experience. With DIA’s permission I have excerpted both the challenges and some of the recommendations from the larger study.

Lessons Learned Challenges Across the IC

1. The individual nature of intelligence work
Unlike the teamwork that characterizes most work in both corporations and government agencies, intelligence work is still largely an activity that an individual analyst or collector conducts independently. For example, performance metrics tend to be based on numbers of intelligence reports from individuals. This view is changing slowly.

Although individual analysts may have suggestions for making changes in how they each get work done, they tend to not see value in coming together to look at the overall process. Simply executing a work process does not produce in-depth understanding about the system in which the process operates, or how to improve it. When personnel both work and are rewarded as individual contributors they perceive little value in joint reflection

2. Disconnect Between Gathering Lessons and Implementing Them
The most frequent concern expressed across the IC is the difficulty of getting lessons implemented.

There are two major factors that impact this gap. First, those responsible for producing lessons are seldom accountable for the implementation of what has been learned. The lessons learned function in most of the Intelligence Community is located in non-mission support units such as training, IT, or administration, which necessitates handing off the results to mission units for implementation. Under the best of circumstances this handoff of findings from studies and reports to ownership by operations is notoriously difficult to accomplish.

Secondly, most lessons learned efforts lack the initial identification of a specific target audience. There appears to be two general audiences for lessons learned across the IC: 1) senior management, who may be briefed or receive reports on the findings, with the intent that the findings should result in policy and procedure changes; and 2) a general audience, which is expected to “pull” lessons from a repository on an as-needed-basis to address a specific situation. Without a pre-designated mutually agreed upon target audience for the lessons, recommendations necessarily lack context that would otherwise make them actionable.

3. Negative Connotation
The term “lessons learned” carries several negative connotations in the minds of most IC personnel. First, the term is primarily associated with failed events or initiatives. Reports based on lessons learned studies are perceived as attempts to find out why the failure occurred and therefore, for many people, are associated with or seem similar to an Inspector General inquiry. Secondly, when lessons learned reports are developed in-house, those responsible for constructing the reports may have to deal with political fall out and attempts to suppress or modify the findings. Finally, there is a general view that lessons learned are of little value to accomplishing the mission and thus are usually just shelved or buried.

4. The Lack of Reflection
The op tempo inside the IC is high. Projects, teams, change initiatives, and strategic operations rarely pause to consider what they have learned from their actions. Without some level of group reflection and discussion, it is difficult for those involved to assess what is currently happening in order to correct course, or at project end in order to derive lessons learned.

Although content review procedures are in place for IC analytic assessments, few, if any, processes are in place to reflect upon the effectiveness of the analytic production process. Without such reflection the production methodology does not get updated nor can it benefit from best practices discovered during the production process. Unless reflection is valued and time for reflecting upon actions is built into the way analysts work, the op tempo will take precedence and IC organizations will lose performance improvement opportunities.

Process improvement requires deliberate reflection on the cause and effect of actions taken and results produced across the whole of the system. Coming together as a group to reflect on and discuss the total process increases the identification, validity, and usefulness of lessons by engaging a diversity of thought and experience.

5. The Retrospective Approach as the Predominant Approach
Lessons learned across the IC tend toward retrospective content, formatted either as composite in-depth reports or lessons from individuals placed in a repository. Retrospective lessons are valuable, particularly when they are developed in response to a question from a specific leadership group that intends to implement the findings through policy or procedures. However, there are many tactical and operational lessons that are more effectively shared and acted upon in real time. Intelligence operations, particularly at the tactical level, have a short shelf life, so that lessons that are over a few months old are no longer valid.

Recommendations resulting from the study (References to specific intelligence initiatives have been removed)

1. Embed reflection in workflow processes to enable organizational learning

Scheduling group time to think about how the work got done, reflecting upon what went well and what could have gone better, results in continuous updating and improvements to work processes.

Many government agencies and corporations that must increase the speed of their learning, do so by planning regular group reflection into their work processes and production schedules, e.g. NASA’s Pause and Learn (PAL), The US Army’s After Action Review (AAR), and Intel Corporation’s Knowledge Harvest.

Whatever reflection process an IC agency employs it should have the following characteristics:
• be simple enough to be implemented by its own employees with a minimum of training (NASA holds periodic workshops to train local personnel in the PAL technique)
• make use of a recognizable label (for example, AAR, Fast Learning) that is employed across DIA. A label elevates an action to the level of an approved practice as opposed to a one-off event. Once established, its value is known and accepted as a part of the way we continually improve our processes.
• utilize a standardized, repeatable format
• engage each person involved in the work process in the reflection process in order to bring diversity of insights and experiences. When reflection is limited to supervisors much of the experience at the tactical level is lost.
• conduct reflection sessions on a regular or scheduled basis, rather than only when things go wrong
• capture and understand what contributed to successful outcomes that should be retained
• focus on creating lessons that are within the group’s scope of responsibility to implement, rather than developing findings for those above them or for other groups to implement.
• reflect on what needs to be done differently next time rather than attempting to place blame

Reflection processes need to be built into the workflow process at all levels of the organization. Management as well as frontline workers accomplish work though processes that could benefit from periodic reflection. For example, every office periodically holds town halls. As a group, Office Chiefs could benefit from reflection on what works about town halls and what does not? What has been learned about the town hall process to make it more effective?

Periodic reflection on process is course correction rather than retrospection. It occurs not at the end of an event or initiative, but while the initiative is in progress – learning in real time

2. Empower groups at all levels to take action that implements the results of their own reflection

The culture of DIA is one in which people at lower levels expect to be asked to identify problems for upper management to solve, rather than finding solutions themselves. Although there are issues in any organization that are beyond the scope of a team or workgroup to resolve, the change that is needed is for groups to recognize they have the knowledge and the power to make improvements to their own work processes. That requires managers above them to support the reflection process that leads to new insights, and to acknowledge the ability of units to identify and implement useful revisions and propose new processes.

The shining exception to this cultural norm of passing all problems upward is DIA’s Crossing Boundaries, (see The Untownhall) where the expectation is that the idea provider is empowered to implement the solution. It is this spirit that needs to be infused now more widely through embedding reflection process in the production workflow.

3. Reduce the difficulties of hand-offs by involving those who can implement lessons learned findings

Hand-offs of lessons learned from those who gain and document its insights to those process owners with authority to make changes are a very common failure of lessons learned programs/initiatives/activities. Hand-offs occur when a team, made up of people external to those being studied, conduct a study and then make recommendations to those who are expected to make changes.

The likelihood that action will be taken based on the findings of a lessons learned study are greatly increased when those who are expected to implement the findings are involved in all phases of the process of creating the lessons learned - from the data collection (whether survey, interviews, review of historical documents or observation), through analysis of the data, to the development of findings and recommendations. An understandable concern is that if people “study themselves” they will be less objective than if studied by objective “honest brokers.” However, having both external and internal members on a study team alleviates that concern. The internal members serve as a source of validity for the larger group who will implement the findings. The external members bring methodology and objectivity.

4. Record and replicate successful initiatives as opposed to focusing only those that experienced problems

It is human nature to try to understand “what went wrong” but there is an equal amount, if not more, to be learned from studying successes. Performance improvement is more cost effective when it repeats successes rather than fixing missteps. With successes the answer is already known and has been tested, while recommendations about missteps require crafting and testing new solutions, which may or may not work. Crafting and testing is always more costly than replicating.

DIA needs to seek out processes that are working well, and study successful practices to understand the factors that make them work. The findings could then be used in training, stories for in-house publications, and transferred to other units, through peer assists.

The purpose would not be to celebrate these as individual successes or as exceptional events (as in awards) rather to recognize these as processes that could be effectively employed by others.

5. Support Communities of Practice at all levels and provide: 1) software designed for Communities, 2) adequate IT resources to maintain Community websites, and 3) adequate start-up help to build Communities

In most corporations and government organizations, Communities of Practice are the major way lessons learned are moved in real time. For example, the US Army has over 60 Communities modeled on CompanyCommand and sponsored by the Battle Command Knowledge System, at Fort Leavenworth, GE has over 600 Communities, Fluor has over 50 Communities. Within the IC there seems a budding yet limited awareness of the value of peer-to-peer Communities of Practice and certainly little IT support for them.

Unlike communities in other settings where the Core Team can respond to Community needs during off hours, most IC Communities operate on classified networks. Core Team members must manage the Community during regular office hours balancing mission requirements and Community needs. A larger Core Team helps Core Team members better balance Community work with mission requirements.

Provide Core Team members with training in relationship building. One major responsibility of Core Team members is to connect members with each other and to build relationships between the members and the Core Team.

Conclusion
A shift in IC cultural norms to empower employees to take action to implement working level solutions will help to build a more effective DIA. By recognizing the untapped knowledge at the frontline and first supervisory level, peers can resolve issues and craft solutions to the problems they face by creating mechanisms to share knowledge and experience among peers. Organizational leaders can help by encouraging time for such networking and providing resources necessary to enable it.

Knowledge Management: Where We've Been and Where We're Going - Part Two

In this series I‘ve classified the evolving landscape of knowledge management into three categories. The first category is leveraging explicit knowledge and is about capturing documented knowledge and building it into a collection - connecting people to content. The second category is about leveraging experiential knowledge and it gave rise to communities of practice and reflection processes. It is primarily focused on connecting people to people. The third category is leveraging collective knowledge and it is about integrating ideas from multiple perspectives. Its medium is conversation in both its virtual and face-to-face forms.

