conversation matters

Hold an Idea Lightly - A Key Lesson for Dialogue

One of the things that gets us into trouble when we talk to people with whom we disagree, whether that disagreement is about politics or problems we’re facing at work, is that we come to such meetings with firm ideas about a solution. Thus, we often think that our task is to convince others of what we know to be right. That’s all pretty understandable. 

But there‘s another way to think about our ideas – the dialogue way.

Being engaged in a dialogue still requires us to be prepared – to think through what would be the best answer – to have done our homework, so to speak. But then when we arrive at a meeting, the dialogue way is to hold that idea lightly.

What does it mean to hold an idea lightly? When I think of holding something lightly I think of holding a fragile Christmas ornament in my hand, or of how a butterfly lands on a delicate flower, barely bending it’s stem. Holding an idea lightly acknowledges that all that we know is subject to change as we open ourselves to the knowledge and wisdom of others. Bohm says, “We have to have enough faith in our worldview to work from it, but not that much faith that we think it’s the final answer.”

It’s really quite wonderful that the ideas we hold can change -that we’re not stuck with the ideas we had as teenagers or what we thought before we became parents or we learned the hundred and one lesson that life teaches us. That our ideas can change is what human development is all about. Without that possibility, we’d all still be in the Stone Age.  

When Bohm asks us to “hold an idea lightly” he is acknowledging that we enter any dialogue with ideas in our mind – whether those are facts we have accumulated from our schooling or understandings life has taught us. He does not say we should not have such ideas, only that when those ideas are challenged in dialogue, we are willing to view them as “possibilities” rather than “truth.” That’s not easy because we get very attached to our ideas. And when someone challenges them we feel like they're challenging who we are. But we need to remember that we are not our ideas! Ideas are the necessary, temporary, constructions our minds make. They are often very clever, certainly very useful - that is, until we encounter a better idea. We should all feel very grateful that we are not our ideas because that would close off the possibility of learning and changing.

Where Is The Only Place Employees Share Their Knowledge?

The Hallways of Learning

Hallways are the places where some of our best conversations occur. Ask any conference attendee and you’re likely to hear the familiar comment, “The sessions were OK but I had some great hallway conversations.”  The analogy of the hallway is a useful way to talk about how learning occurs in organizations.

Learning in organizations can be categorized into three types, only one of which happens in hallways. First, individuals use their experience and training to construct meaning for themselves. When individuals keep this meaning to themselves, rather than making it accessible to others, we can liken their learning to a Private Office. For example, imagine a field representative who installs and repairs the company’s product, and overtime, determines that a given part fails repeatedly under certain identifiable conditions. At this point, the field representative is constructing private meaning.  Unless this private meeting is shared with others, the organization will not learn.

A second category of learning is that which occurs when individuals make their personal meaning available to others in the organization. This category is analogous to the Hallways of the organization where important exchanges take place. Hallways are places where ideas get tested against the thinking of others. As long is meaning is held privately, it is protected from the discovery that it may be wrong or limited in perspective. When it is made accessible to others, the data on which is based can be challenged and the reasoning and logic that led to the conclusions can be examined. Hallways are places were joint meaning is made. In other words, meaning it’s not just exchanged, it is constructed in the dialogue between organizational members.

Collective meaning is the third category of learning. It is the meaning that organizational members hold in common. Collective meaning is like having a Storeroom where the mementos of the past are kept. It is the glue that holds organizational members together and allows them to act in concert with each other.  It provides a sense of belonging and community. Collective meaning saves the organization time. There is no need for lengthy discussions about those issues that organizational members are all in agreement about – time can be spent on more critical issues. The meaning in the Storeroom can, however, have a negative impact on the organization. In a rapidly changing world, collective meaning that was advantageous at one point in time may have become obsolete, yet may prove difficult to change.

Hallways are the only space where it is possible for an organization to learn. It cannot learn in the Private Offices, although individual learning can certainly take place there. It cannot learn in the Storeroom, where it is only possible to affirm what is already known. If organizations are going to learn, they will need to construct Hallways in which the in-depth exploration of meaning can occur. The real hallways of our organizations will not suffice for the level of organizational learning that is necessary. Rather, organizations to need to develop processes that have the positive characteristics of real hallways, yet are more focused and intentional.

Many organizations have developed processes that serve this Hallway function.  Some are Knowledge Management processes,  such as, After Action Reviews, Peer Assists, Communities of Practice, and  Storytelling Circles.  Others are whole system in the room processes such as Open Space Technology, Knowledge Cafes, and Appreciative Inquiry.  Still others  result from the rise of post-bureaucratic organizations that by design create more Hallway structures, for example  self- managed teams,  networked organizations, Holocracy, and Humanocracy  to name a few.  The frequency of such processes in organizations, which has grown rapidly over the last few years, attests to both the need for Hallways and ingenuity of organizations in creating new forms of collective learning.

Based on Dixon.N,Strategy & Leadership; Mar/Apr 1996; 24, 2; ABI/INFORM

The Promise of Dialogue

This blog post is the third in a series of three. In the first, “The Most Important Knowledge KM is Ignoring,” I explain that the way we talk in organizations prevents us from solving the most challenging problems we face. In the second, “An Organization That Changed Its Culture by Implementing Dialogue,” I offer a brief case study of an organization that has implemented dialogue at every level. In this third post, I spell out the promise that dialogue holds.

In a world of increasing complexity, where there are no simple or obvious answers, dialogue brings a ray of hope to address the many troubling issues we face that do not lend themselves to resolution through scientific study or big data. In this post I am primarily focused on how dialogue can address our organizations’ adaptive issues, whether those organizations are for-profit, non-profit or governmental. Most of us spend as much as one-third of our lives inside an organization, so organizations must be places that promote well-being, including autonomy, mastery and purpose (Daniel Pink) of both employees and managers. Dialogue offers a pathway for organizations to achieve that goal by drawing on the understanding of all of its members to address the adaptive issues the organization faces.

The promise of dialogue is that if we can jointly make sense of the issues we face, we can find a way forward. Too often, when we come together to talk, we each arrive with our own ideas about how to address an issue, and much of our taking together is about convincing others that our view should prevail. Of course, the problem is that each of us has a limited perspective on any issue – limited to our own experience and knowledge base. When we can collectively make sense, new possibilities that no one could have conceived of on their own, emerge. Karl Weick once said “Small improvements in seeing can occur when individuals enlarge their personal repertoires of what they can do. But larger improvements in seeing should occur when people with more diverse skills, experience, and perspectives think together in a context of respectful interaction.” 

Coming together in dialogue involves:

• a respectful relationship with those with whom we are talking
• acknowledgement that each person has a right to their own truth and has the intellectual capacity to make sense of their world
• a willingness to examine our own thinking process to understand how we have reached the assumptions we hold
• a willingness to hold our assumptions lightly
• the courage and humility to speak our own truth
• the acknowledgement that there can be no predetermined outcome of a dialogue
• the recognition that our talking together must support a moral purpose, as well as a practical one.

The list of attributes reveals that dialogue is about how we relate to others and our willingness to acknowledge our own limitations, including our blindness to our own assumptions and our unawareness of our implicit basis. I suggest that dialogue is not so much a difference in technique or skills as it is a difference in relationship and humility. I seriously question whether more technique is necessary. There is already a great deal of technique that relates to giving clear feedback, asking clarifying questions, sharing airtime, paraphrasing to check out what is understood, and so on. That is not to say that people always make use of the techniques that are available to them. But it is to say, that even when they do, using a technique may not change their intent to manipulate or control. People may have altered their words but not the nature of their relationship with others.

I acknowledge these seven attributes are a “big ask” of any group. They require each of us to take responsibility for how our organizations function. We accept that responsibility by creating opportunities for, and participating in dialogue, not just with those with whom we agree, but also with those with whom we disagree.

How to Increase the Flow of Knowledge Across an Organization

The most effective way you can increase the flow of knowledge across an organization is to connect  organizational members to each other.

By connect I mean, “I know what you are currently working on and what problems you are facing” and you know that about me. It means, if I need help, I know what questions I might be able to ask you about. I also know how I might be able to help you, for example, when I come across something I know you are interested in. 

I’ll give you a personal example. I have a good friend - we both like reading mysteries. I recently came across a great site. Here is how it works, if I type in the name of an author I like, the app generates a map of other authors that people, who also like that author I typed in, regularly read! I quickly sent my friend a link to the map.

You have to know what another person is interested in, to know what to share with them.

Connected also means there is a sense of trust between us, so that I know you will respond if I ask for help and that you won’t think less of me for not knowing the answer. The two main reasons employees give for not asking for help is 1) they don't want to bother the other, imagining they are too busy and will be irritated by the request, or 2) they don't want others to think they are not competent! Both reasons are less relevant when employees are connected because asking and sharing are ways to maintain the connection between people. It signals, I am aware of you and am interested in your success. 

The short way to think of the strategy I am suggesting is, Connection before Content, that is, before you can exchange content productively, you need to have built a connection.

That is true at several levels in an organization. For example, at the level of a project team.  Hackman, who is probably our greatest authority on teamwork, explains that before a project begins, the leader needs to bring the team members together – in person, when that is again possible. Hackman suggests pairing up team members and asking each to write out what they think the goal of the project is and then discuss what they wrote with each other, in order to come to some kind of agreement. Secondly, he has each one of the pair interview the other about what experience they bring to the project that will help the team reach their agreed upon goal. And finally he has each person introduce their partner to the rest of the team, explaining what skills and experience their partner brings. Team members need to know who has what knowledge if they are going to to make the best use of the team’s resources to solve problems.  Connection before content.

It is equally true at the department level, where again each member needs to know both the tasks and the experience of their colleagues to work most effectively. One way department members can gain that knowledge is to start department meetings with a "check in" during which each members reports on what they are currently working on. That allows others to offer help, as well as, to coordinate. You may recognize this as an Agile practice of holding 15 minute morning meetings. Connection before content.

And it is true for a community, where there are lots of ways to build connections, e.g. “working out loud circles,” Communities of Practice, having robust profiles up, brown bag lunches, your department offering fresh coffee and donuts at 10 each morning for any department they need to stay connected with.  Connection before content.

As we all know, relationships deteriorate over time if they are not renewed. So even if a group has met before, taking a few minutes before a meeting to reconnect reestablishes the relationships and trust that increases knowledge flow.

I realize that these examples raise the concern that one-to-one is a slow way to proceed and that we should be thinking about how to scale knowledge. But if every employee is engaged in one-to-one exchanges, then the whole organization is learning. Moreover, they are getting knowledge that pertains directly to their work, not something that they might possibly need to know sometime in the future.

The idea that you can scale knowledge sharing by posting something that everyone in the organization will learn from is a bit of an illusion, as The World Bank found out when they studied readership in 2014. The published report examined how frequently posted policy reports were downloaded or cited - not just by the 10,000 bank employees, but by everyone. About 13 percent of policy reports were downloaded at least 250 times while more than 31 percent of policy reports were never downloaded and almost 87 percent of policy reports were never cited. (Which World Bank Reports are Widely Read, Doerte Doemeland and James Trevino, 2014)  Those numbers suggest that we should question the value of relying solely on publishing to share the organization's knowledge.

That said, every company needs to publish explicit knowledge like policies, SoPs, processes, etc. But if a company wants knowledge to reach employees when they need it, they need to focus on Connection before Content.  

Ten Big Ideas of Knowledge Management

 

1. Connection before Content

People are more willing to share their knowledge and expose their
thinking when they have built a trust relationship with others. If a group is going to concentrate on a difficult issue, they first need to learn who others are, the skills they bring, the experience they represent, and the values they hold.

So we start meetings with “small talk,” that is, getting to know more about one another, not just the
weather, but what is important in their work right now, or what they have done recently that they are most proud of. “Small talk” is not really small at all, it is how we acknowledge the value of our relationship to the other. When a group has come together many times, the period of connecting can be brief, but not neglected altogether.

 

2. Circles Connect (applicable when the virus is over and we are again able to meet in person)

Circles represent unity. They help individuals in the group view themselves as part of the whole. For example, the United Nations meeting hall is designed in concentric circles to provide a visual representation of what the UN stands for – unity among nations. A circle represents equality - there is no “head of the table.” The circle shows that all voices are equally valued. A circle is also a clear indication to those in the room that they will be expected to actively participate.

It is a useful symbolism to begin and end a meeting with chairs in a circle. It can be a big circle of up to 35, or many small circles of 5. Ideally it is a circle of just chairs, without a table. Participants have a profoundly different experience when they converse in a group without a table. Tables put us across from each other in a position reminiscent of negotiation. Conveners and even some participants will feel a bit awkward for the first few minutes without a table, but that feeling goes away quickly as people get connected. Circles also allow everyone to see everyone else’s eyes. It is difficult to have a conversation with someone whose eyes you cannot see.

When a group is too large to have everyone in one circle, I often make concentric circles and have even made a circle three and four layers deep. Although concentric circles limit seeing those sitting directly behind, they still have symbolic value and provide the best compromise between having too large a circle where it is difficult to hear others.

In many meetings a U shape is set up to enable seeing a screen placed at the opening of the U. But a large U has a very different feel, because the focus is on the screen rather than on each other. And of course a U is open, which loses the sense of boundary that a circle provides. The straight sides of a U make it difficult to see those that are on the same side. Even if there is to be a PowerPoint presentation at some point in a meeting, it is better to start with a circle and then open it to a U during the time the group is viewing the slides.

3. Knowledge is Both Created and Shared in Conversation

Knowledge is created when diverse perspectives are brought together in conversation - when people are able to build on each other’s ideas. Dividing members into small mixed groups that are made up of multiple levels, different disciplines, or mixing customers with employees, legitimizes having different views and makes possible giving voice to a diversity of views.

Learning from others is also best done in conversation. If you need help from others about a problem you are facing, you get the best help if you pick up the phone so you can explain your situation and they can respond, not in generalities, but to your specific situation. You might start with an email, but if it is a difficult situation, it probably needs to move to a phone or Zoom call.

Conversation is not so necessary if the knowledge you are seeking is about a technical problem, for example, “What software do your use for tracking donors?” But if it is a more complex issue you need to be able to ask questions of the other and to share your context.

4. Asking Opens the Door to Knowledge

Whether it is through an email or in person, asking is a little risky;  we are often fearful that others will think we are less competent or will be offended. That is the reason for “connection before content” – so that others build enough trust know how we will react and to use and our competence.  

Asking also means when someone says something we don’t agree with, rather than explain why they’re wrong, we ask what their reasoning is. We seek to understand their thinking. Stephen Covey famously said, “Seek first to understand, then to be understood.”

When we are offering our knowledge to others, we first ask about their context, so we can provide answers that are specific to their situation, not generalized information. And the person seeking answers might  explain, “In your situation you have five doctors and it’s an urban area, but I’m work with only two doctors and most of the patients live miles away. So how could I could apply your process in my context?”

5. Small Groups as the Unit of Learning

Small groups produce the richest and most in-depth thinking – they are the unit of learning in organizations. When I say small group, I mean a group of four to seven people. The group needs to be large enough to contain diverse views, yet small enough for members to engage each other. Engaging each other implies that members have time to fully state their ideas and the reasoning behind them. And then time enough for others to ask questions that will gain them a deeper understanding of what has been 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 his or her own perspective to the others.

Moreover in groups with more than  seven, members become concerned about “air time,” that is, thinking they should not talk too long or too often in order to give everyone a chance to offer their views. Although concern about air time is well meant, it prevents members from engaging each other. For example, what too often happens in a larger group, is that when a member hears something he or she disagrees with, rather than inquiring into the other’s reason or asking how the other came to that idea, the member simply offers his or her own contradicting view. That response tends to polarize positions rather than moving the group toward the integration of ideas.

6. Learn in Small Groups – Integrate Knowledge in Large Groups

After small groups have been in conversation their ideas are brought together in a large group setting to integrate their insights into the thinking of the whole. There are lots of ways to do this:

• Write in a shared Google Doc
• Popcorn (request that anyone that has an idea to speak)
• Report outs (my least favorite)
• 1-2-4-all, a Liberating Structures process
• Go arounds (asking every member to speak in turn)

In a lengthy meeting, small and large group discussions regularly alternate.

7. We Learn When We Talk

This is an interesting phenomena. We usually think of learning as a  listening activity.  But two researchers at the University of Minnesota have done research that shows that we organize information differently when we talk, than when those ideas are just swimming around in our heads.  And by mentally organizing the information in preparation for speaking, we create greater understanding for ourselves. It’s the old adage about teaching a subject if you want to really understand it.  I do a lot of interviewing in my consulting practice and consistently, at the end of an interview, the interviewee remarks that the interview was helpful to clarify some of the issues they had been thinking about.

This principle is also central to transferring knowledge. Listening to an expert provides us    new ideas; but as long as those ideas are just in our heads, they are neither fully formed nor implementable. It is only when the listener puts an idea together in a way that allows them to explain that idea to others, that the idea takes shape. Keep group small enough so that everyone has an opportunity to put their thinking into words.

8. Learning From Experience Requires Deliberate Reflection

Reflection is an invitation to think deeply about our actions so that we are able to act with more insight and effectiveness in the future. Reflection is useful at 4 levels: 1) Individuals: evaluating or processing one’s experiences in the interest of self-development.  2) A team or community: reflecting together to improve the work of the team and improve the way  team members work together. 3) An organization: reflecting to  consider the organization’s strategy and it’s culture, and 4) intra-organizational: focusing on enhancing the  organization’s relationship with partners and clients  and with equally with the community in which it is located and natural environment.

Characteristically, reflecting is more effective if it is done with others.

9. Different Types of Knowledge Needs to Be Shared in Different Ways

Explicit knowledge is “know what,” the facts and algorithms that can be written down so others can both understand and make use of the knowledge. Examples are SOPs, job aids, and well-documented process steps.

Implicit knowledge  is ‘know how” that is, knowledge gained through experience, e.g. the rules of thumb a person uses in designing a meeting or insights about how to approach a difficult client. Implicit knowledge is most effectively shared through conversation. We tend to call on our implicit knowledge when we are faced with a problem or when asked a question by another.

Tacit knowledge is deep knowledge, what a person knows, but often cannot articulate; it is what is often referred to as  judgment. Tacit knowledge can only be learned through observation of a master or being coached by a master. Examples of tacit knowledge are, what makes one speaker more engaging than another, how a conductor acts to get the best from an orchestra, what a skilled facilitator does to help a group reach agreement, or how an experienced physician makes a diagnosis. Perhaps as much as 90% of the critical knowledge in an organization is either implicit or tacit. 

10. Knowledge Sharing is Sustained by Reciprocity

The basic idea of community is reciprocity. That is, if I help others, then when I need help, they will help me. It is of course not a one to one reciprocity, but a generalized reciprocity – meaning that I may not receive help from the specific person I helped, but I will from someone in the community.

Receiving help from others also requires expressing appreciation for their help; and with more than a simple “thanks” in an email. Real appreciation includes acknowledgement of the helper’s extra effort, their kindness, and even how what they offered was of use to us. The three actions of knowledge sharing  are Share, Ask and Appreciate.

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Responsibilities of Organizational Members

In my last post, I wrote about the problems that hierarchical organizations cause employees, including depression, anxiety and heart attacks, as well as being subjected to the inequality of privilege and income disparity. I also suggested that society, as a whole, is impacted when the executive suite engages in illegal or immoral actions (e.g. The VW emissions scandal) that are covered up by controlling the information flow. That post was focused on management hierarchy and suggested that many organizations have found it possible to function effectively with reduced hierarchy.

In this post I introduce an article, “The Responsibilities of Members in an Organization That Is Learning” that speaks to the responsibilities of all employees related to those same issues. I use the term “organizational members” in this article because we have no term in English that refers to people at all levels of an organization. The term employee, in its common usage, references only those not in management positions, although we would all readily acknowledge that managers are also employees of organizations. This article addresses the responsibilities of all “organizational members” irrespective of level. It is noteworthy to recognize that people, like myself, who study and consult with organizations, direct our insights and advice to managers, and only rarely to all organizational members, as I do in this article. In the linked article I elaborate on six responsibilities of members:

1. Actively engage in organizational dialogue that continually examines the worth of the organization’s purpose.
2. Bring the best available knowledge to bear on organizational issues.
3. Function as a co-participant in the creation, maintenance, and transformation of organizational
   realities.
4. Willingly share what each knows with colleagues and create forums and systems by which that can be accomplished.
5. Actively learn from experience every day to develop as a responsible, participating member of the organization.
6. Share in the responsibility for the governance of the organization.

I use the word responsibilities, rather than possibilities or actions in the title, to underscore the idea that by doing nothing, organizational members collude in holding the problems mentioned above in place.   

Download Responsibilities of members in an Organization that is learning

 

Can Democracy Survive in America Without Organizations Becoming Democratic?

“Democracy is a tough way to live. With all its flaws, I think it beats the alternatives. I do not wish to have someone else, no matter how educated, well intentioned, wealthy, or wise, decide unilaterally what is best for me. Unless we are deeply involved in our work, we cannot feel good about ourselves. Unless we work with others toward valued goals, we cannot infuse hope and aspiration into our lives. Unless we treat one another as equals, we cannot find dignity, meaning, and community in work. Unless we make our own mistakes, and learn to forgive ourselves, we cannot learn at all. Unless we cooperate we cannot survive.” Marvin Weisbord, 1996                                           

 

Each time I read Weisbord’s quote, it brings to mind a question, “How can we have a democratic society, when most of our working lives are spent within organizations that are far from being democratic?” Even within western cultures, which have overturned monarchies and reduced the impact of class, organizations remain places where hierarchy and privilege closely resemble the monarchies or class-based societies of the past. Consider that most organizations are places where:

• organizational policy and strategy decisions are made by CEOs, whose actions have too often revealed that their primary interest is in lining their own pockets and that of their shareholders, with little concern for the environment, the well being of employees or the communities in which those organizations function. (Buybacks of  company stock rather than increasing employee salary from the tax cuts; inappropriate use of Covid 19 emergency fund)
• the disparity of income between those at the top of organizations and workers is excessive and unconscionable. (The average S&P 500 CEO earned $14 million in 2017, 361 times the average worker’s salary; compared to a ratio of only 42 in 1980.  From 1979 to 2018, net productivity rose 69.6 percent, while the hourly pay of typical workers increased only 11.6 during that same 39 year period.)
• employees frequently find themselves in an adult/child relationship with their managers, reducing their ability to make use of the knowledge and insight they have gained to address the work problems they face. Rather they are told what to focus on, how to do it, and how long it should take.
• employees suffer from a competitive culture that too often results in depression, heart attack and disengagement. (The health website WebMD reported that work was the number one source of stress. The American Psychological Association’s 2015 report Stress in America noted that the top two sources of stress were money and work, with almost one-quarter of all adults reporting extreme levels of stress. Sixty-one percent said that workplace stress had made them physically sick, and 7 percent said they had been hospitalized because of workplace stress and its physiological effects. The prevalence of heart attacks on Monday morning has caused hospitals to staff emergency rooms to correspond to the increased risk.)
• those at the top control information. The resulting secrecy leads to damaging and even illegal organizational behavior, which if employees had full awareness, they would not support, indeed would feel ashamed. (VW emission control scandal, the Wells Fargo Bank customer deceptions.) 

