conversation matters

The Complexity of Transferring Lessons Learned from Projects

Transferring lessons from one project to another seems like it ought to be a simple task. The team that has learned something writes it up, then the team that needs the lesson reads the report – knowledge transferred, end of story. But unfortunately too many attempts at lessons learned don’t work. Critical lessons end up in repositories that few people visit and when they do log in, the reports they find are often not helpful. Regrettably “Lessons learned” has earned a reputation for being a waste of time in many organizations.

It is easy to fault employees for not retrieving lessons from repositories, or to blame teams for doing a poor job of reporting, but the reality is that transferring lessons learned is a very complex task, not a simple one. It is a task that requires much more than writing, storing and reading of reports. The fault, if there is one, is the lack of recognition of the complexity involved in transferring knowledge.

To speak to that complexity it is helpful to deconstruct the process of transferring project knowledge into smaller components, each of which has associated practices that are involved in making the transfer process work:
1. Sensemaking: The members of the project team jointly make sense of what they have learned.
2. Formatting: Designers assemble, translate, aggregate, and mine projects lessons in such a way that they are useful to different groups in the organization
3. Moving: KM professionals create both pull and push mechanism so that lessons are accessible to those who need them.

In order to talk about each of the components above, I first want to establish some shorthand terms. Rather than having to repeat, “the team that learned the lessons” each time I want to refer to this group, I will use the term “originators” and for, “anyone who might make use of the lessons the originators learned,” I will use “recipients.” There are two other terms that will be useful to this discussion, “actions” and “outcomes.” “Actions” refers to what team members 1) say, 2) do, even do not do, and 3) decide as they work on a project. “Outcomes” refers to both the positive and negative results of team members’ actions. The assumption underlying the idea of lessons learned is that there is a causal relationship between team members’ actions and project outcomes. Lessons learned are primarily descriptions of actions team members took, within a certain context, and the relationship of those actions to the project outcomes. I discussed this concept in greater depth in an earlier post, “The Value of Lessons Learned.”

There are two actions that need to be taken even before the project starts. The first is to build lessons learned into the project’s budget. The second is to think through what learning is anticipated from the project, so that the project has both a performance goal and a learning goal. For example, does this project address some unique issues? Are new processes being implemented? Not every project has lessons that need to be transferred. Many projects are conducted over and over again in much the same way and unless something unexpcted happens during the course of the project, there is little need for lessons learned to go beyond the first step of sensemaking.

Sensemaking
The first step in transferring knowledge is for the originating team to figure out what it has learned. That idea may seem overly simplistic, but in the speeded up environment in which many organizations function, they often fail to bring project members together, either face-to-face or virtually, to jointly make sense of what they have learned.

I am using the term “sensemaking” rather than the more familiar term “capture” for this step because the language or label we put on a task, prefigures how we approach it. “Capture” connotes getting hold of something that already exists, like capturing a wild animal or a crook. “Sensemaking” more accurately reflects the creative process of a project team jointly building their understand of what they have learned. Although the outcome of a project is known before the sensemaking meeting, the understanding of what team members did that brought about that outcome, does not exist until the team members put it together.

The Whole Team in Conversation: A jigsaw puzzle is a useful analogy for the sensemaking step. Each team member has a piece of the puzzle, that is, knowledge of what actions he/she took and the specific outcomes that resulted from those actions. It requires the whole team, in conversation, to put the puzzle together so that a picture is
revealed. However, the analogy of the jigsaw is not totally accurate because each person also shapes their piece of the puzzle as they talk with others about it. For example, I know what I did and what outcome resulted from my actions, but I may not know the way your actions also impacted that same outcome. Moreover in attempting to spell out my own actions and the reasons behind them to you, I may come to a new understanding myself. (see We Learn When We Talk) It is in conversation that the team uncovers a fuller account of the relationship between action and outcome and therefore a more accurate picture is revealed – more accurate than could have been developed by any one individual. As tempting as it is, for cost reasons, for a project manager to try to collect each team member’s lessons sequentially, that process forgoes the conversation that shapes each piece of the puzzle and therefore diminishes the richness of the picture that is created.

The reality in many organizations is that teams disperse quickly when the project ends, making it difficult to get everyone together. But because 100% of the team cannot come together is not a reason to forgo bringing 80% or 60% of the team together for sensemaking. Even if only a portion of the team can meet they will still be able to compile a richer and more complete picture than sequential interviews can produce. And there will be more project workers who can carry that more complete picture of the project lessons across the organization.

Multiple Lessons: The lesson that is learned by a team is the picture or story that they are able to put together at that time. It is a story that suffices; an approximation that team members can use to take next steps. But it is not the only story or lesson that could have been constructed from that set of actions and outcomes. Lessons constructed at any one point are not so much “truth” as they are the team’s current perspective. The Challenger disaster provides a useful illustration. Because the data (congressional transcripts, participant accounts, etc.) from the Challenger disaster was publically available, people from many disciplines have been able to apply their unique lens to the action/outcome relationships that occurred. The disaster has been usefully reframed from those perspectives to illustrate such things as groupthink, the troubling relationship between management and engineering, and engineering detail about how an O-ring functions - all viable, elucidating insights. I have myself often used the script from the Challenger disaster testimony to teach Argyris’ concepts of advocacy and inquiry. Inviting into the sensemaking meeting observations from different disciplines increases the knowledge that grows out of such meetings. Both time and perspective reframe a team’s actions and outcomes to provide new lessons.

Psychological Safety: To make sense of what has been learned, team members need to be able to speak openly and freely with each other, without concern for rank or blame. The meeting environment needs to have, what Edmondson calls, psychological safety, where members feel free to question and challenge each other. A skilled facilitator can help to establish psychological safety for the team. Team members, in striving for openness and honesty, occasionally say things in a way that others’ experience as blaming or critical. A skilled facilitator can help team members rephrase statements and clarify meanings so that both honesty and civility are maintained. A facilitator can also bring structure to a group conversation, identifying issues for the agenda, making sure needed data are in the room before the meeting, setting the tone, and keeping the group focused.

Sensemaking Separate from Documentation: When team members know that what they are saying will become part of a permanent record, psychological safety is reduced. For this reason sensemaking needs to be separated from constructing a document for the retention of the lessons learned. Without getting the sensemaking step right, there is little to transfer that is worth the cost.

Periodic Sensemaking: Particularly with lengthy projects, there is a need to make sense of what is being learned at appropriate stages rather than waiting until project end. When memories fade what is often lost is not the action itself, but the reasoning behind the action, as well as the context in which the action took place – both vital elements of lessons learned

Team Members as Brokers for Project Lessons Learned: Having spent the time to jointly make sense of what they have learned, every team member becomes a broker of the
team's knowledge carrying it to his/her next project. The implications of in-depth lessons being networked by individuals from multiple project teams across the whole organization are profound. If knowledge transfer went no farther than sensemaking, a considerable amount of transfer across the organization would have been achieved.

Formatting
The second component is constructing the originator’s lessons in such a way that they would be useful to recipients in the organization. That requires several steps, e.g. prioritizing the lessons, anticipating whom the recipients might be as well as their absorptive capacity for this content, and then identifying the medium through which the content would be best expressed.

The originating team is the best source of information about many of those issues. They are, however, not the main players in formatting the lessons. Formatting requires writers, videographers, and instructional designers, who have the right skills.

Even if the originators had the needed skills, they would not be the best people to format the lessons. They suffer from the “curse of knowledge,” a paradoxical phenomenon in which the more we know about something, the harder it is for us to explain it to someone who has not been involved. As experts we have a hard time being able to imagine what it is like not to know and we therefore leave out critical elements needed to make effective use of the knowledge. An example of this phenomenon is the way computer manuals were written in the 1980s. Programmers who had developed the software wrote most of the manuals and the result was that you almost had to be a programmer in order to read them. Now, people with journalism skills, who probably know very little about programming, write the manuals, resulting in them being much more useable.

The formatting step starts from the assumption that there is no way to construct everything that has been understood by the originating team. Long ago Polanyi noted, “We know more than we can say,” and more recently Dave Snowden has added, “and we can say more than we can write.” Even having spent time making sense of what they have learned, there is much that the originating team understands that is tacit and is available to others only in response to a specific need or question that calls forth that knowledge from a team member.

Prioritize Which Lessons Need to be Formatted: Prioritizing is necessary because transferring knowledge is costly. Granted that it is not costly to just stick a lesson in a database, but that is not transfer- it’s storage. Because real transfer is costly, it is critical to be selective about what lessons to put time and energy into formatting. Clearly, not every project and not every lesson that has been learned in a project rises to the level of needing to be transferred to others. Many project lessons are instructive to the originating team, but are in no way unique. In those situations lessons may not be worth the cost of formatting. The central question for prioritization is: Is understanding this lesson important to the future work of the organization? To answer that question requires input from the originating team, but because it is a resource question, it is also a question that requires management involvement.

Identifying Potential Recipients: The more a lesson is targeted to specific recipients, the more useful it becomes. In trying to make a lesson useful to a wide range of needs, it can become so general and so lengthy that it is of little use to anyone.

