conversation matters

Learning From Failure - It's Possible

Organizations may think they have taken care of the problem of learning from failure once they’ve put in a lessons learned database. But the research of Cannon and Edmondson indicates that managers greatly underestimate the difficulties that are involved in learning from failure.

They define failure as “a deviation from expected and desired results.”(p. 4) Using that definition, failures not only include disastrous events like the Columbia shuttle disaster and Enron, but also the many small failures that occur everyday. A major conclusion Cannon and Edmondson draw is that looking at small failures can head off those catastrophic failures.

…one of the tragedies in organizational learning is that catastrophic failures are often preceded by smaller failures that were not identified as failures with examination and learning. In fact these small failures are often the key “early warning signs” that could provide a wake up call needed to avert disaster down the road (p.9).

A number of industries have taken that philosophy to heart. The FAA has developed practices that make it a model in learning from failure. Pilots can report near misses with out fear of retribution and major accidents are thoroughly investigated. Patient safety work in hospitals, which began to be addressed in the early 90’s, drew heavily on what had been learned about flight safety and has since saved countless lives. If you are a patient in a clinic or hospital and find yourself being asked for your birth date over and over again, that is patient safety at work – preventing any chance of an error like, for example, the technician putting the wrong name on your tubes of blood. The nuclear industry has also put practices in place, for example tracking anything that is even slightly out of the ordinary and quickly investigating and reporting the results to the entire system.

But these industries are far from the norm. In most organizations failures are hidden or down played as one-off incidents. There is pressure to “move on” rather than “dwell” on past mistakes. In part this results from the very human desire to be highly regarded by peers and bosses, but in part it is people's recognition that success is rewarded while failure often prevents promotion. Added to that are the very strong negative emotions that all of us experience when we have to confront our own failure. These factors are so powerful that without a very intentional and concerted effort, learning from failure just doesn’t happen.

What is needed is a clear model of what it takes to learn from failure and that is what Cannon and Edmondson have provided in their article, “Failing to Learn and Learning to Fail.” (Download Edmondson - Failing to Learn and Learning to fail) They identify three organizational activities that need to be in place if an organization is going to take advantage of this valuable knowledge.
• A systematic way of identifying failures
• A process in place for analyzing failures, and
• A culture that promotes deliberate experimentation
I discuss each of these practices below, providing examples from Cannon and Edmondson and adding examples from my own work.

Identifying failures
One of the challenges in identifying small failures is how to make the failures visible enough that they can be identified as such. There is no problem with identify catastrophic failures – they are well publicized. But if the goal is to identify small failures that are precursors to those catastrophes – then a well thought through system has to be in place. As this example from Cannon and Edmondson shows it often takes someone with good research skills to format data so that others can see it.

X-ray errors

Across the medical profession there is a 10-15% failure rate in reading mammograms accurately - even among experts. So the discovery that a technician has missed identifying a tumor is not viewed as a topic worth spending time on. This well-known error rate is an example of small failures that need attention - yet are easy to consider as “just the way things are.”

When Dr. Kim Adcock became radiology chief at Kaiser Permanente Colorado, she used HMO records to identify failures and produce systematic feedback including bar charts and graphs for each individual x-ray reader. The graphs allowed readers to become aware of their own error rate and more importantly to return to a specific x-ray to investigate why they missed a tumor – allowing them to learn not to make the same mistake again.

Without Dr. Adcock’s skill in putting the data together in a usable format it was largely invisible. An x-ray reader might never even realize he/she had made an error since the patient’s next visit could be months away and an altogether different reader might look at that x-ray.

Cannon and Edmondson note that the inaccessibility of data is one of the issues that prevent learning from mistakes. In many organizations, to make failure visible enough that it can be addressed requires someone with the research and analytic skills to ferret it out. Learning from failure may also require a courageous choice about what data to collect. The eradication of smallpox accomplished by the World Health Organization (WHO) begun in 1965 provides a useful example.

Eradication of Smallpox

Before its eradication 10 million people a year were inflicted with the disease and 20-40% died, with many of the rest left scarred and sometimes blind. Because of WHO’s ten year vaccination campaign, by 1977 the last case of small pox occurred in Somalia – small pox had been eradicated. The story of that success is a story of learning from both failures and successes and being willing to change strategies in terms of what it was learned.