In Part One, Leveraging Explicit Knowledge, knowledge was conceptualized as a commodity that was stable enough to capture and store – the mental image was of a library or warehouse. The knowledge that was deemed most critical was that of subject matter experts. Like the era that preceded the rise of knowledge management, Leveraging Explicit Knowledge was primarily focused on the individual as learner. Since subject matter experts (individuals) were seen as having the most important organizational knowledge, the knowledge management task was to get that knowledge to other individuals who had less expertise.

As knowledge professionals worked within this framework, they began to discover that explicit knowledge was only one type of knowledge that needed to be addressed. Both the value of capturing explicit knowledge and the limitations of that focus became evident. I described the first category in Part One and write about the second category in this post.

Leveraging Experiential Knowledge
Sometime around 2000 organizations began to think about their knowledge in a new way. I have labeled the second category Leveraging Experiential Knowledge and it is where I think most organizations are functioning today.

Leveraging Experiential Knowledge was a revolution in how we thought about knowledge in organizations. It was every bit as profound as the initial change that moved us into knowledge management in the mid 90s. It began with the acceptance of the idea that “know how” is important organizational knowledge – and that “know how” resides in the heads of the people who are on the frontline. “Know how” is very difficult to put into databases for two reasons:
1. it is context specific: It is learned by observing the results of taking action in a specific situation. To share it with someone else requires that the parameters of the situation be explained along with what was learned. That makes any description lengthy to write out, but more importantly, it makes a push mechanism unworkable, because there are simply too many variations in situations. For “know how,” a pull mechanism, as in (Has anybody seen X in a situation with A, B and C?) is more effective.
2. it is dynamic rather than stable: experience is continuous and therefore so is the knowledge derived from it. The question then is not, “What’s the best way to do X?” Rather the question is, “What new understanding has your recent experience yielded about X?” Answering that question needs to occur as close to real time as possible, so stored knowledge is of less value.

Knowledge professionals overwhelmingly turned to Communities of Practice to make “know how” available. CoPs dealt with the difficulties outlined above by making possible the immediate exchange of “know how” among peers on-line and in person. The exchange occurs in an environment in which the context can be taken into account by the specificity of the question asked and the capability of probing for greater detail.

Etienne Wenger’s book Communities of Practice gave us the label for this new knowledge sharing vehicle. He wrote that the exchange of knowledge among peers, although often out of sight, has always been the major way frontline workers learned their craft, having as much or more influence on their performance as a company’s training programs. That book and the one that followed it, Cultivating Communities of Practice, encouraged organizations to nurture and support these informal exchanges, as legitimized Communities of Practice.

The idea that frontline employees held important knowledge was revolutionary because up until that time, knowledge had been regarded as the purview of managers and experts. The knowing–doing divide had been with us since the time of Taylor, made famous by his time and motion studies that employed scientific methods to specify the best way for
workers to do the tasks they were assigned. For almost a hundred years, the accepted point of view in organizations was that “managers think, workers do.”

By 2000, there was a growing recognition that those on the front line had critical knowledge that was not being captured by the experts. If I had not known that before, my work with CompanyCommand confirmed that for me. For example, the war in Iraq changed so fast that there was no time for what was being learned to be vetted, then turned into doctrine and finally be sent back out to the troops. What saved lives and won battles was the immediate exchange of knowledge among those on the frontline. It was not only on the battlefield that the need for the immediate exchange began to manifest itself. In many rapidly changing industries (e.g. technology, pharmaceutical, intelligence) it was the front line that had the ground truth.

This recognition led to another significant change - the role of reflection in learning from experience. The US Army introduced the After Action Review (AAR), initially to learn from simulated battle, but soon recognized its value for course correction in the midst of real events. “Reflection in action” quickly moved into corporations. British Petroleum, one of the early leaders in knowledge management, implemented AARs. NASA implemented their own version they called Pause and Learn (PAL). These and other knowledge management processes, built into the workflow, brought frontline workers together to reflect on and learn from projects, events, and tasks.

Other workflow processes like facilitated knowledge harvests, Peer Assist and Retrospects, enabled the transfer of the knowledge between projects. What began to be understood was that for a team to share its knowledge with others, it first had to figure out for itself what it had learned. That only happened if the group had come together to reflect on what actions they had taken individually and collectively, what results that produced, and what that meant for going forward.

The question that management struggled with in Leveraging Experiential Knowledge was how much control they should exert over communities, reflection sessions or transfer events. Should reports from AARs be sent up the command chain and if so what would the impact be on candid reflection? Should managers establish a community’s goals for them in exchange for support? How far can an exchange, that is inherently informal, be formalized before it loses its value? Although clear cut answers to these questions has not emerged, a movement in the direction of reduced management control over content has been evident.

The analogy for the first era was the warehouse, the analogy for the second era is the network. The exchange is reciprocal, the assumption being that each person in the network is at times both an originator of knowledge that is shared with others and a recipient of others’ knowledge. This reciprocal exchange reduced much of the resistance to accepting the practices of others that occurred with the dissemination model.

The downsides to Leveraging Experiential Knowledge began to become evident around 2005:

• Leveraging Experiential Knowledge was largely focused on the front line. Middle management for the most part was ignored, as was senior management. There were few processes for middle or senior managers to learn with and from each other or through reflection or transfer processes.

• Network exchanges successfully moved knowledge between peers, those at roughly the same level in the organization- lateral transfer. However, there was little flow between hierarchical levels, for example, between managers and front line workers, which precluded different levels from taking the knowledge of other levels into account.

• The knowledge that was exchanged was primarily about the tactical level of work. The strategic level was not addressed within Leveraging Experiential Knowledge. So a team or project could use reflection processes or communities to improve how they were meeting their goals, but if the goals themselves were in the wrong direction, the model provided no way to find that out.

• The increased complexity of organizations was not addressed in the second category, nor were the influences of the external environment.

None of these important issues could be addressed through the conceptual framework that supported the second era. It will take reframing what organizational knowledge is, yet again, to move to the third category, Leveraging Collective Knowledge. Part three will address those changes.

Where Knowledge Management Has Been and Where It Is Going- Part One

KM has changed in many ways since its beginning some fifteen years ago, with new tools and new strategies. But what is most interesting to me is the profound change in the way we conceptualize knowledge and the implications of that conceptualization for how we do our work as knowledge professionals. What I mean when I say, “how we conceptualize knowledge” are issues like, “Who in the organization has useful knowledge;” “How stable >is knowledge over time;” “How we can tell if knowledge is valid or trustworthy.” These are not trivial issues because how we conceptualize knowledge greatly impacts the way we design our KM systems and strategies.

If the goal of KM is, as I believe it to be, to make use of the collective knowledge in an organization – then we have been learning how to do KM since early in the 90’s. It has been a steep learning curve and we still have a steep curve head of us, but we are learning as evidenced by how our thinking about our strategies for dealing with organizational knowledge has changed and evolved.

I will classify this evolving landscape into three categories. The first is leveraging explicit knowledge and it is about capturing documented knowledge and creating a collection from it - connecting people to content. The second category is about leveraging experiential knowledge and it gave rise to communities of practice and social networks. It's primarily a focus on connecting people to people. The third category is about leveraging collective knowledge and it is primarily about conversation both in its virtual and face-to-face forms. It is primarily about who is in the conversation and what the conversation is about - it is connecting employees and decision makers.

For each category I will describe, 1) how those who were leading the field of KM conceptualized knowledge, 2) the strategies those concepts engendered, 3) the difficulties and successes those strategies and conceptualizations presented to the field of KM.

The diagram shows the three categories with a beginning date, but each category then continues past where the next category begins. I have extended each category for two reasons, one, the strategies prominent in each category continue to remain viable, and two, as new organizations take up KM their initial entry, (perhaps based on the charge management has dictated) tends to be focused on the earlier categories.

Three categories are a lot to cover in one post so I have made this a series. In this post I will tackle not only the first category but also paint a brief picture of how organizational knowledge was conceptualized before the rise of KM – the precursors of knowledge management.

Knowledge Management Precursors
Before the first wave of KM in the early 90s there had been document and information management, both clearly labeled as such. If organizations thought about knowledge at all, they thought of it as the content of training classes and training was focused on individual development. For example, in the 1980’s there was a rise of competency models, many of which were further developed into instruments (Boyatzis, 1982; CCL.) The underlying assumption of that pre-KM period was that if you trained each individual with the competencies required for their specific job, the combined effort would lead to organization effectiveness - a kind of additive view of organizational knowledge. I was a part of that period and remember how hard we struggled to word competencies so they could be actionable and measurable.

Following on the heels of the competency push, was Organizational Learning or the Learning Organization, depending on what you were reading at the time. This view depicted learning in terms of the whole system rather than the individual. Senge’s book, The Fifth Discipline, came out in 1990 and my book the Organizational Learning Cycle was published in 1994.

The language of knowledge management drew most directly from Peter Drucker,
who wrote about the Knowledge Age. Framing the growing importance of knowledge, Drucker predicted the knowledge based economy, noting that wealth and power, which had previously been based on land and capital, was shifting and would increasingly be based on knowledge. He coined the term “knowledge worker,” to describe a new kind of work and worker in the knowledge based economy.