No citizens of a democracy would allow their government such control over their lives in the way organizations exert control over their employees. Mary Parker Follett* once said, she could not understand how people could complain about small freedoms taken away, like helmet laws or seat belts, yet were willing to function as surfs within the walls of an organization. I echo that sentiment. In answer to my own question, “How can we have a democratic society, when most of our working lives are spent within organizations that are far from being democratic?” I believe we cannot have a democratic society unless we rethink the governance of our organizations.  

Writing as early as 1989, in “Reassessing the Divine Rights of Managers,” Edgar Schein said, “soon we will need to develop a new picture of what a manager should be. Hierarchical authority will probably play a much small role in that picture, while coordination skills will play a much larger role.” But he cautioned “Our thinking about these matters is hampered by one major, deeply embedded cultural assumption so taken for granted that it is difficult even to articulate. This is the assumption that all organizations are fundamentally hierarchical in nature, and that the management process is fundamentally hierarchical.” He said, “We need models, but we may have difficulty inventing them because of the automatic tendency to think hierarchically.”

The first step, in bringing about this much needed change is the recognition, as Schein reminds us, that the items in the above list are not “givens.” We now have the models that Schein said we were in needed of. There are now numerous organizations that have developed new approaches to organizational governance, although few would use the term democracy. Instead they are called, Deliberately Developmental Organizations (Kegan), Self Designed, Learning Organizations (Dixon), Holocracy (Robertson), Teal Organizations (Laloux), Conversational Firms (Turco) as well as a host of other terms. Whatever the label, they are organizations with little, if any hierarchy, in which employees make the decisions about what work they do and how they do that work, and in which employees influence the overall strategic direction. And there are many more organizations that are moving in that direction, as seen by the increase in self-directed teams and Agile teams.

I have many ideas about what is propelling this change, as well as, specific examples of how governance is being implemented in different organizations because indeed, these examples differ by size and context. But those topics are for other posts. In this post, I only wanted to lay out my concerns about the problems that result from our current model of governance and acknowledge the growing movement toward a revisioning of how organizations might governing themselves in a way that acknowledges respect for employees, community and the environment. I would be very appreciative to hear from you either in the comment section or through email,([email protected]) about what thoughts this post as sparked in you?

 

*Mary Parker Follett, was denied a Doctorate  at Harvard on the grounds that she was woman. She was one of the first women ever invited to address the London school of economics, where she was invited to address the London school of economics, she distinguished herself in the field of management by being sought by Pres. Theodore Roosevelt as his personal consultant, on managing not-for-profit, non-governmental and voluntary organizations. Peter Drucker identified her as his guru.

An Organization That Is Serious About Lessons Learned:The Wildland Fire Lessons Learned Center

The Wildland Fire lessons learned are posted weekly by email to over 7000 readers. They are the way the Wildland Fire Lessons Learned Center (LLC) does rapid lesson sharing. They are also a place for users to submit their own stories about fire-related accidents, close calls, successes, or a way of doing things more efficiently or safely.

Click on the images to read short lessons and learn why they are so impactful. You might be able to use the one about cell phones yourself!

                                     
Research on the transfer of knowledge (Szulanski and Lee 2020) describe common barriers to transfer, which the Wildland Fire Lessons Learned Center has found a way to overcome. Here are some of those barriers (in bold) and my take on how the LLC has addressed them (in italics):

Common Barriers

• The effort required of the source to share lessons – a firefighter can click on the button at the end of each lesson and fill out a quick electronic form to share their story with the Lessons Learned Center who then does the formatting, write up, and adds the pictures of the lessons for publication and distribution.
• Lack of motivation of the source to provide enough detail for the recipient to implement the lesson – firefighters are willing to provide enough detail to keep their colleagues out of life-threatening  situations and the recognition from having their name and often their picture as well is an added incentive.
• Causal ambiguity – the lack of understanding about how a suggested lesson will change the outcome – the lesson writers make the benefit clear, often through the images, as well as restating the benefit again at the end as a recommendation or caution
• Lack of absorptive capacity of the recipient to understand the what the source is talking about- the use of common firefighter jargon (e.g. “faller,” “sawyer,” “geysering”) in the lessons aids in the understanding of other firefighters. Colleagues are doing the same work and have many of the same experiences as the source.

Likewise, Szulanksi and Lee suggest what encourages the production and improves the receptivity of lessons learned.

Encourage Lessons Learned

• Gatekeepers that can absorb knowledge from a source and interpret it for the recipient – the Lessons Learned Center writers, who are firefighters themselves, know what to ask the firefighters to get all the necessary details for their stories.
• A shared superordinate social identity between the source and the recipient - firefighters have a shared identity born out of their commitment to the mission and the genuine threat of danger with which they live on a daily basis.
• The credibility of the source   – that the lessons come from other firefighters, not from an unnamed source or HR lends credibility.
• Observability – the vivid pictures in the Lessons help the receiver both see and remember the lessons.
• Provenness of knowledge – real firefighters telling their stories about their own accidents and recovery, is verification that the lessons work.

The Wildland Lessons Learned Center was created after the 1994 South Canyon Fire that killed 14 wildland firefighters. This tragedy triggered the interagency TriData Firefighter Safety Awareness Study that recommended a permanent “lessons learned” program be established for wildland firefighters. Karl Weick, one of my heroes, from my faculty days at the University of Texas, worked with Wildland Fire to figure out how it could learn as an organization. That is what Lessons Learned should be – a way for organizations to learn.   

In 2002 the interagency Wildland Fire Lessons Learned Center (LLC) was created to focus on  improving safe work performance and organizational learning for all Wildland firefighters. The website declares, “The Wildland Fire Lessons Learned Center is the single most important step forward for wildland fire agencies in becoming “learning organizations.” The LLC facilitates the documentation of lessons in a variety of formats to make them accessible. In addition to the weekly emails, the LLC produces a compellation of incidents that have occurred over the past year, for example, trees falling on firefighters, chainsaws accidents, or heavily loaded vehicles that have rolled. Check out one the annual reports - you will be amazed at what firefighters deal with daily. 

The LLC also provides  a  1) quarterly magazine called Two More Chains; 2) a popular website for wildland firefighters, 3) a YouTube channel as well as 4) training, meetings, conferences, workshops, seminars, and wildfire academies throughout the United States.

The website notes, “The LLC is particularly important at this time when a large cohort of senior wildland fire managers are retiring within the next 4-5 years. The LLC offers an opportunity for those highly experienced firefighters to provide the next generation with well-learned lessons in fire behavior, safe practices, wildfire management, prescribed fire, and all other aspects of wildland fire management.”    

That is taking Lessons Learned seriously.  It takes a lot of effort and focus for an organization to become a learning organization!

 

 

 

Five Misconceptions About Virtual teams

 

1. The bigger the virtual team, the more it can get done

Wrong! To get things done, team members have to talk to each other. So do the math!  With a team of 5, it takes ten conversations for team members to connect with everyone about a critical issue – very doable. Guess what happens with 13 team members – it requires 78 conversations – not happening. It’s the number of links between people that creates the collaboration problem. A team of five members is ideal!  It's large enough to have a diversity of ideas. It’s small enough for one person to build on another’s ideas. If you go much beyond five, you have lots of people offering their views, but they come out as serial monologues, with little ability to make collective sense. If you want your team to move fast – break a large team into smaller pods. And re-design the work so that a small team can accomplish a given task. Then ensure collaboration between the pods by selecting leads for each pod that frequently meet for coordination. These leads are not bosses but coordinators – regular members of the teams who are willing to take on extra duty.

2. Virtual teams do not need to meet F2F

Not so. It is almost impossible for team members to maintain the deep relationships required for a truly cohesive team without periodic face-to-face interaction. The research is undeniable on that topic. When people come together in person, they have the opportunity to exchange knowledge and ideas, as well as convey feelings in a way that’s tough to do virtually. Having the whole team together can ensure that everyone is interpreting objectives, goals, roles and other vital content the same way. Disagreements can be aired more easily and quickly, and mistaken assumptions can be identified and dispelled. And, very importantly, face-to-face meetings help people create the bonds that are needed for team members to collaborate virtually down the road.

3. It’s helpful to have the co-located team members sitting all together in the office while remote members join through Skype or Zoom.

Mixed-mode causes real problems! Having some participants sitting together, maybe even in the same room as the boss, while others are online, unduly privileges those who are collocated. Those in the room can make eye contact with the person speaking and can even notice who is getting ready to talk. While those online have no eye contact and can only view the whole group. Even if the group is careful about ensuring that that online team members “get in,” those that are remote remain 2^nd class citizens.  Build a level playing field across time and distance by having every team member be on their office computer for team meetings. Just remember - No Mixed Mode. We are all together or all apart.

 4. Virtual teams don’t need to worry about team building

All teams need to think about how they’re working together periodically. It’s even more critical for virtual teams because they have fewer opportunities to run into someone in the hall to repair a misunderstanding or to casually check out how others might be thinking about an issue. Team building can be accomplished virtually if spaced over time.  Rather than gathering for a two-day F2F event, effective team building can occur in 2-hour virtual segments, spaced over six weeks. A virtual team building workshop increases trust, builds appreciation for others’ strengths and weakness, re-builds alignment around goals, and improves communication. 

5. A good way to get everyone on the same page is to use virtual team meetings to show PowerPoint slides and have everyone do individual status updates.

That one is a no brainer! According to a recent study, 82% of people admit to doing other things while in
a virtual meeting—anything from surfing the web to playing solitaire. They do so because the meeting, or substantial parts of it, are of little interest. So follow the 80/20 rule. Make meetings 80% active and 20% passive. Don't bore meeting participants by showing slides or reviewing documents that can be sent and read before the meeting. Use virtual meetings to solve problems, exchange ideas, offer suggestions, or seek guidance. Do that in small breakout groups of 3-4 people and invite team members to suggest items that need to be discussed in the meeting.

How Often Do Virtual Teams Need to Meet Face-to-Face?

In a previous post, I wrote about how successful virtual teams benefit by functioning as #Hybrid teams. I defined Hybrid teams as teams that  1) meet face to face periodically, 2) meet in pairs when appropriate, and 3) are intentional about engaging in interpersonal as well as transactional interactions during online meetings.

This post answers the question, what should the frequency of face-to-face meetings be? The answer depends on three factors 1) the type of tasks of the virtual hybrid team, 2) the degree of a shared view among team members, and 3) the strength of relationship among team members (Maznevski).  The most critical of those factors is the type of work the team does and it is this factor that I address in this post.

There are three levels of team interdependence, pooled, sequential and reciprocal,  each requiring different levels of interaction and thus the frequency of meeting face-to-face.

With Pooled interdependence virtual hybrid team members work independently of each other. Examples would include insurance claim reviewers, call center responders, appliance repair mechanics, and some sales teams. In such jobs, the outcome of all the workers is combined to reach the team’s target. As there are no handoffs between team members, there is no need for the team to come together to ensure that handoffs go smoothly or to resolve joint issues. Coordination is achieved by standardizing the task. However, like other virtual team members who function without the presence of colleagues, they can suffer loneliness and feel disengaged, which reduces the team’s total productivity. Hybrid virtual teams, that are doing tasks that require pooled interdependence, bring those members together at least yearly to celebrate the success of outstanding performers and to build relationships and team commitment. Some organizations combine such meetings with the introduction of new products or training. Limited face-to-face meetings are supported by asynchronous exchanges such as Communities of Practices where team members can ask questions of each other and share best practices as well as synchronous exchanges such as webinars when those are designed for interaction rather than presentation.  

With Sequential interdependence, the team carries out a series of tasks, each performed by a different team member, like a virtual assembly line. Each team member’s success depends on the person who does the previous task completing that task on time and at a high level of quality.  Therefore, a virtual hybrid team’s performance can be improved by each team member fully understanding the needs and requirements of the person who will receive their handoff. Because needs change over time, a virtual hybrid team holds weekly, online, synchronous conversations by Skype or Zoom to stay updated on problems and concerns. Teams use online project management apps like Trello or Zoho for planning and to track task completion. They use asynchronous team apps such as Microsoft Teams or Slack for messaging, social interaction and document storage. Many hold daily, virtual, standup meetings, often lasting no more than 15 minutes to check in with who needs help and to head off problems. 

Virtual hybrid teams with sequential interdependence meet face to face initially to build strategic alignment, to do the necessary upfront planning for coordination and to establish trust relationships that are critical to sequential interdependence.  Although the team’s ongoing tasks are sequential, the initial meeting requires reciprocal interdependence.  Without the conversations that establish trust relationships, team members lose awareness and concern about those they depend upon. Team members need to meet face to face at least twice a year to renew that trust and to put into place changes learned from their ongoing experience.

Reciprocal interdependence requires continual interaction between co-workers. Team members must diagnose, problem solve, and collaborate to accomplish their task. They must continually adjust to each other’s actions as the situation changes. Examples of reciprocal interdependence are product design teams and strategy development teams. Reciprocal tasks require in-depth discussion that involves input from diverse perspectives. A virtual sales team may involve technical experts, developers and marketing people who must interact to craft a proposal for a client. As the client gives feedback on the proposal or later adds new requirements, the team will need to convene to make modifications. Coordination is achieved by mutual adjustment anytime a new factor is introduced. Moreover, mutual adjustment entails synchronous conversation that is best achieved face-to-face. Attempt to make such changes asynchronously whether by email or team apps results in mis-interpretation of others meaning and often the false assumption that agreement has been reached.

Virtual, hybrid teams that are reciprocal meet at least quarterly face-to-face. In between meetings, they primarily rely on visual communication tools such as Skype, Zoom or Google Hangout. They may also use team apps such as  Slack or Teams, to maintain documentation.  As Weick notes, “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 need to pull off this difficult task are most available in variants of the face to face meeting.”   

Task interdependence varies depending upon the task in which a virtual team is engaged. It is not uncommon for teams to have some tasks that are reciprocal and others that are sequential. For example, the initial design of a software project would be reciprocal, while the ongoing development tasks might be sequential and the retrospect at the end that looks for ways to improve the process, to again be reciprocal.

How to Learn From Experience

There is a growing recognition of the value of employees learning from experience. In this post, I outline what needs to be in place to make learning from experience work. I also highlight some examples of learning from experience that are currently improving productivity and increasing collaboration within organizations.

What Needs to Be in Place to Learn From Experience

Learning from experience requires setting aside time to learn, but equally important, it requires being in conversation with peers with whom learners can reflect on their own experience and contrast that with the experience of others. It is not the advice of others that is so helpful; instead it is 1) assimilating 
the experiences of peers that inspires thinking about one’s own experience from a new perspective and 2) it is the questions that peers ask. Here I am not talking about questions that come immediately to mind such as questions for clarification or even questions to better understand the parameters of a situation. Rather I am thinking of generative questions that take a while to form, and that having been asked cause the learner to reflect more deeply. Generative questions are the gold standard of learning from experience becasue they surprise us, engage both heart and spirit, build relationships, and reframe reality (Bushe 2007).

Learning from experience with peers benefits from being-spaced over time, rather than occurring in a single conversation.  Whether it is overnight at a workshop or a week later at a regularly scheduled meeting, spaced conversations provide time for generative questions to develop and for learners to ponder the experiences of others. Think of it as gestation time. Any new idea, particularly those ideas that apply to self-development, for example, competence, image, attitude, or mindset, require time to assimilate.

Spaced conversations also allow time for trust to build among peers. Using Argyris’ language, “single loop learning” is an effort to identify solutions to a specific problem. However, there is often a deeper layer of understanding that is missed when the focus is solely on solutions. Argyris calls it “double loop learning.” It brings to light underlying norms, habits or attitudes as the source of a problem; insights that are apparent to peers, but which we are often blind to ourselves. However that awareness only develops when the group of peers has had enough time together to know each other and to build a sense of psychological safety that is necessary to offer new perspectives or indeed to take them in. Psychological safety grows over time and with repeated contact.

Finally learning from experience benefits from having a designed structure. Structured conversation guides participants by allocating  time to listen to others, to speak, to reflect, and to ask questions, as well as, limiting certain kinds of exchanges, for example, cross talk,    judging others, or speaking with undue conviction, rather than speaking from one’s own experience.   

Five Methods for Learning From Experience 

1. Coaching Ourselves®

The most productive conversations I’ve been involved with is Coaching Ourselves®, which brings together small groups of 4-6 employees in ninety-minute sessions that occur over several weeks, either online or in-person. Modules developed by leading management thinkers guide these meetings. The modules provide carefully crafted discussion questions that spur participants to reflect together on their own work issues. The structure is relatively consistent across all modules with times specified for each activity so that the modules can be self-facilitated by the group:

• Sessions start with each participant sharing a story about something that happened at work over the last couple of weeks or following-up on items left over from the previous meeting.
• Then each participant reflects on a situation related to that week’s module topic, which might be accountability, decision making, conflict, or any one of several dozen modules.
• There is a 10-15 min lesson offered by the management expert on the topic.  
• Followed by a lengthy period where the members of the group apply the expert’s concepts to their own work. The application might entail a series of questions for each participant to respond to, a survey to complete and discuss, or a role play.
• The 90 min sessions end with a final reflection by each participant.

By the time a group has met for six sessions, participants have come to know and trust each other. They have helped each other solve problems, laughed with each other, commiserated together, watched each other improve, and most importantly, discover that they had learned an enormous amount by collaborating. When multiple groups across an organization engage in Coaching Ourselves®, it significantly increases the level of collaboration within the organization.

2. Action Learning

Action learning is both a process and a powerful program that involves small groups of peers coming together to solve their own real work problems while at the same time benefiting each group member and the organization as a whole.  Revan’s, the father of Action Learning, says that learning and action require each other.  “There is no learning without action and no thoughtful action without learning”.  Action Learning brings together small groups of 4-6 peers for an all-day meeting. Peers meet regularly, over several months, with a facilitator. Sometimes action learning groups are made up of peers from different parts of the organization to broaden participant’s understanding of the whole organization. During the meeting each person has their own “airspace” of 45-60 minutes to describe an issue they are facing, reflect with others about how to address it and at the next meeting report back to the group on what happened. The help that others provide is primarily by asking questions rather than giving advice. These are genuine questions of curiosity that help the members think through the “why” behind their actions and consider their own assumptions. Because the meetings are spaced, usually every two weeks, participants have time to try out what they learned and see the results. Over time participants began to care about the other members of the group and for that reason are increasingly open to helping others and to receiving the help of others.  Members of an action learning team often form relationships that last for years after the meetings have ended and thus remain a source of learning and support.

3. KM Clinics

Knowledge Management  Clinics are hour-long, free, online meetings where a KM professional can get help from peers about a KM issue they are facing in their organization. Each session  has one client, the person with the issue, and up to 11 peers who have some knowledge or interest in that same issue. The issue could be, for example, how to transfer knowledge from someone retiring, how to get more participation in an online community, or how to convince higher management that KM is important. The clinic starts with the  client explaining their issue, the context in which they are working in, and what they have tried already to solve the issue. There is then is a period of silence while their peers individually construct and post questions that have the potential to broaden the thinking of the client about the issue. The client selects one or two of the questions to focus on – questions they believe would help the problem owner to think differently about the issue. Then there is a lengthy period of general discussion about the topic among all the peers. The hour ends with the client identifying one or two new actions they will try. Before leaving the call, the client commits to letting their peers know the outcome of their actions.  KM Clinics are a way for peers to think in more depth about issues than can be achieved by posting their questions on a community forum.

I would be remiss if I ended this post without referencing learning from experience when there are highly divisive or sensitive issues at stake. These are conversations designed so that the structure does not permit peers to say “you’re wrong”  or “that’s not correct.”  Also where peers are asked to talk only out of their own experience. In such meetings, although it is possible to disagree with another’s facts, it is not possible to disagree with another’s experience.  Following are two examples where the structure of the conversation makes peer learning possible even in difficult situations. 

4.  Alcoholics Anonymous

The most well-known example of learning from experience with peers is Alcoholics Anonymous. The guidelines for AA are few but powerful:

• Keep confidentiality: “What you hear stays here.”
• Make “I” statements: Avoid using “you” or “we.” For example: “I am Stephan. I am an alcoholic.”
• Stay in the “Here and Now”: Share what you are dealing with today or this week.
• Share feelings about your experiences, strengths, and hopes.
• No fixing or advice giving to or by other members.
• No crosstalk or asking of questions. Just listen.

With such a simple structure, the accompanying “12 steps,” and the availability of a sponsor, AA has helped millions of alcoholics maintain their sobriety. Although studies vary about the success rate of AA, one eight-year follow-up showed that 49% of individuals who attended AA were abstinent.

5. Better Angels

Finally, I have been moderating meetings of Better Angels workshops for about a year and a half. Better Angels is a non-profit organization devoted to de-polarizing America. The workshops are attended by an equal number of Red (conservative) and Blue (liberal) participants. In each workshop, participants on both sides of the political divide have opportunities to talk about their views and why those ideas are important to them. The guidelines are simple:

• We’re here to understand others and to explain our views, not to convince anyone to change their mind.
• Let’s each speak for ourselves and not try to speak for or represent any outside group.