The originating team can be helpful in identifying potential recipients for its lessons; for example, team members know other projects doing similar work, follow-on projects, and up-coming related projects. They know about training courses that their lessons could update or lessons that should be added as a step in the project management process. Targeting recipients allows designers to know what content to include, what to leave out, and how much context is necessary for understanding.

Translate for Different recipients: Having identified target recipients it is necessary to translate what has been learned for each. Translation involves tailoring content, language, and context. For example, management may be most interested in lessons related to time and cost savings, while other project teams may be most interested in how specific actions would reduce their travel time, and project managers may need detail about the sequencing of activities.

Lesson often need to be modularized so that pertinent knowledge is made available to each type of recipient, eliminating the need for recipients to have to read through lengthy reports that do not pertain to them in order to fine a single useful nugget. And of course, recipients are more likely to review and digest knowledge in smaller segments, as all of us are learning from the popularity of YouTube and blogs.

An important issue for translation is the absorptive capacity of the recipient. This term refers to the existing knowledge recipients have that will allow them to connect the new knowledge in the lesson to their own understanding. The lessons of the originating team may have the potential to critically impact the work of a recipient team that draws on a very different discipline. That team may be equally smart and experienced, but still lack the background to make use of the originating team's knowledge without considerable additional detail. The same problem arises with inexperienced teams who need to make use of the lessons of their more advanced colleagues. Lessons learned, like courses, need to be tailored to the anticipated learner.

Mining Lesson Learned for Themes: There is great value in aggregating lessons in order to pull out topics for specific recipients. There are important lessons that are not evident in the reports from a single project team, but are found in the trends across multiple projects. For example, the US Army, Center for Army Lessons Learned (CALL) regularly receives After Action Reviews (AARs) from units in Iraq and
Afghanistan. One of the troubling realities of combat is that soldiers are in the greatest personal danger at the beginning of their combat experience. Lessons about how soldiers should protect themselves are embedded in many of the AARs CALL receives. But it would be unreasonable to expect soldiers to search through thousands of
AARs to find the knowledge needed for their own safety. CALL has aggregated those lessons into a handbook called, “The First Hundred Days”. This re-purposing of the lessons from those many AARs illustrates the need to translate what was learned to serve specific needs. The First Hundred Days handbook is also an illustration of taking absorptive capacity into account. The manual, directed at new combatants, has very different language than it would have had for experienced soldiers. As a second re-purposing, a handbook has also been prepared for leaders about how they need to work with their soldiers who are in their first hundred days.

Selecting Formats: There are lessons that are best told as a story, others that are effective as case studies, or as displays of charts or graphs. Some require pictures or video to make them understandable. The question of what format would best convey the lesson is an instructional design decision but it is informed by the knowledge of the originating team. As an example, The 10th Mountain unit of the US Army developed a much

needed way to quickly remove the door of a humvee that had been overturned by an IED, often leaving soldiers trapped inside. This specialized crowbar, which they called the Rat Claw, was attached to every humvee. Knowledge about the Rat Claw was transferred to other operational units first by pictures and then quickly followed by a “how to” video.

To summarize, formatting lessons learned so that they are relevant and understandable to recipients takes specialized skills and resources. Without that effort lessons tend to languish in repositories, no matter how good the search engine. It is helpful to employ multiple pathways to increase the flow of lessons throughout the organization. Being able to read a case study, listen to a brief video, engage originators in an on-line conversation all work to put lessons in motion.

Moving
The third component of transferring lessons learned is to put processes in place that will move lessons around the organization. I am again struck by the flawed implication of the label we typically use for this step, “transfer.” (A term I am guilt of using in the title of this post as well.) Transfer implies that knowledge that has been made available through some media and can be inserted into the minds of others in the same form. And of course we know that is not the way we as human beings develop new knowledge. Any uptake of others’ knowledge is modified by the current knowledge the team or individual already has and in the best of cases is adapted, not adopted. I’m using the term “moving” here as in putting into motion. Moving lessons learned is accomplished through both push and pull.

Pull is the most powerful, it works when recipients are aware of what they don’t know. There are many ways pull can happen, all of them initiated by someone who recognizes he/she needs help with a question or a problem; 1) on-line search enables recipients to quickly find pertinent lessons in repositories, 2) expert locator systems or facebook-like systems enable recipients to find colleagues willing to share their lessons directly, 3) the Q & A of on-line communities provides a place to ask questions and receive answers from multiple originators, 4) peer assist sets up face-to-face conversation with originators.

The Fluor Corporation is a great example of on-line communities where recipients pull lessons from their colleagues. Almost all of Fluor’s work is done on a project basis. They construct major facilities like airports and power plants in remote parts of the world. Because local knowledge is often unavailable, Fluor engineers need to tap into the lessons other projects have learned - lessons that speak to critical issues like climate conditions, the availability of equipment locally, and national regulations. Fluor relies on its functional communities to spread project lessons learned. Because these communities have such importance to Fluor, they are set up through a rigorous development process. And they are held to demanding standards including responding to questions within 48 hours and a high level of expectations for the participation of subject matter experts. Both standards help Fluor live up to the motto, “When I hire Fluor I hire the whole company.”

Increasingly facebook-like media are becoming the way people connect more fully than the earlier expert locator systems were able to do. I have described A-Space Download A_Space_Study.pdf (276.4K) the system that spans all sixteen intelligence agencies. Deloitte’s D-street is also an excellent example and has greatly increased collaboration across Deloitte. On D-Street, a Deloitte employ looking for someone to ask about lessons on a specialized topic, has, at a glance, a host of information about the potential originator including, their picture, projects they have worked on, their blog, their publications, a visual map of their colleagues, and if the originator chooses to reveal it, their personal interests, family pictures, languages, on and on. The availability of more expansive information provides the asker a way to establish rapport. It is the equivalent of the small talk that precedes more serious conversation between relative strangers. To ask you a question, it helps if I know something more about you than your position.

Peer assist is another great pull mechanism as well as being a way for recipients to put themselves “in the company of smart people” so that they can learn ideas of which they were unaware. Peer assist is a team-to-team exchange. A team (the recipient) that is just starting a new project invites a team (or members from several teams) who have had greater or different experiences with that topic to meet with them. The meeting is a conversation. There are no presentations from the originating team, rather a peer assist is an opportunity for the recipient team to ask in-depth questions about how to achieve their objectives given the context they face - to learn from colleagues what they did not know that they did not know. Nick Milton tells this story about peer assist. His North America client wanted to establish a presence in Europe in order to quickly become the dominant player in that particular market. While the client had extensive experience of the North American market they had no experience of the European market. The client created a strategy and implementation plan for approaching the European market, including such diverse topics as how to work with the regulators, standards, marketing and local supply. Then with Nick’s help the client held a peer assist with a local organization that had European knowledge to improve on their plans and accelerate their progress in becoming market leaders in Europe.

Knowledge Harvesting: Knowledge Harvesting Download KM assessment conducted using KM principles.pdf (62.4K)is a process developed at Intel and now used by other corporations. It is the reverse of a peer assist. The originating team calls for the knowledge harvest in order to spread a critical lesson they have learned to other parts of the organization. But they are very selective about who they invite as recipients - only inviting those who have some current use for the lessons. That might include someone from a similar project who can put the lessons to immediate use, or someone from a function like marketing or training. And again rather than presentations, it is a small group conversation in which the recipients have enough air time to ask the originating team questions directly related to their own needs. For example, if the originating team has made an exciting new development that will save customers money, the marketing team representative would have very specific questions to ask them. The facilitator of the meeting takes notes formatted on a computer so that they are visible to all participants whether they are in the room or on-line. Both the facilitator and the invitees are brokers of the lessons learned. The facilitator tracks ideas in the meeting and follows up with the invitees to ensure that the lessons are implemented.

Drawing Out Tacit Knowledge: Both of these process (and many others) draw out the tacit lessons the originating team has learned, using conversation as the mechanism for accessing those lesson. As these processes, as well as communities illustrate, to be in motion lessons learned don’t have to be written down, they can emerge through conversation. But even conversational exchanges require planning and carefully thought to make the knowledge exchange happen.

Knowledge brokers: A Peer Assist is pull, while Knowledge Harvesting is a push mechanism. Brokers make push work. They are the KM professionals who know what knowledge is needed for a particular group and proactively provide them that knowledge.

The Center for Army Lessons Learned, L2I Net, is a good example of a push mechanism. The job of members of L2I Net is to be aware of the lessons that come into CALL through AARs, community exchanges, and the many other sources for lessons that CALL has developed. Each L2I Net member is embedded with an internal customer, e.g. in the Army’s
schoolhouses, the combat training centers, and the combatant commands. They keep track of the lessons learned their customer needs so they can push relevant lessons to them. And because they are connected through the network with other L2I Net members, they have enhanced awareness of key information from other operational forces and schools. The L2I Net has significantly reduced the speed at which lessons are pushed to those who need them - what the army calls “flash to bang.” They were responsible, for example, for pushing the much-needed knowledge about the rat claw out to commands within a day of learning about it. Push is extremely valuable, but only when those who are doing the pushing have good insight into the needs of the recipients - without that insight, pushing lessons just adds to the information overload.