An important part of that learning resulted from the choices WHO made about what data to collect during the long vaccination campaign. It would have advantaged WHO politically to track the number of vaccinations given and the number of areas free of small pox. But instead they chose to track trends in the incidence of smallpox. Those data were openly shared with field workers around the globe. WHO considered the field workers co-researchers, so felt a responsibility to continually provide them accurate and useful data with which to guide their own field vaccination program and research. Such reports were frequently embarrassing both to WHO and to the countries – yet it allowed WHO to learn in a way that could not have been possible from data that were more sensitive to public relations

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Analyzing failures
The second organizational activity that is necessary in order to learn from failures is the ability to analyze the failures. Cannon and Edmondson explain that organizations tend to avoid such analysis. They may request that someone conduct a study but studies are of little use unless the organization creates the forum for in-depth discussion of the failure.

And those forums need facilitators who have the skills to create an atmosphere of psychological safety in which a spirit of inquiry and openness can flourish. As Cannon and Edmondson note:

Decades of research by organizational learning pioneer Chris Argyris has demonstrated that people in disagreement rarely ask each other the kind of sincere questions that are necessary for them to learn from each other. People also try to force their views on the other party rather than educating the other party by providing the underlying reasoning behind their views. (p.28)

Edmondson’s work on patient safety is particularly relevant for me, because of my own research and project work in this area. The following report, written by a facilitator of a failure analysis meeting in one of those projects, illustrates that facilitation skills that create psychological safety can indeed be learned. The skills the report writer references in this report were based on Argyris’ Model II skills that are intended to make organizational learning possible. The report is a first hand account written by St Anthony’s Director of Patient Safety following a meeting (which we referred to as sensemaking) she facilitated to look at a small failure that had been reported in the hospital.

St Anthony

We held a sensemaking session on a medication error that originated in the pharmacy. A patient was given a blood pressure medication that the physician had put on hold. The patient had come from the regular floor to our re-hab unit where the medication was wrongly administered. No harm occurred because of this error.

Before the sensemaking session occurred, I, as the Director of Patient Safety, along with the Director of Pharmacy conducted a Root Cause Analysis on the error and based on that developed a causal tree.

We were particularly interested in this error because we were in the process of implementing bar coding throughout the hospital. The unit where the error occurred was trialing the bar coding system so both the pharmacy and the re-hab unit had put in new processes for medication orders.

The sensemaking meeting brought ten people together, including the Director of Pharmacy, two pharmacy technicians and two pharmacists, one of whom had been involved in the error. We also had the nursing unit director from the floor where the error occurred, the VP of administration, the management engineer and the nursing informaticist who had expertise in bar coding. In addition two nurses from the floor had agreed to come, but at the last minute were not able to do so. The meeting lasted about an hour and a half and was held toward the end of the shift to allow some people to come in early and others to stay after their shift.

I facilitated the sensemaking session, having participated in the earlier sensemaking training. At the beginning of the meeting I attempted to set a tone of openness. I explained that the intent of the sensemaking session was to educate ourselves on how we do things and more specifically how this error had occurred and I acknowledged that we all make errors including myself. I recalled an error I had made and asked if the others, whom we had arranged in a circle, would be willing to share a personal experience they had with an error and to say something about what it meant to them. Nearly everyone in the circle did so and this beginning proved valuable in demonstrating to everyone present that we were all on equal footing. The beginning also served to introduce those present to each other, which was important because one of our barriers to fixing medication errors has been that people from the floor don’t know many of the people from pharmacy.

I had printed the events from the causal tree on individual sheets of paper and these were placed one at a time on a wall chart. I explained to the group that this was just our rendition of what had occurred and that what I was looking for was input from them as to the correctness of the items or the sequence. As I placed each component on the tree, the group talked about that item, providing feedback, correcting, and adding new items. I used post-it notes to write additional information or steps. Having the items on individual sheets to be posted and changed proved much less threatening than using PowerPoint. It emphasized the tentativeness of what we had already produced illustrating that it was changeable.