During the several exercises of the workshops, e.g. fishbowl, stereotype, Q&A, each side initially talks separately with like-minded colleagues to decide what they want to say about their ideas to the other side. When the two groups come back together, each side just listens to understand the other’s views. As the moderator, the question I ask the whole group, after each exercise is, “What did you learn about how the other side thinks about these issues and what did you hear in common.” It is through this reflective question that learning and respect grows. There is no cross talk and no attempt to persuade the other side to their view.  I have been amazed at what happens when people put down the intent to persuade and just agree to listen and try to understand. Participants walk away seeing the “others” not as a stereotype but as fellow human beings who share some of their values, if not the way to achieve them. After the workshops many of the participants, choose to join a Better Angel’s Local Alliance where they work together toward common goals for their community.

In these five very different examples of learning from experience (and there are many more), it is possible to see the reasons why learning from experience in conversation with peers works. It works because:

• it is peers in conversation with peers
• they are in conversation, not listening to presentations
• the conversation occurs in small groups, which is the size most conducive to learning
• there is time to reflect on each person’s own experience and the experience of their peers
• the structure of the conversation provides a sense of safety and over time builds trust
• they employ spaced learning, that is, learning happening over time
• no one tries to persuade/convince others, whether that is a peer, leader, consultant, or a trainer.

#KM, #KMers #knowledgemanagement

What If It Was Okay To Be Friends With Your Employees?

Some years ago, Jerry Harvey developed a survey about organization practices. Responders were asked to mark each item on the survey as true or false.  One item said, “Occasionally, it is necessary for a manager to lie to or deceive others in his/her organization in order to achieve organizational objectives.” Being realistic, most people responded “true.”  After all, managers have to stay in role and not get too friendly with employees. Managers are taught, “Keep a professional distance.  If you know a layoff is scheduled, act like you don’t know. If a merger is in the offing, pretend ignorance.  Don’t think of employees as people or get too involved with their concerns. Think of them as resources you have to manage - human resources.”

The next item on the survey said, “I work most effectively with those who occasionally lie to me.” Trying to respond to that item often produced an internal conundrum in the responders because they could not mark it as “true” to match the first item. They knew what we all know, that if we don’t trust our managers we are less effective because we find ourselves doing things like withholding problems and not admitting mistakes, resulting in us and our organization being much less competent. However, we also know that “keep your distance and stay in role” is well-accepted management theory. It is what the gurus tell us we are supposed to do – a conundrum.

Interestingly, one of those management gurus, a very famous one, Ed Schein, is now saying, it is time managers created stronger relationships with employees. Rather than staying in role, managers and employees need to see each other as whole persons, and he advises that managers should develop more personal relationships around shared goals and experiences. Quite a shift!

In his new book, Humble Leadership, Schein explains this shift by describing leadership in terms of relationships. He identifies four levels of relationship a leader could have with employees:

Level Minus 1: This relationship is total impersonal it depends on domination and coercion. It is like the relationship between prison guards and prisoners, or managers of sweatshops and their workers or between leaders and immigrants who, though they are often mistreated, say nothing out of fear of being deported.

Level 1: This relationship is transactional, role and rule-based leadership. The manager described in the above survey item has a Level 1 relationship with employees. The manager stays in role, keeping his/her distance, even lying and withholding information when the role requires it. It is the relationship surgeons have with nurses and in most organizations it is the relationship that managers have with employees.

Level 2: This relationship is personal, cooperative, and trusting. It is the way friends relate to each other. It involves knowing each other as whole persons, knowing about each other’s families, ambitions and disappointments. Level 2 leadership achieves a kind of collaboration that is built on deeper trust and openness. It acknowledges joint responsibility and honoring commitments. Both parties trust that neither will undermine or harm the other. Nor will they lie or withhold information from each other.      

Level 3: This relationship is emotionally intimate, with total mutual commitments
. These are the relationships we hear about among military platoons or  Navy seal teams or like the relationship the Apollo 13 astronauts had with their ground crew.   

Schein says that managers need to move from Level 1 relationships to Level 2 to achieve the kind of collaboration and trust necessary in the current work environment.  He says the complex and multi-disciplinary tasks that much of the workforce is now trying to accomplish requires Level 2 relationships. Level 2 relationships provide psychological safety, that is, members of a team, including the team manager, are willing to acknowledge mistakes, are candid about needing help, and are willing to discuss differences of opinion openly rather than privately. Those types of actions don’t happen with Level 1 relationships because everyone is  protecting themselves.

I find Schein’s description of leadership types, based on the nature of the relationship, a very useful way to think about leadership and about what needs to change. It is a change at a more significant level, than most leadership gurus talk about. I agree with Schein that most current leaders need to move from Level 1 to Level 2. And he may be right that groups are more effective when facing complexity, if they have Level 2 relationships. However, I see a more fundamental need for the shift. I believe Level 1 relationships have made our organizations toxic. They allow neither managers nor team members to be fully human at work. We all spend too much of our work lives in places where indifference, manipulation, or worse, lying and concealing are the norm. We cannot grow and develop as human beings in that kind of environment.  We need managers to move to Level 2 relationships because it supports human flourishing.  

SharePoint Can’t Learn

I am just back from KM World and was amazed that so many of the presentations were about how some organization has implemented SharePoint.  SharePoint has become so ubiquitous that, at KM World, Knowledge Management seems to have become equated with implementing SharePoint repositories and communities!

I want to push back a little on that. Learning in an organization happens when teams or workgroups take the time to think together about what is occurring within their purview and then to consider what needs to be changed or strengthened – when they have human-to-human conversations aimed at improving their own work. Only after they have reflected together and figured out what they need to do next, is it useful to seek out the ideas of others. A document in a SharePoint repository or a question/response on a community forum can certainly spur the imaginations of team members about what might be possible. But help is most useful when a team has identified a problem. Without the first step of reflecting on what is needed, documents are just “nice to know.” A document in a repository is not knowledge any more than a book on a shelf is knowledge. Knowledge is created and resides in the minds of human beings.

Even when a document in a repository is a good match for a team’s need, a second kind of human-to-human conversation is required for learning to take place. A team does not learn from reading a document about what some other team has done. The successes of others have to be translated to fit the tasks and culture of the receiver’s environment. Copy and replace never works!  When the receivers of new ideas function within a context that is different from the one the document was written about, translation is required.

Although the receiving team can do some translation on its own, they lack the knowledge of the reasoning behind the actions of the other team, for example, what they tried that did not work, what they thought about but did not execute on and why. There is so much more a team knows than they can put in a written in a document or an online response to a question. (We know more than we can write!) Translation is most effective when it is a conversation between those that wrote the document and those that want to use that knowledge. Through conversation the receiving team can learn what conditions made the other's success possible, for example, the level of team experience, size of the team, management support, time frame, and culture. Human-to-human dialogue is invaluable in figuring out how to modify what the originating team did so that it could work in a different environment. Joint translation is a learning process that significantly benefits the receiving team. But, as often, it is also learning for the originating team because in explaining what they did, they come to a more complete understanding of their own work.

At the next KM World, it would be great to hear presentations on how teams figured out what they learned from a project and how they thought through what changes they needed to make on the next project, based on that learning; how often they reflected on what they were learning and who they involved in those discussions; in what ways those reflections changed the way that they worked.  It would be great if KMer’s focused on innovations in learning from experience, rather than just getting reports into SharePoint. It would be great to find out how a team talked through what they hope to learn on the next project, as well as the outcome they wanted to achieve. That way they could continually improve their work processes and get better at what they were doing.  It seems like we have become so focused on “sharing” that we have forgotten that KM is primarily about learning.   SharePoint Can’t Learn, only humans can.

Turning Lessons Learned Upside Down

                                                                                                                                      

Many organizations have diligently collected lessons learned from projects and programs that, unfortunately, no one pays much attention to after having been categorized and stored.

The reality is that documented lessons learned are useful only under very limited conditions, what I refer to in Common Knowledge as “near transfer.” In that book, I explain that for documented lessons learned to be useful, the conditions and the context of the receiver of the lessons must be the same as the originator.  Ford Motor Company is an example of where those conditions are the same. Ford Motor plants across the world build the same vehicle using the exact same parts and process. If a Ford truck plant in Kansas City discovers a process improvement, it can be replicated at a sister plant in Cologne, Germany.  Documented lessons learned are also useful when an organization has developed a standardized operating procedure (SOP) to accomplish a task.  Then, when an improvement in the procedure is developed, the standard can be updated and notices sent out to employees to inform them of the change in the SOP.  In summary, documented lessons learned are effective when a team does a regularly occurring, routine task, that can be made available to other teams that are doing the same task in the same context at a different location.  “Near” refers to the similarity of context and conditions, rather than to the geographical distance.    

“Far transfer,” implies dissimilar context and conditions. Far transfer is needed when a team that is doing a non-routine task wants to learn lessons from another team, that does a similar non-routine
task in a different context. For example, an HR team planning a reduction in force, having never done one before, or a hospital unit that has been trying unsuccessfully to reduce the spread of hospital-acquired infection.  To transfer lessons of non-routine tasks you have to turn lessons learned upside down, meaning you start with the problem, not the solution.

The first step is for the team in need of certain knowledge to locate other groups that have had a similar experience or solved a similar problem. Maybe you find several such groups. Now here is the place where many organizations go wrong. The wrong way is to ask those groups to tell you how they solved their problem or to ask them for a presentation or an article about how they did it. That won’t be useful unless their conditions and context are the same as yours; and for non-routine tasks that is, by definition, not possible, because every time your own team does the non-routine task it will be done differently. Add to that, other teams are sure to be a different size, in a different part of the country, have higher levels of expertise, less sophisticated clients, more or less capital, and on and on. The team that needs the knowledge cannot copy what others did because they have a situation that is “far transfer, not “near transfer.” 

Having identified other groups, you invite them to a meet with your group. Maybe you invite 4-5 members from one other group, or maybe you invite one member from each group you’ve found. When your visitor team is assembled, you turn lessons learned upside down! You tell them about your problem, your context, your conditions, what you’ve tried, etc. The visitors will want to ask questions to get a full view of your situation, that’s all to the good. When you have explained the problem as thoroughly as you can, you set out your objectives – exactly what help you want. You tell them that you want them to apply their knowledge and experience to your problem. You are asking them to translate their experience into your context. That is a harder job than just telling you how they succeeded in their own environment. You are asking for their tacit knowledge – all that stuff they learned from the innumerable experiences they have had but didn’t write down because that kind of knowledge only comes together in response to a new problem or puzzle.

Now the learning begins, and perhaps surprisingly it feels like a conversation among colleagues. It is not your visitors teaching you, but you and your visitors thinking together, testing ideas with each other, wondering out loud about possibilities. Now you are gaining the lessons they have learned but targeted at your problem. This is the real deal! You are making full use of each other’s tacit knowledge.  It works because you’ve started upside down with the problem rather than the solution.

Working with organizations, I’ve facilitated many ways to turn lessons learned upside down. I’ve explained one way here. But other possibilities are, going to the other team’s site, having a virtual meeting, setting the transfer up at a conference, holding a clinic.  In whatever way it is formatted, the process has to start with the problem, not with someone else’s solution. And it has to end in a conversation among equals, who are together using their tacit knowledge to invent possible solutions.

We Learn When We Talk

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!  For example, has this happened to you? You begin to describe a complex issue to another person whose help you want to understand it. But while you are in the midst of explaining it, the answer pops into your mind even before you finish the question. And you end up saying, somewhat sheepishly, “Never mind, I think I’ve just realized what the answer is.”  What happened is that in trying to explain the issue, your mind has put the bits and pieces that you know about the topic together in a new way and provided you greater clarity. 

Johnson and Johnson, researchers at the University of Michigan, who have conducted studies of conversations, explain it this way. “In these meetings (of expert and asker) 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!

What an incredible phenomenon - we learn when we talk!  It has all kinds of implications for knowledge sharing:

• If I deliver a lecture or a presentation, it would be helpful to make time for those listening to have a conversation with each other – a way for them to put what I've said in their own words and to make mental connections that otherwise might never be made.
• If I want another team to learn from the lessons my team or project has garnered, the transfer will work better if I arrange a conversation between the two groups rather than having one team write and post lessons learned. The conversation would provide the opportunity for the recipients to think out loud about how the lessons relate to their own work.
• When I’ve read a great article, I will incorporate the ideas more fully into my cognitive map, if I tell a colleague what I have just read (or write a blog about it.)
• 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 team members to talk to about what they learned. They will figure out what they learned as they talk with each other.
• 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 about 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.”
• Perhaps most profoundly, it means that if we want people to learn from each other, we need to put them together, face to face if at all possible. If not, by a medium conducive to conversation, for example, Skype, Google Hangout, or Zoom. But they need to be together in small groups of no more than five or six, to give an opportunity for each person to talk.

On the negative side, it means webinars, where one person does all the talking, aren’t very good learning mechanisms.  Nor are presentations where one person is talking or making a PowerPoint presentation, and the only opportunity for others to talk is at the when the speaker says, “Are there any questions?” in the last five minutes.  Questions after a presentation, really just ask the presenter for more information. They don’t help the listeners put the learning into their own words. How many times have you sat through a day of presentations at a conference and can remember very little of what you heard?  Without the time to articulate the ideas in your own words, all that knowledge quickly evaporates.

A simple rule of thumb, we learn when we talk. 

A Book That Will Blow Your Mind About How to Make Use of The Knowledge in Organizations: A Review of An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization

•  If you think you’re already doing a pretty good job of making use of the critical knowledge in your organization;
• If you find yourself thinking about ways to fix the problems that hierarchy causes in organizations; or
• If you are still hoping management will be re-invented;  

- then you should read An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization by Kegan and Lahey.  A remarkable book!   

Kegan and Lahey are adult development professionals at Harvard. Kegan’s theory of adult development identifies three stages of adult development:

• Socialized-mind
• Self-authoring mind
• Self-transforming mind

The authors explain that in the past organizations functioned very effectively if they had employees who were at the stage of the socialized minded.  They were “good team players, pulled their weight, were loyal to the organization and could be counted on to follow conscientiously the directions and signals of their boss.”  However, in the knowledge economy to be effective employees need a greater capacity for innovation, self-management, personal responsibility and self-direction.” In other words, to be self-authoring, which means understanding themselves and their world at a qualitative higher level of mental complexity.” And managers of self-authoring employees, must necessarily be self-transforming, that is, be able to step outside their own ideology or framework, to observe the framework’s limitations or defects, and author a more comprehensive view. In short, today’s organizations need a quantum shift in individual mental complexity across the board. 

If you want to know more about the three stages of adult development read Immunity to Change, where Kegan and Lahey provide detailed explanations and tools to help readers understand the different stages. But in An Everyone Culture, they are focused on how the stages of adult development play out in the workplace.   

The authors find that the norms  of most organizations as well as the hierarchy, are designed to support the socialized-mind. People cannot continue to develop past this initial stage of adult development while working in an organization that is trying to keep any threats to certainty, predictability, routine, control, and connection to a minimum. Noting that we spend most of our waking hours at work, they say that if employees are to continue to develop, they need to do it at work in what they call a Deliberately Developmental Organization.    

And as farfetched as it sounds, they have found three organizations, Next Jump, Decurion and Bridgewater that are as focused on the development of their members as they are on making a profit. Indeed, they say the two are intertwined, that is, that they are profitable because they are focused on development. And what is most remarkable is that these are not organizations coached by the authors, rather each organization has independently come to the idea of the need to continuously develop their people.

But this is not your father’s kind of development!  It is not a workshop or a training course - this development is on-the-job. It is about all employees, including the CEO, management, and frontline employees, daily working on overcoming their own internal barriers to change and using their errors and vulnerabilities as prime opportunities for personal and company growth. Each of the three companies showcased in this book have deliberate practices in place that are focused on development, and in each, those practices are quite different – clearly growing out of the context of the organization, not out of academic theory.  Let me introduce you to just a few of the developmental practices at each of the companies discussed in the book.   

Bridgewater

A lot of organizations talk about the need to learn from failure, but at Bridgewater learning from one’s mistakes is a job requirement. “The company’s culture supports treating errors as opportunities for growth through a variety of tools and practices.”  One such practice is the Issues Log. “Every employee is required to record problems and failures in a companywide “issues log,” one that requires detailing one’s own and others’ contributions to business mistakes. The logging of errors and problems is applauded and rewarded, but failure to record a mistake in the issues log is viewed as a serious breach of duty.” The data collected in these Issues Logs is treated as a resource for collective diagnosis of root causes of failure – both individual and organizational. The Issues Log is open to everyone in the company and, in fact, everyone is expected to review it and to be aware of problems that might be systemic. One employee noted that, the Issues Log “is like our evolution machine” for “watching the progress on any problem that’s ever been raised in the company.” “People’s limitations are seen as their growing edge—a company resource, an asset—that should be continuously and publicly engaged.” 

Here is an example of an issue that Rohit, a junior staffer in the research department, entered in the Issues Log. In his entry he is questioning how
Alex, his department head, is overseeing work. He writes, “We’ve been struggling to keep up with all of our needs, and it’s gotten to the point where Alex now has consultants managing consultants. For a place so synced in its culture, how could this be? How could we have all these outside people managing these other people without having gone through all the necessary things to become a Bridgewater citizen? . . . How is Alex ensuring the consultants acting as managers are managing in a principled fashion and holding the bar high enough?” In the days following Rohit’s entry there are responses both by Alex and others, exploring this issue in an extended online conversation.

At Bridgewater every employee, including senior leaders, has a Baseball card, which is electronically accessible to everyone else. The Baseball Card integrates all kinds of data about what a person is like, for example, testimonials, personality inventories, “relys-on” (what the employee is reliably good at doing) and “watch-out-for” (areas of weakness).  

The Daily Case is a multimedia case study of a teachable moment that every employee reviews for fifteen minutes each day and then responds to a series of questions about what they would do in that situation. Another daily practice at Bridgewater is the Daily Update, a way to stay in sync with each employee’s manager. Updates are a way to give employees an opportunity to reflect on what they are learning about themselves, any pain they’re experiencing, and ways they’re grappling to improve their application of the principles. And Updates are, again, public.

As these practices illustrate, one of the central principles of Bridgewater is Pain + Reflection = Progress.

Next Jump

 Next Jump also has a formula for its principle, “Better Me + Better You = Better Us”.  Everyone in the organization, from the CEO to new hires, has a Talking Partner that they meet with every day. Each person takes a turn, and a turn begins with venting – no topic is out of bounds. Then the talk turns to the day ahead. “What will be most challenging, rewarding, significant or meaningful?” What opportunities will there be to practice my Backhand (practice overcoming a habit that typically gets me into trouble)?  An example of practicing a Backhand is, if I typically tend to dominate conversations, then waiting until two others have spoken before I speak again is practicing my Backhand.

Everyone participates in a Personal Leadership Boot Camp where they learn to identify their character weakness (backhands). They leave Boot Camp with a practice plan for working on their Backhand. Everyone is given a Peer Mentor who coaches them, holds them accountable and helps them stick to the practice plan. Again, everyone, including top management, participates in Boot Camps and has a Peer Mentor.

At Next Jump, people bring challenging situations into a Weekly Situational Workshop, a one hour meeting of five people who talk in two different pairs of talking partners, along with a more experienced colleague acting as a mentor and coach. Partners talk about situations encountered in the work life of an individual. But rather than spending a long time on any one situation, the focus in on becoming aware of patterns they would not otherwise see.

Employees devote two Saturdays per year for Super Saturday where they interview, test, and choose new employees for Next Jump.  They are looking at the potential employees for, Are they takers? Are they in it only for themselves, or do they have the ability to be givers (helping others grow)?

In the Salary Review Process at Next Jump, contributions to revenue are weighed at 50 percent and contributions to culture at 50 percent. You can be a revenue hero and still be penalized in compensation if you’re not working on personal growth. The highest bonus and salary increases go to those who improve the culture.  And at Next Jump there is a No Fire policy, an explicit commitment to stand by employees through thick and thin.

Decurion

Decurion’s principles are that 1) work is meaningful; 2) that people are not only means but also ends in themselves; 3) that individuals and communities naturally develop; and 4) that pursuing human development and pursuing profitability are one thing. The developmental practices at  Decurion include a Check-In at the start of every meeting – a deep form of Check-In that openly welcomes the whole person into work every day.  There is a Check-Out as well. Check-Ins and Check-Outs are a part of creating and maintaining a sense of strong community. Working life at Decurion is organized around this idea of community. Decurion believes that when authentic community forms in groups, learning happens: a collective intelligence.

One segment of Decurion’s business is managing theatres that primarily employ young people who are often in their first job, to do tasks like taking tickets or working the concession stand.  In the theaters, Pulse-Check Huddles occur throughout the evening, where groups of crew members and managers give and receive feedback on how the floor operations are going and how they can be improved.

Every job at Decurion has a list of competencies and every person has a Competency Board listing the competencies he or she is working on and that is publically displayed. When the employee has achieved a competency, a blue pin is placed by that competency. As with the two other companies, such information is publically displayed and the practice is engaged in at all levels of the organization.

Once every three to four months, depending on the need, the entire business leadership—every manager—attends a daylong Decurion business leadership meeting (DBL). The DBL is a slower, more deeply reflective version of a huddle. A DBL usually begins with individuals Checking In, sharing the worries and excitement that have a hold on their attention, so that they can acknowledge these concerns and ideas and allow others to better understand what’s going on interiorly.

When problems occur at Decurion, rather than jump into solving the problem, group members will try to let the problem solve them, exposing issues and patterns of thinking that go much deeper than the immediate circumstances. To do this they use a Fishbowl, another developmental practice, that puts those who are involved in the issues in a tight circle within a circle, to talk through the issues. Those in the outside circle listen to the conversation. Two of the ground rules for the Fishbowl include 1) speaking from your own experience and 2) not leaping to inferences about what others believe.    