The First Category of Knowledge Management - Leveraging Explicit Knowledge
Building on Drucker’s framing, the new way of thinking about knowledge, that began in the mid 90s (the red bar on my diagram), was that knowledge was an organizational asset and if an asset then it needed to be managed. After all, organizations manage their other assets, (e.g. capital, people) so it made sense to also manage an organization’s knowledge – thus the term (which nearly everyone now regrets) “knowledge management”. CEOs began to declare, “Knowledge is our competitive advantage.”

The early thinking about how we should manage this knowledge asset, was to use technology, taking advantage of the growing capability of intranets. There was an effort to collect all the important knowledge that an organization possessed into one database. The analogy was of a warehouse or a library. People were to put knowledge in the warehouse and those that needed it could take the knowledge out and use it. And much like the contents of a real warehouse, knowledge was thought of as stable. That is, you could put knowledge in the warehouse today and get it out in six months or even two years later without any degradation of its value. In this first era of knowledge management, knowledge repositories were the strategy of choice and they contained best practices and lessons learned as well as technical documents.

Management had a great deal of concern about the quality and validity of the knowledge being captured. The salient question was, how can we be certain that a practice is “best.” Many organizations brought together teams of experts from each field to identify and then write up the best practices. In other organizations everyone was invited to contribute, then a panel of experts would vet the contributions so that only the “best” made it into the repository. In some companies experts categorized employee contributions into levels of practice, e.g. “local practice,” “good practice,” “validated practice,” all the way up to “best practice”. Having identified the “best practice” some organizations required everyone to implement that practice, making knowledge management a move toward standardization. The assumption was that there was a best way to accomplish any task – so knowledge management professionals were expected to identify and then capture it.

Leveraging Explicit Knowledge was conceived as a dissemination task; expert knowledge was sent out to those who did not know as much about their jobs as the experts did. It was based on a model that we were all familiar with, the school model, with an expert providing knowledge to those who were less knowledgable. So it was a natural model for knowledge professionals to use.

Repositories were so ubiquitous that in many organizations the term “knowledge repository” was synonymous with “knowledge management.” And since IT necessarily built the repositories, KM was frequently placed under the IT department.

There was one further assumption, which was that employees would seek out the captured knowledge and use it. But of course in many organizations people did not readily submit knowledge nor were they inclined to take it out of the warehouse. Managers determined they would have to incentivize employees to get them to use the knowledge. Lots of schemes were put in place, from offering frequent flyer points for input to requiring teams to go through the database for ideas before starting a new project – and checking a box in the project plan to prove they had looked the ideas over.

For the most part these databases, even with incentives in place, did not produce much improvement. In a few organizations, where the work was repetitious and standardized, they were successful. Ford Motor Company was a great example, saving millions of dollars by sharing best practices. But for the most part front line workers had little interest in putting things in or taking things out.

Some of the assumptions made about leveraging explicit knowledge were incorrect, but many were not inaccurate, rather they were limited to one kind of knowledge - explicit knowledge that can be documented.

What knowledge management professionals began to discover was that technology alone was not enough to manage knowledge. “People to content” was a necessary step but fell far short of being sufficient to leverage an organization’s knowledge.
• It left out all the important knowledge that was in people’s heads.
• Employees resisted using other’s knowledge. It made them feel a bit child like or incompetent to be the recipient of the knowledge that some unknown expert had declared as “best.”
• A great deal of important knowledge is, in fact, not stable over time but is constantly changing, in some situations even daily.
• It left out considerations of the context in which the practice would be implemented, because for practices to be useful to a larger number of situations, they had to be generalized.

Having spent thousands of dollars with little return on investment, in many companies, management became disillusioned with knowledge management.

Then some time around 2000 organizations began to think about knowledge in a new way and Leveraging Experiential Knowledge breathed new life and capability into knowledge management. That will be Part 2

Bringing the Flow of Knowledge to a Standstill by Speaking with Conviction

One type of work I do with organizations is to analyze how organizational members talk to each other in ways that encourage or prevent knowledge from flowing between them.

One way of talking that inhibits the exchange of knowledge is speaking with conviction. That may seem contrary to what we’ve all learned in communication and leadership workshops, where one of the lessons often taught is to speak with confidence- “sound like you mean it”. Yet, as I examine conversations in the work setting, stating an idea with conviction tends to send a signal to others that the speaker is closed to new ideas. When speaking with conviction people sound as though no other idea is possible, as though the answer is, or should be, obvious. For example:

“Look I’ve spent years studying Iran and I know that they will not be a threat to our military efforts in Iraq.”

This statement came from a “case”* written by the listener, not the speaker. When the listener heard this remark, his immediate reaction was, “He’s closed to any other point of view, I may as well save my breath.” and so gave up without further explaining his own perspective on the Iran/Iraq issue. Although a great deal of the meaning in this speaker’s remark came from the tone of voice used, even without hearing that tone, the choice of words and the format of the sentence effectively carry the message that he is uninterested in any other perspective than his own. For example, he started the sentence with “Look” which we tend to use to express exasperation; his claim that, “I’ve spent years studying Iran” is a jab at the listener’s lesser experience; the term, “I know” signals that this topic is not up for question.

When we’re in the midst of a conversation we can’t stop to examine every word, as I just did, to think about whether it sends the right signal. So trying to change the words people choose is not a good place to start if we want to help people bring more knowledge into their conversations. Rather, the place for the change to start is with the thinking behind the language. The words we choose are, after all, a reflection of how we think about an issue. The thinking behind the brief statement the speaker makes about Iran is that, “This is truth.”

David Bohm*, the great physicist and proponent of dialogue says,
“We have to have enough faith in our world-view to work from it, but not that much faith that we think it’s the final answer.” P. 4*

That would have been great advice for the speaker in the example. Neither people in general, nor this speaker in particular, can function effectively without reaching conclusions and using those conclusions to guide our actions – to do otherwise would leave us immobilized by indecision. But it is also true that we are unable to learn unless we stay open to the possibility that a conclusion we’ve drawn may not be correct or that circumstances may have changed.

What our speaker needs is to change his thinking from certainty to a willingness to entertain other possibilities - a change that is necessary if any conversation is to produce new thinking and learning. Bohm puts it this way, “Ideas must be vulnerable.”

If we were to put the speaker on the spot and ask him if there was even the remotest possibility that he could be wrong about Iran or that some data might be available to the listener of which he was unaware, the speaker would undoubtedly acknowledge that there is always room for doubt. Yet in the midst of a discussion, especially when trying to “win a point”, there is a great inclination to make categorical statements and then, having made them, feel obliged to defend them.

If our speaker could agree, at least in principle, that “there is always a possibility” then he would be able to act his way into a change in thinking – to “act as if.” William James said, “If you want a quality, act as if you already had it.”

So the question is, if I am really certain about something, how do I act as if I’m open to other possibilities, that is, without coming off as phony?

One of the very useful ways of acting out that belief of possibility is “perspective taking.” Perspective taking, according to researchers Johnson and Johnson* is “An active and non-evaluative attempt to understand the perspective and information of another person.” But it involves more than just carefully listening to another person’s explanation, perspective taking requires giving voice to the other’s perspective - articulating both the conclusions and the reasoning of the other person. (This is related to the idea that We Learn When We Talk)

To take another’s perspective does not imply agreement with it, but rather it's like trying the idea on for size. When I put on the “coat” how does it feel? What do I understand from this perspective that I could not see from my own?

Perspective taking is an action that produces some remarkable conversational results. That is particularly true when a team is working together on a problem. The value add of a team, over individual problem solving, is the variety of perspectives from which a problem may be approached. The conversational goal then, is to make sure all of those perspectives are not only heard, but also fully comprehended by the group.

Johnson and Johnson say, “In order to create a synthesis based on the best reasoning and information by everyone involved, individuals must, a) actively attempt to understand both the content and the information being presented and the cognitive and affective frames–of-reference of the person presenting the information and b) be able to hold both their own and other people’s perspectives in mind at the same time.” Being able to hold two disparate ideas in mind at the same time enables synthesis and can even engender an altogether new way of thinking about an issue.

Johnson and Johnson’s research shows that when individuals are competent in taking others’ perspective:
• more information is disclosed than occurs when each person simply makes a case for his or her own perspective
• communication is facilitated because the re-statement of others’ perspectives tends to make a complex idea more easily understood
• the information and reasoning of others are retained longer
• the results are more creative and higher quality solutions and more accurate problem solving.

Perspective taking does not require a person, like the speaker in our earlier example, to stop doing something; rather it asks the speaker to do something different – always an easier task. Moreover, perspective taking is not something that has to be learned. Children start to be able to put themselves in another’s shoes around five years of age. Before that, of course, they are amazingly egocentric. To take another's perspective does not take extensive training; it has only to be exercised.

So here’s the challenge, the next time someone suggests an idea that seems utterly preposterous to you, try perspective taking. Then see what results you get. What ever the results, you are likely to come away with new knowledge.

• Cases of actual conversations using Argyris’ right and left hand column format
• Bohm, D. in (1985). Unfolding meaning: A weekend of dialogue with David Bohm. Ark Paperbacks. P. 4.
• Johnson, DW and Johnson, RT, 1989 Cooperation and Competition, Theory and Research. Interaction Book Company

What Do We Get From Conversation That We Can't Get Any Other Way?