The discussion evolved slowly as the group began to open up. As the meeting continued it became clear to me that the members were really trying to make sense of each other’s reasoning and contributions. Rather than all the questions coming from me, they began to ask questions of each other. For example, one pharmacist asked, “How do you know what medication you’ve put in?” The other pharmacist responded, “I check them off.” The first pharmacist was surprised because he had not been checking them off. Moreover, one of the techs explained that he thought the check meant that the pharmacist had already done a double check, so had not been re-checking those items. So even the pharmacist were discovering differences in how they did things and that often led to a discussion about which practice was safer.

One of the ways this meeting seemed different from a typical Root Cause Analysis that I have conducted was that the sensemaking meeting had a tone of curiosity rather than the urgency to get the form completed and the meeting over with. I found myself exploring more in this meeting, trying to get at staff’s understanding rather than just get the facts. I found myself honestly curious about what happened and did not feel compelled to make judgments. In this meeting we primarily tried to understand what had happened and to reflect those changes in the causal tree. In the end I felt great satisfaction knowing that the discussion did indeed go beyond the surface of the event. The casual tree we ended up with added several.

In two subsequent meetings we created an action plan to address the issues we had uncovered in the sensemaking meeting and based on the same incident we conducted four subsequent Failure Modes and Effects Analysis meetings. So the sensemaking meeting proved a rich source of understanding for our continuing improvement work. The safety culture re-survey conducted in the pharmacy showed a positive change which, in part, was as a result of the conversation we had in the sensemaking meeting.

This report illustrates for me the value of a systematic process to analyze mistakes. It also illustrates the care that needs to be taken with the tone of the meeting, the media that is used to convey the concepts, the facilitator skills, and even how the room is arranged.

Deliberate experimentation
The third of Cannon and Edmondson’s three practices is the need for deliberate experimentation. They call it “learn to fail intelligently – a deliberate strategy to promote innovation and improvement.” This may seem counter-intuitive because experimentation necessarily leads to failure. But a practice of experimentation requires a shift in thinking from seeing failure as something to avoid or punish, to seeing failure as a way to learn. Lewis Thomas in The Medusa and the Snail says,

Mistakes are at the very base of human thought, embedded there, feeding the structure like root nodules... We are built to make mistakes, coded for error.... The lower animals do not have this splendid freedom. They are limited, most of them, to absolute infallibility. (P.29)

Cannon and Edmondson quote research that shows that organizations that experiment effectively are likely to be more innovative, productive and successful than those that do not take such risks.

A well know example is IDEO, the award winning design firm. It uses many slogans to encourage experimentation including, “Fail often in order to succeed.” In the early stages of creating a design for a new product, IDEO encourages many experiments, knowing that most of them will not work, but also knowing much will be learned from those failures.

Another celebrated example is the 3M Corporation that has encouraged deliberate experimentation in a culture that is tolerant of mistakes. “At 3M failures are seen as a necessary step in a larger process of developing successful, innovative products.” (p. 21) The 3M corporation provides incentives and has policies that encourage deliberate experimentation.

The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) Knowledge Lab developed a process to encourage innovation and experimentation called Crossing Boundaries. You can read the full description in an earlier post. But to summarize it briefly here, Crossing Boundaries is a system where many ideas are encouraged and support is provided to make those ideas happen.

Crossing Boundaries takes place in the largest auditorium at DIA with the Director up in front. The meeting starts with an impressive chart that reveals how many ideas have been offered and how many have resulted in change – 47% at last count. As soon as the accounting is over, employees from across DIA stand up, one at a time, and offer the Director solutions, not problems. And they only offer solutions THEY are willing to take personal responsibility for implementing. The Director listens to the ideas, responds to each one, sometimes with questions, sometimes with comments. There are from 5 – 20 solutions offered at each monthly meeting. Immediately following the meeting, a group of coaches gets in touch with each of the idea submitters to assist them, that is, to help write a business case, open doors, connect to others with a similar idea.

Crossing Boundaries illustrates Cannon and Edmonson’s caution that, “Deliberate experimentation requires that people not just assume their views are correct, but actually put their ideas to the test and design (even very informal, small) experiments in which their view can be disconfirmed.” (p. 20)

Summary
It is possible for organizations to learn from failure but to accomplish that requires more than admonitions from seniors about the need to do so. It requires 1) a way to systematically collect data on small failures, 2) designing systems to jointly analyze the data on failures, and 3) encouraging experimentation which deliberately results in failures from which the organization can learn.