Looking across all three organizations, Kegan and Lahey identify five qualities of the practices in the DDOs:

• Practices help externalize struggles that are interior
• Practices connect the work of the business to working on ourselves
• Practices move us from focusing on outcomes to the processes that generate outcomes
• Language is a practice and it creates new tools for a new paradigm
• Systemic stretch involves everyone, every day, across the organization

My big take away from reading the book is that the employees at the three organizations really want to be learning and growing.  But for that to happen requires being able to make mistakes and learn from them, which is only possible if you don’t have to hide those mistakes, and when people at all levels are open and supportive. The employaees at these organization are willing to undergo the pain involved in both uncovering and in acknowledging mistakes, because they value the personal growth they achieve.  Having experienced both the discomfort and the benefit, they agree with Bridgewater’s claim Pain + Reflection = Progress.

The Hidden Knowledge Problem in Organizations

Having had the opportunity to observe many conversations in organizations, I have come to understand that the greatest knowledge deficit in organizations is not the lack of sharing nor is it poorly designed repositories. Rather it is the inability to hold authentic conversations. What I have too often observed is teams and units where members do not offer their best thinking out of fear; fear of not being viewed as a team player, fear of being seen as incompetent, fear of embarrassing themselves or someone else, fear of acknowledging that they do not understand something. I find team members unwilling to say they disagree with the boss or saying they agree when they do not.  

When I say fear, I don’t mean shake in your boots fear or fear of being immediately fired. I mean the everyday reluctance of individuals to say what they know or believe, because of the threat of embarrassment or a negative response from others.  I see it both at the highest organizational levels and with front line employees. When fear exists, critical knowledge is lost and serious problems remain hidden. The time waste is both enormous and expensive. Rather than speaking honestly to one another, people invent costly workarounds, delay, procrastinate, or make agreements they don’t intend to keep. This problem is so long standing in organizations that people have become resigned to it as, “just the way things are.” We hear that resignation in the familiar phrases people use to explain not speaking out, “You have to choose your battles,” “You just don’t tell the boss that he’s wrong,” or, “Saying that would be career limiting.”  

But at a time when “critical shifts have taken place in the wider culture away from hierarchy towards networks, from top-down to widespread engagement with greater emphasis on innovation and creativity” (Gilmore) the need for making use of the knowledge of all employees has become a major imperative.

Fortunately, along with the knowledge demands made by these critical shifts, has come a richer understanding of how to access this hidden knowledge (Edmondson, Kegan, Turco).  These new perspectives demonstrate that it is possible for authentic conversations to be the norm in organizations or even within a team that is embedded in a larger organization. But they also illustrate that such a deeply embedded deficit does not succumb to quick fixes such as a simple workshop or admonitions for authenticity from the C suite.  Rather to address the problem requires a sustained focus on three elements 1) developing a culture of psychological safety, 2) members’ gaining awareness of their own blind spots, and 3) building learning routines in everyday work.   

It is possible to find case studies of organizations that have accomplished this. They include some that I have written about and some that others have detailed, Kessels & Smit, Bridgewater, Next Jump, Decurion, TechCo (pseudonym in The Conversational organization),  Lake Nona Project, The Defense Intelligence Agency.

Learning Together and Working Apart

I have a new article published in a series on The Future of Workplace Learning by Emerald Publishing. My article, Learning Together and Working Apart: Routines for organizational learning in virtual teams, is here.  

 

Abstract:

Research suggests that teaming routines facilitate learning in teams. This paper identifies and details how specific teaming routines, implemented in a virtual team, support its continual learning. The study’s focus was to generate authentic and descriptive accounts of the interviewees’ experiences with virtual teaming routines.

All six of the articles in this journal can be downloaded free until July 27. They are here and include:

Building Better Learning and Learning Better Building, with learners rather than for learners

Interactive Technology and Smart Education: Augmented reality, the future of contextual mobile learning 

Learning Opportunities for Group Learning: An empirical assessment from the learning organization perspective

Workplace Spirituality, Perceived Organizational Support and Innovative Work Behavior: The mediating effect of person-organization fit

The Future of Learning and Teaching in Next  Generation Learning Spaces

So please take advantage of these free downloads. If you miss the deadline contact me and I'll be glad to send a pdf of the one you are interested in. 

 

 

Three Books Every KM Professional Should Read

Much of the very helpful research and theory that under lies our field of KM is produced in the related disciplines of Organization Behavior, Organization Learning, Group Dynamics, Computer Science, and Organizational Psychology.  Following are summaries of three such, highly acclaimed, books that have recently been published.  They are:

• Teaming: How Organizations Learn, Innovate, and Compete in the Knowledge Economy, 2012, by Amy Edmondson, a Harvard Professor of Organizational Learning.

• Critical Knowledge Transfer: Tools for Managing Your Company’s Deep Smarts, 2015, by Dorothy Leonard, Walter Swat, and Gavin Barton. Dorothy Leonard is Professor Emeritus at Harvard Business School.

• Social Physics: How Good Ideas Spread: The Lessons From A New Science, 2014, by Alex Pentland, Director of MIT’s Human Dynamics Laboratory and the MIT Media Lab Entrepreneurship Program.

Teaming

Edmondson’s book, Teaming is one of the best knowledge management books I’ve read, although I don’t think she ever mentions the term knowledge management in the book. The book is not limited to teams, rather she uses the term “teaming” as a verb, to talk about a way of organizational functioning. The major take-away from the book is that an organization needs to move from focusing on “organizing to execute” to “execution as learning”. To do this employees must make use of learning behaviors, such as, asking for help from other members, discussing differences of opinion openly rather than privately or outside the group, revealing their own errors to the group, and several more.  The organization must provide the routines (opportunities) during which employees can use those behaviors.  Those routines vary with each organization described in the book, but examples included retrospects, planning meetings, soliciting feedback from customers, strategic conversations, and surgical team meetings that occur before an operation.  Edmondson clarifies that team members will only exhibit learning behaviors when they feel psychologically safe and explains in detail how psychologically safety comes about. The book is rich with examples of teaming, including the Beijing Olympics, Children’s Hospital and Clinics in Minneapolis, NASA’s space shuttle program, Intermountain Health Care, and many others. The book also includes findings from Edmondson’s own research much of which has been conducted in health care venues. It is a must read for anyone serious about helping an organization learn. 

Critical Knowledge Transfer

In her book, Leonard is not addressing the transfer of all knowledge in an organization, rather she is focused on “critical knowledge,” expertise that is largely undocumented and is in the heads of employees, particularly employees considered experts who have vital knowledge that is likely to leak out of the organization during transitions. Leonard categorizes knowledge into three levels, explicit, implicit and tacit, explaining that each must be transferred differently. This book is primarily about the last two.

Explicit knowledge can be transferred through written documents and community Q&A.

Implicit knowledge is that knowledge which an expert can articulate, but only with the help of skillful elicitation techniques. Those techniques require training and experience to develop.

Tacit knowledge, that which even an expert may not be aware of, is transferred through the learner’s observation of an expert, followed by supervised practice and coaching. Leonard calls this process OPPTY (for Observation, Practice, Partnering and joint problem solving, and Taking responsibility). She explains that OPPTY works best when knowledge is transferred, not to novices, but to “near experts”.

The book has advice for managers in terms of how to determine what knowledge is critical to transfer. Leonard says, “First you have to be confident that you understand what know-how, skills, and other capabilities underlie your company’s success.”  She devotes three chapters to the various techniques to elicit and capture knowledge, make sense of it, and then massage it into a form that can be transferred, with lists of knowledge elicitation questions for each. This is an in-depth look at knowledge transfer from one the great experts on the topic.

Social Physics

Pentland describes social physics as “a quantitative social science that describes reliable, mathematical connections between information and ideas on the one hand, and people’s behavior on the other.’ He builds on Bandura’s theory of social learning, “the fundamental assumption that learning from examples of other people’s behavior (and the relevant contextual feature) is a major and likely dominant mechanism of behavior change in humans.”

Pentland found that he can study patterns of information exchange in a social network without any knowledge of the actual content being exchanged, and using that data, can predict how effective a network is, whether a small team or a large organization. The data is gathered by means of mobile sensors, embedded in badges that employees wear. The sensors can track where employees go, how long they are there, even the tone of the conversation – but not the conversation itself. In one such study Pentland found that 50% of the variation in performance across groups and tasks can be explained by:

• The large number of ideas: many very short contributions rather than a few long ones.
• Dense interactions: continuous, overlapping cycling between making contributions and very short (less than one second) responsive comments (such as, “good,” “that’s right,” “what?” etc.) that serve to validate or invalidate the ideas and build consensus.
• Diversity of ideas: everyone within a group contributing ideas and reactions, with similar levels of turn taking among participants.”

And 35% of the variation in a team’s performance can be accounted for by the number of face-to-face exchanges among team members. From Pentland’s research, he concludes: 

• It is not simply the brightest who have the best ideas; it is those who are best at harvesting ideas from others.
• It is not only the most determined who drive change; it is those who most fully engage with like-minded people.
• It is not wealth or prestige that best motivates people; it is respect and help from peers.

He concludes that leaders need to focus on changing the connections between people rather than focusing on getting individual people to change their behavior.  His findings are ideas that KM has been saying all along, but Pentland has the data to prove it. This book provides evidence that being in relationship with others in a team or organization improves the flow of knowledge.

Using Teams to Solve Hard Problems: A Book Review of Collaborative Intelligence By Richard Hackman

There are many insightful researchers and theorist who come from other disciplines, but have much to offer knowledge managers. Richard Hackman is one of those.  Hackman, a Harvard University Professor in Social and Organizational Psychology, is an acknowledged expert on teams and teamwork.  He has studied airline cockpit teams, high tech teams, orchestras, chamber music groups, bank teams, and many others. In this post, I am reviewing his last book (he died in 2013) in which he turned his in-depth understanding to study teams in US intelligence agencies. His established reputation gave him access to that very difficult-to-breach classified environment. His study looks at how teams of intelligence analysts learn from each other in order to tackle the threats of international terrorist and other risks to our security.

I have followed his work for many years, but this latest book was of particularly interest to me because of the five years I spent working on knowledge management projects within one of those agencies, The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). There I saw first-hand the difficulties that teams of intelligence analysts face in sharing knowledge within their own agency, not to mention the enormous problems of sharing between agencies. Along with Adrian Wolfberg, I wrote and article, Speaking Truth to Power, about that work. 

Hackman’s book is filled with practical understanding about teams. In this post I will focus on a major finding Hackman made from his studies, the 60-30-10 rule.  A rule that will probably surprise you.  This is what it says:

• 60 percent of the difference in how well a team eventually performs, depends on the pre-work the leader does before the team even meets for the first time! 
• 30 percent depends on the quality of a team’s launch, leaving just
• 10 percent to depend on the leader’s hands-on, real-time coaching. 

So, what is this pre-work that makes such a difference? Hackman names six issues a leader needs to address even before a team starts its work – six issues that make a difference in team effectiveness

1.The first issue is designing a “real team,” rather than a team in name only.  Hackman has a specific meaning for a real team. It is one where team members “work interdependently to generate a product or service for which members have collective, rather than individual accountability. And the team has, at least moderate stability, which gives members time to learn how to work well together.”

Hackman finds that in many situations teams are put together when it would be better to have individuals working on a task. It is the leader’s job to be sure a team is needed, not just that it is the fashionable thing to do. In general, teams are required when 1) more resources are needed than any individual working alone has available, 2) a diversity of resources are needed in terms of varied knowledge, skill, experiences, and external relationships, and 3) the task is wider in scope than an individual could address. When these requirements are not present it is better not to assign the task to a team, because a team created without a real need will invariably run into difficulty. “The benefits of teamwork come only when capable people work together interdependently to achieve some collective purpose.”

2. The second issue is that the leader specify a compelling purpose or end toward the team is working; one that energizes team members and fully engages their talents and is “consequential for the achievement of some larger aspiration.” He explains that if the purpose is compelling, then the team’s motivation is internal and therefore less need for the leader to intervene to attempt to motivate the them. This diagram looks at the leader's role in terms identifying the ends, and means. The optimum is in the upper right corner, labeled “self-managing.” The leader has provided a purpose or direction for the team that is clear, palpable and incomplete. It needs to be incomplete because there necessarily must be room for the team to make sense of the goal for themselves. Hackman says, “sense-making is an essential part of coming to ‘own’ a piece of work, and an overly explicit statement of direction can preempt that process.” Thus, in the upper right box the end is specified but the means are left to the team. The lower right box, labeled “Wasted human resources” is a situation where the leader specifies both the end and the means.  Hackman notes, “Expecting teams to follow a defined set of steps assumes that the solution can be completely known in advance and the path to that solution can be charted fully ahead of time,” whereas a complex goal requires that teams continually make adaptations, reflect on the outcome, and then make course corrections. In the upper left box neither the ends or means are specified resulting in "Fragmentation" as a team attempts to figure out what they should be doing. Hackman calls the lower left hand box, the “Worst” because a team is told to how to do something with no understanding of the why behind it. 

3. Putting the right number and the right mix of people on the team is the third issue. The right mix includes 1) task expertise, 2) the ability to work collaboratively with others, while keeping the team 3) as small and 4) as diverse as possible. In terms of the right number, Hackman cautions, “Work teams in organizations generally are substantially larger than they really need to be and therefore encounter problems that they do not need to have.” “Work groups of 10 or more are certain to encounter free-riding or “social loafing” problems.” Elsewhere, Hackman has said the ideal number of team members is six, large enough to have needed diversity and small enough for a team to coordinate among members.    

In terms of the second criteria, being able to work collaboratively with others, Hackman notes, “Even a single member who is a ‘team destroyer,’ someone whose behavior is egregiously disruptive and destructive, can cause a team to fail.” He cautions that the only way to know if a person has those unwanted characteristics, is to talk with past team mates of the individual, relying on how the individual interacts with a manager, is not a good way to make that assessment. Excessive homogeneity can also cripple a team because if everyone has the same perspective, the team risks performing poorly on non routine tasks that require original ideas or approaches.  “Well-composed  teams  have a good mix of members, people who are neither so similar to one another they duplicate one another’s resources nor so different that they are unable to communicate or coordinate well.”

Hackman cautions against adding members when a team falls behind, because adding new members requires taking the time to bring them up to speed and to reconfigure roles to accommodate them, which almost always has the opposite effect. He quotes Fredrick Brooks’ law, formulated from his involvement in IBM’s OS/360 programming effort. Brooks' law says, “Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.”

4. The fourth issue a leader needs to address is helping the teams specify clear norms of conduct for team behavior. “The greatest advantage of teamwork is that team members have diverse information and expertise that, if properly integrated, can produce something that no one member could possibly have come up with.” But good use of team members’ information and expertise does not happen automatically.

A great deal of research has shown that in teams 1) higher prestige member’s voices tend dominate, 2) team members are likely to give special weight to contributions by other members from their own discipline, while discounting contributions made by people from other disciplines, and 3) the risk of professional embarrassment causes members to be reluctant to acknowledge they do not know how to do some aspect of the work or to appear to be uncertain about something. All of these very understandable human interaction shortcomings and biases, prevent all the knowledge of a team from being considered and thus defeat the primary purpose of utilizing a team. Establishing team norms reduces the effects of these shortcomings and biases allowing the team to capture and use all potentially valuable ideas and perspectives.

“Norms of conduct specify what behaviors are, and are not, acceptable in a team. Having clear, well enforced norms greatly reduces the amount of time a team must spend actively managing member behavior. The best norms promote continuous scanning of the performance situation and the deployment of work strategies that are well tuned to the special features of the team’s task and situation.” Examples of such norms are, “Hold off submitting RFIs [requests for information] until we all agree about what we most need to find out.” or “Hear out the ideas of others without interruption or contradiction.” 

It is important for the team to identify and agree upon such norms at the launch of the team, because, later, when members are fully occupied with urgent subtasks they are unlikely to be willing to take the time to develop norms.   

5. Providing a supportive organizational context is the fifth issue a leader needs to address.  That context includes 1) having the material resources needed to carry out the work of the team, 2) a reward system that provides recognition and positive consequences for excellent team performance, rather than individual performance, (3) an information system that provides the team with the data and the information-processing tools members need to plan and execute their work, and 4) how the organization’s educational system makes available to the team needed technical and/or educational assistance.

Hackman describes a situation from his study of airline crews to illustrate the four aspects of a supportive context. He depicts a situation in which a plane is coming in for a landing. The captain has pulled the lever to lower the wheels, when a light goes on indicating that the wheels have not locked. The captain turns over control of the plane to the first officer while she deals with the problem. First, the captain calls the airfield to terminate the landing and to request a vector where she can work on the problem clear of other traffic. The airfield quickly responds, providing a clear space. While the captain is doing that, the crew brings up a gear problem checklist on the aircraft computer and goes through it step by step. These steps, including resetting the circuit breaker for the indicators, do not extinguish the offending light. Visual inspection by the crew through the cockpit floor shows that the gear is down, but there is no way to know if it is locked. The captain calls the FAA inspector to ask if he has any suggestions, but he doesn’t.  She radios the dispatch desk to report the problem and then company maintenance for consultation. The maintenance supervisor calls a technical specialist with the airline manufacturer and patches him into the conversation, but the additional checks and procedures still do not solve the problem. Eventually, everyone agrees the crew should attempt a landing. The captain tells the lead flight attendant to prepare the passengers and calls approach control to request a straight-in approach with fire equipment standing by just in case. She then flies the approach. The gear holds and the landing is routine. After the passengers have departed, the FAA inspector turns to the crew and says, “Nice flying guys, very professional.”

In this scenario, all four of the suggested supports are readily available. 1) There are “ample material resources for use in carrying out the team’s work, ranging from the availability of extra fuel on demand, to the presence of fire equipment at the arrival airport.”  2) The team, not just the captain, is recognized for excellent performance in a difficult situation and the recognition occurs in real time. 3) The captain is able to call on a number of information sources, including the FAA inspector, the maintenance supervisor, and the airline manufacturer, not to mention the readily available check lists. Finally, the team has been prepared through classroom training as well simulators to deal effectively with emergencies.

Hackman notes three ways to go wrong in giving recognition and reinforcement for task-performing teams. “The first is to ignore successes ('That’s what we expect from our teams so further comment is unnecessary') but to call out failures.” He notes that strategy encourages risk aversion. “A second way to go wrong is to identify the person whom one views as mainly responsible for the team’s success and single out that individual for special recognition.” The third way is go wrong is to provide specific, concrete objectives for the team’s work, reinforced by strong incentives contingent upon achieving those objectives. This way risks inviting unintended and unwanted secondary outcomes, that occur because the team figures out ways to game the system, for example, by overlooking troublesome data or violating expected standards of behavior.

6. The sixth issue for a leader to address is making competent team-focused coaching available to the team. Hackman suggests that  teams are open to coaching during three time periods, 1) when they are just starting their work, 2) then half way through their work, and 3) when their work is finished or nearly finished.  He quotes Gersick, a researcher who has tracked hundreds of teams whose periods of work ranged from just a few days to  several months. She found that each team “developed a distinctive approach toward its task immediately…. and then stayed with that approach until precisely half-way between its first meeting and its project deadline." At that point, “all teams underwent a major transition altering member roles and behavior patterns, re-engaging with outside authority figures or clients, and exploring new strategies for proceeding with the work.  Then, following that midpoint transition, teams entered a period of focused task execution that persisted until very near the project deadline, at which time a new set of issues having to do with the termination process arose and captured members’ attention.”

Using Gersick’s model, Hackman shows that a team is particularly open to coaching at the beginning, especially interventions that orient members to each other, define member roles and assisting them in coming to terms with task requirements. A leader’s coaching at this point can foster collective motivation. Hackman notes that this is best accomplished by a face-to-face meeting. By midpoint, teams have gained a sense of what has been working well and what not. They are ready to reflect on how things have been going. However, he notes that, “midpoints are not good times for teaching team members new skills.” If they discover they lack skills it is better to locate external people to lend a hand. The end calls for a systematic debrief to learn from their own experience. A debrief can help members learn how to better deploy member talents in future tasks, by addressing questions like, “What resources went unused?” or “What would we do differently another time?” Hackman acknowledges that the major challenge is to get the debriefing to happen, because If the team was successful they are more likely to be interested in celebrating and if it did less well, they are more likely to just want to move on to the next task.  But when held, there are critical lessons relevant to the development of individuals and certainly to their understanding of team work.

In Collaborative Intelligence, there is a wealth of information about how to help teams become more effective, from the most celebrated researcher of teamwork. In this blog post I’ve reported on the six issues that Hackman says cause 60% of team effectiveness. The sixth issue has also said a bit about the 30% of the launch and the 10% of coaching.  But there is more to say about both that I will leave to another post.   

4 Great Ways to Conduct Peer Assists: Transferring Knowledge Effectively

    In an earlier blog post  I described a framework for Knowledge Transfer and explained that the choice of knowledge transfer process differs depending upon 1) what transfer problem the organization is trying to solve, and 2) the type of knowledge (e.g. explicit, implicit or tacit) that needs to be transferred to solve that problem.

    In this post, I want to focus on one row of that frame work; “Adapting what has been learned in one team for team members in another context.” I use the term “adapting” in the label of that row because always what a team has learned in one situation cannot just be copied to a different context, it has to be adapted.

    Following are four examples where team members, with in-depth experience, assist a team that is facing a difficult problem. Although it is unlikely that any of these examples will fit your exact context, I’m hoping one or more will inspire some new ideas about how peers can assist each other in your organization. In each of the four examples I bold the problem the Peer Assist is addressing. Peer Assists are specifically designed to transfer tacit knowledge, so in all of the examples it is primarily tacit knowledge is being transferred, that is, knowledge that is drawn from the Assisters’ own wealth of experience in similar situations. But in several of the examples both implicit knowledge and explicit is transferred as well.  I start with a British Petroleum (BP) example that was my first introduction to Peer Assists while I was conducting research for my book, Common Knowledge.   

 

Peer Assist at British Petroleum

    Helen is the team leader for British Petroleum’s Exploration site, called Barden. The site is located in deep water in the North Sea.  Helen has four people reporting to her, two geo-physicists, a geologist, and a petroleum engineer. The team has spent several months collecting and analyzing a great deal of data about the possible well site off the coast of Norway. The team is at a point where they need to make a decision as to how they will proceed. Should they commit to a rig that would allow them to know for
 sure that there is oil under the deep water at this site? Should they make firm commitments to their partners in the exploration license to protect their investment in the hoped for oil?  These are important decisions because of the money involved; sinking a rig, for example, can cost up to 200 dollars a minute!