This is an intriguing question because each time we think about contacting someone for help on an issue we face a choice; Do I email, phone, walk down the hall, twitter, text message, post on the community website?

This post is about the benefits of choosing to have a conversation* through what ever medium we select.

The greatest benefit is that with conversation we get “more than an answer.” That’s the title of a great article by Rob Cross and Lee Sproull. They did a study in 2004 that looked at the benefits that accrued to people who had a conversation with a colleague about a relatively ambiguous issue each was facing. These seekers were project managers in a large consulting firm. They had access to first-rate company repositories of best practices, case examples, reusable work products, methodologies and tools, discussion forums and expertise databases. In spite of such tools, overwhelmingly they preferred to take the issue they were wrestling with to a colleague.

Cross and Sproull conducted in-depth interviews with each of these project managers to explore what they learned through the conversations they chose to have. Then they sorted the responses into five categories, which I outline here. I’ve also embedded my own thinking related to the categories- so they are not pure Cross and Sproull.

Answers: Not surprisingly the seekers got answers to the questions they asked. Some of the answers were factual in nature. But more often what was asked for and received was procedural or methodology based. The seekers were looking for the application of facts or principles in order to develop a solution.

Meta Knowledge: This category was about where to go to get more information on the issue, or conversely where not to go because a certain report was out-dated, or superficial. Also in this category was the identification of specific work products and the names of other people who could be helpful, along with an introduction.

Meta knowledge is incredibly useful, but only if the source knows enough about the issues the seeker is facing to sort through possibilities based on 1) the seeker’s level of expertise (absorpative capacity) and 2) the applicability of the meta knowledge to the seeker’s specific situation.

Problem Reformulation: This occurred when the source suggested a different way to look at the problem or issue, a way that might even invalidate the original question. It tended to broaden the thinking of the seeker or approach it from an entirely different angle. Also in this category was helping the seeker become aware of potential unforeseen consequences of specific actions as well as increasing awareness of issues that were likely to be particularly sensitive.

To gain meta-knowledge and/or problem-reformulation requires the source to be willing “to understand the problem as experienced by the seeker and then shape her/his knowledge to the evolving definition of the problem” and is best served by the give and take of conversation. And as Cross and Sproull point out, to provide meta knowledge also demands a strong enough tie with the source so that he or she is willing to invest the necessary time in the seeker’s issue.

Validation: This is assurance that the approach the seeker is taking is on course. And it is the expression of appreciation for the seeker’s thinking behind his or her planning. Validation builds seekers confidence and allows them to move forward with greater certainty and perhaps even be more self-assured when approaching a client. Validation also provides seekers the certainty that they have done enough background work, saving the seeker the time it would take to gather further data.

Validation has an emotive content that comes across most fully through the facial and tonal cues we pick up in face-to-face conversations. Like most feedback, validation provides greater assurance when it references specifics rather than generalities. For example, “Great plan” is less validating than is, “The logic of your argument is well sequenced which adds to its face validity”. But to offer that level of specificity takes in-depth understanding on the part of the source.

Legitimizing: Legitimizing is the expression of approval by a person in authority or with known expertise, which the seeker can then use to influence others. As with validation, legitimizing can save the seeker time by reducing the amount of proof or data that may need to be collected before the client is willing to act. It also serves to head off arguments others might raise.

The greatest benefit of conversation is that it produces five categories of responses, not just the answer. We get so much more from conversation, e.g. an unexpected insight, a sense of affirmation that inspires us to new heights or, equally useful, having to confront a realization that we've been trying to avoid; deepening the relationship with a colleague or the introduction to a collaborator we would never have discovered on our own; and on and on.

The multiplicity of benefits addresses the very real problem of not knowing what we don’t know. A problem that is so frequent when the issues we are addressing are ambiguous and complex.

I don’t think we enter into conversations expecting so many outcomes. Rather I think we come with a goal or question in mind and the rest emerges out of the interaction of the conversation. And that interaction is impacted by the nature of the relationship between the seeker and source. The source has to be willing to engage with the seeker to understand the issues; the seeker has to put him or herself in the vulnerable position of asking for help. On both parts that willingness requires a relationship of trust and respect. Paradoxically, in-depth conversations also serve to strengthen just that kind of relationship.

Imagine how much knowledge we would gain if we did enter every conversation anticipating that we would gain "more than an answer."

The published version is at: Cross, R. & Sproull, L. (2004). More Than an Answer: Information Relationships for Actionable Knowledge. Organization Science. 15(4): pp. 446-462. Click here for an earlier draft

* Conversation being defined as: the interaction that occurs when each person is actively working to understand the meaning the other is trying to convey.

Five Actions Organizations Can Take to Increase Knowledge Sharing

There are five actions that organizations can take to increase knowledge sharing. Each approaches knowledge sharing from a very different direction and in that sense each adds something unique to the mix. They are not just five different ways to do the same thing; on the other hand, there are many different ways to do each of the five actions.

1. Help people build relationships with each other
2. Build knowledge sharing processes into the workflow
3. Design physical space that encourages conversation
4. Deliver an actionable leadership message about knowledge sharing
5. Develop and then practice conversation skills

   
   1. Help People Build Relationships with Each Other
   In the last post I talked about why relationships are so necessary for knowledge sharing. Here I want to suggest how organizations can go about building relationships. The organizational task is to bring people together in a way that they learn something about each other’s knowledge and experience. That coming together can be face-to-face or virtual, but if virtual the relationship building has to be planned, not left to chance. Here are a few of the many ways organizations do this:

   • Communities of Practice
   Since Wenger introduced the idea of Communities of Practice (COP) in early 2000, communities have been the number one way to build relationships across hierarchical boundaries. Nearly every Fortune 500 Company has built COP. Although there are a number of terms people use to differentiate levels of relationship in these communities, for simplification I will just reference the polar ends of the continuum, labeling them “COP” and “Networks”. COP are groups that intentionally build relationship among members. Facilitators actively connect members and concern themselves with the tone of the on-line conversations, setting a welcoming and appreciative climate. At the other end of the continuum, networks are transactional by design. Members exchange documents, PowerPoint presentations, and provide technical answers to questions others ask. These transactional exchanges serve a very useful purpose, but they are not places where members build the relationships that allow them to share insights learned from experience.

   • Social Events
   Social events build relationship. In every culture breaking bread together is used to connect people. I worked with Tandem Computers in the 1990’s and every Friday afternoon at Tandem everyone gathered in the cafeteria, the president, senior managers, assembly line workers, shipping clerks, loaders, engineers…. And for a couple of hours every Friday there were no speeches or presentations just beer and popcorn. The talk was about sports, families, and inevitably about work.

   • Meetings
   Meetings are great opportunities to build relationships – IF at least a third of every meeting puts members in small groups of three or four to work on issues that matter to them. Typical meetings, where each individual directs comments to the leader at the front of the table, don’t build relationship, at least not positive ones.

   • Facebook
   Facebook (and similar social media brought in-house) does not build relationships but it does give people more information about others than they would find in the company directory and that’s a great help in finding people they might want to have a conversation with. Seeing another person’s picture rather than a dry resume makes a huge difference in feeling connected. At IBM, which has made great use of Facebook, when participants are on one of those dreadful teleconferences, they look up others who are on the call to see who they’re talking to and what they might have in common.

   2. Build Knowledge Sharing Processes into the Workflow
   People will share informally if they are in relationship with each other. But it greatly increases the flow of knowledge if there are knowledge sharing process that become a part of the way the organization gets its work done. Communities of Practice should be included in process here as well as in relationship building. Here are a couple more:

   • After Action Review (AAR)
   AARs are a process started in the Army, but now used by hundreds of organizations. An AAR requires bringing together everyone that was involved in the event or project to have a structure, in-depth discussion. It is built into the workflow after defined phases and at project end. It’s a time of reflection to share individual knowledge with the group as well as to create new knowledge through group sensemaking. As with COP there are lots of names for this kind of group reflection process, for example, NASA labels theirs PAL, Pause And Learn.

   • Peer Assist
   Peer Assist is a knowledge sharing process started at British Petroleum. I wrote about it at some length in Common Knowledge after talking with the King of Peer Assist, Kent Greenes. With Peer Assist a team that is beginning a new effort, invites others (who have experience with the task) to meet with them. No presentations are made; this is the give and take of the “asking team” drawing out the tacit knowledge of those who have come to help. Peer Assists are a great relationship building process as well as being one of the most effective knowledge sharing process. At BP Peer Assist is used routinely at the start of a project.

   I’ve described only three of the many knowledge sharing processes organizations have invented, some very specific to their own context. Patrick Lambe has a clever deck of cards that identifies 80 processes. Having knowledge sharing processes built into the workflow greatly increases the amount and quality of knowledge in an organization.

   3. Design Physical Space that Encourages Conversation
   I know it may seem odd to be talking about physical space in a time when we are increasingly virtual, but despite our virtual work we do work in the physical space of offices and how those spaces are designed impacts who and how much we share knowledge with each other.

   • Providing space for informal conversations.
   One of the great examples of informal space is the Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve. Here the hallway spaces are intentional designed to encourage colleagues, who meet in the hall by chance, to sit for a moment to catch up. In many British Petroleum offices every floor has several coffee areas with enough space for three or four café tables to encourage casual conversations. The Nokia building in Copenhagen is built around an atrium with trees and lovely expanses of green with coffee and snacks read to hand. There is always a space in the atrium to hold a quick meeting.