The Complexity of Knowledge Transfer

• Prioritize what lessons need to collected, taking into account that transferring lessons is costly
• Conduct sensemaking sessions with the project team to derive lessons learned
• Use skilled facilitators to create a sense of psychological safety in sensemaking sessions
• Recognize that any lessons is only one of many perspectives
• Employ professional designers to format lessons
• Identify potential recipients for the lessons
• Format lessons targeted to specific recipients
• Find patterns and trends across lessons learned
• Put lessons in motion using both push and pull
• Create multiple pathways for recipients to pull lessons
• Use knowledge brokers to push knowledge to recipients, but only when the brokers know the recipients well.

Collective Intelligence: The Eradication of Smallpox

All of the recent talk about collective intelligence has reminded me of one of the best examples of making use of collective intelligence – an example which occurred without benefit of social media or even the internet. I wrote about the World Health Organization’s (WHO) eradication of smallpox in The Organizational Learning Cycle, presenting it as one of four exemplary organizations. There has probably never been a better illustration of an organization learning from it’s experience; of workers freely sharing their knowledge with each other; and of drawing on the ingenuity and knowledge of frontline workers.

Smallpox is the only major human disease to have ever been eradicated. The goal was established by WHO in 1967 and ten years later the eradication of smallpox had been accomplished. But before its eradication in 1977, every year over 10 million people in Asia and Africa, where the disease was still endemic, were inflicted with smallpox and 20-40% died, with the rest left scarred and many blinded. Once smallpox is contracted, there is no treatment.

Support for a world-wide campaign to eliminate smallpox grew when it became evident that North America, Western Europe, and Japan had all been able to eradicate the disease. More recently the Philippines and much of Latin America were free of smallpox. The decision to take on this enormous task was also influenced by the US military’s recent invention of the jet injector that was capable of handling up to 1000 vaccinations an hour and could be used effectively by untrained workers. Deeming the time had now come, in 1967 the World Health Assembly began an intensive effort that would focus on Africa, Asia, the Indonesian archipelago and Brazil.

By 1967, the start of the campaign, past experience in epidemiology overwhelmingly indicated that the most successful strategy was surveillance and control – a strategy that relied on containment teams quickly moving into areas of outbreaks, insolating infected persons and rapidly vaccinating all those around them. Despite the epidemiological evidence, The WHO chose mass vaccination, a strategy that involved immunizing 80% of the population on the supposition that smallpox would then decline more or less automatically. The choice of mass vaccination over surveillance and control was influenced by a number of factors, 1) the success of a recent test of the jet injector for mass vaccination that was conducted in1963 on the island of Tonga, an isolated and remote location; 2) the push from the national governments of the cooperating counties who saw mass vaccination as a highly visible display of government action, and 3) the large investment that had been made in creating a vaccine infrastructure, including jobs and salaries. So the campaign began with a strategy of mass vaccination.

Donald Henderson led the WHO headquarters team dedicated to smallpox. He had only 150 staff to work with 150,000 fieldworkers, mostly volunteers, in 50 countries. Headquarters had no authority over the fieldworkers yet chose to deal with them as co-researchers. Headquarters treated requests for help from the field with absolute priority providing immediate responses. To diminish the gap between fieldworkers and headquarters, all headquarters staff and regional advisors were expected to spend at least one-third of their time in the field, visiting each country at least once and preferably twice a year.

Within a year of the start of the campaign an outbreak occurred in Nigeria, where 90% of the population had already been vaccinated. Fieldworkers did not have adequate supplies for mass vaccination so they quickly sent for more. But the supplies of vaccine were late in arriving. Working with the limited supplies they had, the fieldworkers sought out smallpox cases and then vaccinated those who were in the immediate geographical area surrounding each case – surveillance and containment. By the time the mass campaign supplies arrived there were no detectable cases in Nigeria – containment had worked where mass vaccination had not.

With the lessons from Nigeria, the WHO smallpox team’s strategy changed to surveillance and containment. In hindsight it was recognized that the Tonga context, an isolated island with a limited population, was very different than countries like Nigeria with contiguous areas and large populations. Even so, the decision to change the strategy was not easily taken given the factors that had influenced the original decision.

Experimenting with surveillance and containment (which fieldworkers called the Bank Robber Theory, as in "go where the money is") fieldworkers discovered they could contain an outbreak when as few as 50% of the population was vaccinated. The process involved discovering new outbreaks before the smallpox had time to spread, then vaccinating the victims families, neighbors, and then the village in an ever-widening circle until no more cases occurred.

The focus on the new strategy meant the need for new practices and policies. Considerable attention was turned to the practice of reporting, a critical element of surveillance and containment. In some countries a reward was offered to the first person in an area who reported an undiscovered outbreak to authorities. The rewards were large, sometimes equivalent to one month’s income for poor villagers. A network was established through radio connections to report outbreaks. A manual was produced detailing the philosophy of surveillance and outlining methods for improving case detection and notification. A major breakthrough in reporting occurred when each local unit began to be visited regularly by a mobile surveillance team that provided instruction and assistance. The fact that someone was actively and visibly concerned with receiving reports and then acted on those reports encouraged increased reporting.

Early on the WHO smallpox team recognized the need to constantly learn from fieldworkers’ experience and adapt and change based on that learning. Although policies were established centrally, control resided at the local level. Fieldworkers were able to alter their practices to fit local culture. For example, in some locations where tattooing was used to ward off witchcraft, the vaccination scar became a part of that custom; in others midwives were used to encourage vaccination, in yet others the radio was a major tool.

Fieldworkers thought of themselves as researchers as well as workers, systematically recording their practices and tracking data. They religiously made those practices and data available to other fieldworkers. Every 2-3 weeks a summary was made of new approaches and distributed to fieldworkers. The variation in practice and the emphasis on collecting and sharing findings allowed the WHO smallpox team to innovate and learn continuously.

One of the changes fieldworkers brought about by their collection of data was the method of vaccination. Initially the WHO used the newly developed jet injector. But over time fieldworkers realized that speed was not a factor when staff were going from house to house, or waiting at local watering holes. The jet injector proved to have maintenance problems, breaking down in the field with no way to repair it. Through the influence of fieldworkers, the bifurcated needle, a simple device that had two prongs with a wire between them on which a drop of vaccine could be suspended, replaced it. The bifurcated needle was inexpensive to make and could be flamed with a match over 200 times without dulling – so was more field-worthy.

Even longstanding techniques were questioned and changed. Headquarters learned from field reports that the time-honored technique of swabbing the vaccination site made no difference in bacterial infection – so supplies that were costly both to purchase and then transport could be eliminated. They learned, again from field reports, that adult women rarely contracted small pox, so the time consuming task of vaccinating them could be eliminated.

It would have advantaged the WHO to track the number of vaccinations given and the number of areas free of small pox. But they chose instead to track trends in the incidence of smallpox. Those data were frequently embarrassing both to the WHO and to the cooperating countries – yet it allowed the WHO smallpox team to learn in a way that could not have been possible from data that was more sensitive to public relations. Negative as well as positive results were widely publicized.

Looking back at the effort from 1999, Donald Henderson, who led the smallpox team, said, “… research initiatives were encouraged at every level. This occurred despite the opposition of senior WHO leadership who insisted that the tools were in hand and the epidemiology was sufficiently well understood and that better management was all that was necessary to eradicate smallpox. Research initiatives included the development of new vaccination devices to replace traditional lancets; field studies, which revealed the epidemiology of the disease to be different from that described in the textbooks and, in consequence, the need for modification of basic operations; the discovery that the duration of vaccine efficacy was far longer than that normally stated, making revaccination much less important; operational research, which facilitated more efficient vaccine delivery and case detection; and studies which demonstrated conclusively that there was no animal reservoir. The principle was to ask again and again, how could this programme be made to operate more efficiently, more effectively. And, indeed, without the fruits of these research efforts, it is highly unlikely that eradication would have succeeded.”1

The story of the WHO’s success is a story of learning from experience, both successes and failures. Among them:
• The initial strategy of the WHO smallpox team did not succeed and they were able to shift strategies in mid-stream
• The initial technology proved difficult, and although the jet injector was one of the reasons the project had originally seemed feasible, they switched to the simpler solution of the bi-furcated needle
• Field workers considered themselves co-researchers, creating testable hypotheses in the field and reporting the results
• Field workers had authority to experiment, adapting their practice to local situations
• Data collected in the field about both practices and results were systematically distributed
• Everything was open to question – even long standing practices like swabbing the vaccination site
• All headquarters staff spent one third of their time in the field to reduce the gap between themselves and fieldworkers
• Policies promoted the collection of accurate rather than politically correct data

We Need More Examples of Collective Intelligence
We need more examples like this story to really understand what collective intelligence means. I’d appreciate it if you would suggest organizations you know of that provide other good examples. Add them to the comments so we can all see them, and I’ll write about any here that I can dig out enough information on.

1. Henderson, D. “Eradication: Lessons from the past.”

2. Hopkins, J.W. (1998).The eradication of smallpox: organizational learning and innovation in international health administration. The Journal of Developing Areas 22, 321-322.

3. The World Health Organization Smallpox Eradication Programme

4. Smallpox: 30th Anniversary of Global Eradication, CDC

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

.

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.