    Helen’s team has decided it would be useful to call a Peer Assist. They wanted to bring the latest learning that has occurred at other deep water sites to the table to help them make the best possible decision. Helen and her team identify fifteen possible BP colleagues, from other parts of the world, who have experience with the kind of issues facing the Barden team. She makes the calls and finds some are too busy on other projects, but she locates six people from her original list, three from the Norway office, one from Scotland, one from South Africa and two from London. They have agreed to meet on Wednesday, one month from now, in Stavanger, Norway to spend the day. 

    On the meeting day, Helen starts by defining what her team wants from the Peer Assist. She lays out their objectives for the meeting. The Assisters have all received a packet of material to read through in advance. The walls of the conference room, where Helen’s team and the Assisters are meeting, are covered with geological pictures of the ocean bed, seismic lines, and charts. More are spread several layers deep on the tables around the room. After Helen finishes her introduction the Assisters ask some clarification questions about the objectives. Then Helen introduces Knut, the geologist, who begins to talk through the data on the wall charts, offering his interpretation of it. Before long everyone is up looking more closely at the wall data. There is a lively discussion, among all the participants, about the implications of what they are seeing.

    After a coffee break, Martin, another team member, is introduced and he begins to show the data for seismic velocity. Again, within minutes the whole group is back on their feet examining the charts.  The discussion flows back and forth with the Assisters, asking each other technical questions about the data and often challenging each other’s responses. 

    After the lunch break, Helen says that they have finished explaining the data they gathered. The Assisters return to the original objectives, asking questions for clarification in light of what they have just heard. One of Assisters notes that: “I’m uncomfortable with the discussion because there are some strategic decisions that need to be made before we can give our opinion on whether to drill the well.”  The group decides they need to develop criteria for drilling the Barden well. Collaboratively the two groups develop these criteria, gaining additional insight as they talk through each point.

    About three o’clock Helen says she would like to excuse herself and her team to give the Assist team a chance to talk through the response they want to make. As the group gets down to work on their recommendations there is an animated exchange. The member from Scotland suggests a new technique they have just developed west of the Shetlands that could provide useful additional data on a prospect like Barden. He offers to send the specifications for that process and to spend some time helping the Barden team go through it the first time.  The discussion is technical but it is very open and lively. It is obvious that the members are interested in this situation and want to be of help.

    About five o’clock the Barden team returns to hear the ideas of the Assist team. The spokesperson for the Assist team thanks the Barden team for giving them a chance to work on such an interesting problem and notes they have all learned from the exchange. A verbal report is given with the promise of a more formal written report later. As the verbal report proceeds the Barden team asks a few clarification questions, but mostly they listen to the thoughtful ideas the Assisters are providing.  When the report is finished, Helen says that the report is very clear and notes that it has given her team a great deal to think about as they move toward the decisions they must make.  She acknowledges that the Barden team was nervous about whether it was too early in their investigation to call for a Peer Assist, but she is now convinced that the timing was right, because her team can take the recommendations into account before they are fully committed to a course of action.

    The day ends with a dinner at a local restaurant. The dinner is relaxed and people have time to talk through how the Peer Assist went. The dinner is a way for the Barden team to express their gratitude to those who came to lend their knowledge. The Barden team is not obliged to take the Assisters’ recommendations and interestingly the written report will be sent only to the Barden team members, no report is sent to their bosses, because this is an assist from their peers, not a formal review.  

 

Police Crowd Safety in the EU

In Europe football matches too frequently end in death or injury to fans, often from fights and as often from trampling or suffocation in the stadium. After such a tragedy, there is sometimes an investigation by the government, which can even end in firing the police chief. But such investigations have not resulted in making events safer – they seem aimed at culpability rather than help. 

 In 2005 the Netherlands police made a suggestion to the European Union Police Cooperation Working Party (PCWP) that the police from all the EU countries begin to conduct Peer Review Evaluations in order to reduce the death or injury to football fans. This was agreed to and for three years such evaluations were conducted.  Evaluation is the wrong word in our nomenclature, because these reviews were conducted only at the request of the commander when a football match was to be held in his city - so I will reference them here as Peer Assists.  If requested, a team of six, made up of four police chiefs from other countries and two researchers, would travel to the city where the match would be held, arriving on the day before the match. The Host commander would have thought though a list of what observations would be helpful to him. The Host commander and the Observation team together would then make a plan for the next day. The day of the match the Observation team, in pairs, would observe and conduct interviews according to the plan. Some might observe an area where the “away team” were scheduled to exit their buses, others might observe how the fans moved in and out of the stadium stands, still others might observe the interaction at the local bars. The Observation pairs would not interfere or try to control what was happening - that was the job of the local police. The Observation pairs were there only to observe what occurred and to try to understand why it was occurring - both good and bad.

    On the day after the match the Observation team would meet to discuss what they had seen and to prepare a draft report. In the weeks following, the report would be finalized then sent to the host commander for his use.  He could share it with others or keep it private, although most choose to share it with their officers and many with the whole community. The police chiefs, who participated as observers, learned as much as the Host commander and could then implement the "best practices" in their own cities.

    These Peer Assists occurred over a three-year period; twenty in all were conducted. An EU manual on crowd safety resulted from the Peer Assists. And many of the ideas were also embedded in local police training programs. Later, the practices that were learned about crowd safety at the football matches were extended to other types of crowd events, for example, concerts, protests, and the Queen's birthday.

    While working with the Police Academy in the Netherlands, I interviewed one of the initiators of the Peer Assists at the EU. He proudly reported that there had not been a football death in the EU in the 3 years since the report had come out.  

 

Mars Inc. Sales Force

    In 2004 Mars Inc., the company known for its candy, identified a challenge in the newer markets in the developing world.  These were markets where the bulk of consumer spending occurred in small local shops, unlike the European/US model of large supermarkets.  The challenge was to achieve a step-change in the number of small retail outlets which sold Mars products in order to drive a rapid increase in sales in these markets. The challenge covered twelve markets, in which there were approximately 12 million shops, and 3.5 billion potential consumers of Mars products. The Mars Global Practice Group (GPG), which was comprised of the Sales Directors of the twelve markets, was given this challenge.

    To address the challenge the GPG met every six months, face-to-face, hosted by one of the twelve markets. The meetings were focused on sharing, learning lessons, and discussing. There were no formal presentations - numbers and details were covered outside the meetings. Instead the meetings were based around activities designed to encourage the GPG to share its lessons and to build a knowledge base of successful processes and principles.

    One day of each meeting was spent as a Peer Assist with the attendees from the other eleven markets working with the salesforce of the market in which the meeting was being held. The day began with a briefing about the local market and its structure, including learning about the top three challenges which the local business unit was currently facing. Then the GPG members would divide into smaller groups to spend the day with an experienced local sales associate, each group observing in local retail outlets. At the end of the day the GPG would reconvene to give detailed feedback on 1) what they saw as working well in the market, and 2) how to build on the successes they saw. They also offered their top ten ideas on how to address the challenges, based on lessons and experience learned in their own markets. In this way the Host market received positive confirmation of their success and how to build on it, plus around 30 ideas and improvement suggestions targeted at their key challenges, based on lessons from proven, practical experience elsewhere in the world.

    In the five years this network existed, sales in the small retail channel in the twelve markets trebled and the percentage profit more than doubled, adding around $250 million to the bottom line. (Milton and Lamb, the Knowledge Manager’s Handbook 2016)

 

USAID – Introducing Expert Patients into Health Facilities

            In 2011, the USAID Health Care Improvement project (HCI) in Tanzania wanted to introduce expert patients into health facilities to address patient self-management for HIV in order to shift many of the tasks from overburdened healthcare professionals. Expert patients are people living with a chronic disease who are successfully managing their disease, and who provide support and services to other patients in facilities and at the community level.

    Having not done this type of work before, the team from Tanzania decided to visit the HCI team in Uganda, who had already been working with expert patients, so that they could learn from Uganda’s experience. The team was made up of the Chief of Party, four Quality Improvement Advisors and the Knowledge Management advisor. When the team arrived in Uganda, they went with the Uganda team to a facility to discuss with the clinic staff and expert patients what they had been doing and how they made it work. They saw that the Ugandans were using expert patients as a conduit between communities, facilities, and patients and they   asked about the systems Uganda had put in place to make that happen.

    When the Tanzania team returned home, they were able to make a number of adjustments to their plans and communication tools based on the Ugandan's experience. Additionally, after the visit, the Uganda team realized they had learned more about their own work through explaining it and answering the Tanzania team’s questions. In addition, the Tanzania team showed them some patient self-management tools they had developed which the Ugandans were able to adapt for their own use.

    In August 2013, another technical exchange visit was held, this time with the team from Uganda visiting the team from Tanzania. Similar to the first visit, they went on site visits together. While on this visit there was a growing recognition that while the two countries had different health systems, there were many similarities, for example, the Ugandan team saw certain registers that could be adapted and used in Uganda to help their work. Dr. Humphrey Megere, Chief of Party in Uganda, said, “We realized that we have resources in Tanzania that we can tap into. We can call on them for help.”

    As a result of these exchange visits, the two countries started working together to develop patient self-management guidelines for health workers. Additionally, the next year when the project in Uganda was asked to begin work to improve the quality of services for orphans and vulnerable children, something Tanzania had been involved in for a number of years, the Ugandan’s called upon their neighbors to provide them with experience and guidance, for which they were happy to oblige. (Based on a report by Kate Fatta, URC 2012)

Summary

   These four examples differ in many respects. Two are corporate examples, BP and Mars; one is an international development example, Uganda/Tanzania; and one a government example, the Police Chiefs.  BP, the Police Chiefs, and Mars, all three brought together assisters from several different teams or locales, while the Uganda/Tanzania exchange was one intact team meeting with another intact team. The Police Chiefs, Mars and Tanzania examples were site visits, where observation was critical to gain an understanding of the context, while the BP example was not so much observation as it was looking at data.

    As varied as those examples are, they all follow a set of principles that make Peer Assist useful, particularly for the exchange of tacit knowledge:

• A Peer Assist is initiated by the Receivers because they have a specific real world problem that they want help with – teams are not told to have a Peer Assist, rather they choose to do so.
• The Receivers are in charge. They decide what help they want and who they want to receive that help from – it is their agenda.
• Peer Assists meetings are face-to-face and usually last a day or more. The format is primarily conversation, and the knowledge that is generated is created in the exchange between the Assisters and the Receivers.
• The Assisters are given the time to learn enough about the Receiver’s context to be able to adapt their knowledge to the new context.
• There is mutual learning - both the Assisters and the Receivers learn and gain from the exchange.
• What is learned does not become an evaluation of the Receivers, or a judgement - the only purpose is to assist the receivers.
• The meeting is between two groups of team members, that is, it is not a team learning from one expert. When the two groups come together for a Peer Assist, participants who are in different roles are able to ask questions related to their own role.   

    As the Framework for Knowledge Transfer illustrates, Peer Assist is only one of many ways to transfer knowledge.  But for team to team transfer it is one of the most effective. If you try it you don’t have to call it “Peer Assist,” you can give it your own name, but the principles outlined above are useful guidance for success.

Knowledge Transfer: When to Use What Method

Transferring knowledge from one part of the organization to another is at the heart of knowledge management. But a general call to encourage more knowledge sharing or transfer is not very effective because there are many ways to transfer knowledge. You need to be sure that you are investing in the best method for what you want to accomplish. There are two questions that influence the choice of method.  

1. What is the transfer problem you are trying to solve? For example, do you want to:

•     transfer the knowledge that has been learned in one project to other projects?
•     transfer the knowledge of a retiring expert to his/her successor?
•     transfer the knowledge gained from a critical event, such as the loss of a contract?

2. What type of knowledge do you want to transfer?

• Explicit – is “know what,” the facts and algorithms that can be written down so others can both understand and make use of the knowledge. Examples are SOPs, job aids, and well-documented process steps.
• Implicit – is ‘know how” A professor or a book can teach you the “know what,” but “know how” is learned through experience. A skilled interviewer can ask the right questions to make the “know how,” that is in someone’s head, explicit enough that others could use it, for example, the rules of thumb the person uses, insights about a difficult client, short cuts to use in fixing a troublesome machine, etc.
• Tacit – is deep knowledge, what a person knows, but often can not articulate; it is what is often referred to as judgment.  Tacit knowledge can only be learned through observation of a master or being coached by a master. Examples of tacit knowledge are, what makes one speaker engaging and another less so, how a conductor acts to get the best from an orchestra, what a skilled facilitator does to help a group reach agreement.

Attached is a abbreviated version of a Knowledge Transfer Framework I have built for working with my own clients. It starts in Column 1 with a list of knowledge transfer needs that I frequently hear from clients. Column 2 lists the type of knowledge associated with each need. Column 3 outlines how that type of knowledge can be harvested and Column 4 outlines how it can be transferred to others.

Harvesting knowledge is only the first step in knowledge transfer. Once it is harvested there must still be a process in place to make it available to those that need it. An if it is tacit knowledge there needs to be an additional process to assist those that need it to internalize it.  However, in the most efficient and well designed transfer processes, harvesting, making available, and internalizing can occur simultaneously.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Think Knowledge Innovation Instead Of Knowledge Transfer

The African Rice Center* has been very successful in transferring knowledge about how to process rice in a way that makes it more nutritious and has less breakage. In a study conducted in Benin, 92% of the 600 women farmers took up a new process for parboiling rice. That is an amazing percentage for the transfer of knowledge. But the real story is the remarkable way they accomplished the transfer.

I should note that in Benin parboiling rice is a major economic activity and generates income for women and girls. So an improvement in the process can result in a significant economic gain for women farmers.

The traditional method women farmers used to prepare the rice, was to soak the rice (paddy) for 12 hours, then drain and cook it in a small amount of water in the bottom of the pot. Unfortunately that allowed the paddy at the top to not be entirely steamed while the paddy at the bottom would be completely cooked. After cooking they then dried the paddy on the ground in the sun for some days. This traditional process resulted in an uneven product to mill and was often mixed with sand and stone from lying on the ground.  Consequentially the rice was harder to cook and brought in less money when sold than would more evenly steamed rice, that had been dried with a different technique.  

The African Rice Center had been using a conventional way to spread new agricultural practices, which was to teach farmer women to adopt a ready-made research output. And that is how they initially taught women farmers to parboil rice, using a ready-made perforated aluminum pot. To learn, the
women farmers came to the Center for a two-day community workshop during which experts from four local NGOs demonstrated how to parboil the rice using the perforated pot, as well as, learning techniques for washing and drying the rice. The typical uptake of that training was about 18%, which isn’t bad, but the African Rice Center knew that it was too slow to reach all the women farmers who could benefit from the better practices taught in the workshop.

The Transfer Story

The African Rice Center decided to try video to transfer the knowledge, thinking video could be easily distributed to more people. But they didn’t just make a video of the training they had been doing. Instead they developed the video using a participatory method they called Zooming-in and Zooming-out.

Zooming–in started with visiting communities where they listened to the learning needs of villagers. They especially paid attention to the words people used when talking about parboiling rice. They searched among the communities for local innovations in parboiling rice. Then rural men and women played an active role in identifying the ideas and principles that would be in the video and in preparing the video script. Finally the Center made a draft video showing the women farmers using their own innovations and describing what they were doing.

Zooming-out was about showing the draft video to more communities, which spurred even more innovations, which were then also incorporated into the video. The Center was also able to modify places in the draft video where the ideas were not clear. The video was then ready to be viewed.  Over time the video was translated into twenty African languages and was shown throughout central Benin in many different age meetings and markets, and was also distributed through partners of the National Agricultural Research Center.

 

After a period of two years, the Center conducted a study to assess how effective the video had been in transferring this improvement. The study included 600 women farmers in central Benin, that were divided into five categories, based on the extent of their exposure to the new way of parboiling rice; 1) those who only had the conventional training, 2) those who only saw the video, 3) those who saw the video and had the conventional training, 4) friends and neighbors who had neither training, but were able to observe what others were doing, and 5) those who had no new information about how to parboil rice.

The following chart shows the percent of women who changed their practice and innovated a way to parboil rice using local materials, as well as those who took up the associated practices (click on the chart to make it bigger) 

As I read about this amazing result, I puzzled about why it was so successful and I drew several conclusions - you will probably think of several more and I'd be interested in your thinking.

The data in row 3 show that watching the video increased the probability that the women farmers would innovate a solution for parboiling the rice, over the conventional training. The same is true in row four, reducing vapor loss by stuffing a cloth between the two containers. Video appears to stimulate more innovation that conventional training. 

• One possible explanation is that the video gave the women farmers an understanding of the principle behind how to parboil the rice with steam, which the conventional training did not convey. Understanding the principle made it possible for the women farmers then to use local materials to innovate a way to prevent the rice from touching the water, for example a pot with sticks in the bottom. 

• Another possible explanation is that seeing women like themselves in the video, rather than observing NGO workers, or males in the conventional training, made it seem to the women more likely that they could figure out how to parboil their rice without the cost of buying a perforated pot.

• The data also suggest that new users may understand a principle better if they can see the principle in action, rather than just hearing or reading about it.

• If those conclusions are correct, then the video was effective because it lead to innovation, not because those who viewed it copied exactly what was shown in the video.

• That conclusion is supported by the data in rows one and two of the chart, “removing dirt from the rice” and “washing rice two and three times.” Both practices were nearly as effective by conventional training as by video. I conclude that was because no innovation was necessary to add these steps to the traditional practice of the rice preparation.

These conclusions can be generalized to other situations in which knowledge needs to be transferred, because nearly always a practice has to be modified to fit a different context. Too often what is said (or thought) by those that are being asked to take up the knowledge is, “We are not like them, so it won’t work here.” And they are not to be disparaged for such thinking - they are right, it will not work as it is presented. 

1. Understanding the principle behind a practice is critical for the necessary innovation of the practice to occur.
2. All too often the principle is not clear, even to those who are presenting the practice to others. For example, it would be easy to mistake the practice of rice processing as being about having a perforated pot and tarpaulins on which to dry the rice.  There is an inclination in most presentations of successful processes to describe the practice as "what we did." 
3. New users are more likely to borrow a practice from others if they are able to identify with the others. The video depicted people “like self” which the conventional training did not.

*Espe ́rance Zossou, Paul Van Mele, Simplice D. Vodouhe,and Jonas Wanvoeke, The power of video to trigger innovation: rice processing in central Benin, International Journal of Agricultural Sustainability 7(2) 2009, Pages 119–129

Pay it Forward: Making the Transfer of Knowledge More Effective in Developing Countries

I want to propose what may seem to some a radical goal for the international development agenda: The most impactful way for knowledge to serve development is for every successful, local, intervention to “Pay it Forward” to another facility or region. For example a team of originators in a region that has reduced HIV, “Pays it Forward” by taking what it has learned to another region to help that region accomplish what the originating team has learned to do. A city that has successfully reduced E.coli in its water “Pays it Forward” by sending a team of originators to a sister city where the water is still causing disease.

The current way knowledge transfer (or spread as it is often called) is attempted is that the funder (e.g. the agency, foundation, NGO) of the intervention, builds into the contract, that those providing the technical assistance to the originators have the responsibility for spreading the intervention after it has shown to be successful. 

But that practice is flawed for two reasons. First, technical assisters typically obtain the knowledge of what happened through interviews. Interviewers can obtain the explicit knowledge of the originators, but
much of what the originators will have learned while doing the implementation is tacit, which by definition, the originators are unable to articulate.  Tacit knowledge is available when the person who holds that knowledge is embedded within a context where the knowledge is needed. Secondly, using the technical assisters to transfer the knowledge takes the success away from the originators and makes it the success of those that provided the technical assistance. “Paying it Forward,” as described above, acknowledges the success of the originators. The originators, being present in the new situation, can transfer both their explicit and their tacit knowledge to others. Calling on their tacit knowledge they can make adaptations to the new context.  Moreover, the act of calling on their tacit knowledge, strengthens and sustains that knowledge within the originators. “We learn when we teach.”

Agencies, foundations and NGOs can support “Paying it Forward” by providing the funding to pay for the time and travel of the originators to work with another facility or region. And technical assisters can help by identify sites that need the knowledge the originators have gained. 

There is a lot of talk a lot about South-to-South, but it is not South-to-South as long as the technical assisters take on the task of transfer. It is empowering when implementers put down the role of helpee and take up the helper role.

We actually already know a great deal about how to “Pay it Forward” from regions that have twinned or groups who have conducted peer assists and site visits across regions and countries.  We have learned through the example of Positive Deviance, as well, that those embedded in the problem are best able to transfer the knowledge gained. 

Technical Assisters are necessary to bring evidence based practice, to facilities and regions, but they have proven to be poor at transferring how that practice was implemented. Transfer remains the biggest challenge improvement projects face. The answer is to quit attempting to spread something that technical assisters can’t know enough about, rather to provide the financial support for those that accomplished the intervention to spread it.

What elements of an improvement are transferable, and what adaptations are needed?

One of the questions to be discussed at the up-coming Salzburg Seminar I will be attend July10-15 is, “What elements of an improvement are transferable, and what adaptations are needed?” I have written this blog for the attendees at that seminar, but wanted to share it with others who are interested in healthcare, particularly in developing countries.

“Transferable” implies moving the knowledge that was gained in one place, to another place. The term “adaptation” acknowledges that the improvement must change to fit into the new context. It is the process of adaptation that I want to focus on in this blog. The issue is, who does the “adapting.” The customary approach to accomplish adaptation is a two step process, 1) the originator tells the receiver (often in a presentation format) what his/her team did and why, and then engages in a Q&A with the receiver to explain anything further that is needed, and 2) the receiver takes those ideas back home, then adapts them into his or her own context. In this format the responsibility for adaptation lies with the receiver.

I suggest that a more effective format is to give the responsibility for adaptation to the originator. In this format the interaction is not a presentation but is a group discussion, what I referred earlier as collective sensemaking. Rather than starting with the originators explaining what they did, the conversation starts by the receivers outlining their context, what they are trying to accomplish, why that is important to them, and what they have already tried. During this explanation, the originators ask questions about the context to be able to put themselves in the shoes of the receivers as much as possible. Then the receivers ask the originators what they have learned from their implementation that could address the receiver’s specific context.

