As KM practitioners our focus has been on using our skills and techniques to accomplish our organization’s strategic plan or stated objectives. We take our direction from top management and apply our techniques to implement senior management’s objectives.
To date, most of the work we, as KM professionals, have done to meet these goals has been focused on the lateral movement of knowledge. The outcome of the lateral movement of knowledge is performance improvement – often sorely needed improvement. But lateral movement cannot help the organization address its most complex and difficult issues.
The strategic plan and stated objectives of our organizations are themselves a product of knowledge – but knowledge that we, as KM professionals, have not addressed. Until KM professionals address how to use the knowledge of the whole system to influence the direction the whole system should move toward, we are just fooling ourselves about using collective intelligence. We are not using KM to address the most important issues our organizations face.
Recently the question, “Could KM have saved General Motors?” was asked on the SIKM list serve. General Motors had, until a few weeks ago, an outstanding KM program, with a very experienced and skillful person leading it. This program, which made many innovative improvements in how knowledge was shared horizontally and without question saved GM money, did not apply knowledge management to the most serious issues that GM faced and that ultimately brought GM to the brink of bankruptcy.
As with GM, in most organizations, a very small percentage of the collective intelligence is applied against this most critical knowledge task. The small group at the top may be very smart people, but even very smart people have blind spots, biases they are unaware of, and are sometimes tempted to build self-serving strategies - as the many recent organizational failures have taught us. As KM professionals, we are ignoring the people at the top of our organizations and the processes they use to create the strategic knowledge they employ.
We have viewed the top primarily as a source of funding and support – not as a part of the organization that has a critical need to deal with knowledge more effectively. We have not asked, “Where is the top getting the knowledge they use to make strategic decisions? How are they exploring and accessing diverse views? What processes do they use to make sense of the knowledge they acquire? How do they insure that the knowledge that filters up from the bottom is not distorted or diluted?” We need to turn some of our attention to this part of the organization and use our professional knowledge to build practices that use the collective intelligence to create more effective strategies.
There is no lack of knowledge about how to involve the system in collective sensemaking; Future Search, Conference Model, Whole System Change, Open Space Technology, Appreciative Inquiry, etc. all provide proven methodology. But as KM practitioners we have done little to make this happen.
Regardless of whether senior management requests our assistance, KM professionals have the capability to convene the conversation around the complex issues our organizations are facing. We could call for an open space technology meeting on “Our Greatest Strategic Need” or hold a Future Search Conference on “Lesson from our Competitors.” We could copy IBM with an Innovation Jazz on-line forum. We could do a benchmaking study with our most successful competitors. Why do we need top management to demand this or tell us this is what we should do? We are the ones who have read the literature, looked at the case studies, know the examples. We could be the source of the need for change. We could be proactive, not reactive.
I fear we have stayed where it is safe, not where we are needed. We have been good employees, but perhaps not good organizational citizens.