Do We Really Need So Many Kinds of Social Media?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Wiki for Generals

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But let me begin at the beginning of the story.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dealing with increasingly complex issues

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Erosion of Cognitive Authority

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Inclusion of cognitively diverse perspectives

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

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

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

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

KM Professional’s Role in Addressing Cognitive Diversity

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

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

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

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

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

Integration of the organization’s knowledge

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ecopetrol

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

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

A-Space

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

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

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

KM Professionals’ Role in Integrating Organizational Knowledge

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Increased transparency

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

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

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

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

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

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

KM Professional’s Role in Increasing Transparency

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A KM Strategy Built on the Collective Knowledge of Ecopetrol

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lessons Learned Challenges Across the IC

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. Embed reflection in workflow processes to enable organizational learning

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Five Actions Organizations Can Take to Increase Knowledge Sharing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Incentive Question or Why People Share Knowledge

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Four Conversations to Address Adaptive Challenges

Trish Silber coauthored this post with me

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

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

We are using the term “conversation” to mean,

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

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

Conversations for Relationship-Building

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

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

Conversations for Mutual Understanding

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

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

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

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

Conversations for Possibilities

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conversations for Action

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

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

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

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

Welcome to Conversation Matters

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

This blog is about:

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

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


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

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

My Perspective

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

Five Theorists That Have Influenced My Thinking

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

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

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

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

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

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

Content Overview for Conversation Matters

http://www.wordle.net

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

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

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

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

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

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

Potentiation: Neurology and Knowledge Management

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




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

But on the more positive side:

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




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




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

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

Trust Versus Psychological Safety

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We Learn (When We Listen) When We Talk

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

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

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


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


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


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



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



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



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

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

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

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

1. The Coast Guard’s Rescue Swimmer Program

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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


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


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


3.Absorptive Capacity

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

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

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

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

Possible Lessons

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


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


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


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


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


Questions the examples raise:

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


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


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


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

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

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

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

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

Levinson, Harry. Organizational Diagnosis. 1976

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

When is Help Helpful: An Unsuccessful Attempt at Help

My colleague Tom Gilmore and I have had a long-standing interest in the topic of help. Tom works at CFAR, a consulting firm that spun out of Wharton long ago, and has puzzled over the ratio of the amount of help available and the seeming constraints for the party seeking help to metabolize it. We have reflected on key conditions in the relationship, how and why we vest others with the knowledge and authority to help us, and in the so called ‘helping professions’ how do we learn and continuously improve. This is the first in a series of pieces that we want to write on that topic in order to explore the question “Under what conditions is help helpful?” We invite the readers to join us in the exploration of this topic. Add your thinking in the comments section or email us nancydixon@commonknowledge.org or tgilmore@mail.cfar.com. We’re interested in examples, references, and new ways to think about this issue.

We want to begin with experiences of help that were not helpful, whether, who, and how it was detected, to build grounded theory by contrasting cases of unsuccessful help and successful help. In our discussion we have bolded emerging topics. We invite your thinking and references on what will be taken up in subsequent posts.

A case of unsuccessful help from the helpee’s point of view.

I (Nancy) tape record and then study a lot of conversations and I remember one I recorded between Jane and an expert from whom she was seeking information. The expert worked at a Center in a government organization. The Center had developed a new process that had gained a great deal of acclaim and so was often visited by corporations and academics alike. Jane represented a corporation that was interested in finding out enough about the process to determine if it would be useful in their setting. In the conversation I recorded Jane asked a question and the expert started responding - but unfortunately, not to her question. He went on at length, while she kept looking for a place to break in to redirect his answer – but she could never get in. Finally the expert wound down, and as he ended, he asked, “Was that helpful?” to which she replied, “Yes, thank you, it was very helpful.” and proceeded to move on to another topic.

Discussion. One feature of this exchange is the role of gift giving and gratitude in helping. The pull for expressing appreciation, even when not warranted, inhibits learning on both sides. Jane may have missed the opportunity to learn about her skill at presenting succinctly the focal area for assistance. The expert missed an opportunity for feedback on his inquiry skills to clarify the situation. Later I interviewed Jane about their conversation, in referencing that part of the conversation, I asked her why she had responded that his answer was helpful, when he so obviously had not answered what she was trying to find out. Her response was, “I didn’t want to hurt his feelings - or get him started again!” Yet she felt obliged to thank him. In doing so she misdirected him and perhaps increasing the likelihood that he would make a similar lengthy “speech” the next time he had a request for help. She carried the burden of hypocrisy as well not getting the information she wanted. The relationship between Jane and the expert was not reciprocal, or at least not treated as such, so Jane found herself in the role of supplicant.

Here is a case of failed help, even when solicited. Imagine how much more challenging are the dynamics around unsolicited help. We also imagine considerable variation in the bandwidth for authentic exchange depending on the relationship. Would each have responded differently if the relationship had been viewed as reciprocal? Does help take on different characteristics when it is between peers, across an authority, power or expertise difference, within or across systems, etc,

We welcome your cases, especially ones of failure to get us started.

Nancy Dixon and Tom Gilmore

A Rant on Report Outs

In the entire world, there is nothing so boring as a report out at the end of a small group discussion. Now, I’m all for small group discussions. They are both necessary and useful - we need more small group discussions. But report outs should be abolished.

The value of a small group discussion is in the discussion. It gives the members of the group an opportunity to hear other view points, to learn from the articulation of one’s own view (see We Learn When We Talk) and to build or deepen relationships with others. None of those reasons require a report out.

As far back as I can remember, I’ve never learned anything useful from a report out. Here’s a typical one – see if it’s familiar. When it’s his turn, the self-appointed reporter of the small group starts,

“In our group we talked about maturity, growth, and development. We all agreed that you need to define a clear goal to work toward, but you also need to stay flexible so that you can adapt to changes in the environment. Without a clear goal you can’t measure progress and without measures you don’t know if you are reaching the goal. Measuring is critically important. In my company we use a dashboard, red, yellow and green. The green means you are on target, everything is fine and there is no need for action. Yellow means ….(you can guess the rest as the reporter continues). 


Let’s examine what is learned from that report out. First, we learn what topics were covered. That would be helpful if we learned anything about the thinking behind these topics, but the typical cryptic phrase or single word does little to inform us. Take “Growth” for example, Growth at the expense of quality? How much growth? Are their limits to growth? We learn nothing from a list of topics or cryptic phrases.

Secondly, the one topic that is elaborated, clear goals, is so couched in generalities that it is useless. None of us would question that having a clear goal to work toward is helpful. But is this comment insightful? Is it news to anyone? No! How is it helpful to report out generalities that everyone already knows?

I’ve sat through so many report outs that I consider myself something of a connoisseur. (I was once in a meeting in which 20 groups reported out, one after the other – it was deadly. We were cautioned to keep it to no more than 5 minutes - but that is an hour and a half! We reported out longer than the small group discussion!). That aside, based on years of experience I’ve been able to classify all small group reporters into two broad categories, The Cataloger and the Ego Centric.

The cataloger feels duty bound to report out every idea that any one raised during the small group discussion, no matter how mundane. The cataloger usually ends this recitation by turning to the group and asking, “Did I leave anything out?” Which unfortunately, opens the gate for yet more trivial items. 


The Ego Centric, on the other hand, reports out on his own ideas disregarding anything the group said. Group members listen in puzzlement to this recitation thinking, “I don’t remember discussing that!” My example above tends toward the Ego Centric with the reporter’s speech on what the dashboards they use in his company. 


There is, however, an option to report outs – POPCORN! Here’s how it works. When the small group discussion time is over the facilitator gets the group’s attention. Then she says, “Let me give you a minute to reflect on the discussion you’ve just had. Think about what stood out for you.” And then the facilitator actually quits talking for a whole minute! Then the facilitator says, “I’m interested in hearing a few comments. What stuck with you?” Then the popcorn begins. Not right away of course, you have to wait a bit before the corn begins to pop. But within a minute someone raises their hand and the popping begins.

There are several valuable learning outcomes that are achieved when you do POPCORN, that just don’t happen with report outs.

1) The facilitator asks for what was learned not what was said – and actually gives the participants time to reflect on that. What I learned is so much more insightful than what was said. There are a dozen questions that could be asked, “What stood out for you?”; “What was new for you in the discussion?”; “What did you learn that you didn’t know before? – all focus on what was unique or significant to you personally.


2) Participants are responsible only for speaking their own thoughts. Participants can be a great deal more accurate, not to mention shorter, when articulating their own learning, than when trying to be fair to everyone’s comments.


3) The facilitator asks for “a few comments,” signaling to the group that not everyone needs to speak. But the few you get, are often choice! It’s amazing what participants will say if you ask them to think rather than recite. And those thoughtful insights inform the thinking of the other participants and add to the collective understanding by providing new perspectives. 


4) Even with only a few comments, the facilitator is able to gain a “sense of the room” in terms of their understanding and she often learns something as well. 


* Trish Silber gave me the wonderfully descriptive term, Popcorn

The Power of the Conversation Architect to Address Complex, Adaptive Challenges

One of the most powerful tools a leader has is the power to convene the tough conversations that need to happen in an organization – to focus a group of people on an issue that matters. To convene that kind of meeting, the leader needs to be a conversation architect.