Organizational Studies that Don't Just Sit on the Shelf: Participatory Action Research

Organizational studies don’t have a very good track record for making a difference in organizations. There are lots of reasons for this. Sometimes the findings offend a high level official so the study never sees the light of day. Other times the client who asked for the study just isn’t in a position to do anything about the findings. Sometimes the findings are not credible, or are too abstract – lots of reasons but in the end, all too frequently, the recommendations are never carry out.

I am using the term "study" here, but you could substitute the terms "lessons learned," "evaluation" or "assessment" and see the same absence of results. In most situations in which an organization asks or is required to take an in-depth, objective look at an issue, the study report is more likely to be the end rather than the beginning of change.

Participatory Action Research is a way to conduct an organizational study that has a very different outcome, that is, change starts to happen while the study is still being conducted. By the time the study is completed there is already a buzz in the organization about the issues and people are trying out changes. There are a number of ways to design Participatory Action Research and I’ll write about other designs in up-coming posts. But central to all Participatory Action Research are four basic principles:

1. employ a social scientist to design the study to insure the reliability and validity of the findings
2. involve a team of internal employees (who will be the beneficiaries of the findings) in all phases of the research, that is, data collection, analysis, recommendations and implementation
3. design organization wide conversations about the findings and recommendations
4. assess the results of the implementation as input to continuing the organization’s learning about the issue being studied.

I’ve just completed a study for a government agency that I want to use here to illustrate how Participatory Action Research works and why it makes a difference when other studies don’t.

The Situation: For some time this agency has questioned the effectiveness of its longstanding process intended to improve the quality of its reports for clients. That process involves submitting the reports to a series of hierarchical reviews before they are released. My task was to take a systematic look at the hierarchical review process to accurately describe how it works and more importantly to learn what impact the review process has on the quality of outcomes. And I had a very important second task - to conduct the study in such a way that the findings from the study wouldn’t just sit on the shelf in some decision maker’s office. The goal was to embed the findings in the minds of organizational members.

The Participatory Action Research study I designed to address this issue used semi-structured interviews. That means there was a standard set of questions, but the interviewers were instructed to encourage interviewees to raise issues the interview team had not yet thought of and to follow those trails when they seemed promising. In a study like this one, where the issue is not well understood, having that flexibility is essential. Had interviewers just stuck with the original interview question a great number of critical insights would have been lost. Using semi-structured interviews and multiple interviewers required adding four research practices to the four principles listed above:

5. ensure consistency across multiple interviewers
6. take verbatim notes to reduce interviewer bias in the data
7. analyze interview data using qualitative data analysis software in order to compare the data from differing perspectives
8. ensure interviewee anonymity and keep faith with those who have offered their insights

The first principle is to have as a principal investigator a social scientist that is knowledgeable about how to conduct qualitative research to insure both the reliability and validity of the study. In this study I served in that role of principal investigator. But with Participative Action Research the social scientist doesn’t conduct the study alone, which leads to the second principle.

The second principle is to involve an internal team of people who will be the beneficiaries of the findings. The beneficiary is not the person who sponsored the study; rather it is those whose work could change based on the findings – often those on the frontline. Participatory Action Research involves this internal team in all phases of the study. Team members become joint researchers, collecting data, analyzing the data, and constructing recommendations.

Identifying Interviewees: In consultation with the agency sponsor, four departments were selected to be involved in the study, making sure a diversity of types of work were included. I met with each department head to outline the parameters of the study and to offer anonymity both in terms of the department and the interviewees.

Each department was asked to identify eight interviewees including both frontline workers who produce the products, and those in the hierarchy who conduct the reviews; and taking into account a distribution of level and experience. Each department was also asked to provide a two person interview team made up of one frontline worker and one person in the hierarchy.

Preparing the Interview Team: I developed a set of interview questions and a protocol for conducting the interviews, which I had tested earlier and revised based on the responses. A protocol is a step-by-step guide of how to conduct the interviews. It includes how to introduce the study to the interviewee, issues of confidentiality, how to probe responses, how to take notes, etc. The protocol satisfied the research practice of ensuring consistency across multiple interviewers.

