conversation matters

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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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 [email protected] or Nancy at [email protected]

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 [email protected] or [email protected]. 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