We all know that to have an effective meeting we need to have an agenda, keep things moving, and track action items. That is excellent advice when the purpose of the meeting is to work on everyday, routine issues. But much more is necessary if the group is to deal with what Heifetz* calls “adaptive” challenges.

Adaptive challenges are complex and unpredictable; they have no known answers. To address them organizations must invent their way to solutions. 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; or companies that, in order to survive, must change from selling products to service.

By contrast, technical problems are predictable and solvable. There are methods and tools that the organization has already developed to address them. 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 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.

It is a different story with adaptive challenges. Existing assumptions, methods, and tools are useless in the face of complex challenges. They may even get in the way. Dealing with complex 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.

“By trying to solve adaptive challenges for people, at best you will reconfigure it as a technical problem and create some short-term relief. But the issue will not have gone away. It will surface again.” Heifetz

The power of a leader to address adaptive challenges does not lie in inventing solutions; rather it lies in using leadership authority to convene the conversations. And the task of the leader is to design those conversations in a way that learning and knowledge result – to be a conversation architect.

The conversation architect takes into consideration the following design elements:

1. Framing the conversation: The first leadership task is to recognize the adaptive challenges the organization or unit is facing. That can be difficult, because some adaptive challenges have become so much a part of the organizational culture that leaders and employees alike have resigned themselves to, “that’s just the way it is.” The task is to see with fresh eyes, the issues the organization is facing. 


Framing the conversation also involves posing the question in a way that gets to the heart of the issue, not just a symptom. Without care, the question can limit the scope of possibilities that could be discovered.


2. Identifying who needs to be in the conversation: Those that do the work and those that are impacted by the work have insights and knowledge to bring to bear on the challenge. It may be that customers or stakeholders can also provide a necessary perspective. Our inclination is to think too narrowly about inclusion so it is useful to ask what voices haven’t been heard.


3. High interaction activities: The goal is to design for conversation rather than for presentations or speeches. Our predisposition is to assume we need someone to speak to legitimize the meeting or give direction - a speech from the president to confirm the meeting as important. The conversation architect designs the meeting on the 80-20 rule so that 80% of the meeting time, participants are in conversation with each other. 


4.The small group as the unit of conversation: The small group, (trios, quartets or pairs) is the unit of conversation that is most effective for addressing difficult issues. The group needs to be small enough that members can fully state their ideas and the reasoning behind them, can query each other and probe for understanding of what others have said. If a group exceeds seven, it tends to no longer be in conversation; rather the exchange becomes more like turn taking, with each member declaring their perspective to the others. 


Periodically the small groups need to reconvene as a whole to get a sense, (not report outs) of what is being learned in the small groups.


5. Role of the leader in the conversation: There are two roles the leader plays in the conversation. The first is the convener role. The second is as participant in the conversation. The conventional wisdom is that a leader should withhold his/her own ideas out of concern that it will bias subordinates. That is a useful strategy when the format is such that each subordinate is speaking in turn to the leader. But when the meeting is formatted as small group conversations, the manager’s participation in one small group does not inhibit the forthrightness of those in other small groups. And as important, participating in the small groups gives the manager a voice in the conversation. 


6. Physical space to serve the conversation: The physical space in which we talk has a greater impact on conversation, than most of us credit. The most ideal configuration for a conversation is chairs drawn together without a table to separate those participating. That is why the conversation with a senior is so different when it takes place at the couch and easy chair off to the side, than when the senior is behind his/her desk. Space matters. Round tables elicit more collaboration (King Arthur’s round table) than do square tables which suggest a contest (opponents in a negotiation). The more the space welcomes participants as human beings responsive to their needs for light, nature, food, and beauty, the more they are able to function as human beings in the conversation, rather than as roles in the organization.


7. Connection before content;*** One of the important benefits that small groups engender is that they connect people more effectively than any ice breaker or round robin introduction could possible do. If a group is going to work on difficult issues, they first need to gain a sense of who others are, the skills they bring, the experience they represent, and the hopes they have. A sense of relationship needs to be built before people can address difficult issues together. The leader’s task is to ask questions of the small groups that will provide them the opportunity to make themselves known to others, e.g. talking about experiences they have had relevant to the adaptive challenge; discussing what importance the challenge has for them and their work. 

“Leaders have the power to focus attention and define the conversations for people whan they gather. We might say that leadership is the capacity to name the debate and design gatherings.” Block

Increasingly it is adaptive challenges that organizations face. As the pace of technological, scientific and global change increases, organizations face issues that they have not had to deal with before. The law of requisite variety, which originates in the field of cybernetics, states that the variety in the control system must be equal to or larger than the variety of the perturbations in order to achieve control.

Leaders that find their organizations facing adaptive challenges can no longer rely the method they have used in the past - the senior leadership team meeting to develop the organizational response. However intelligent and experienced seniors are, they lack the requisite variety that can be found in the organization. The task of the leader is to be conversation architect to convene the conversations out of which new thinking can emerge.

*Heifetz, Leadership Without Easy Answers. Harvard University Press. 1994

** Drath, “Leading Together: Complex Challenges Require a New Approach, LIA, Volume 23, Number 1, March/April 2003

*** Block, Community: The Structure of Belonging. Jossey-Bass. 2008

Connection Before Content: Meetings That Are Knowledge-based

Peter Block has a rule of thumb that is very useful if you want a group to apply its collective knowledge to address a difficult issue, Connection before Content. Before a group attempts to use its collective knowledge to deal with serious issues it has to build the relationships that will allow the group to hold an open conversation.

However connection does not mean just going around the room and having everyone say their name and organization – that’s useful, but it doesn’t build connections. We build connections in pairs or trios - groupings that are small enough for each person to gain a sense of who the others are as human beings. For example individuals need to understand, How are these other people like or different from me? Are they open to hearing an idea if it contradicts their own? What shared experiences have we had? Building that level of awareness about others in the group provides the confidence that this is a safe place to say openly what each individual is really thinking about the issues they are facing together. It is a way to create the psychological safety that Edmondson talks about.

When a group has not had the opportunity to build those connections, members so consistently act in ways that reduce the knowledge available to the group. that it is almost as if they were follow a set of unspoken rules. For example:

• Members tend not to share any “unique” knowledge they hold, so group discussions tend to focus only on information that is jointly held. The result is that little that the group does not already know is discussed.
• Members don’t admit implementation mistakes they or their group have made, even when doing so would benefit the whole group. So the group is likely to repeat mistakes that could have been avoided.
• Junior members tend wait until they have the “lay of the land” to speak, leaving those who are in acknowledged positions of power to do most of the talking. That means a diversity of ideas and opinions is lost to the group.
• Members don’t ask for help from the group, even when they recognize that others in the group have the insights or knowledge they need. So everyone learns slower than necessary and a great deal of re-inventing the wheel occurs.

A couple of days ago I sat in on a meeting in an organization that is facing a difficult challenge. A number of their offices are going to move to another city – one several hundred miles away in a different state. The employees that work in those offices will either have to find a new job or move when the job moves. The group that was meeting has been tasked with setting the policies and dealing with the logistics for the move. They hope to make the move go as smoothly as possible, even given that it is going to be traumatic for hundreds of employees.

This was the second of what will probably be months and months of weekly meetings. Twenty-some team members were seated around a long conference table. Those that came late sat in a second tier of chairs placed against the walls. A few people in the room knew others, but most did not.

The leader of the group, not wanting to waste anyone’s time, got the group’s attention and started to work down the agenda. Four or five of the people in the room did most of the talking during the hour and a half meeting, primarily directing their comments to the leader. A few others answered questions when the leader called on them, but otherwise just listened.

The meeting produced little in the way of knowledge exchange or learning. These were well meaning people, wanting to do a good job, but if I were guessing, I’d say this won’t be an effective team. They’ll get their task done, but they won't be able to make use of the knowledge of those in the room.

To build a group that could learn from and with each other under these circumstances, the leader would have had to get the group connected before dealing with such difficult content. For example, they might have spent the first two meetings working in trios rather than the full group, learning about the issues and each other at the same timel. At the first meeting each trio might have identified the key issues the group must address. Perhaps at the second a different set of trios might have talked about the difficult issues they’ve had to face so far in dealing with the move. Such topics would have allowed them to test out their own views and get the reactions of others to them. It might have taken more than two meetings, but having built a level of connection and trust, they might have been ready to talk in ways that would create learning in the group, that is,

• Offer new ideas even when those ideas were not yet fully formed



• Challenge each other’s tacit assumptions which would have allowed them to generate fresh ideas



• Share their own mistakes when it would benefit the group



• Take the risk of saying something they were aware the group would not want to hear 



• Ask each other for help when that help would speed up the process in their own units


That people need to feel some relationship to each other in order to be open is not news to any leader that has had Team Building 101. So sitting in on this meeting raised a question for me, “Why don’t leaders put into practice what they know will help teams and task forces be more effective?”

One answer that comes to mind, is that we’re often hesitant to do anything that smells of relationship building for fear it will be perceived as a waste of time - playing games when we have too much to get done. I share that worry every time I’m asked to help a leader with a new group. As I start to put people in pairs or trios, I wonder if this time they will all rebel and just say they don’t have time for “exercises.” But they never have (yet) and in the subsequent days and weeks I hear from this one and that one, that it was important that they took the time at the beginning - that it made the difference.