The interview teams from the four departments came together for the first of three meetings. In this first meeting I demonstrated the interview protocol and the interviewer group made revisions to the questions. Involving the interviewers in refining the questions was important for two reasons, 1) interviewers were able alter the language of the questions so they would have more meaning to their colleagues, as well as adding new questions that were important to the interviewers, and 2) the discussion and language changes helped the interviewers to “own” the questions – the start of making it their study.

Collecting Data: I assigned each interview team to a department to conduct their interviews – a department other than their own. This not only reduced interviewer bias, but served to broaden the interviewee’s understanding of the review process.
The interviewers found conducting the interviews informative, they 1) discovered practices that would be useful in their own department, 2) empathized with the difficulties others faced in departments other than their own, and 3) gained a clearer understanding of their own department process by seeing it through the eyes of others. After interviewing they reported:

“What is illuminating is seeing other processes.”

“It was very helpful. You don’t realize that things could be better or worse in other offices. We asked interviewees what things needed to be fixed and we thought we could profit from those fixes too.”

“It helped us look at our own process. We’ve revamped a number of things.”

“It was also revealing to us that we’re not doing that bad.”

The research practice of using verbatim notes to reduce interviewer bias in the data was employed. Taking down what an interviewee actually said rather than paraphrasing, which is the interviewer’s interpretation of what the interviewee meant, is critical to the validity of the study. Having a team conduct the interviews allowed one person to concentrate on the notes and the other to focus on asking the questions and follow-up probes. Verbatim notes are also useful in writing the report because interviewees’ actual words help to substantiate and bring the findings to life.

The teams conducted half of the interviews and I, as principal researcher, conducted the other half. The comparison between the content of my interviews and the interview teams’ interviews provided a reliability check.

Analyzing the Interviewee Data: After the interviews had been completed, the interview team met again to report to each other on what they had learned. Out of those reports and the discussion that followed the team identified common themes across all four departments. This was an important meeting that served several purposes, 1) it provided the initial themes used to code the data in a qualitative database, 2) it broadened the interviewers’ understanding of how the review process is conducted in different offices, and 3) the insights of this group provided additional data for the study.

A new group of frontline workers and members of the hierarchy were then brought together as a focus group. I provided them a brief written description of each of the themes the interview team had developed, which they then discussed at length. This meeting served to both validate and amplify the themes with new insights.

The research practice of analyzing interview data using qualitative data analysis software was particularly critical with this study because of the large number of interviews. This type of software makes it possible to sort unstructured data and then examine it through multiple lenses, (e.g. role, theme, tenure, etc.) It makes it possible to organize and manage thousands of pieces of related information, explore themes, and make comparisons.

I entered all of the verbatim interview notes into a qualitative database and coded the data with the themes identified by the interviewers as well as a number of additional themes that emerged from the lengthy task of coding. Coding the data entails assigning codes to every sentence of every interview and as new themes emerge, returning to already read interviews to re-assign codes. Based on this analysis I then wrote a first draft of the report.

The draft was sent to each of the interviewers to read and revise. The interviewer team came together for a third meeting to talk through the draft report. They brought with them their corrected copies of the draft. Each team was also asked to bring a thought leader from their own department with them to the meeting to participate in the discussion. In this review meeting the interview team made revisions to the draft and validated the findings. The team then turned their attention to constructing recommendations based on the findings, which then became a part of the final report.

By the third meeting, change related to the study issue had already begun to happen. There was now in each department a group of 5-6 employees (consisting of the interviewer team, the focus group members and the thought leader) who had a thorough understanding of the findings and a vested interest in using them to make change.

The research practice of ensuring interviewee anonymity and keeping faith with those who have offered their insights was followed. Each person who had been interviewed and promised anonymity received a draft of the report and was asked to read through it to make sure none of the quotes could identify them. Before sending them the draft I had taken care to sanitize it as thoroughly as I could, but even so, a handful of interviewees ask for changes in their quotes to further ensure they would not be recognized.

By the time the final report was ready to send to the sponsor, sixty employees spread across the four departments had thoroughly read the draft. Which meant there was already an organizational buzz about the findings of the report.