   • Meeting Space.
   It would be wonderful if our conference rooms did not come equipped with large tables that define how we will interact with each other. What if some of them had informally arranged chairs or chairs on rollers so we could configure ourselves according to our need. Space matters because it impacts the tone and even the content of conversations. Several years ago I worked with the VHA to help implement a number of Learning XChanges, spaces that leaders could use to have a different kind of conversation with their staff or council – it was remarkable to see the difference in interaction patterns and tone when the space itself was less formal.

   • Traffic flow.
   Some years ago a group of MIT workplace researchers came up with the 30-Meter Rule. This rule says that the frequency of interaction with anyone sitting more than 30 meters (99 feet) from you is going to be roughly zero (Fisher, 2001). Organizations would have more knowledge sharing if they co-located teams and projects, and if they put groups that need to interact, like marketing and sales, on the same floor.

   4. Deliver an Actionable Leadership Message About Knowledge Sharing
   It is very helpful for the leadership of an organization to verbalize the organization’s need and intent to share knowledge.
   • The message from John Brown, former President of British Petroleum was: “Most activities or tasks are not onetime events. Our philosophy is fairly simple: every time we do something again, we should do it better than the last time.”

   • The McKinsey message from the top has been that, “If anyone makes a call to a colleague, anywhere around the world, that call will be returned within 24 hours.” These are actionable ways to express leadership’s intent to have knowledge sharing happen.

   This kind of statement sends a signal to employees that leadership supports employees taking time to share or seek knowledge. Although such statements don’t actually motivate employees to share, they do remove a significant barrier to knowledge sharing – employees’ concern that they will be penalized for taking time away from the organization’s mission to share their knowledge.

   5. Develop and Then Practice Conversation Skills
   For most conversations our skills are “good enough” but when people are trying to draw out tacit knowledge, more sophisticated skills produce deeper insights. They are particularly necessary when conversations cross disciplines where the same words mean something quite different to each person; when they cross levels of authority where the challenges each level faces may be so dissimilar that the “why” behind each person’s concerns seem inexplicable; or when the conversations are between differing levels of expertise, where leaps of thought are difficult to follow.

   There are many books and programs that develop the skills of conversation. The skill set I personally have found most effective, because they were specifically designed to promote organizational learning, are those originated by Chris Argyris, e.g. advocacy, inquire and the ability to identify and probe inferences. The inquiry skills are particularly important for drawing out tacit knowledge, because they provide a way to ask difficult questions without offending. But what ever system is employed there is a need to be thoughtful about how we talk to each other, the words we choose, the metaphors we employ, as well as what we withhold from the conversation. All impact how effectively knowledge gets shared within our organizations.

   Summary
   Five actions are a lot to do yet I think each is necessary. Taken together they cover most aspects of our organizational life, the culture we design for ourselves, how we get our work done, how we relate to our colleagues, and how we talk to each other.
   

The Incentive Question or Why People Share Knowledge

I get asked the incentive question a lot. How do we incentivise people to share their knowledge? The question is asked because when managers look around their organizations they don’t see much knowledge sharing going on. This is a serious concern, but I think it is the wrong question. The question is based on the assumption that people don’t want to share what they know and therefore require an incentive to get them to do it. And that assumption is inaccurate.*

A much more useful question is, “What causes people to be willing to share their knowledge with others?” I want to answer that question in this article, but first I want to tackle the assumption that people don’t want to share what they know.

People Willingly Share Their Knowledge
There is both anecdotal and research data to support that, as human beings, we willingly share what we know. To give a personal example, I lived in Washington DC for many years and daily I walked from home to my university office. It was a rare day when a visitor did not stop me to ask for directions; “Do you know where the Kennedy Center is? Where’s the Metro stop? Far from being annoyed, I was actually pleased to be asked. DC is a difficult city to find your way around in and my own extensive knowledge of the city was hard won. I was proud of my ability to navigate the city. In fact, my pride was such that sometimes if I saw a couple standing on a street comer with a map spread out between them, I would even offer, “May I help you find some place?” My guess is that everyone has a similar experience with a subject they know very well.

Eric Erickson,* the great development psychologists, claims that we are, by nature, a teaching species. He says, “parenthood is, for most, the first, and for many, the prime generative encounter; yet the continuation of mankind challenges the generative ingenuity of workers and thinkers of many kinds.” We would not have survived as a species if knowledge sharing were not basic to our nature.

One of the most interesting studies on knowledge sharing was conducted by Constant, Kiesler and Sproull.* One of their findings was that employees differentiated two kinds of knowledge sharing. One type was sharing products, for example, computer programs, or reports they had written. The second type of knowledge was what employees had learned from their own experience, for example, how to get around a certain bottle-neck in the system, or how to deal with a particularly tricky bug in a program. This second type of knowledge they regard as part of their identity – part of who they were as professionals.

They were willing to share both kinds of knowledge, but the motivation for sharing each differed greatly. The documents and programs they shared because they considered them the property of the company. But the second kind, their experiential knowledge, they shared because they gained some personal benefit from doing so. The personal benefit, however, was not money or the promise of a promotion. According to the study, “Experts will want to contribute to coworkers who need them, who will hear them, who will respect them and who may even thank them.”

Peer Recognition
As this study shows, the primary driver for sharing experiential knowledge is the respect and recognition of peers. It is hard to overestimate the psychic value peer recognition. In a previous post I told the story of a company commander who was moved to become a very activity contributor to a US Army community because he heard from a peer that an AAR he had posted “made a difference.”

There’s a great story about Eureka, the website where Xerox copy repair technicians share “fixes” they’ve developed while repairing the copy machines. The story is about one of the technicians who had sent in some fantastic “fixes” – he was everyone’s hero. When he walked into the auditorium at an annual meeting of technicians, his peers jumped up and started clapping and whistling – celebrating both his knowledge and his willingness to share – that’s peer recognition!

Recognition means the most to us when it comes from those who really know the subject – who know what they’re talking about. It’s great to have your boss think you’re a top performer, but chances are your boss doesn’t know enough about the technical part of your work to know how good you really are – but your peers do. For a peer to say, “The person that really understands that problem is Pete,” that comment Pete would regard as a sign of respect and one he would highly value.

Who I am as a professional is, in a very real sense, what I know - about leading a team, being an aeronautical engineer, an HR director, etc. We do not give that knowledge away lightly. Before we take the time and trouble to share that knowledge, we need some assurance that our knowledge will be treated with the respect it deserves, given thoughtful consideration, and that the recipient actually knows enough to make use of it. And that leads to the second reason people share their knowledge - relationship.

Relationship
The way a professional can know how someone will treat the precious commodity of her knowledge is to know that person well enough to make that judgment call. Relationships can be built through informal conversations, reading what another has written, working together on a team, or seeing the comments made in an on-line community. If a senior leader is committed to increasing knowledge sharing in her organization, then focusing on building relationships is the most important thing she can do.

Give yourself this test. Can you think of a time when someone you’ve worked with on a team asked you for advice and you turned a cold shoulder? Can you even think of a time when someone, with whom you enjoyed a brief conversation at a recent meeting, called to ask a question and you said, “Sorry I don’t have the time.” Fortunately, most of us cannot. If we have built a relationship with a peer, even a brief one, we will help if we can.

An organization can foster relationships many ways, but nearly all of them involve people being in conversation with each other. It is through conversation that we learn enough about the other to know the depth of their knowledge, where their strengths lie, what interests they have, and what they are passionate about.

Summary
Because our knowledge is so closely tied to our identity, it’s very important to each of us that our peers view us as knowledgeable and skillful. One of the major ways we demonstrate that to our peers is by sharing our knowledge with them. But sharing knowledge is risky, the other person may make a cutting remark about it or indicate that it’s not worth listening to. And sharing knowledge is time consuming, because to really respond to another’s question or problem takes the time to understand the issue and to explain in sufficient depth. So we rightly place conditions around sharing our in-depth knowledge. The relationships we build with others provide a needed level of confidence that our knowledge will be treated with respect. Knowledge sharing and relationship are coupled.

Rather than management asking, How do we incentivise people to share their knowledge? It would be more useful for management to ask, How do we develop relationships across the organization that will set in motion more knowledge sharing?

Erikson, E. (1961). The roots of virtue. in Julian Huxley, ed., The humanist frame. New

Constant, D., Kiesler, S., Sproull, L. (1994) What’s Mine Is Ours, or Is It? A study of attitudes about information sharing. Information Systems Research 5:4 400-421.

*Caveat: It is altogether possible to defeat the human tendency to share knowledge. One sure way is to create a situation where in order for one person to succeed the other has to lose. Too many organizations create those conditions with performance management systems that rank order or pit one person against another.

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Four Conversations to Address Adaptive Challenges

Trish Silber coauthored this post with me

When organizations face adaptive challenges that are complex and unpredictable, the people who have ideas vital to dealing with the issues are those whose work is impacted by the challenge. They know the subtleties of the process and hold the tacit knowledge of how it works and therefore how it will have to be adapted or reinvented to meet the new realities. The leader’s task, when faced with such a challenge, is not to make sense of it for that group, rather it’s to create a forum where it’s possible for those involved in the work to do the sensemaking for themselves. No one can make sense for someone else.

There are four types of conversations that are broadly applicable to any situation, and that are especially necessary for harnessing a group’s thinking during adaptive challenges: 1) conversations for relationship-building, 2) conversations for mutual understanding, 3) conversations for possibilities, and 4) conversations for action.