There is another reason we might hesitate to use the tools for learning that we know about. I wonder if many of us have been in so many meetings that were a waste of time that we’ve lost faith in meetings as having any value. Maybe we feel there is nothing to be done but to tolerate what we cannot change. The meeting I described earlier would confirm that view. My hope in writing this blog is to encourage leaders to renew their faith in the power of conversation in groups and more over to do the simple things that make those conversations more learningful like Connection before Content.

A Rant on “Are There Any Questions?”

Every good speaker knows that at the end of a presentation, you have to leave time for questions. Hogwash! Leaving time for questions is the worse learning process we could have invented. We’ve all been brainwashed into the pseudo learning theory that asking for questions at the end of a presentation makes it a better learning experience for the audience. Wrong!

You know what typically happens; you’ve seen it a hundred times:

The speaker gives his talk, of course going on longer than he was supposed to, leaving a slim five minutes for Q&A. But being thoroughly conditioned he asks, “Are there any questions?” An uncomfortable silence ensues. The speaker looks around anxiously, standing it as long as he can - usually about 10 seconds - then starts to make an embarrassed exit comment. Just then a member of the audience takes pity on him. The audience member, not being able to conjure up a real question within the short 10 seconds, asks an inconsequential one. Nevertheless, everyone breathes a sigh of relief because the speaker is saved from the worst of embarrassments –that there was so little interest in what he had to say that no one even had any questions!! He gratefully elaborates on the same points he has already made twice, going on as long as he can so there won’t be any more uncomfortable silences. By the time he stops someone in the audience has actually had time to come up with a reasonably pertinent question, but alas the conference timekeeper says, “Sorry I’m afraid we’re all out of time for questions. The next speaker is …..” 


“So what’s wrong with that”, you ask with considerable indignation, “surely you’re not suggesting that presenters should NOT leave time for the audience to ask questions?”

Yes, that is exactly what I am saying – because having a handful of people out of a large audience ask 2 or 3 questions does little or nothing to enhance the learning experience of the audience. In fact the whole charade is about as anti-learning as you could get. Take a hard look at it:

• For starters look at the meaning of that ubiquitous phase, “Are their any questions?” The speaker is not asking for comments, different views on the topic, or reactions, any of which might produce some learning. No, the speaker in effect is asking, “What did I say that you did not understand or that you would like me to elaborate on because it was unclear?” That puts the audience in a bit of a pickle. If they have understood, maybe even agreed with the speaker, what are they going to ask? 

• On the other hand, if someone in the audience did disagree with the speaker, they will now have to cleverly disguise their disagreement in a question. This is accomplished by starting with a lengthy statement of one’s own views then tagging on a non-question like, “So, I’m wondering if you’ve given that possibility any thought?” Of course the audience knows what is happening and is reasonably tolerant of this ruse – but only up to a point. If the phony question asker goes on too long with his introductory statement, he will suffer glares and frowns from the rest of the audience who after all came to hear the speaker – not some nobody in the audience. It’s a charade and the whole audience is in on the game. 

• The “Are their any Questions” question loudly proclaims, “The only person in the room that has useful ideas on this topic is the speaker!” We even listen to speakers in rooms where we can look only in one direction, at the speaker in the front of the room – a clear message about who in the room is expected to have anything important to say. Never mind the reality that many audience members have in-depth experiences and deep knowledge that, could they be heard, might even enrich the understanding of the speaker. Surely, in this age of Wikis and Del.ici.ous, we are years beyond the idea that a single expert has “answers.” The lone expert in the front of the room, telling a naive audience what they do not know, is out of sync with our more sophisticated understanding of how knowledge is created and shared. 

• And then there is the notion that we learn by listening; the research is very clear that listening, no matter how long the speaker goes on, is not enough to learn. Rather we learn when we take the time to connect new information to the store of knowledge that is already in our heads and making those connections takes time. Without processing time, what has been heard goes in one ear and out the other. We forget what was said almost as soon as we hear it. 

• Moreover, as listeners, we require a way to process what we are hearing. There are lots of ways of doing that, we can talk to someone about it, write out the logic of it, draw a map, make a chart – but all of them require the active involvement of the listener– not just passive listening. 


Okay, so we’ve got it all wrong: all those endless speeches punctuated by a few audience questions are a poor excuse for learning. Got it! What do we do about it?

Obvious, have the audience talk (or write or draw or chart). Now clearly there is not time for every member of the audience to stand up and express his or her thinking on the speaker’s topic. But there is a much better way for audience members to talk at a presentation. Talk to each other!

There are lots of ways to make that happen. An easy way is, after talking for 15 or 20 minutes the speaker asks the audience a question and then puts them in small groups or pairs so they can talk to each other about what they have just heard. The more talking they do the more learning they do. Then the speaker makes a few more comments and the small groups talk about the second question.

But you say, “That takes time away from the speaker.” Yes, it does. I know you paid a lot for the speaker to come and you want to get your money’s worth. But remember, the goal is for audience members to go away with some new ideas – and that won’t happen unless they take the time to build their own connections. Think about it this way; the speaker is not there to provide answers, rather to stimulate the thinking of the participants – and that doesn’t take up the whole hour.

So if you change your habits and give the audience the time to process what you have said, then will they remember your golden words? Probably not, but they will certainly remember what they said, and after all, that is what they learned!

Don’t Worry About People Feeling Involved in Change

We’ve all heard the management adage, “Involvement is the key to implementing change.” When I’m consulting in organizations, too often I hear that adage framed this way, “The Board needs to feel like they’ve participated in this decision,” or “It’s important that the supervisors feel like they have input into what’s happening to them,” or “We need R & D to support this change so we’d better do something that will make them feel involved.”

These statements are made in good faith by managers trying to do the right thing – yet their language reveals an assumption that, not only do I hear, but that the target of the change effort often hears as well. The assumption is that what’s important is that others “feeling like” they’ve been involved, rather than that others actually are involved. If actually being involved was the goal, then I would hear something like, “I don’t see how we can address this change without the input from the front line – they know about issues we’re unaware of.”

The latter statement implies that the manager sees a need to make use of the collective wisdom of those who will be impacted in order to figure out what needs to be done. Knowledge is the end and involvement is a means to that end. “Feel like” implies that managers already have the answer or knowledge, but want those who will be impacted to think they are involved because that will make them more likely to go along with what has already been decided. Involvement has become the end.

That’s the test - if a manager already has an answer, he’s not involving others, no matter how many town halls or fireside chats he holds. He’s only trying to get others’ compliance by acting like he’s involving others – and it rarely fools anyone.

I learned that lesson many years ago while leading a Great Books Discussion Group. These groups meet once a month to discuss a book that all have read. The fundamental idea of Great Books is that the members have the ability to make sense of what the author is saying. Members don’t come to hear lectures; they come to have a discussion about the meaning of what they’ve read. The leader’s responsibility is to frame the discussion with two or three salient questions. One of the rules is that the leader cannot ask the group to discuss any question that the leader already has an answer to in her own mind.

The reasoning behind that very tough rule is quite sensible because it is close to impossible for any leader to ask such a question in an unbiased way. For me it meant I often had to read the book two or three times to formulate good, unbiased questions. If I, as the leader, violated the rule, I would find myself subtlety steering the group’s discussion toward my own bias and of course everyone in the group recognized what was happening. Framing unbiased and useful questions was great training for designing honest involvement in change efforts.

From that seven year experience of leading Great Books Discussion Groups, I also learned about the power of ordinary people to develop insights and understanding that none of us could have developed on our own, no matter how many times we read the book. If I could frame a good, honest questions, the discussion became a place of insight and alive with the pleasure of learning.

If managers bring people together to address the tough issues they face and if they frame honest questions, those discussions will produce insights that make the value of being involved obvious. There will be no need to worry about those impacted “feeling involved.”

Resistance to Change

I don’t believe in the tooth fairy, big foot, or resistance to change. I have no problem with the idea that sometimes people don’t want to make a change we think they should make, and therefore push back against it. The problem I have is the way the term “resistance to change” causes us to act toward the people who are doing the pushing back.

When we say that a person (or a group) is “resistant to change” we speak of resistance as if it were a characteristic of the person. We imply that something is wrong with them, akin to being “lazy” or “arrogant.” That leads us to think it is something we need to help them get over, perhaps by sending them to training or writing “agility” into the competencies they must display in order to be promoted. And if that doesn’t work, we feel free to write them off as just not worth our effort.

I have not met a person who is characteristically resistant to change. I have met many that push back against a specific change, but on other issues in their life and work they seek out change. Resistance to change is situation specific, not an attribute of an individual or group.

Organizations have somehow been drawn into thinking that resistance to change is a human characteristic. Perhaps, we have been oversold by the consulting industry that their help is vital to deal with the pervasive resistance we will surely face as our organizations change and evolve. I even frequently see articles that start with, “As is well known, people resist change.” But I’ve never seen research to support that claim, rather quite the opposite.

The research I see says human beings tend to seek out new experiences, that curiosity is the characteristic that got us to the moon and expanded our world through the World Wide Web. We are a specie that looks for the novel, the new, and the interesting. No, resistance to change is not a characteristic of human beings. But we do share the characteristic of pushing back against being required to make a change that takes from us something we value, that we perceive will cause us harm, or that just does not make sense to us. Perhaps “self-determination,” if not an innate characteristic, is a least a part of our national character.