I now return to the third principle of Participatory Action Research, designing organization wide conversations about the findings and recommendations. To produce change in an organization, the findings of the study have to become a part of the organizational conversation. With Participative Action Research those conversations begin to happen during the study, but that isn’t adequate to bring about change. It is critical to convene small and large group conversations across the organization to provide employees the opportunity to process the findings for themselves and to think through what the findings mean for how their work needs to change. It is necessary to have such conversations among high-level decision makers, but equally critical that those whose work will change hold such conversations and make recommendation specific to their own department.

Participatory Action Research is, at its heart, a conversational process, not an impersonal survey, nor an experimental design with “subjects;” rather it is a conversation between organizational members. That conversation takes place between interviewer and interviewee, between members of the interview team, and between organizational members in the conversations set up to discuss the findings. All of the conversations are a part of the change. In the end all change is a result of organizational conversation – the only question is who is invited into the conversation. Participatory Action Research is a methodology to focus the organization on conversations that matter and invite into the conversation those whose work will change.

For the agency study I have used as the example in this post, we are now poised at the step of designing the organization wide conversations. So stay tuned.

The Value of Lessons Learned

In common usage the term LL means, something I learned through an experience I’ve had that will cause me to act differently in the future. We learn lessons in obvious ways, for example, we ask someone for help, to which they agree, and then find they don’t come through – lesson: “I won’t ask her for help again.” And in more subtle ways, as when over time we feel we’ve finally mastered how to produce the quality of report that a demanding editor or boss wants - lesson: “Okay, now I see what I need to do.”

In our own minds we usually frame lessons learned as instructions to ourselves that are both action oriented and future oriented – they are not just descriptions of what happened but guidance for our future. Lessons learned are in fact one of the most important ways we learn, grow and change. We greatly value those lessons of experience and they become a part of our sense of self.

The US Army took this valuable every day behavior to a new level when, in the 1970’s, it formalized it into the After Action Review (AAR). In each AAR session the army drew out three levels of lessons:
1. Lessons for the platoon (or battalion or company) that would lead it to take more effective action the next time it was engaged in a similar maneuver - typically a facilitator wrote these lessons on a flip chart for everyone to see
2. Individual lessons that each soldier learned, that would lead him/her to act more effectively the next time that soldier was involved in a similar maneuver - each soldier carried a pocket notebook to write these lessons down during the group meeting
3. Lessons that could be generalized for the use of others – a subset of what was learned in the meeting was sent to the Center for Army Lessons Learned (CALL) to be made available to other platoons.

Formalizing lessons learned, as the Army did, is useful because, let’s face it, we don’t often take the time to pause and think through, “Now what did I learn out of that experience?” “What would I do differently next time?” Consequently we frequently find ourselves making the same mistakes over and over again – and kicking ourselves for not having learned the first time.

Even for individuals, the reflection process is more effective when it is formalized, for example, keeping a journal or a holding a regularly scheduled conversation with a colleague or mentor who can help the individual think through the lessons. We learn when we talk applies to understanding what we have gained out of an experience. As the saying goes, “Experience is inevitable, learning is not.” Turning experience into learning involves an intentional, reflective process.

If it is a group that has conducted a project or team effort, formalizing the lessons learned process is critical. Individual reflection is not enough for a group to improve. After all, in a team or group project it is not just the actions of each individual team member that makes it work, it is also the interaction – how one person’s action impacts (delays or facilitates) another. The interplay between team members in a basketball game is a useful analogy – the star can’t make the goal without the help of teammates that get the ball to him at the right time.

The relationship between cause and effect is always complex. Most of the outcomes of a team’s actions have multiple causes and it takes the thinking of the whole team to tease those cause and effect relationships out. A group discussion moves the knowledge each individual holds into a group or public space where it can then be integrated and made sense of by the whole team. The team then draws on the shared knowledge the next time it takes action.

This diagram borrowed from my book Common Knowledge (p.36), illustrates this concept.


Different organizations have given different names to the process they use to learn from experience. The Army term is After Action Review (AAR). NASA uses Pause and Learn (PAL). The Emergency Preparedness Community term is Hot Wash. Regardless of the name, each has guidelines in place to make such meetings more effective than just having a group of people tossing out ideas. All of us have experienced debriefs or postmortems that were a great waste of time. Here are some general guidelines that help lessons learned meetings be more effective:

* Meetings to construct lessons are held as soon as possible after the outcome because memory fades quickly
* If the project is lengthy, lessons learned meetings are held at milestones along the way
* Meetings focus only on the team/project lessons learned, not on other issues the group may be facing
* Meetings are brief – it is not a meeting to solve a problem only to tease out what was learned
* They focus on what went well as well as what could have been improved.
* Everyone involved in the action is there to contribute to the lessons – no one is too junior or to senior to participate
* It is framed as a meeting to learn, not to judge – so no recriminations
* Meetings have a structure and a standard set of questions the group will address
* There is a facilitator to keep the group focused. Often it is a team member who has had some training in that organization’s lessons learned methodology. Typically the group’s leader participates but does not facilitate.