The receivers are not asking the originators to start with the actions they took, rather to start with, what Perry et al. calls, the core concepts. However, the task of the originators is not to recite the core concepts, but to think how the core concepts would apply to the receiver’s situation. The actions that the originators took may not work in a new context, but the reasoning behind the actions should be of help. This adaptation activity provides deeper understanding not only for the receivers but for the originators as well. By striving to apply what they have learned the originators come closer to understanding why it worked.

Because this adaptation activity is collective sensemaking, it is most effective when engaged in by a collective, that is, several members of the receiver’s team are present to engage in conversation with several members of the originator’s team, providing the needed diversity of perspectives. The six principles discussed in the previous blog are applicable in the adaptation discussion:

1) Set aside the time required to reflect together,

2) Include multiple perspectives,

3) Create a psychologically safe space,

4) Connect people through circles,

5) Connect before content,

6) Make ideas visible.

The adaptation format can be made even more powerful, if the originators are each from a different group that has successfully implemented the intervention. If multiple originators are present, both they and the receivers can begin to ferret out the core concepts from across their different experiences. The goal then is two fold, to understand the core concepts and to adapt the intervention to the receiver’s context.

This format of giving the originator responsibility for the adaptation is effective because of the nature of our tacit knowledge. When working in a complex system, much of what we are learning is tacit. Although we skillfully call upon that tacit knowledge to take action, we are often hard pressed to articulate the reasoning behind those actions. A story told by Gary Klein in his book, Sources of Power, provides a useful example of this paradox. He recounts this incident of the lieutenant of a fire crew acting in a dangerous situation.

It is a simple house fire in a one story house in a residential neighborhood. The fire is in the back, in the kitchen area. The lieutenant leads his hose crew into the building, to the back, to spray water on the fire, but the fire just roars back at them. “Odd,” he thinks. “The water should have more of an impact.” They try dousing it again, and get the same results. They retreat a few steps to regroup. Then the lieutenant starts to feel as if something is not right. He doesn’t have any clues; he just doesn’t feel right about being in that house, so he orders his men out of the building…  As soon as his men leave the building, the floor where they had been standing collapses.  Had they still been inside, they would have plunged into the fire below.

Klein reports that in an interview with the lieutenant it was only after persistent questioning that the lieutenant was able to name the thinking (tacit knowledge) that led him to the decision that saved the lives of his men. The best he could do in explaining was to offer pieces of the pattern he had unknowingly put together;  “For example, the room was hotter than he would have expected from a small fire, and the fire was very quiet. He unconsciously deduced that there must be an unsuspected basement beneath the living room, and that was where the main fire was; he then “intuited” that his men were in danger.”

As with the lieutenant, much of our tacit knowledge is so deeply embedded that we require the stimulus of a real situation for us to surface it. As Dave Snowden has said, “We only know what we know when we need to know it. It is for this reason that bringing originators of successful interventions to a real situation where they must figure out how to solve the problem, allows them to surface knowledge that they would otherwise not be able to articulate. Berwick, quoting Tiller explains, “Experimentalists have pursued too single mindedly the question of whether a [social] program works at the expense of knowing why it works.” I suggest this adaptation format as a process that focuses on “why it works.”

It would be too much to expect the first originators of a successful intervention to travel to every site that requires the originator’s knowledge adapted. But imagine if every group that became successful, perhaps through engaging in this adaptation activity, was willing to “pay it forward” by themselves engaging in an adaptation session with others. Soon there would be many conversations and a wealth of knowledge growing about the core concepts. All would be researchers as well as implementers!

Bib

• Gareth J. Parry, Andrew Carson-Stevens, Donna F. Luff,   Marianne E. McPherson, Donald A. Goldmann, “Recommendations for Evaluation of Health Care Improvement Initiatives” Academic Pediatrics, Vol. 13, Number 6S, 2013
• Gary Klein, Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions, MIT Press, 1999
• Dave Snowden, “7 Principles of Knowledge Management”, Cognitive-edge.com
• Donald Berwick, “The Science of Improvement”, JAMA, March 12, 2008

What Makes Organizational Conversations Effective? Participant Skill or Skillful Design?

I have been writing and talking to groups about Collective Sensemaking for some time, and in this post I answer a question I am often asked, "Can any organizational conversation can be effective if participants in the conversation are not skillful communicators?"  I will start by defining Collective Sensemaking, then, given that I have worked extensively with both ways of creating conversations, training participants in Argyris' Model II skills and designing meetings that are conversational, I will draw on those experiences and the research literature on the topic to answer the question.

Collective Sensemaking

Collective Sensemaking is a process that leading edge organizations use to take advantage of the collective intelligence of their members. It is a conversational event that brings organizational members together in order to make sense of an issue or problem the members are mutually facing. Collective Sensemaking is not one a time event but a way of getting work accomplished. There are many terms used for this growing practice, “swarming”, “collaboration,”  “teaming”, “Whole system” etc.  All bring people together in a new way, that is, not to listen to PowerPoint presentations, nor to hear leadership introduce a change that must be implemented, but rather to engage in meaningful conversation among organizational members themselves. Collective Sensemaking is a conversation where members tryout ideas, challenge the status quo, and puzzle together on the meaning of information and events that have occurred within their unit.

I am using the term “unit” to mean any of the following, a team, project, department or whole organization, depending upon the part of the organization that owns the issue or problem.  I am using the term “organizational member” to reference all levels of employees from senior management to front line workers.  Unfortunately, we do not have an inclusive term in English to reference all of the people who work for an organization. The term “employee” typically references only non-managers so is not inclusive. 

Collective Sensemaking is increasingly important as organizations face growing complexity and ambiguous challenges. It is the recognition that no one individual, however highly placed, is smart enough to address the challenges organizations now face. The time of the heroic leader, who is expected to have all the answers, is over. It is the time for drawing on the collective intelligence of the organization to generate both strategy and action.

Experience Using Training to Improve Organizational Conversations

During my academic career, both at the University of Texas and at The George Washington University, I taught Argyris’ Model II skills to graduate students. Model II is arguable the most effective communication skill set that has been developed. Using these skills students experienced a significant change in the way they interacted with each.  Learning the skills was like a door that allowed them to experience the values, which Arygris identifies as necessary to produce learning at the organizational level, that is, valid information, free and informed choice, and internal commitment to that choice.   

Valid information: means to share all relevant information related to an issue and share it in a way that others understand it and can independently validate it. It also means continually seeking new information to determine whether previous decisions should be changed.

Free and informed choice means people define their own objectives and methods for achieving them. They are not coerced or manipulated into acting against that choice and their choices are based on valid information.

Internal commitment to that choice means people feel personally responsible for their decisions and find their choices intrinsically compelling or satisfying.  Internal commitment is necessarily based on valid information and free and informed choice.

Later, as a consultant, I taught the Model II skills in organization workshops. For example, over a period of several years I conducted workshops for the top  leaders of a large government organization as well as for project teams, all with considerable success. I collected over 200 ”left and right hand cases” from participants who wrote about their interactions.

From these cases as well as cases drawn from other client organizations, I identified numerous interaction patterns, which managers and employees alike exhibit, that prevent learning within the organization. The patterns will be familiar to most readers:

• Hiding Agendas – Trying to get another person to come around to my view without telling them what I want, e.g. to do a task, agree to a course of action, support an issue. For example,

Jack believes he should author a particular paper. But in talking to Pete, a counterpart at another agency, he discovers that Pete believes he should be writing the paper himself. Jack sees a “train-wreck” coming over this. He knows that Pete lacks the necessary knowledge and if he persists in writing the paper it will result in disaster for everyone. However, Jack does not say this, rather he asks Pete questions to try to get him to come to the conclusion, on his own, that he should not write the paper.

• Hiding Negative Information – trying to get the other person to see that they are causing problems by hinting about it.

Larry has come to the Director to get him to use his influence with a subordinate – a problem employee.  The director believes the real problem is not the subordinate, rather he believes that Larry is being over controlling. The Director talks in vague terms to Larry about things like empowerment and support, but never tells Larry that he think Larry is the problem or why.

• Not questioning the thinking of superiors – accepting their opinion or task without raising contradictory evidence

Francis has received an assignment from her boss to put together a recruitment plan to hire 200 new people. Being much closer to the data, Francis is aware that there are already enough people in the pipeline to fill the up-coming vacancies.  However, she does not tell her boss this – feeling that he would not want his judgment questioned. She draws up the plan hoping she can avoid implementing it before she wastes too much of the organization’s money.

• Not raising information that would contradict the prevailing view

Everyone on the team seems to support the view that the leadership of country A will not yield to pressure to reduce arms.    Several team members provide intelligence from their contacts to support that view. Sam has reliable intelligence from his contact that things have changed in country A, but against the sureness of all the others he is hesitant to raise this contrary opinion in the meeting. 

Such patterns severely limit an organization’s learning.  The patterns also create distrust because the person upon whom they are being enacted most often recognizes they are being “played.” These concerns are not limited to lower level employees. Research by Detert & Edmondson shows that even executive level employees withhold knowledge out of concern for how they will be perceived. Argyris refers to this phenomenon as organizational defensive routines and suggests that employees learn behaviors from other employees about how to interact with bosses and with other employees.   

The participants in the training program learned to recognize such dysfunctional patterns in themselves and others from the cases they wrote. And using the new Model II set they were able to interact more effectively in staff meetings and in conversation with each other. The change was manifest in their increased willingness to raise tough issues; to test the inferences they made about each other, rather than holding them privately; and to be open to having their own conclusions challenged. As a result they were also able to resolve long-standing issues between departments.   

I have taught several less comprehensive models of communication skills in organizations, such as listening, and how to ask powerful questions.  Although participants enjoy these less rigorous workshops, they typically retain the skills no more than a few days. The Model II skills are the only skill set I have found that is retained long enough to change the patterns of interactions in an organizational unit.  This is because the way organizational members interact with each other is largely tacit. In order to make a lasting change, participants must first have the time to, 1) become aware of the dysfunctionallity of their current patterns of interaction, 2) learn the new skill set, and 3) to internalize the values that underlie the new skills. In the end, it is not the words people choose to use in conversation that make a difference; rather it is the intent behind the words – the values they hold. 

This extensive experience, over many years has convinced me 1) that most organizational conversations produce little learning, and 2) that it is possible for training to greatly increase that learning.

 

Using Skillful Design to Improve Organizational Conversations

            Action Learning

As early as the 1980s I began using designed group conversations in both my consulting and academic work. One form that took was Action Learning. With Action Learning, small groups of 5-6 participants (called a set), made up of organizational members from across the organization, meet every two weeks over a period of six months to help each other with the work problems they are facing. During the meetings each member is allocated an hour to explain what had happened in their problem situation over the last two weeks and to describe the issues on which they wanted the help of the other members of the set. The other members listen careful and then pose questions to speaker. The guidance is that members should not offer advice in the sense of, “Here is what you should do,” rather they should interpret what was happening through their own lens, share their own experiences in similar situations, and express their interest and support. When the hour is up it is the next person’s turn, until all six members have the opportunity to help and be helped. Over the months participants develop strong and meaningful relationships with each other that often lasts long after the Action Learning meetings are over. Because they grow to care about each other, they are willing to speak honestly with each other, to speak even painful truths, if that is needed to help a colleague deal more effectively with a problem. Those Action Learning  conversations produced solutions that no member could have developed on their own.   

            GE Work-Out

During the same time period I began to use GE’s Work-out with client groups. Work-Out is a simple, straightforward methodology for cutting bureaucracy and solving problems quickly. Its genius lies in harnessing the intelligence of workers closest to a problem. The Work-Out process has four basic steps:

1. Bring together the people who know the issues best.
2. Challenge them to develop creative solutions.
3. Make yes or no decisions on the solutions immediately in a public forum.
4. Empower people to carry out the solutions⁶.

Before a Work-Out meeting occurs there is a lengthy planning stage during which a process map is drawn that details the steps and sub-processes of the problem as it is in the current state.  The process map helps identify the members of a cross-functional team that will come together over three days, so that every aspect of the process is present in the Work-Out meeting in order to develop a solution. The design of Work-Out includes the following, 1) hierarchy is absent from the three day meeting in which the participants create solutions, 2) discussion alternates between small group work and full group work, 3) each team presents a recommendation in the public form, but only if a team member is willing to be "owner" of it — to take responsibility for driving it through to completion.

Work-Out is credited by GE for moving its operating margin from 8.92 in the early 1990s  to 14.4% by 1995. Other companies that have implemented Work-Out achieved similar cost savings. For example, Zurich Financial Services verified savings of over 100 million from Work-Out meetings held over a four year period.

            Whole System

Early in the 1990s I begin to work with many of the Whole System in the Room processes that were becoming prominent, such as, Future Search, Open Space Technology, Real Time Strategic Change, World Café, and Appreciative Inquiry. Each of these Whole System processes has a unique design, but all share similar processes:

• They are conversation meetings
• They use the small group as the unit of learning
• Participants connect on a human level before they are asked to hold  content related conversations
• All voices in the room are heard
• Participants are heterogeneous, representing a wide range of organizational and stakeholder perspectives
• Participants do not feel the need to defer to one individual, recognizing that information and expertise is distributed among the participants.
• Rather than being defined before the meeting, participants determine the outcome of the meeting.
• The conversation is extended over several days so that participants come to know each other in terms of skills and knowledge. 

 

Conclusions

Out of these experiences and many more I have engaged in, I have come to the following conclusions about the value of training organizational members in communication skills vs designing an environment that produces learningful conversation.

The most effective way to have learningful conversations in an organization is to disrupt the dysfunctional conversational practices that are occurring. Both training and skillful design can disrupt those patterns. 

Training accomplishes it by identifying the dysfunctional patterns organizational members use on a regular basis and training them to use new skills based on the Argyris values of valid information, free and informed choice and internal commitment to that choice.

Skillful Design disrupts the patterns by changing the way a meeting is designed and how the topic of conversation is framed. The environment in which the conversation takes place (e.g. the meeting room, the configuration of chairs and tables, how a meeting starts, who stands and who sits, who is in charge, who is allowed to talk, who controls the agenda, etc.) all act as cues to participants to interact in familiar patterns. To break the pattern, participants need to meet in an unfamiliar setting, with unfamiliar conversational activities, and to significantly alter the type of topics that are discussed. The topics need to be altered from 1) how to implement an already constructed solution, to 2) identifying issues the unit is facing and jointly developing solutions for those issues; and from 1) being objective and impersonal,  2) to being relational. 

The designer, facilitator or leader of such meetings must themselves hold the values of valid information, free and informed choice and internal commitment to that choice, to be able to create a design which is commensurate with those values.

Valid information –

• Convene participants who hold multiple perspectives on the issue including people from different parts and levels of the organizations, as well as stakeholders
• The design enables all voices to be heard
• The design provides adequate time to explore differences 
• Dissenting views are encouraged
• Where possible, participants make their knowledge visible through boundary objects (e.g diagrams, lists, drawings, charts) which creates common ground when expertise-based knowledge is involved
• Both senior management and participants make available all the information that is pertinent to the issue, including that which is financial, political, and strategic

Free and informed choice –

• The convened group is free to reach its own conclusions, the outcome is not pre-determined before the meeting is convened
• The issue is framed in a way that opens it to new ways of thinking – a solution is not contained within the question.
• Participants have the opportunity to connect with others in order to know, who is in the room, what knowledge others hold, and that others are trust worthy

 Internal commitment to the choice –

• Participants are free to commit or not, to the solutions the group develops
• Participants are more likely to commit to those solutions they have a part in developing and are often willing to commit to an outcome that is not their preference, if their views have been given a fair hearing and they fully understand the reasoning behind the outcome selected

Collective Sensemaking is based on the principle that knowledge workers are capable of understanding events and information rather than having to rely on the interpretation of someone who claims authority through force, tradition, superior intellect, or divine right.  It affirms the wisdom of attending to the relationship between people for human kindness, support, new ideas, comradeship, feedback and help. It is an affirmation of the intellectual capability of not only the individual but also the collective.  It acknowledges that everyone, including leaders, is blind to his or her own tacit assumptions and requires the help of others to see those assumptions. It acknowledges that each person, no matter how smart or capable, sees the world from a perspective and that there are other legitimate perspectives that could inform that view.

Such conversations can and do result from skillfully designed convening which enables participants to trust other members and feel psychologically safe to raise difficult issues, admit mistakes, ask for help and feedback, and offer views that oppose the prevailing view. 

Note: this post will appear as an article in the upcoming issue of iKnow, published by The Institute for Knowledge and Innovation SouthEast Asia (IKI-SEA) 

 

 

Part II “We Know More Than We Can Say: How to Use Tacit Knowledge

 

In Part I, I explained why “we know more than we can say” including, 1) how our brains store knowledge, 2) how we create knowledge 3) the values and relationships that are involved in tacit knowledge.  I gave examples of situations in which knowledge workers, who understood something very deeply, were unable to clearly articulate what they knew to others, although they were themselves able to act on their deep knowledge.

If, as these examples illustrate, you can’t just write it down, the question remains, "How do we make use of our tacit knowledge?" In this post, Part II, I suggest two important ways that can occur. The first is to draw on someone’s tacit knowledge for an answer to a pressing question or problem. And although we may never fully know the deep understanding that forms the basis of their response, we can take action based on their advice. I suggest two pathways that are useful when there is a pressing question or problems

The second way to make use of the tacit knowledge in the organization, is to grow it in employees so they have the capacity to solve complex problems themselves and here again there are multiple pathways to this end.   

I - Drawing on the Tacit Knowledge of Others

There are two ways to draw on the tacit knowledge of others. The first assumes an individual has a question or problem he or she needs some help with, the second assumes a larger issue, perhaps a team that is starting a new project and needing to draw on the collective knowledge of those in the organization to plan or develop a strategy for it.

1. An individual with a question or problem   

The first way is to hold a conversation with a colleague or expert (the source) to draw on his/her tacit knowledge. Email won’t work because the source will have to spend some time learning about the asker’s context in order to draw on patterns within his/her experience that fit that context. A face-to-face conversation is optimal because it allows the give and take that Hans described or that we saw Fred engaged in with Alice. A conversation could certainly begin with an email, or a question asked in a CoP, and then continue over coffee or, if simple enough, by phone. But here we run into the issue of values and relationship. To be willing to invest conversation time, the responder has to have a sense of who the asker is. This, of course, is where building a network is critical; having met the individual face-to-face at a network meeting, or being a part of a community where people are committed to helping each other, increases the likelihood that the responder will expend  the necessary time and energy.  

Rob Cross and Lee Sproull conducted 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, in order to sort through possibilities based on, 1) the seeker’s level of expertise (absorptive 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 have invalidated the original question. Problem reformulation tended to broaden the thinking of the seeker or to approach the question 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 the seeker’s confidence and allows him or her 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 an exchange with a colleague is that it produces five categories of responses, not just the answer. So much more is available from conversation, e.g. an unexpected insight, a sense of affirmation that inspires the seeker to new heights or equally useful, having to confront a realization that he or she has been trying to avoid; deepening the relationship with a colleague; or the introduction to a collaborator the seeker would never have discovered on his or her own; and on and on.  

2. A Team or Group Requesting Help on Broad Issues Such as a Plan or Strategy

Here the technique is to bring together a group of colleagues that can provide multiple perspectives on an issue. We often think of this as a Peer Assist, that is, drawing on the knowledge of peers who do similar work. But just listening to others present, as happens at most conferences, does not constitute a Peer Assist because to make use of the tacit knowledge of another requires an in-depth conversation and that does not happen in presentations, even with Q&A tacked on at the end.  Nick Milton tells this story about a Peer Assist in South America.

"A company had moved into a South American country through acquisition. They had taken over a chain of local dealers, and needed a business information system up and running. The vendor said, 'This will take you 10 months'. Management said, 'We need it in 6 months if we are to capitalize on this acquisition.' Although the implementation of a business information system was new to that country office, it was not new to the company. Offices in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, had done this sort of thing recently, a team in the head office were working on standard processes for business systems, and there were several vendors who offered these systems. The country office decided to tap into this knowledge through a [face-to-face] 2-day Peer Assist. They held video interviews with the participants to develop a shared context in advance, and built a careful agenda of knowledge sharing and solution creation.

An email from the country manager afterwards confirmed that they had benefited from applying the knowledge management principles, starting with the peer assist, which produced a much improved project plan, reducing the time-scale from 10 to 4 months. Examples of processes/procedures and technical templates were lifted from Poland and Russia to start the project off. External benchmarking suggests that the costs would have been up to $500,000 higher without the knowledge transfer. So a direct benefit of $500,000 was realized, with the additional indirect benefits of accelerating proper governance by 6 months compared to the original vendor estimate."

A second example of a type of Peer Assist comes from Healthcare. 

In 1987 the US government started requiring Medicare to publicly report hospital death rates in all regions of the country. One of the figures reported was on bypass surgery, one of the most frequently performed surgical procedures.  For the hospitals in the Northern New England region the reported death rate was 4.3 per hundred operations.  The cardiac surgeons in the hospitals began to realize that there was great variability among individual hospitals, ranging from 2 to 9 deaths per hundred patients. Up until this time surgeons would have been aware of their own death rate, but would not have known how it compared to others – after all some deaths are not preventable, no matter how skilled the surgeon. 

The surgeons in the five largest hospitals in the region took this information very seriously and voluntarily created a study group to do something about it. The action they decided on was to observe each other operating on patients and after each operation meet to discuss the case.

Because of these many “peer assists,” between 1991 and 1993 the death rate across the region fell from 4.3 to 3.3 deaths per hundred operations, resulting in 74 fewer deaths in that two-year period than what the trend line would have predicted.   By the end of the study in 2002 the death rate had fallen to 2.1 percent across the region, which translated into 811 fewer deaths.  

In both of the examples the requirement is conversation and in the last, observation as well. In the Peer Assist examples, multiple perspectives were involved because the receivers needed more than an answer, they need a deeper understanding to guide many actions they would take in the future.