There are two reasons I think the ubiquitous use of the term “resistance to change” is, not just inaccurate, but actually harmful.

First, the term lets us off the hook for the responsibility of attending to the concerns of those we are requiring to make a change. It prevents us from having to look too closely at the inconvenience and sometimes heartbreak felt by those we ask to change. It allows us to just write them off as “resistant” and feel ourselves justified.

Secondly, unless we are willing to look closely at what specific harm or stress those who must change experience, we can’t be helpful to them. The stock justifications we offer, “we must all tighten our belts” or “if we are to achieve our projected goals we must transform the way we deal with our customers,” do not address the issues of identity or values that trouble those who must change. If, for example, I am told that the way I have been doing my job, (a job that I know I’m good at and that has been the source of my success) is wrong, then with the change I may lose my sense of competence, perhaps my sense of identity. Those are not inconsequential losses however necessary the change may be to the organization.

We may be completely justified in the changes we impose upon others, but that does not justify insensitivity to the consequence for those who must change. And to deny the outcome of our actions by assigning the problem to the character of those who are impacted, is to employ a euphemism to easy our own discomfort.

The words we use to talk about people have a powerful influence on how we act toward them. It is easy to use a common phrase like “resistance to change” to reference a difficult situation we are facing, but insensitivity to our choice of words can have the unintended consequence of limiting the possibilities we are able to consider for dealing with the complexity of the situation. That is never more true than when we are dealing with change in organizations.

There is a clever limerick that always comes to mind when I think about the unintended consequence of the words we choose.

When the universe began,
God, they say, created man.
Conversely: dancing around the sod
Man, they say, created God
Watch your words or they may do
Something of the same to you.

The Four Room Apartment: Where the Energy is for Change

There is a model of change offered by a Swedish social psychologist, Claes Janssen*, which has always appealed to me, in part because it’s optimistic about the ability of people to change. It’s a simple model for visualizing where the potential energy is in a person, group, department or company – he calls it the “Four Room Apartment.”

Janssen says that each of us lives in a four-room apartment. We move from room to room depending on perceptions, feelings or aspirations triggered by external events. Someone who occupies a room today may, in a week, a month, or a year, have moved to another room of the apartment.

The four rooms Janssen describes are Contentment, Denial, Confusion and Renewal. Janssen says that as we change and develop as human beings, (and I would add as professionals) we continually circle through these four rooms.

In the Contentment room, we like the status quo. We are seen as and feel satisfied, calm and realistic. We are uninterested in attempting improvements or major changes – “If its not broke, don’t fix it.” But we can’t stay in contentment of course or we would never grow. As Sanford says, “Development occurs primarily in response to the challenges of life.” And no one gets through life without continually being presented with new, and often very difficult, challenges. A significant challenge - a merger, reorganization, new leader, new system, market crisis, job threat – can move us out of the Contentment room into the Denial room.

In a sense, people in the Denial room, already have the facts – that’s what they are in denial about. It’s the parent who finds herself still dealing with an adult son as though he were a teenager. Or the manager who, a year after his promotion to the new job, is fighting what everyone else already recognizes, that he has not made the switch from being an engineer to manager. They are, for their own reasons, not yet ready to deal with those facts. From the outside they are perceived as unaware or afraid of change.

When we are in the Denial room and finally acknowledges what we have been hiding from, that doesn’t solve our problem; it only moves us through the door into the Confusion room. Here we are seen as, and feel different, out of touch, scattered, and unsure. We muck about in the Confusion room, sorting out bits and pieces of our lives. Far from a state to be avoided Confusion signifies a readiness to learn. People in the Confusion room acknowledge they don’t have the answer. They have energy to spare; they just haven’t decided where to invest it.

We stay in Confusion until we own up to whatever fear or anxiety is keeping us from committing to the new. That moves us through the door to the Renewal room, and now we are perceived as, and feel, sincere, open, willing to risk. People in Renewal are trying out new practices and ideas. They are open to site visits to see what others have done and looking for articles about the latest innovation. The Renewal room feels like a place full of new converts, ready to put energy into a new path and wanting to convert others to the answer they’ve found.

But of course, over time Renewal subsides. We get comfortable with the new program, lifestyle, or relationship and we find ourselves back in the Contentment room. We have it “all worked out,” we have answers and we function comfortably within them; life is good.

Residing in any room is not a characteristic of a person’s personality; it is rather where they are at this time and in regard to this particular change. In time they will move because we all live in all four rooms.

As leaders or change agents, whose task it is to mobilize energy for a change, we need to work with people in the Confusion or Renewal rooms. In every Confusion room there are people already taking constructive action. They would welcome help to obtain needed resources or to coordinate activities with others. It is they who will carry the initiative forward – if they can be brought together to learn how their initiatives integrate with the whole. The seeds of success are sown in the Confusion room and sprout in the Renewal room.

The people in the Contentment or Denial rooms are not frozen, events will move them soon enough. But to mobilize change people in the Contentment or Denial rooms are not an effective place to spend a lot of energy or time. We need to continue to involve them in meetings with their colleagues, provide them information, but not to make them the focus of our efforts.

All of us need some part of our lives to remain stable especially when other parts feel
like they are in confusion. When professionals are dealing with personal problems like a divorce, birth of a new child, adjusting to a child leaving for college – or when they are dealing with work issues that are disorienting, being passed over for promotion, or failure of a project, they need stability in the other parts of their lives. And sometimes that stability is bought with denial. But when those troubling issues get resolved, then they have the energy to attend to what they had not seen before.

Weisbord writes about Janssen’ theory in Productive Workplaces. Jossey-Bass 1987

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

Assessments and Lessons Learned

• Assessment of Knowledge Management Programs The critical difference that Common Knowledge Associates brings to KM assessment is the involvement of an internal team as joint researchers. This means the assessment knowledge remains in the organization after the consulting engagement is over, not just in a report, but in the minds of organizational members. Download KM assessment conducted using KM principles

• Assessment of KM initiatives (Communities of Practice, Wikis, Social Networking sites, etc.) to determine the impact those initiatives on the productive work of the organization. See examples of impact assessments conducted by Common Knowledge Associates at the Defense Intelligence Agency Download Intellipedia_Study.pdf (185.4K) and Download A_Space_Study.pdf (276.4K)

• Qualitative Research Studies of Organizational Issues Common Knowledge Associates conducts rigorous studies that provide in-depth understanding of complex organizational issues. See a description of how we conduct Participatory Action Research.

• Lesson Learned Studies Common Knowledge Associates conducts studies of both organizational successes (so the success can be repeated) and organizational failures or missteps. See Learning from Failure

• Harvesting the organization’s knowledge with techniques that guarantee re-use (see article) Faciliated Knowledge Harvesting

View more presentations from nancydixon.

Public Speaking and Conference Planning

I am available for keynotes at public and in-house conferences

My practice with presentations is to talk for a short while and then pose a question to the audience to discuss in small groups, giving them the time to connect what I’ve been talking about to their own knowledge. I then continue the presentation, adding a few more ideas and again provide a question. The average attention span for an adult is 20 minutes. Anything a presenter says after that is lost to memory unless the presenter provides an opportunity for listeners to process the information. Using the talk-then-discuss format, members of the audience retain what they’ve heard because they’ve had the opportunity to put it into their own words in the discussion segments. (See We Learn When We Talk) They also share their own knowledge with others in the audience in a way that coffee breaks just can match. A typical talk with the discussion sections takes about an hour and a half.

Examples of presentations topics:

• KM: Where We’ve Been and Where We’re Going There is a way that most organizations start up their KM efforts and then a next step they usually take, and so on. This presentation lays out that trajectory but most importantly looks at how leading edge organizations are thinking about knowledge management – “where we are going.” I first made this presentation at the Army KM Conference and then revised it for KM Asia and then again for other smaller venues. It's a helpful way for an organization to think about where they currently are and what next steps they want to take. To get an overview of the presentation read these three blog posts:

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3

• How to Learn From Failure – It’s Possible A number of industries have found the secrets of learning from failure, but it takes a great deal more than building a lessons learned database. One of those secrets is to focus on learning from small failures to prevent large catastrophes. That however requires a systematic way to identify small failures. I provide organizational examples for each of the three critical elements. To preview the other elements read Learning from Failure.

• Five Actions Organizations Can Take to Increase Knowledge Sharing This presentation focuses on different ways for enterprises to address knowledge sharing, including building relationships, designing spaces (physical and virtual) that encourage conversation, developing and practicing conversation skills, building knowledge sharing into the workflow, and leadership support of the knowledge sharing message. I first made this presentation at a KM World conference, and it has become my most asked for presentation. You can see some of the ideas at Five Actions Organizations Can Take to Increase Knowledge Sharing.

I assist conference planners to making conferences and retreats more interactive.

It is something of a paradox that most conferences put on to promote knowledge management in an organization provide little opportunity for participants to share or exchange their own knowledge.