When KM began to gain prominence in the early 90’s organizations borrowed the idea from the Army and lessons learned became one of the early KM practices. Over time lessons learned became so focused on transferring knowledge to others that organizations tended to ignore the greatest value, what the individuals and teams had learned for themselves.

The transfer part is very tricky. What organizations found is what we already knew as individuals: that although lessons, that are learned first hand, are incredibly impactful, it is very hard to transfer those lessons to someone else. From our own experience as parents, trying to share our lessons from the past with our children, we know how difficult it is to make that transfer. As our children tell us, “But Mom, things are different now than when you were growing up.”

So all those repositories of lessons learned that we built in the early days of KM just didn’t work very well and lessons learned took on a bad name within organizations. In an up coming blog post I’ll talk about ways to make lessons learned transfer more effective.

But it is critical that we not overlook the most important way lessons learned are useful, which is for the group that has achieved an outcome, successful or not, to really come to understand how that happened. In the end, unless the originating group has gained a thorough understanding for themselves, anything they transfer to others will be inaccurate.

The greatest value of lessons learned is for those who took the action.

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.

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

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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Crossing Boundaries - The Un-Town Hall

Crossing Boundaries is a change program at the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). At first glance it looks like a typical town hall, but is remarkably different and a hundred times more effective at making change.

The program started when LTG Maples came to the Agency three years ago. In reviewing the latest human capital survey he learned that employees felt they had no ability to provide input into issues, they couldn’t push things up. With the help of the Knowledge Lab (the part of the organization I contract with) he created Crossing Boundaries to address that issue.

Crossing Boundaries takes place in the largest auditorium at DIA, and in typical fashion, LTG Maples is up in front – and there the resemblance to a town hall ends. The meeting starts with Adrian (Zeke) Wolfberg, who heads the Knowledge Lab, putting up a chart to show how many ideas have been offered and how many have resulted in change. By the November 2008 meeting there had been 352 total ideas submitted, 167 ideas had resulted in change (47%); 59 ideas were in progress (17%) and 54 ideas have been withdrawn (15%). A remarkable achievement!

As soon as the accounting is over, employees from across DIA stand up, one at a time, and offer LTG Maples solutions, not problems. And they only offer solutions THEY are willing to take personal responsibility for implementing. LTG Maples listens to the ideas, responds to each one, sometimes with questions, sometimes with comments. There are from 5 – 20 solutions offered at each monthly meeting.

Immediately following the meeting, a group of Knowledge Lab coaches gets in touch with each of the idea submitters to assist them, that is, to help write a business case, open doors, connect to others with a similar idea.

There have been remarkable ideas submitted and equally remarkable changes made by the idea submitters. Many of course are classified, but here are a few of the unclassified examples:

• One idea submitter created a new civilian intelligence reserve where former employees could volunteer to return in support of high priority, ad hoc missions (e.g. crisis response).




• Another employee created a regular communication of “News You Can Use” to the broad agency via an internal Web page that would publicize new analytical tools available to analysts. He gathered a number of volunteers to serve on an editorial board and assess the tools.




• Yet a third employee created a tool linked to badge readers to accurately account for employees known to be in the facility during emergence evacuations.

I asked LTG Maples what makes Crossing Boundaries work as a change program and he suggested three elements (his words in quotes):

• “First we make the results from Crossing Boundaries visible” That happens not only by the tally each meeting starts with, but by employees periodically standing up in the meeting and talking about a project they have completed. Some of the successes are written up for the DIA internal publication. In other words, this is not a suggestion program where ideas disappear into a void never to be heard of again.



• “The Knowledge Lab coaches that provide the help the idea submitter needs.” Idea submitters are not on their own, rather the program builds a support system around them and the coaches track the ideas so they don’t fall off the radar.