 

II Developing Tacit Knowledge in Others

What organizations have learned, through twenty years of attempting to transfer an expert's broad base of tacit knowledge to less experienced others, is that it is not possible. They have found, what we already knew as parents attempting to transfer our own life experience to our children, that everyone has to develop tacit knowledge for him or her self. And that our role as parents is, 1) to provide as rich an experience base as we can, through such events as, travel to different environments, engagement in activities from cultural arts to sports, opportunities to try out new ideas and even to fail and learn from those failures, and 2) to offer coaching, most importantly our own, but also through competent teachers, sports coaches, counselors, etc. that provide a broader perspective and new ways of understanding the world.

So the second way to draw on tacit knowledge is to grow the tacit knowledge of employees, so they have the capability to solve problems themselves. Organizations need to offer, 1) opportunities for experience and 2) structures through which coaching can occur.  These two elements would sound familiar to any HR person, but to grow tacit knowledge these elements must be designed based on what we have learned about 1) how our brains store knowledge, 2) how we create knowledge, and 3) the values and relationships that are interlinked with tacit knowledge and that were elaborated in Part 1 of this article.   

1. Experience and reflection

People learn from experience, when 1) they have to opportunity to try different ways of doing things and 2) they have the time and opportunity to reflect on what they did.  To develop tacit knowledge these two actions must be paired. Little learning results from experience without reflection, likewise reflection is empty without new experiences that serve to test the knowledge that reflection has brought forth. 

The opportunity to try different ways of doing things occurs both at the individual and the group level. At the individual level it means employees have the opportunity to try out their own ideas for improvement or innovation. In some companies this is labeled “empowerment,” but whatever the label, it means employees are able to make use of their own judgment in determining what actions to take.

A well known example is the 3M Corporation that has encouraged deliberate experimentation by offering employees at all levels 15% of their work hours to develop and test their own ideas.  The 15% program has generated some of the company’s best selling products such as, post it notes, clear bandages, optical films that reflect light and painter’s tape. 3M’s successes inspired Google to offer 20% time and that has been as fruitful, producing Gmail, Google Earth, and Gmail Labs.

But experimentation does not need to be individual to build tacit knowledge. Teams that have the flexibility to test new ideas, with members offering their own thinking and the reasoning behind that thinking, serves equally well to build tacit knowledge.  What does not build tacit knowledge is for a team or an individual to be told what to do, without the ability to impact those instructions and with little understanding of the reasoning behind the decisions.  In such situations, neither success nor failure will yield tacit knowledge in the participants.  

The second half of the pair is reflection. Experience is gained, not through one occurrence, but over enough occurrences that patterns begin to emerge across all of the actions taken. Reflection requires thinking back on the actions taken, the reasoning behind the choice of action, the context in which the action took place, and the outcomes that resulted from the actions, many of which are unintentional. While experience is inevitable, learning is not.  To learn from experience requires deliberate reflection. 

Reflection is most effective when it is done in the company of others who are involved in the same kind of work.  When we summarize what happened for another, we begin to understand it better ourselves.  We learn when we talk.  Each practitioner functions within a somewhat different context, and responding a bit differently. Consequently the learning of each practitioner is unique. When those practitioners reflect together on their actions, “creative abrasion” (Leonard) occurs, which leads to greater understanding in those engaged in the conversation. 

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 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.

The US Army took reflection to a new level when, in the 1970’s, it instituted the After Action Review (AAR) to be conducted at every level following any engagement. 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, teams don’t often take the time to pause and think through, “Now what did we learn out of that experience?” “What would we do differently next time?” Consequently teams frequently find themselves making the same mistakes over and over again. 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.

Coaching

According to Nonaka and Takeuchi, “The key to acquiring tacit knowledge is experience. Without some form of shared experience it is extremely difficult for one person to project her or himself into another individual’s thinking process. The mere transfer of knowledge will make little sense, if it is abstracted from associated emotions and specific contexts in which shared experiences are imbedded.”  

Leonard describes a top consultant who was asked where and how he learned his skills in closing deals with clients. 

“‘I had an excellent teacher,’ he replied. He explained that when he joined the company, an elder statesman in the firm had asked him to set in on clients meetings. ‘You don’t have to say a word,’ the older consultant told him. ‘Just listen and learn.’ The junior consultant rightly took that directive as more than a suggestion and sat at the back of the room. After each client meeting, he and the older consultant discussed what had occurred. ‘I learned more from those briefs,’ he said, ‘than in four years at my prior company and two years of business school.’”

The US Army has long used coaching as a critical part in the development of military officers. Nate Allen, one of the founders of CompanyCommand, an on-line community for Company Commanders, describes the Leadership Challenge as a “simulated, Cognitive Leadership Challenge. A platform where Soldiers can construct solutions to various scenarios presented to them by their peers and/or predecessors.”  The challenge is a short video of a soldier presenting a real situation he or she has faced - one in which there was no clear-cut or obvious answer. For example a U.S. Army Platoon Leader serving in Iraq describes this situation in a video:

“We were headed out to a pretty easy mission. My front truck reports that there’s a dead body under a car in the middle of the road. He was on the ground. He had been in his car and he had been shot. At that point, the gunner from my lead truck noticed a double-decker bus that had stopped. And there was a guy up on the top deck who appeared to have a blue video camera, and he was just hanging out the window video-taping us. Our rules of engagement permitted us to engage anybody video-taping an attack. I looked down my sight and noticed the same thing. The gunner looked through binos and noticed the same thing. He asked me, ‘Hey sir, can I go ahead and shoot him?’  

The viewer is then asked, What are the considerations? and  What would you do?  After answering the viewer then reads a set of 3-5 sample responses and is asked to rate each. Follow his response, the viewer can then read the responses other viewers have written.  Before the final step views are provided resources that broaden their understanding, such as army manuals, interviews with other soldiers in a similar situation and news articles.  Finally the viewer sees “the rest of the story” of the original video. Viewers can then make changes to their original answer and participate in a threaded discussion with their peers about the issue.   

This sequence of experiencing a realistic but ambiguous situation described by someone much like the viewer, planning an action, and exposure to others’ thinking, develops the tacit knowledge of the viewers. The situation is one in which the viewers recognize they will likely find themselves in the future. They are required to envision a course of action and then to learn what others would do in that same situation, but more importantly they learn the why of others thinking, a tactic that broadens their own view. When they have the opportunity to review their original response, 40% percent make changes, a strong indication they have broadened their tacit understanding.

Borrow Forward is an example of the development of tacit knowledge that comes from Kaiser Foundation Health plan (KFHP) and Kaiser Foundation Hospitals (KFH). The health care system employs a form of Process Improvement called “adaptive design” that requires employees from a unit, for example the emergency room, to work together as a team. Alide Chase, Senior Vice President of Quality and Service, explains the joint experience each team has before beginning their Process Improvement (PI) training.

Before each new team begins their PI training, they engage in “Borrow Forward.” A team of 4-5 persons from, for example the Emergency Department, makes a visit to an Emergency Department in another location that has already successfully implemented adaptive design. The visiting team goes in a state of inquiry. Each visiting team member shadows his/her counterpart for 2 to 3 days. Before leaving, the visiting team holds a meeting with those they shadowed to talk with them about the observations and insights they experienced. This is a reflection meeting in which both parties learn. The visiting team articulates their insights which helps them clarify what they learned for themselves and the host team gains new understanding of their own processes by seeing those processes from a new perspective. 

After their return, the visiting team begins their PI training and implementation. They hold weekly meetings to reflect on the actions they have taken and the results achieved. Borrow Forward provides a shared experience from which they derive shared meaning, and provides a lens through which they are able to think about their work.

 A final example comes from the consulting world. Leonard describes the way SAIC, a consulting firm that works primarily with the US government, prepares  “knowledge consultants.”

“Knowledge consultants learn their trade from more experienced consultants through first observing the expert help a client learn a particular knowledge management process, next practicing the skills by leading a client session and receiving feedback from the coach, and then teaching the skill to another consultant.  This process is one of SAIC’s most useful knowledge transfer tools not only in-house, but also for coaching clients. The knowledge consultants take their clients through the same “see one, lead one, and teach one” processes of learning.

Coaching can come from many quarters. The first example is a typical one, where a mentor helps a junior consultant gain tacit knowledge.  The second example of the Army’s on-line peer coaching is very carefully crafted sequence of steps, the third involves a team conducting an in-depth observation and the fourth, is the well known process of “see one, lead one, and teach one.” In each, coaching involves observing, conversation and doing.

Summary

In Part I, I described the research basis for why it is difficult for people to write their tacit knowledge down; 1) that our brains store what we have gained from experience in bits and pieces and then reconfigures those elements when faced with a problem or question, 2) that we create knowledge by finding patterns in our experience, 3) that values and relationships impact our willingness to share our tacit knowledge with others and their willingness to trust that knowledge. 

In Part II, I offered two ways to make use of tacit knowledge, given that it is not effective to ask people to write it down. The first was to call on the tacit knowledge of others when faced with a problem or question and to probe for understanding through an in-depth conversation with them – one in which the resource has the time to understand the context of the asker. The second way was to develop tacit knowledge in others which occurs through 1) providing opportunities for employees to initiate actions and reflect on those actions, and 2) providing opportunities for coaching from experts and more often, and more usefully, from peers. 

 

 

We Know More Than We Can Say: The Paradox of Tacit Knowledge - Part One

“We know more than we can say” is a popular phrase heard at KM conferences and quoted in the many KM blogs. It is quoted to encourage attending to tacit knowledge, rather than exclusively focusing on explicit knowledge.  But those quoting the phrase seldom go beyond referencing it to Polanyi, providing little explanation or reasoning for why, if we know it, we can’t just write it down.  

In this post I want to offer the “why” behind the phrase and give some examples. The answer lies in, 1) how our brains store knowledge, 2) how we create knowledge, and 3) the values and relationships that are interlinked with tacit knowledge.  

How Our Brains Store Knowledge

What we learn from experience is stored, not in the form of answers, but in bits and pieces of the experience we have accumulated, sometimes over years. What we think of as tacit knowledge is really the human ability to draw on our past experiences to respond to new problems or questions.

When a colleague asks a question, the responder pulls together the bits and pieces from different parts of past experience to construct an answer. The operant word in that sentence is “construct.”  The responder constructs an answer in the moment of responding. Responders do not “know” the response they will give until faced with the need for it. Karl Weick, the well-known organizational theorist, affirms this idea when he says, “How do I know what I think until I hear what I say?”  

Weick describes a situation in a neonatal unit in which the nurse draws on her experience to diagnose that a baby is in a critical situation.

“I took care of a 900-gram baby who was about 26 or 27 weeks…who had been doing well for about two weeks. He had an open ductus that day. The difference between the way he looked at 9 a.m. and the way he looked at 11 a.m. was very dramatic. I was at that point really concerned about what was going to happen next. There are a lot of complications of the patent ductus, not just in itself, but the fact that it causes a lot of other things. I was really concerned that the baby was starting to show symptoms of all of them.

You look at this kid because you know this kid, and you know what he looked like two hours ago. It is a dramatic difference to you, but it’s hard to describe that to someone in words. You go to the resident and say: “Look, I’m really worried about X, Y, Z,” and they go: “OK.” Then you wait one half hour to 40 minutes, then you go to the Fellow (the teaching physician supervising the resident) and say: “You know, I am really worried about X, Y, Z.” They say: “We’ll talk about it on rounds.” 

When asked about the meaning of  “X, Y, Z,” the nurse begins to describe the items she noticed and finally gives up because she feels it is not possible to identify all the individual symptoms that she drew on.

The fact that the kid is more lethargic, paler, his stomach is bigger, that he is not tolerating his feedings, that his chem strip (blood test) might be a little strange. All these kinds of things. I can’t remember the exact details of this case; there are clusters of things that go wrong. The baby’s urine output goes down. They sound like they are in failure. This kind of stuff. Their pulses go bad, their blood pressure changes. There are a million things that go on. At this time, I had been in the unit a couple or three years.

Her last sentence is significant, indicating as it does, that she has three years of experience dealing with premature babies to draw on to reach her conclusion.  In this interview she is being asked, in effect, to make her tacit knowledge explicit for the interviewer and her giving up on that effort illustrates the difficulty in “just writing it down” or in this situation, even being able to say it fully.

The nurse was able to diagnose what was happening to the baby, but was  unable to convince the physicians she spoke with that there was a problem. She explains,

I talked to a nurse who had more experience and I said, “Look at this kid,” and I told her my story, and she goes: “OK.” Rounds started shortly after that and she walks up to the Attending [Physician in charge of patient] very quietly, sidles up and says: “You know, this kid, Jane is really worried about this kid.” She told him the story, and said: “He reminds me about this kid, Jimmie, we had three weeks ago,” and he said: “Oh.” Everything stops. He gets out the stethoscope and listens to the kid, examines the kid and he says: “Call the surgeons.”

Another researcher who has studied the sharing of tacit knowledge is Dorothy Leonard, who wrote Deep Smarts.  She says, “…Deep smarts are based on first-hand life experiences, providing insights drawn from the tacit knowledge that has built up over time.  Deep smarts are as close as we get to wisdom about managing. There is no way to transfer this wisdom, all the packets of knowledge, all the lightening-fast associations, all the rich details that a single word or phrase calls up from the long-term memory in the brain of a person with deep smarts. Rather, wisdom must be re-created.” 

She tells the story of Dr. Eleanor Mobilia, a leading expert in fitting specialty contact lenses for people with cornea diseases. Dr Mobilia died before she had fully trained a protégé to take over her practice.  “Dr. Eleanor Mobilia’s career spanned 50 years. She had conducted decades of research on contact lenses and had fitted thousands of patients.  [Her] protégé, Dr. Janet Rand, reflected on the difficulties of re-creating Dr. Mobilia’s deep smarts:

There are a lot of different scenarios for the shape of the cornea due to how the eye heals. They are like snowflakes. Everyone heals differently, so it’s a very inexact science. Dr. Mobilia had fitted thousand of eyes of each shape and she knew the type of lenses that would best be tolerated. I'm sure she had a plan for how to fit patients with really irregular corneal transplants. But most of her knowledge there was lost.  After she passed away, I had a transplant patient with an eye that was so flat lenses would just fall off. Nothing I tried worked. I'm sure Dr. Mobilia knew by looking at some patients, this is impossible, and not even try fitting them until they had further surgery.”

This story illustrates that even when an effort is made to transfer tacit knowledge from one skilled practitioner to another, even working side by side, only portions of that knowledge is actually transferred.

Another researcher is Julian Orr, who in the early 1990’s studied how copy repair technicians went about their work of diagnosing and solving the problems of the machines they were trying to repair. He conducted an amazingly detailed study of the use of tacit knowledge.  He explains that the repair technicians, in a given geographic area, often met at the same restaurant for lunch. Orr describes a meeting where Alice, who has a problem she wants some help with, shows up for lunch. She has no faith in the diagnostics that are in the manual about this problem. The diagnostics tell her to change the board, but she has changed the board numerous times and has come to believe there is a deeper problem, which is causing all these boards to fail, and she knows that the diagnostics do not consider that possibility.

Alice brings with her copies of a log from the machine that is troubling her in the hopes that others will get interested in the puzzle. Most of the conversation over lunch is between she and Fred. Fred says he can’t go with her [to look at the machine] but begins to tell her how he would approach the problem. … Fred starts to tell her about running the noise test, and then says she probably cannot do it if the machine will not run at all. … He tells her about testing the communication lines …  after she checks the communication lines, [he explains] she should follow the procedures the book specifies for that error code. Another technician asks Fred if the manual specifies testing the communication lines the way Fred has just described; the book only says to check them but Fred prefers more rigorous testing. [Alice] knows his suggestions are based on experience, that they are things he has found to do to shortcut the diagnostic procedures.” 

It is in these luncheon meetings that tacit knowledge is shared. Fred’s response to Alice goes far beyond what can be written in any manual. The exchange arises out of a real problem Alice is confronting and Fred is drawing on his tacit knowledge to address that specific problem. But, as he is explaining Alice is listening not only to his solution but also to how he thinks about solving such problems. In this way Alice is building her own tacit knowledge.

Orr explains that the luncheon meetings of copy repair technicians, are not recognized by the corporation. The corporate view is that knowledge and skill are a matter of individual competence, which is gained by attending training, reading journals, and/or listening to lectures.  The technicians, however, know that training is only the beginning of developing knowledge. The deep knowledge they need is developed through experience that happens while doing the work, so they willingly use their lunch hour to tap into the tacit knowledge of their more experienced colleagues.

Creating Knowledge

In each of the stories, what the experienced practitioners are doing is finding patterns in their past experience that fit the current situation. A physician, software engineer, or policeman encounters many different situations, perhaps 15-20 times a day. And over months and years they begin to “pattern recognize,” that is, to step back and think to themselves, “I’ve seen this situation before and usually this is what is going on.” Leonard puts it this way.  “Armed with this broad-based knowledge, the expert becomes increasingly aware of, and sensitive to, meaningful patterns in a sea of information.”

In his book, Sources of Power, Gary Klein recounts this incident of a fireman recognizing a pattern:

It is a simple house fire in a one story house in a residential neighborhood. The fire is in the back, in the kitchen area. The lieutenant leads his hose crew into the building, to the back, to spray water on the fire, but the fire just roars back at them. “Odd,” he thinks. “The water should have more of an impact.” They try dousing it again, and get the same results. They retreat a few steps to regroup. Then the lieutenant starts to feel as if something is not right. He doesn’t have any clues; he just doesn’t feel right about being in that house, so he orders his men out of the building…  As soon as his men leave the building, the floor where they had been standing collapses.  Had they still been inside, they would have plunged into the fire below.

It was only after persistent questioning during an interview, that the Lieutenant is able to name the pattern that led him to the decision that saved the lives of his men. Like the nurse in the neonatal unit, his explanation is offered as only a part of the pattern he detected;  “For example, the room was hotter than he would have expected from a small fire, and the fire was very quiet. He unconsciously deduced that there must be an unsuspected basement beneath the living room, and that was where the main fire was; he then “intuited” that his men were in danger.”

The story of the nurse in the neonatal unit illustrates the difficulty of transferring the recognition of a pattern to another. Jane tried twice to explain to physicians in the area that the baby was in trouble, and each time was summarily dismissed. It was only when the more experienced nurse related Jane’s concern to a physician who was just starting rounds. That physician took the time to see the pattern for himself. The tacit knowledge of the more experienced nurse was seen as more credible, which leads to the third element, values and relationships.

Values and Relationships

Constructing knowledge from past experiences is hard work as we saw with Fred, who first thinks of the noise test as a solution to Alice’s problem and then, realizing that won’t work, tackles the problem from a different angle, the communication lines. Sharing tacit knowledge is not about the source recalling the answer, rather it is about the source constructing an answer.  How hard the source is willing to work to construct an answer has to do with the relationship the asker has with that responder.  In Fred’s situation, he has some interest in Alice’s development as a technician because she is a member of his team and there is a norm that the more experienced Techs help bring the newer people along.  In order for responders to be willing to put in time and energy they need to view the asker as, 1) someone who values their information, 2) knows enough to be able to use it, and 3) that the problem being presented is worth their time and effort.    

I was studying knowledge transfer at Erickson in Sweden. As I interviewed technicians I kept hearing Hans’ name come up as the person to go to if a technician had a question about the computer language C++. Finally I checked with someone, “So Hans must be the resident expert on C++?” and was quickly told, “Oh no, the resident expert is Joachim, but he’s not very good at explaining. Now Hans, he can really help you understand how C++ works with our switches.”

Later when I interviewed Hans I told him that I kept hearing his name as the person a technician should seek out if they want to understand C++. I asked him how he got that reputation. Modestly, he said, “Well, I’m not sure how I got the reputation, but I’ll tell you how I try to help people who come to me with a question. Is that what you want to know?” I agreed it was what I was after. So he explained, “When a technician comes to my office he usually starts by explaining what he wants to know about. But before I try to answer his question, I ask a few questions to see how much he already knows about C++. Then I ask a few more questions to find out what he’s planning to do with the information. By that time I’ve formulated an idea about where to start and what I need to say. And we just go from there, talking back and forth.”

During this same study, I heard a number of inexperienced software engineers complaining about Joachim. The complaint was that Joachim ignored their questions or was rude when they tried to ask them.  When I asked others about this, I got a chuckle in response, “We save Joachim for the really tough problems, the ones no one else can figure out.  If he answered all the newbies questions he wouldn’t have time for the work only he can do.”  This quite sensible response, illustrates the need for the responder to believe that the person asking the question knows enough to be able to take in the answer. Clearly, from Joachim’s perspective, inexperienced software engineers did not.

What Hans was doing is also what a skilled medical diagnostician does, that is, try to fully understand the context before answering the presenting question, and that takes time.

The knowledge we learn from experience is very personal. In a study  conducted by Constant, Kiesler, and Sproull they found that employees considered any product (including documentation) they had produced for their organization to be the property of the organization and therefore should be freely offered to others. However, the knowledge they gained through experience, they considered their own property and although they were willing to share it, they did so only when they felt that the asker was interested and would do something with it. They explain.

“One major distinction people seem to make is between tangible information such as written document or a computer program, and intangible information embodied as human memory, knowledge, experience, or skill such as ability to type, ride horses, or fix a software bug. ...People do not view expertise as simply a commodity but … view it as part of themselves. Hence, expertise more directly reflects on their identity and self worth.”

This study helps us understand why relationships and values are so important in the transfer of tacit knowledge. It what I know if part of my identity and self worth, I would be careful about how and with whom I shared it. It speaks to Block's counsel, "Connection before content."

Summary

To summarize the answer to the my question, "why can’t we just write it down?"

• It is possible to write down the answer that a responder provides to a specific question or problem, as we often see in communities of practice. So in a sense the responder has written down his or her tacit knowledge, but the answer is in response to a specific situation. If the responder were to be asked a question with a slightly different context, the answer would be different. In fact if the responder were to be asked the same question a week later, it is very likely that the answer would be different because the experience of the responder has grown and therefore the responder has new bits and pieces to draw upon. 
• To ask someone to write, record, or otherwise document their tacit knowledge is like asking them to respond to all imaginable questions or problems about their area of expertise. And given that new problems and technology are constantly arising – the task is clearly not possible.  
• Moreover, responders may have little confidence that what they write will ever be read or if read that the reader will have sufficient understanding to make use of it.  