Common Knowledge Associates designs meetings, retreats and conferences that facilitate knowledge sharing. I draw on techniques from large group processes including, Appreciative Inquiry, Open Space Technology, Knowledge Café, and Future Search to tailor a design to purpose. Learn more about how I think about assisting conference planners Download Conference planning

Learning in Public

A wonderful thing has been happening in organizations about learning - the idea of learning is shifting from the tradition of “learning in private” to “learning in pubic”. Learning in private was what we all did in school; remember “don’t look at your neighbor’s paper, write your own essay, and no whispering during test taking.” Learning was seen as an individual pursuit, and that attitude carried over to how we thought about learning in the workplace. When employees are rewarded for their expertise there is some need to keep private those things that they do not know.

However that traditional idea is giving way to “learning in public.” In part, we can credit Web 2.0 and the general increase in transparency that it has engendered through social media like Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter.

But learning in public is also coming about because of the work KM professionals have done in organizations. As KM professionals we have enabled transparency by implementing knowledge sharing processes like peer assist, collaborative workspaces, communities of practice, blogs and wikis. These have made it acceptable to say, “I don’t know” about an issue or problem and to ask others for help. When professionals acknowledge not knowing and reach out to a colleague, it not only opens the requester to learning, it signals to others that they can acknowledge that there are things they don’t know - it begins to change the culture. We see a willingness to “learn in public” among professionals, be they scientists, engineers, analysts, or physicians. We see teams and projects learning in public through AARS and Retrospects. We see whole systems learning in public through practices like appreciative inquiry, knowledge cafes and a host of other whole system processes.

We are also learning in pubic when we engage in in-depth conversation. Elsewhere I’ve defined conversation as: when each person is actively working to understand the meaning the other is trying to convey. To understand another’s meaning often requires us to ask questions about the other’s reasoning, ask for examples, and paraphrase what was said to check if we now “have it.” All of which takes time. So part of learning in public through conversation is a group’s willingness to make a time commitment in the interest of learning and understanding. That’s a change for many groups where the norm has been - when hearing an idea from a colleague, but not quite clear about what he/she is trying to say, just let it go and move on to the next statement. Increasingly I see a willingness to engage in the in-depth exchange that is necessary if we are to create new knowledge together. Conversation is a “learning in public” tool – maybe one of the best.

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.

Workshops

• Productive Conversations that change the conversation in the organization resulting in improved knowledge flow between peers and between subordinates and superiors. Download Productive Conversation desc

• Creating a "Speaking Up" Culture - workshop/intervention that shows managers how to develop a culture in which their subordinates willingly and openly offer their ideas, concerns, and challenges – and as willing accept responsibility for moving their unit forward- where they are willing and able to tell truth to power. Download Creating a %22Speaking Up%22 Culture

• Learning Strategies Workshop that train in-house facilitators to implement Peer Assists, After Action Reviews, and Retrospects

• Developing inquiry skills that draw out deep knowledge

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.

Bio

Dr. Dixon is a researcher and consultant working with clients to understand the impact of change initiatives they have employed. She conducts qualitative studies using in-depth interviews and ethnographic tools. She is the author of eight books as well as over 50 articles that focus on how organizations learn. Books include, CompanyCommand: Unleashing the Power of the Army Profession (with Burgess, Allen, Kilner and Schweitzer), Common Knowledge: How Companies Thrive by Sharing What They Know, HBSP and Perspectives on Dialogue, Center for Creative Leadership.

Dr. Dixon’s consulting company conducts in-depth assessments of knowledge sharing efforts within organizations, e.g. how people are collaborating, sharing knowledge, and making use of lessons learned. She brings extensive research skills to her work from her years as a Professor of Administrative Sciences at The George Washington University in Washington DC.

Recent studies include, Intellipedia, an intelligence Wiki, and A-Space, a Facebook implementation, both studies conducted for the Defense Intelligence Agency. These social media initiatives span the 16 intelligence communities and have had a positive impact on their ability to collaborate with each other.

Dr. Dixon has a comprehensive knowledge of the Intelligence Community and has worked extensively in the Health Care Industry. Recent government clients include The Defense Intelligence Agency, US Army, The Agency for HealthCare Research and Quality, and The Institute for Healthcare Improvement. Corporate clients include, Raytheon, ConocoPhillips, Towers Perrin, Deloitte, British Petroleum, Haliburton and the American Medical Association.

Dr. Dixon is a former tenured Professor of Administrative Sciences at The George Washington University, and served on The University of Texas Human Resource Development Graduate Faculty. Dr. Dixon serves as an Editorial Reviewer for the Human Resource Development Quarterly and as a Member of the Editorial Board for Management Learning and for Action Learning: Research & Practice. She is a member of the Editorial Advisory Board for the Journal of Workplace Learning. She serves on the Advisory Panel for Battle Command Knowledge Systems. Her book Common Knowledge was recently selected as one of the best 100 business books.

Conducting a Knowledge Management Assessment

The goal of a Knowledge Management Assessment is to:

1. Assess where the organization is in terms of leveraging explicit and tacit knowledge, collaboration, and the development of new knowledge for innovation
2. Assist the organization in developing a vision of where they need to be, taking into account 1) the strategy of the organization, and 2) the best practice within their industry
3. Work with the organization to develop a road map of strategies to get from where they are to their vision

The critical difference that Common Knowledge Associates brings to a KM assessment is the involvement of an internal team as joint researchers, rather than bringing in an external team to conduct the assessment. The internal team is composed of those whose work and behavior is expected to change – that often means those on the frontline.

Conducting the assessment through an internal team begins the important process of leveraging the organization’s collective knowledge. The benefits to the organization in conducting the knowledge management assessment with an internal team are:

• The knowledge does not leave when the researcher leaves - in-depth understanding continues to resides in the organization
• The internal team conducts 70% of the interview/observations, significantly reducing the cost of assessment for the client
• A greater number of organizational members can be interviewed/observed
• Members of the internal team gain an understanding of the reasoning behind the change effort and are therefore able to influence change from the bottom up
• Suggested changes are more useful and realistic because they are developed by those who do the work

Assessing The “As Is”
The internal team, acting in their role as joint researchers, is involved in data collection, analysis, and the development of findings. This team has wide representation from across the organization, touching all units and levels that are anticipated to be involved in the changes. Dr. Dixon acts as principal researcher, using skills and knowledge developed through her many years as Professor of Administrative Science at the George Washington University. Depending upon the nature of the work, the “as is” assessment may involve interviews, observation, surveys, review of documents and review of intranet sites including content management sites, communities, and social media. In her role as principal researcher, Dr. Dixon designs the assessment so that validity and reliability are preserved. Among these design tasks are:

• Selecting the methodology(s)
• Designing the interview/survey questions and then testing them for ambiguity and clarity
• Constructing an interview/observation protocol to ensure consistency across multiple interviewers
• Training the interviewers/observers in semi-structured interviewing techniques
• Selecting a representative sample of the population
• Conducting a minimum of 30% of the interviews/observations
• Employing qualitative analysis software to analyze the data
• Facilitating joint analysis sessions with the internal team, and
• Developing a report of findings

Because of the involvement of the internal team, by the time the assessment is completed, change has already started to happen. There is a buzz in the organization about the issues and people are trying out changes. For a detailed example of how this works see the post Participatory Action Research.

Constructing the “To Be” - Visioning
Common Knowledge Associates understands that real change, rather than compliance, occurs when employees, whose practices will have to change, are themselves involved in thinking through those changes. Therefore constructing the “to be” picture is again a joint effort that consists of uncovering what knowledge efforts would support the organization’s strategy, but also what is leading edge. Those whose work and behavior will necessarily change participate in exploring “best practices” of other organizations. Common Knowledge Associates selects from a set of collaborative strategies (Peer Assist, Field Trips, Kaizen Blitz, Future Search) to use in developing the “To Be” vision. See an example of Peer Assist at http://commonknowledge.org/page.asp?id=30 and an example of Kaizen Blitz at http://www.nancydixonblog.com/2009/09/if-the-army-can-put-its-doctrine-up-on-a-wiki-youve-got-no-excuse.html

Moving from “As Is” to “To Be” - Roadmap
Once the organization’s knowledge gaps are identified the task is to build a road map from here to there. Identifying the practices, strategies and process that can be put into place to achieve the vision. Many of these will have been identified in the process of developing the “To Be.”

In the experience of Common Knowledge Associates the “To Be” already resides in the organization in bits and pieces – at the fringe, in the cracks, and parasitic on old practices. Using appreciative processes it is possible to locate where the future is already happening within the organization and to build upon those “found pilots.” They offer a great advantage for early successes and quick wins.

The internal team that has collected and analyzed the data now turns their focus to bringing about change in their own units/departments. By this point in the study several people from each of the units/departments have been involved in one or more of the activities of the study and they form an internal group to advocate for change and to be the first implementers of that change. The internal team becomes a valuable source of influence within the organization.

The internal team working with senior management prioritizes the identified strategies for the road map in terms of 1) greatest need, 2) cost, and 3) ease of implementation.

Summary
All three steps of the knowledge management assessment described above make use of the collective knowledge of the organization. Each step involves organizational members, not as subjects to be studied, but as joint researchers and innovators. A basic assumption of knowledge management is that much of the organization’s knowledge resides in the minds of those who are currently engaged in the work. That assumption is evident in the knowledge management assessment process designed by Common Knowledge Associates -it’s a matter of “walking the talk.”