Third is the leadership piece, LTG Maples says, “I always try to be there. I see it as my program - a way for me to demonstrate my personal involvement.”
I would add two more to his list of what makes it work:
• LTG Maples’ himself has a remarkable ability to hear the kernel of the idea in what is sometimes a disorganized statement of the solution being offered. Often he paraphrases the idea to check if he has understood - demonstrating greater interest in clearly understanding the employee, than in his own response. The message this sends is subtle but vital to producing the change DIA is trying to achieve. LTG Maples typically expresses appreciation for the idea being offered and for the willingness to help the agency, even when the idea being offered necessarily has harsh criticisms embedded in it. His appreciative language sets a tone in the meeting that encourages a kind of honesty and frankness rarely seen in organizations.


• The insistence that employees only offer solutions that they are willing to make happen themselves. It is this that sends the critical change message - that YOU can change what happens at DIA.

Crossing Boundaries has indeed brought change to DIA, not only the 150 some ideas that have been implemented, but more importantly, the growing belief among employee ranks that it is possible for them to change the agency – that DIA is open to change.

Read more in Crossing Boundaries to Build Change and Crossing Boundaries in Government Executive

Thank You for Sharing Your Knowledge

One of the things that has always drawn me to Knowledge Management is that knowledge sharing is essentially an act of giving. And in that sense it brings a bit of humanity and warmth to an organizational setting.

We use the term “share” in two senses, one is to give a part of what I have to you, as in, “let me give you half of my brownie.” The other meaning of share refers not to a possession but to a part of my thinking, as when I share my thoughts, disappointments, or joy. And that too is a gift.

Dave Snowden is fond of saying that “all knowledge sharing is voluntary” and I’m very much in agreement. Even when my organization requires me to share my knowledge by writing it into my performance plan or counting the number of contributions I make to a community, it would be easy for me to run up the count with superficial knowledge. But to take the time to engage with another person in order to understand their need and then respond to it, that is a choice I make - a gift, no matter what the organizational requirement.

I believe we could incrementally increase the amount of knowledge sharing in organizations if we were to be more mindful of saying “thank you” for these gifts. Actually, it would require a bit more than a perfunctory “thank you.” Genuine appreciation would involve letting the person who offered their knowledge know how it had been used and what was achieved because of their insight.

That was brought home to me when I interviewed one of the company commanders for my book, CompanyCommand. I asked Jay Miseli, a tank commander, what caused him to take such an active role in that community. He said that in the past he had used the CompanyCommand website off and on, but did not really consider himself a member of that community. He had, for example, sent in his AAR after being deployed to Iraq and a couple of times had pulled an item off the website that would save him some time. Tony, one of the founders, had been after him to take a more active role in the CompanyCommand community, but Jay had responded to Tony that he was just too busy. He explains,

“Then I got an email from a headquarters Company Commander of a tank battalion in Korea—someone I didn’t know—thanking me. He had downloaded my AAR, and he had used it, not only to influence his organization, but through the chain of command, to influence how the brigade executed their logistics. Then it hit me… “a tank brigade in Korea is going to be better equipped to fight if they’re called—wow!’ I was just floored that a document I wrote had this influence well outside of what I thought of as my relatively small sphere of influence. So, when I got back to the States and Tony hit me again ….I’m like, ‘Yea, I’m on board.”

It has always struck me that what drew Jay in was not the benefit he received from the website, rather it was his realization that what he had contributed made a difference. But how would he have known that without the tank commander in Korea taking the time to let him know?

Often when we have responded to a request in a colleague’s email, we get back a quick, “thanks,” but we seldom learn if it made a difference. Likewise, when we answer a question on a community forum we rarely hear whether the ten minutes we took to write out our response was useful to the question asker.

For most of us our knowledge is an important part of our identity. We highly value the knowledge we have gained through the trial and error of our experience. Too often we treat knowledge sharing as a transaction, when actually it is the much more personal giving of self. A “thanks” is adequate for a transaction, but inadequate for sharing a part of self.

It would be interesting to see what would happen if, rather than encouraging more knowledge sharing, we were deliberate about encouraging more appreciation.

A Challenge to KM Professionals to Address Strategic Organizational Issues

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.