We are using the term “conversation” to mean,

the interaction that occurs when each person is actively working to understand the meaning the other is trying to convey.

Although each of us can recall times when we’ve engaged in that kind of mutual and authentic exchange, it only rarely happens inside of organizations. Organizational meetings too often seem to be opportunities for each person to make declarative and politic statements about their own position, with little interest in trying to understand the meaning others intend to convey. To convene a conversation rather than the typical meeting requires that the leader act as a conversation architect. The first task of the leader/architect is to determine which type of conversation is required at any particular juncture.

Conversations for Relationship-Building

Until those invited into the conversation have built a sense of psychological safety with each other, serious work on the issue will not take place. Rather people will tend to speak in general terms, rely on clichés, give voice only to what it seems safe to say and withhold any information that might possibly embarrass themselves or others. In other words, only a small part of the knowledge available in the room will be spoken. To break through that caution, the leader/convener has to create the opportunity for people to learn about each other – a relationship-building conversation.

In this context, a relationship-building conversation is often a conversation about the meaning of the task or work for those brought together in conversation. The question the leader poses to the group to initiate such a conversation, draws on the adaptive challenge, rather than being in the nature of an icebreaker. For example, if the challenge is about the difficulty of teams working virtually, each person might be asked to describe a time when they felt most effective as a part of a team. Such a question allows others to hear about what is valued or important to that individual. Through these conversations, held as a series of small groups, members discover their mutual interests and identify areas of expertise and experience. In this way a relationship of trust and mutual respect is built, and the group establishes a sound understanding of the assets and resources it brings the adaptive challenge.

Conversations for Mutual Understanding

Conversations for Mutual Understanding are the conversations we hold to make sense of what we know – to create meaning out of a mess of unstructured data and information. That involves exploring and uncovering each other’s perspectives, reasoning, and ideas about the topic. Weick* says

“...the same event means different things to different people, and more information will not help them. What will help them is a setting where they can argue, using rich data pulled from a variety of media, to construct fresh frameworks of action-outcome linkages that include their multiple interpretations. The variety of data needed to pull off this difficult task are most available in variants of the face to face meeting.”

The Conversation for Mutual Understanding is required before individuals can align, decide, and coordinate effectively. COL Lee Shiang Long, Head of Joint Communication and Information Systems Department (JCISD) for the Singapore Armed Forces (SAF), describes a practice that senior leadership use consistently. Two conversations are held, often in two different settings. The first of the two is held in the form of planning seminars and workshops for mutual understanding. Here the officers are trying to understand the situation, not to persuade others to their point of view. Everyone in this conversation speaks as an equal in trying to make sense of he complexity. Subsequently, a second meeting is held in the form of decision forums, where decisions are made about the issue under discussion. The physical separation of the two meetings ensures that one does not spill over into the other. Without such separation it is all too easy for a group to move towards a decision before all the valid information is considered.

As Abigail Adams said long ago, “Learning is not attained by chance, it must be sought for with ardor and attended with diligence.”

Conversations for Possibilities

By their very nature, adaptive challenges require learning and innovation for resolution. Conversations for Possibilities are those conversations in which we release ourselves to create and innovate, opening up pathways to a future beyond what already exists, rather than a perpetuation of the past. These are forward-focused, transformational conversations that must eventually root themselves in reality, but not before we’ve entertained scenarios unfettered by our current assumptions. At the essence of these conversations is the belief that creativity is a conversational phenomenon, not dependent upon a few inherently creative individuals.

The best Conversations for Possibilities are those in which the group:

- has a common understanding of a minimal set of givens and non-negotiables so that their conversation has necessary boundaries;

- entertains ideas of various scale, allowing the possibility of small moves creating big impacts;

- has enough time to conduct multiple rounds of idea generation, which creates richer ground for true assumption-busting, innovation, and learning. Mark Twain had it right when he said, “If you want to have a good idea, have a lot of them.”

Conversations for possibilities require deliberate pre-planning that prepares people to step out of their current interpretations, constraints, and bias for action. That pre-planning may include an ethnographic look at the present reality, scanning the external environment for trends and new ideas, or posing powerful questions of participants for reflection. Goldberg* suggests that “a paradigm shift occurs when a question is asked inside the current paradigm that can only be answered from outside it.”

Conversations for Action

Conversations for Action generate decisions, commitments, and coordinated actions with others. They are the most frequent conversations held in organizations. In fact they are often the only type of conversation held - the default conversation.

Conversations for Action may include discussions of feasibility; establishment of deadlines; requests and offers between individuals or groups; specific commitments; decisions and measures of success; and how fine-tuning a decision will happen. The wealth of action planning and decision making tools available speaks to our struggle to be as explicit and structured as this conversation usually requires.

In fact these conversations often fall short because the commitment or decision is not clear or publicly owned by a group or individual. A nod of the head in agreement is one thing, but publicly acknowledging the actions each member will take to support the group decision helps to move the group from lip service that too often occurs, to considered thinking about what it will take to make it happen.

• Goldberg, M. The Art of the Question, 1998, Wiley.
• Weick, K. Sensemaking in Organizations 1995, Sage.
• The title headings of “Conversations for Possibilities” and “Conversations for Action” are reflective of Fernando Flores work

Welcome to Conversation Matters

I am excited about the direction knowledge management is headed. There is a growing interest in drawing out deeper insights and more profound knowledge - what we often think of as tacit knowledge. This is the type of knowledge that can address the increasingly complex issues organizations are facing.

This blog is about:

• The way in which conversation addresses complexity, ambiguity and the fast paced organizational change

• How to create deeper, more insightful conversations, internally, and with customers and suppliers - it is about the practices, tools, and strategies that produce insightful conversations. 


Most organizations have mastered how to leverage explicit knowledge and have the improvement gains to show for it. Many have also learned how to build knowledge sharing communities of practice and develop social networks that are successfully transferring knowledge across organizational silos. But organizations now face a new environment of ever faster change and growing complexity.

That more complex environment necessitates a different kind of knowledge management strategy- a strategy for inventing solutions for increasingly ambiguous issues. That new strategy is conversation – it is the skills and processes that can make organizational conversation effective. Alan Webber, the Founder of Fast company, when asked what’s so new about the new economy – responded “What’s new about the new economy is that work is conversation.”

My Perspective

I come at knowledge management from a learning perspective, rather than the more common technology perspective. Although I’m totally enamored with every new piece of technology that comes along, the value I bring to the field of knowledge management is an in-depth understanding of how individuals learn and change through conversation, how they come to know and recall, and how they use language to transfer knowledge. And having written three books on organizational learning and worked with hundreds of clients, I bring an understanding of how organizations create and retain their knowledge and how that knowledge gets shared and is reused.

Five Theorists That Have Influenced My Thinking

Chris Argyris, from whom I’ve learned how the inferences we make about each other prevent us from having a valid exchange of knowledge. For over twenty years I’ve taught the skill set of advocacy and inquiry, first in universities and then in organizations. The underlying principles of Argyris’ work, valid information, free and informed choice, and internal commitment to that choice, have formed the basis of my work.

Karl Weick, who has helped me understand the vital role of sensemaking in organizational change, particularly the unexpected change that high reliability organizations must face.

Reg Revans, a mentor and friend, with whom I share the deeply held belief that managers, when they talk openly and honestly with each other, are capable of addressing even the most difficult organizational issues.

Ron Heiftz, who focuses on the power leaders have to convene the organizational conversation around issues that matter.

Peter Block who knows that to change an organization you have to change the conversation.

Through all of this the role of conversation is central, thus, Conversation Matters.

Content Overview for Conversation Matters

http://www.wordle.net

We think we know what we write and talk about. But when I put all my posts into Wordle what came up was a surprise. Wordle is a clever piece of software that analyzed all of my blog posts, counted the times I used each word, and then made a word cloud out of the results. The bigger the word the more times I used it in the posts.

Knowledge and conversation are large in the cloud, as I would have expected – I write about conversation producing knowledge. But change was, was a surprise, I don’t think of myself as writing about change management, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I do see change as the end product of insightful conversations. “To change the organization, change the conversation” is a Peter Block quote I find myself saying a lot.

Another surprise was that employees was large. Sometimes the word conversation is thought of as managers speaking to employees. But often in these posts I am advocating for conversations that include employees in the thinking and sensemaking – conversations with and between employees. It always troubles me that we don’t have a word that includes both employees and managers. Of course managers are employees, but when the term is used in most writing it references only those who are at the frontline. Maybe in the future, organizational citizen will appear in large type.

Of course group is prominent because as important as one-to-one conversations are, it is the public conversations we have that change the culture – public in the sense that we speak in settings where others will hold us accountable for what we say. I searched the word cloud for public and didn’t see it – so I need write more about that aspect of conversation.

The word learning is prominent as it should be. Knowledge sharing and knowledge creation are both acts of learning.

So in spite of my surprises, I think it is an accurate portrayal of what I write about in this blog.

Potentiation: Neurology and Knowledge Management

There is a wonderful term that cognitive neurologists use, “potentiation.” It’s a term that those of us that are involved in knowledge and learning could make great use of – no need for neurologist to have all the fun!

Here is what it means to a cognitive neurologist, as translated by an amateur with a few graduate courses in neurology. Information moves along neurons and when the information reaches an axon terminal, in order to go any further it has to jump the synaptic gap to the next neuron. It jumps the gap by producing a neurotransmitter that the next neuron picks up (neurologists say the neurotransmitter excites the next neuron) and off the information goes down the next neuron (and the next) until it gets to some important destination where the message tells your little finger to wiggle or you arrive at a brilliant new insight. Of course, it’s all a good deal more complex since that lone neuron is also exciting lots of other neurons and even turning some off – but for the purpose of thinking about how it impacts knowledge, lets stay simple.

Now it turns out that each time the neurotransmitter excites its neighboring neuron that pathway becomes stronger and can be more easily excited the next time. An example of a path that is very weak is that uncomfortable experience of meeting someone and ten minutes later not being able to remember her name. Each time the pathway is excited it becomes more potentiated, that is, more accessible the next time. Building the strength of synaptic communication is the neurological basis for learning.

Now here is the interesting part. The synaptic gap is excited, once, twice, three times, each time sending out one type of neurotransmitter. But if you really excite that next neuron over and over finally it releases a different kind of neurotransmitter, (one with a calcium base) and that type of neutrotransmiter has a hundred times more capability to excite the next neuron and produces Long Term Potentiation (LTP). It is not a linear progression- it is exponential. So an idea keeps exciting the next neuron gradually getting a little stronger each time, then there is a sudden burst and wham! the idea is now firmly fixed in your mind - LTP. Having achieved LTP the idea is easily brought to mind, the slightest hint or related idea will bring it to the fore. That makes it incredibly available for immediate use, like the expert chess players who with only a glance at the board can see potential patterns that might emerge during the game. Learning is not linear – it is exponential!

The first time we hear a very new idea serves as a kind of preparation for later understanding that idea; the connection is weak, but it’s there – potentiation has occurred. You may not even know its there but it is. Then we hear the idea again, a week or a month later and the connection gets a little stronger – it still may not be strong enough for you to recall the idea. But you might at least have recognition the next time you hear it as in, “Oh, yes, I do remember now that you mention that.”

I had that experience about three years ago when I was at a meeting where Bill Ives was speaking about Web 2.0. Now Bill is a guru of social media, so even back then he was talking about the value of blogs, wikis and rss feeds. I liked what he said and was intrigued about the idea of Web 2.0 – but by the time the meeting, and several other speakers, was over, my thinking about blogs was over as well. The idea was potentiated but not strong enough for me to give it much thought in the subsequent weeks and months.

But probably like you, over the next three years I kept hearing about blogs, in articles and presentations. Last month Dave Snowden and I were both speaking at KM Asia and Dave talked about blogs and the value they bring to his own learning and the idea went LTP! And I started blogging. Now, I don’t think it’s that Dave is a more convincing speaker than Bill, to the contrary, if I hadn’t heard Bill’s speech three years ago I don’t think Dave’s speech would have been able to trigger me to start writing a blog.

There are a number of implications that come to mind for me, two that explain some of difficulties people face, and several that have more positive aspects. The negative ones first-

• LTP explains how people can get an idea so firmly fixed in their minds – a connection that has long term potentiation - that it seems that no amount of new evidence will impact their thinking. For example, someone who bought a Toyota in 1975, that turned out to be a lemon, and will never buy another Toyota no mater what consumer reports says about its reliability in 2009.




• LTP also explains Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome, when even the smallest reminder of a traumatic stress will trigger it again – so sensitized is the connection between those neurons.

But on the more positive side:

• Learning theorists know about potentiation – they call it “foreshadowing.” They advise teachers to introduce a concept before it comes up in the curriculum or lecture. Foreshadowing prepares the mind of the listener or the reader for an idea to come. In the vernacular it’s the familiar, “Tell ‘em what your going to tell ‘em; tell ‘em; then tell ‘em what you told ‘em. Not a bad way to strengthen potentiation any time we are introducing a new idea.




• I explain to a colleague just why it’s imperative that he support the redesign of the development process and I can tell he’s listening but I can also tell he isn’t getting it. I could walk away from that exchange thinking that he is just not a forward thinking individual, or any of a hundred other attributions we make about those that don’t immediately take to our ideas. Or I can assume, “it is early days;” I can say to myself, “He doesn’t get it yet but I have started the potentiation process.




• There is a great story about Rosa Parks that illustrates potentiation for all of us who facilitate workshops. Rosa Parks attended a workshop on school desegregation at Highlander in 1955. At the end of the workshop the Highlander staff asked, as we often do at the end of a workshop, "What are you going to do when you go back?" Many of the participants said, probably not much because they didn’t think the black community would stick together to fight segregation. Rosa’s response was, "Montgomery is the cradle of the confederacy. The white people won't let black people do anything." And she echoed the sentiment of the others, "Even if they did, I don't know whether we'd stick together or not." Then a few weeks later in Montgomery Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus to a white man, triggering the Montgomery boycott that drew national attention to the civil-rights movement. At the end of their workshop the facilitators at Highlander must have felt a disappointment at the response to their question. Apparently they had changed few, if any, minds. Yet, there was potentiation occurring in that room. You wonder how many times those synaptic connections had to be strengthened for the Montgomery bus boycott to occur.

David Bohm, the great physicist and one of my heroes said, “When you listen to somebody else, whether you like it or not, what they say becomes part of you.”

Trust Versus Psychological Safety

We’re all aware of how heavily our KM work depends on trust. Amy Edmondson takes a deeper look at trust related to knowledge sharing. I always find her work insightful. This week I was re-reading her article “Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams”, probably for the sixth or seventh time, and was struck again about how valuable it is to go beyond our simple understanding of trust and to think about the issue as psychological safety.

Perhaps I should start with what she means by psychological safety, it is “a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking.” But that, of course, begs the question, because then we have to ask what exactly does “interpersonal risk taking” mean. Edmondson explains it is “a sense of confidence that others will not embarrass, reject or punish someone for speaking up.”

So Psychological Safety seems to go far beyond interpersonal trust to include, 1) respect for each other’s competence, 2) caring about each other as people and 3) trust in each other’s intentions.

It’s a group, rather an individual concept, thus a shared sense that is developed out of a shared experience. As an example of a shared experience, she explains that group members, “will conclude that making a mistake does not lead to rejection when they have had a team experience in which appreciation and interest are expressed in response to discussion of their own and others’ mistakes.” Such shared experiences, occurring over time, create the tacit belief that that the team is a psychologically safe place.

In fact, Edmondson says it does little to increase psychological trust for managers or team members to talk about the need for it or to urge others to trust, because it is the experience that teaches. I’m certain that’s true for me personally. Although I’ve been in countless situations where the leader has said something akin to, “I want this to be a place where everyone can speak their mind,” as far as I can remember, hearing that has never made me one wit more open or forthcoming. In those situations what I needed to know was how others in the room were going to regard what I had to say. Would they see me as “out of touch?” “outlandish?” “showing off?” “smart?” “interesting?” If I conclude from their response to a comment I make, that their view of me is more the latter, I’m more willing to share my thinking, even when it isn’t fully formed. But the clues I use to make that decision are subtle; a widening of the eyes, a follow-up inquiry to what I’ve said, nods of agreement, and probably many other clues I pick up on but couldn’t name. From my own experience, I can affirm, what Edmondson suggests, that a sense of psychological safety is tacit.

The central idea of her study was to see if there is a relationship between psychological safety and team learning. To find that out Edmondson studied 51 real work teams in a manufacturing company, some of which were product development teams and others project teams, some self-managed, and others leader-lead. Edmondson conducted extensive interviews with team members, observed them, and collected survey responses from them.

The major finding from the study was that, 1) if the group/team feels psychologically safe they will, 2) be more willing to ask for help, admit an error, seek feedback, etc. and those actions, 3) produce learning in the group which, 4) improves their performance. Written as a simple formula:

We Learn (When We Listen) When We Talk

The title is a bit of an exaggeration, but intended to make the point that contrary to common belief, our own articulation of an idea adds to our understanding of that idea. At face value that doesn’t make much sense, after all we must know what we think about an issue; how else are we able to talk about it? But the reality is that what we don’t necessarily know what we know. Has it happened to you that, as you begin to describe to another person a complex issue you want to ask them about, the answer pops into your mind before you finish the question? And you end up saying, somewhat sheepishly, “Nevermind, I think I’ve just realized what the answer is.” In trying to explain the situation, your mind has put the bits and pieces you know about the topic together in a new way and provided a new understanding.

Johnson and Johnson, researchers at the University of Michigan, who have conducted studies of conversations, explain it this way. “In these meetings individuals exchange their data, conclusions, reasoning and questions with others. Although the cognitive benefits to the receiver of such an exchange are apparent, there is evidence that it is the speaker who makes the greatest cognitive gains from the exchange. Individuals organize information differently if they are going to present it to others than if they are trying to understand it solely for their own use. It is in the act of speaking that people tend to organize cognitively what they know.” They learned when they talked!

This interesting phenomenon has a number of possible knowledge management implications for me:


It implies that if I am stating an argument to convince someone else of the reasonableness of my position, I would be wise to pause periodically to give the other person an opportunity to articulate his or her thinking on what I’ve said. Even if the other’s response is only to offer a counter argument, that person will learn something new about their own position by “the way they have organized information differently…. to present it.” 


It implies that if I deliver a presentation or a lecture it would be helpful to make time for those listening to have a conversation with each other – a way for them to make mental connections that otherwise might never be made. (This is a part of the rationale behind my rant on “Are There Any Questions”) 


It implies that if I want another team to learn from the lessons my team or project has garnered, the transfer would work better if I arrange a conversation between the two groups than as a document. The conversation would provide the opportunity for the recipient to think out loud about how the lessons relate to their own work. 



It implies that I read an great article I will incorporate the ideas more fully into my own cognitive map, if I tell a colleague what I have just read (or write a blog about it). 



It implies that in the debrief of that great project my team just accomplished, the team is more likely to be able to understand how they achieved that success, if I gather the group to talk to about what they learned. They will learn what they learned in the talking. 



What a wonderful phenomenon - we learn when we talk. It has all kinds of uses

When is Help Helpful?: The Capacity to Make Use of Help

Tom Gilmore and I have received some thoughtful comments from our initial post in this series “When is Help Helpful?” Those comments call our attention to the relationship or the system in which both parties are embedded. Our thanks to those who offered thoughts and even sent a great youtube video.

In this post we explore the ability of the receiver to make use of the help being offered. Particularly in today’s context, we are often too overloaded or lack the requisite competences to absorb or metabolize the help. Three studies help us examine this issue.

1. The Coast Guard’s Rescue Swimmer Program

The Coast Guard is charged with assisting ships in distress. Too often, they were able to get helicopters, men, and equipment to the area of a disaster but the people in the water were in such a depleted condition that the Coast Guard was unable to rescue them.

In 1982, a particularly tragic case spurred the creation of the rescue swimmer program. (Beard; Junger)

“A Coast Guard HH-3F arrived on the scene to find the ship’s crew scattered, floating and swimming in chilling heavy seas. The waves were too high to allow the amphibian helicopter to alight. The ship’s crew, all suffering from exposure, were no longer able to assist themselves into the rescue basket. … Three survivors were rescued; thirty three people died … Crews in a powerful rescue machine could only watch as victims died just a few feet below them.” (Beard, p.150)


This event caused the Coast Guard to conduct a review of the patterns across previous cases. They found that having a skilled person in the water with those in distress, who had the ability to communicate with helping resources, significantly changed the dynamics. Having the skilled person in the depleted context was significantly more effective than if they were on the helping team. This was the genesis of the rescue swimmer program. When the help arrives, a highly trained swimmer is ready to leap into harm’s way, to amplify the distressed system’s capability to make use of the help. The first intervention is often to calm and reassure those in distress, to provide “the human link … between exhausted, terrified and often injured sailors and their only ride to survival” (Beard, p.150). Simply containing the panic can help those in peril recover aspects of their own coping skills. The rescue swimmer, with communication links to the helicopter and others, can make more effective use of whatever resources are still present in the distressed situation.

2.New York City Rand Corporation’s ‘Help’ to Mayor Lindsey’s Commissioners.

Peter Szanton in Not Well Advised set his sights on studying ‘advice’ and why so often it goes unused. He studied in depth very talented Rand experts who were assigned to major city agencies such as fire, police, housing, etc. Like the Coast Guard story he found that very talented, costly resources were brought to the boundary, yet the results were deeply disappointing. In the fire department, for example, the Rand experts analyzed the elapsed time from receiving a call to having water on the fire. As a result they attacked a major component in the delay - the heavy hoses and the time it took after the equipment had arrived. They explored the idea of ‘slippery water’ as an additive that would allow 3” hoses that were lighter and required fewer men and therefore could be deployed faster. But the ultimate success of this as well as innovations in other city agencies was disappointing.

Szanto makes a thoughtful systems analysis of why the help was not helpful:

• The direct clients were not paying for the advising services because it was funded by a foundation. Therefore, the Rand experts were pushing the potential help they could offer to the city agencies rather than having it pulled and paid for by agency people who might have defined the focus and the terms of engagement quite differently. Like many cases of help that look dyadic, even when the actual exchange of help is a pair, the dynamics are often better understood in a triangular system. Another common example, are the many instances of executive coaching where the company contracts with and pays for a coach to help a manager who has been identified as “in difficulty” – clearly a triangular case of help.


• There were real skill and competency deficits in the targets of the advice in consuming the help (especially in the context of turbulent conditions that resembled the situations for sea rescue that the Coast Guard faced). 


• “The advisor must be willing to provide ‘intensive care’” – again not unlike the Coast Guard putting a key embodiment of their expertise in harms way on the distressed side of the boundary. As consultants we are often sensitive to over functioning in a helping situation in ways that impede the learning of the client. We need also to consider that we may underestimate their capacity in the moment to make use of the help. 


3.Absorptive Capacity

Cohen and Levinthal looked at the ability of firms to absorb learning and innovation from external sources. They argue, “the ability to evaluate and utilize outside knowledge is largely a function of the level of prior related knowledge. At the most elemental level, this prior knowledge includes basic skills or even a shared language but may also include knowledge of the most recent scientific or technological developments in a given field.”

For example, some organizations that have attempted to implement a knowledge management initiative have stumbled because their employees have little experience of working in teams where members necessarily learn how to collaborate and share knowledge with each other in order to accomplish the team’s task. The implementers of KM find that this lack of knowledge slows down and sometimes defeats the implementation of the knowledge sharing processes.

Cohen and Levinthal labeled the extent to which previous knowledge is needed to take on new knowledge, absorptive capacity. Further, referencing the ability to bring innovation in from outside the organization, they suggest that “if all actors in the organization share the same specialized language, they will be effective in communicating with one another. But they may not be able to tap into diverse external knowledge sources.”

These examples speak to the capacity to make use of help in several senses. In the case of the rescue swimmers it was both the physical and emotional capacity of those in distress that was lacking. For the Rand experts as well as the Cohen and Levinthal study, there was a lack of skills and knowledge to absorb what was being offered. For the Rand experts there may have also been a lack of awareness that help was needed. Finally, the overload with other pressures in the context may be a major barrier to using the help because of the inability to pay sustained attention.

Possible Lessons

1. Get deeply into the context and concerns of the help seeker, not just the presenting issues but the ‘blooming, buzzing confusion’ (Wm. James), that surrounds the issue. Too often advice givers are too filled with the assets they represent. At our worst, we fall into the dynamic of the narcissistic Hollywood producer who is going on and on about himself, and then says, “But enough about me, Lets talk about you. What do you think of me?” There may be echoes of this in our first case. 


2. Assess the absorptive capacity for help. The more diverse the group asking for help, the more likely that organizational members will be able to relate to the incoming information. “It is best for the organization to expose a fairly broad range of prospective “receptors” to the environment.” (Cohen and Levinthal) In some situations it may be appropriate to offer the step before the requested knowledge. 


3. Time the help appropriately. We know in therapy that the timing of an interpretation deeply impacts its power. Harry Levinson (1976) in his organizational diagnosis work would read his report to his client in the evening with a ground rule of only questions of clarification. Then the following morning, they would meet again for a rich exchange. This enabled some ‘taking in’ of the findings, some working through of defensiveness, some dream work on what it stirred up before taking up the collaborative work.


4. Get the help on the right side of the boundary. As in the Coast Guard example, all the assets in the world will make no difference if there is no capability of those in distress to link up with them. Often the choke point in help is in the capacity of the client system to metabolize assistance.


5. Begin by assessing what the organization might stop doing to create more space for development. One aspect of Jack Welch’s effectiveness in leadership at GE was his emphasis on shedding as well as development (Tichy, 1997). This is particularly true in today’s overloaded, skinnyed down settings. 


Questions the examples raise:

• How far does the helper need to/have to go to be helpful? Do we have to get in the water? If we don’t, does it just make the situation worse for those in the water? Is deep empathy a form of connecting with the distress of the other in a powerful way that helps them recover some of their inner resources?


• In these situations the person or organization asking for our help may not know that they lack the absorptive capacity to accept it. Is part of our role to break the bad news that they are not yet ready to be helped? Nancy remembers a young technician whose questions were routinely ignored by the leading technical Guru. When he complained to a peer, he was told, “The questions you’re asking, any one of us could answer for you. You shouldn’t bother Hans with those kinds of questions.” 


• What are the skills for being an effective asker of help? In our teaching in business schools with student teams (and sadly in many top executive teams), the skill and proclivity to give advice greatly exceeds the skill in asking for help – which often feels taxed with the shame of being viewed as ‘helpless.’ Yet as Nancy has suggested in Does Your Organization have an Asking Problem.pdf” often the place to begin is addressing the ‘asking questions’ competence.


We would enjoy hearing from you about your answers to these questions or thoughts on the three examples. You may have other examples that will inform our thinking about these issues. Please make your comments here or respond to Tom at tgilmore@mail.cfar.com or Nancy at nancydixon@commonknowledge.org

Beard, Tom, Lt. Cmdr. “Coast Guard Rescue Swimmers: Filling the Void.” Proceedings, January 1999, pp. 106 – 107.

CFAR, Briefing Notes: “The Challenge of Helping Depleted or Overloaded Systems.”

Cohen, W. M. and Levinthal, D. A. (1990). Absorptive Capacity: A New perspective on Learning and Innovation. Administrative Science Quarterly. 35 128-152.

Junger, Sebastian. The Perfect Storm. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1997.

Levinson, Harry. Organizational Diagnosis. 1976

Szanton, Peter. Not Well Advised. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1981