Given this understanding, in Part Two, I will lay out several ways that it is possible for an organization to make use of tacit knowledge - ways that reflect the nature of tacit knowledge that I have outlined here. 

Collective Sensemaking: How One Organization uses the Oscillation Principle

Kessels and Smit (K&S) is a consulting firm that makes use of Collective Sensemaking to continually learn how to be more effective as a company, serve their clients better, help and support each other, and find and engage in interesting client projects.    

K&S is based in the Netherlands with sister organizations in four other countries, Belgium, South Africa, India, and Germany. Some 90 consultants work with client organizations on strategy, change, workplace learning, leadership, and development.  The consultants work on client projects in small ad hoc groups formed around topics of joint interest, for example, knowledge productivity or sustainable
business. Each group or individual sets their own fee structure with their clients and pays a percentage of that fee into K&S for common needs such as joint office space, equipment, invoicing, and marketing. Consultants work across a variety of industries, government, corporations, healthcare, and non-profits. Some consultants work at the K&S office, some at client sites, some out of a home office, and most, use a combination of all three.  

K&S was founded in 1996 by two education scientists, Joseph Kessels and Cora Smit, who after earning their PhDs, worked for several years for a small company that produced teaching materials for schools and businesses. They found they did not like working for an organization that directed how they should do their work, or
even what they should be interested in working on. They founded K&S on the simple principle that a hierarchical environment is not challenging for knowledge workers and the necessary related principle of self-responsibility. Given those principles, after 15 years there are still no managers at K&S, nor hierarchy or job descriptions.

K&S is managed by Collective Sensemaking. Every six weeks the 50 K&S consultants in the Netherlands come together for a “K&S day.” K&S Days are a day of conversation held in several configurations, as a whole, in small groups, and in one-to-one meetings. The day provides time for necessary coordination and joint decision-making but also for sharing client work, exchanging professional development ideas, and working on projects.  The sister organizations in other countries hold similar K&S days.

In addition to the K&S days, once a year the full organization that includes the international branches, meets for “Working Days.”  These are 3 days of conversation to explore how K&S is working as an organization, to have conversations about where each member is in relation to the whole, and to think through what role each might want to play in the future. It is an opportunity to build new relationships and to renew old ones. Out of this collective sensemaking new projects and new insights about current work emerge. The consultants apply their collective thinking to the challenges that K&S, as an organization, is facing, for example, how to bring on new consultants who do not yet have clients or how to deal with the financial downturn that has impacted all consulting firms.

During the year round tables meet around issues such as finance, “care for people” and adhoc issues. A Consultant volunteers to be responsible for each round table which meet on an as needed basis. Anyone that has an interest can join a round table meeting. Round tables are a way for consultants to help take care of the company.

K&S is a vision driven organization with the basic theme being, how to arrange work more intelligently and humanely. Their goal is to build companies that grow from people first – starting with K&S itself.  They call themselves the “Learning Company” because it is learning that is at the center of all of their work. They say, “Without learning there is no growth, no improvement, no innovation.”  K&S has a reputation in Europe for excellence that they maintain by staying at the leading edge of research and practice about learning. To maintain that leading edge they need to be deliberate about reflecting together to learn from innovations they create with client organizations and about setting aside time to learn with and from each other.

 

Study

In my own work I have been exploring Collective Sensemaking both through the research literature and by learning from organizations that currently oscillate between virtual work and Collective Sensemaking. I have interacted with K&S for over ten years, working with their clients and offering the K&S consultants my own growing insights about knowledge management.  Knowing from my interaction with them that they practiced Collective Sensemaking, I wanted to study K&S in a more formal way. To do so, I conducted twelve, hour-long interviews with consultants during a two-week visit to K&S headquarters in Utrecht, Netherlands. I also had the opportunity to interact informally with the consultants and to observe them in their interactions with each other. The objectives of the study were to learn about, 1) how they use Collective Sensemaking to address organizational issues, 2) the oscillation between client work and Collective Sensemaking, 3) the culture that supports Collective Sensemaking, and 4) the extent to which the principles of Collective Sensemaking that I had gleaned from the literature were present in their interactions. Those principles include:

• Connection before content (Block)
• Learn in small groups integrate in the large group (Weisbord)
• Setting aside time for joint reflection
• Circles connect
• We learn when we talk (Johnson & Johnson)
• Intentionally explore differences (Weisbord)
• Insure cognitive diversity (Page)
• Create a culture of psychological safety (Edmondson)
• Design shared experiences (Weick)

Structure and Purpose of K&S Days

The interviewees described a typical K&S Day as starting with everyone in a circle and doing a “go-around” where each person shares how they are doing at a personal level. Some interviewees referenced this time as “sharing and caring”. Examples of the topics are, celebrating a new book written by a member, the kids coming for a visit, an exciting new project, sadness over a death or illness, and up coming marriages.

After the opening circle the group turns to a topic related to how the company is doing as whole. These topics range from financial issues to up-coming conferences. A day or two before each meeting an email goes out to everyone to ask what topics need to be discussed. At the meeting there are usually three or four topics and each person chooses which small group to meet with.  Each group then reports back to the full group on what they discussed, which sometimes then generates a larger group discussion.

During the day there is often a discussion of a new learning theory, professional development opportunities, or interesting research that a consultant has come across or been engaged in.  There is also time set aside for consultants to work with each other on their projects, or to just meet one-to-one, e.g. “I need a half hour to talk with you.”  The day ends with a closing circle.

 

Consultant’s View of the Purpose of K&S Days

I asked each interviewee what they saw as the purpose of the K&S Days. Although several themes emerged, the most consistent response was that the purpose was to connect. Esther explains, “Most important is just to stay connected with each other, and know what the other is doing. We are an organization. We want to stay connected with each other, and to the whole.”

Another theme was the focus on how the whole is functioning, e.g. what needs to change and what is working well, coordination, joint decision making. Marloes said, “The purpose for me is keeping the internal relationships healthy and sane - constantly checking are we thinking about the same things. How are we dealing and doing with each other. For others it might be more about content.”

A third theme was learning what others are doing in their work. Paul explains, “The purpose is to connect and learn from each other and develop a common purpose – to feel a part of something of value that is part of ourselves.”

As the quotes illustrate, the consultants valued being connected to each other and they recognized that relationships need attention if they are to stay healthy. The meetings provide time to rejuvenate and repair the relationships between members and between each member and the whole. K&S days serve to affirm for members that they are part of an organization whose principles they value - a part of something that is larger than self.   

 

Psychological Safety

For consultants to learn during the K&S Days, a culture has to exist that Edmondson labels “psychologically safe”, that is, “team members have a sense of confidence that the team will not embarrass, reject, or punish members for speaking up.”  When members feel psychologically safe they are able to engage in behaviors that are necessary for any group to learn and change. Edmondson identifies those behaviors as, seeking feedback from each other, customers, and other parts of the organization; sharing information; asking for help; talking about errors or problems; challenging the interpretation of others, experimenting to gain insight; and reflecting together. 

In the interview data I saw many examples that indicated that the consultants felt psychologically safe. Andres, a relatively new member of K&S, exemplified psychological safety as he explained a time when he bought up a difficult subject at a K&S Day.

“I don’t live in the Netherlands but I wanted to work with K&S so I thought the way to do it would be to build a new branch of K&S in my own country, as others had done. The other consultants supported this idea. So for about a year I struggled to establish a new branch of K&S. Some of my Dutch colleagues invited me into their projects and I invited some of them into my projects. During that time I got interested in building a wilderness project. The wilderness project really began to shape up and I became very passionate about it.  I found I was spending more and more time on the wilderness project and less and less time on building a K&S branch.

At one of the K&S Working Days I brought up the subject of my building a branch in my country.  I explained to the group how much I valued being a part of K&S and working with my Dutch colleagues on projects, yet I was finding I didn’t have much passion for building an organization in my country, even though that was the task I had chosen to take on. I wanted to stay connected to the larger K&S organization but I was finding my role as an independent consultant, especially working on the wilderness project, more satisfying than the work of organizing a branch. I saw that one way I could function was as a member of the Netherlands group, but who worked in another country, and who contributed my fair share to the whole. But that did not feel right to me either, because I found that living in another country I did not benefit from any of the services my contribution supported, for example, the use of the office, computers, and administrative help, which were primarily in the Netherlands.

Others listened to me with interest, asking a few questions and responding empathetically. One colleague, who was trying to be helpful, suggested that maybe K&S needed to make a new rule about how much independents, working with K&S in another country, should contribute to the core. There was silence for a few moments when another colleague said, ‘Well, maybe what we need is to have more conversation about it so that we can think about different configurations that would allow people we value to join us in a new way, one that would benefit us all.’ I felt very positive about her response and that we would be able to invent a new arrangement. And we have now had several conversations about what that might look like.

It took courage for Andres to raise this issue with the group. But the K&S consultants have learned that raising difficult issues is necessary if they are going to function without managers – raising difficult issues is a part of self-responsibility. As I listened to Andres’ tell his story, I could not help but contrast the group’s response to what I would expect to hear in a hierarchical organization. There, I imagined, Andres would most likely have only talked to his manager about his situation. The manager would have heard his concern and then probably conferred with his manager to make a decision.  Other colleagues, who valued Andres, would have only been told that he was leaving the company or moving to another position. They would not have had a voice or an opportunity to find a way to accommodate both Andres’ interests and their own.

Over the years, K&S has developed a trust in collective sensemaking. They have found that if they think together they can create something quite new that no one person could have generated on their own. So during K&S Days consultants voice their concerns, with confidence that others will help them figure out a viable solution for all. 

 

A Changeable Structure

K&S considers itself a laboratory for learning how people can work together in ways that support individual growth and development while, producing productive outcomes for their clients. The K&S organizational structure is not viewed as fixed, rather there is a recognition that it should and will continually change. Consultants hold the view that here is not one right structure, in part because they see themselves as an on-going experiment in organizing.  Paul notes, “We combine oscillation with virtual work but we keep experimenting with how to connect and how to meet.” He continues,  “If you find a structure that has been working, then it is not owned by the people because new people have joined and they did not create it.”

 An interviewee described a recent change in structure that was prompted by a change Saskia, one of the more influential consultants at K&S, wanted to make for her own development. The interviewee explains, “Saskia wanted to experience a managerial role in an organization and she also wanted to make space for some of the younger consultants to exert more influence. At one of the Working Days, she and Paul talked with several of the younger consultants about what role they wanted to take on in the company. Five people stepped up to say they wanted to take a larger role. So Saskia took a step back to be employed for 3 days a week with an education company.  So she does not attend the K&S days now.  The five, we affectionately call them the ‘hijackers’, took up the invitation and now one of the things they are doing is to design the K&S days in a new way.” 

In the interview with Pieterjan, one of the hijackers, described the same experience from his perspective, “In the last working session a small group of us walked with Saskia on the beach. We talked about  what are next steps for you? How do you want to serve the company? The beach, the sea, it was relaxed. It was a very important moment for me to think through what I wanted for myself and for the company.”

What seemed most important to the consultants I interviewed were the K&S principles the organization was founded on, which in their view, could support a number of different structures. Esther says, “Every 6-7 years we need a new structure or formation. The economy is changing and we need to change as well.”  Joeri echoes that, “We need to reinvent ourselves and we are going to do that together.”

 

Confidence and Trust in Each Other

Members trust other members of K&S to do what is right for the whole. They recognize that not everyone can be involved in every discussion or plan. For example, the group of members who wanted to take on the task of designing the K&S days for the next year first talked with other members on a one-to-one basis about the ideas they had. The reaction of others was supportive of their taking this role on.   Barbara notes, “You give your trust that they will organize it well. I have the confidence that they will work it out and design it together.”  Marloes provides another example that trust,  “When I was first here and a new person joined K&S, who I did not feel connected to, I struggled to understand if that was okay. But now, when a new person joins I know I can trust the competence of my colleagues - that they have chosen the person for good reasons. I can trust that decision.”  The K&S days often take the format of a focus issue raised at the beginning of the meeting and then small groups hold discussions about related sub-questions. Erik gives this example of trusting the other small groups,  “People have freedom to choose to work on the questions that are most attractive to them. We trust that others are capable of working on the other issues. With 50 people we are too large to have this kind of discussion with everyone. Confidence in others grows out of the connection.” 

Tension Between Independence and Responsibility

Interviewees mentioned a tension, inherent in the way they work, between the need to focus on their own clients and interests and feeling responsible for the whole – the tension of autonomy vs. responsibility.

Several interviewees noted that there were tasks that benefit everyone which required attention, for example, making sure new people were integrated into the organization, writing a blog for the website, coaching interns, planning conferences. Arne noted, “We give each other space to do what we are interested in. But the other side of the coin is that sometimes we really need people do things for the company. There are consultants at K&S who volunteer to take on these tasks for the whole. He goes on to explain,  “We have a value that urges no hierarchy; everyone is equal. On the other hand someone has to take the initiative to be responsible [for these tasks].  The philosophical question is, can we be a community of everyone based on choice of own interest?”  Paul explains, “It is about ownership and separation – the issue is autonomy and community. We try to maximize both rather than balance them at the same time. It is a tension. But a tension field is also a kind of energy.”

Johnson and Johnson, researchers who have been studying cooperation vs competition for 40 years, use the term “positive interdependence” to explain the tension K&S members describe. They acknowledge the tension that exists in positive interdependence and explain that sustaining it over time cannot be left to chance. They specify five elements that must be present to support positive interdependence in groups:

1. Clearly perceived positive interdependence, that is, recognition they will not succeed unless their colleagues do
2. Considerable promotive (face-to-face) interaction, defined as individuals encouraging and facilitating each other's efforts to achieve, complete tasks, and produce in order to reach the group's goals.
3. Clearly perceived individual accountability and personal responsibility to achieve the group’s goals
4. Frequent use of the relevant interpersonal and small-group skills
5. Frequent and regular group processing of current functioning to improve the group’s future effectiveness

These five elements are visible in the interaction between K&S consultants and in the processes they have established, such as K&S days, Working Days, Apple Trees, and round tables. With out the regular occurrence of Collective Sensemaking the benefit of positive interdependence would not be achieved.  

 

Personal Relationships 

Members of K&S talk about the idea of “mutual attractiveness,” meaning that they value working with people whom they like. Arne explains, “I only want to cooperate with people whom I find interesting and who like to work with me too. The starting point for healthy working relationships is ‘mutual attractiveness’. We work together because we can add something to the job and to each other, not because hierarchy forces us to. However, this also means making a constant effort to be an attractive colleague. And I don’t believe any regulation or structure can incorporate or replace this effort.”

The way new consultants join K&S illustrates one of the ways the organization applies “mutual attractiveness”.  An invitation to join K&S comes from an existing member who sees something unique or valuable in someone they have met. The existing member invites several other consultants to have a conversation with the potential colleague, perhaps several conversations over time. When others are positive that this is a person they would enjoy working with, a contract is signed.

The contract is between the new person and 2 or 3 consultants who form an “Apple tree”.  As one interviewee explained, “An apple tree is a tool to express mutual commitment and to guarantee that adequate people within the network will give effort to and take care of a colleague. One is connected to ‘everyone’ through the people in one’s apple tree. This way, the care for colleagues has a face and the ‘bystanders syndrome’ (which means: everyone sees that someone is about to get in trouble, but no-one acts upon it) is prevented.” The term “Apple tree” comes from the early history of K&S when meetings were held under an apple tree in the garden of Joseph Kessels, one of the founders.  All K&S consultants belong to an Apple tree, not just new people. Apple trees form and reform over time as consultants’ interests change and grow.

K&S consultants are deliberate about building time and structures to facilitate relationships. In addition to the hiring practice, time is set-aside at both K&S days and Working Days to strengthen relationships. Arne describes Working Days, “Because relationships are so important to the way we work, the first evening is quite crucial.  It is time to have a beer and meet with others. You can focus on the tension in relations that you’ve not had time to deal with, maybe because something happened in the last month. Without it being explicit we are strengthening and sometimes repairing relationships.”  

Creating Shared Experiences

Weick advocates the need for shared experience, if shared meaning is to be created.  Interviewees mentioned a number of shared experiences.  One that was frequently mentioned was the “talk show.” In the Netherlands there is a popular television talk show and the “hijackers” designed the first K&S day of the year based on that show.  They designed it as a way to raise some difficult issues that K&S was facing. One in particular was that several valued consultants had recently left K&S, leaving a question in the minds of many members about what their leaving meant for the company.

Joeri describes the event, “We had a talk show that was a totally different way to have a meeting because normally we are in circle for 10-35 minutes and then split into small groups to talk about the issues that have been raised. But for the talk show we had an hour and a half. There were several themes, they were topics we needed to address as a company and also the things that are not normally said. For example, one topic was ‘should I stay or go’. Each theme had 1 or 2 hosts who were quite sharp and let you say what was really on your mind. For each topic there were different colleagues invited to sit at the table with the hosts to give their opinion.  It was very fast paced with ‘guests’ coming and going and sometimes being cut off by the host to turn to another guest. It was high speed almost like a machine gun. Guests said that, 'some things might need to change;' 'that we needed to do some things differently;' 'that we needed to reinvent ourselves.' And there was new energy that we are going to do that together. In between guests my task was to sing and Pieterjan played the guitar.  At the end someone summarized the conversations in a very insightful poem.  The talk show was really an important moment that enabled us to deal with this difficult topic in a sort of fun way. 

This shared experiences was referenced in the conversations between K&S consultants as they work together on issues. Remember when we…” evokes both a shared understanding and a shared emotion within the group. As Pieterjan noted, “The future is richer if you have a history together.”   The consultants at K&S seemed aware that creating shared experiences are critical for creating shared meaning.

Conclusions

1) How K&S uses Collective Sensemaking to Address Organizational Issues.

Given the absence of managers in K&S, governance occurs through Collective Sensemaking during K&S and Working Days. It is primarily complex or difficult issues that are addressed by the collective. Simpler issues, such as a way to conduct a new practice or inviting a colleague into a project, are dealt with between K&S Days through meetings of project teams, round tables or one-to-one meetings. 

Because of the trust consultants have developed in their colleagues to make decisions that benefit the company, consultants do not feel a need to be involved in every issue.  However, this efficiency only seems possible because the consultants carefully and continuously attend to the relationships that are central to that trust and perhaps because they frequently design shared experiences that produce shared meaning.

2) The Oscillation Between Client Work and Collective Sensemaking

The oscillation between client work and Collective Sensemaking is on a regular and scheduled basis rather than being on an “as needed basis.”  The regularity assures consultants that when an issue arises they know there is an upcoming K&S day where that issue can be aired. These regular forums appear to serve two major goals, to address the company’s complex issues and to maintain consultants’ relationships. 

Relationships decay over time (Burt) so the interval between K&S days is critical. As the interviews reveal, consultants have a clear understanding that they need to take care of the relationships they have with other consultants. After 8-9 weeks some consultants begin to feel out of touch with the whole and with each other. However, that concern is offset by the cost of taking a day for collective sensemaking, which is not trivial for the consultants. It means the loss of a day of consulting fees and for Working Days, the loss of three days plus their travel expenses.   For most, the interval of eight weeks seemed about right.

The research of Maznevski & Chudoba work agrees with that frequency. They explain that the necessary interval between face-to-face meetings is dependent on three factors:

1)    the interdependence in the tasks the group engages in, 

2)    the complexity of their organizational issues,

3)    the level of complexity resulting from geography, culture, or organizational  hierarchy.

For K&S consultants in the Netherlands office, the complexity of organizational issues is high because of the governance role that the collective takes on. However, issues of geography, culture, and levels of hierarchy are relatively insignificant. Task interdependence is also minimal since tasks are primarily within, not across, project teams.

K&S Days are not the only opportunity to maintain relationships. Some consultants frequently drop by the office to work there, hold client meetings, or project team meetings, all of which provide the opportunity to engage with other consultants. The first floor of the office is an open café with tables and easy access to seating areas in a garden beyond the French doors. The space itself encourages informal interaction among the consultants.

Finally, consultants take it upon themselves to stay in touch by email and phone. As Paul notes, We know a lot about each other’s lives. I phone a colleague because I want to know how he is doing, not just to get a problem solved or a question answered.

3) Culture that Supports Collective Sensemaking,

In a national sense, The Netherlands is known for its egalitarian culture and the Dutch people pride themselves in cultural diversity and tolerance of difference, all of which supports the culture of openness and lack of hierarchy at K&S.

Organizationally the culture is built around a number of central ideas that have been discussed through out this article and are listed here:

• knowledge workers don’t function well in hierarchical environments
• self responsibility
• mutual attractiveness
• pursuing work that is of interest to one’s self
• taking care of the whole
• taking care of each other
• learning as the center of their work
• K&S as an on-going experiment in how to arrange work more intelligently and humanely

These ideas seem well inculcated in the consultants, or more likely consultants who join K&S do so because they are attracted to this set of ideas.

4) Principles From the Literature That Are Found in K&S Interactions 

There is no literature on Collective Sensemaking per se.  There is, however, useful literature on sensemaking (Weick), group learning (Edmonson, Johnson & Johnson)  and on group processes (Block, Weisbord, Page)

Because many of the K&S consultants have degrees in education science they are aware of the literature and research that underlie the principles of Collective Sensemaking, so it is not surprising that their actions are congruent with these principles.

The interview data provided support for the following principles of Collective Sensemaking:

• K&S and Working Days, as well as the format of those meetings, illustrate several of the principles,
  • Starting the day with “sharing and caring” is in accordance with the collective sensemaking principle of “connection before content – the need to establish or re-establish connections before focusing on company business. 
  • Setting aside time for joint reflection is in evidence by the practice of coming together a full day every six weeks for K&S days and three days each year for Working Days
  • The principle of “we learn when we talk” can be seen in the use of discussion groups that are small enough that everyone has adequate air time to voice their thinking
  • "Learn in small groups, integrate in the large group”  was evident in the discussion format
  • "Circles connect" was visible in the opening and closing of the day’s activities.
  • Design shared experiences was illustrated by memorable events like the Talk Show
  • Psychological Safety was evident both by the way the group handled Andres’ concern as well as the design of the Talk Show that intentionally raised difficult issues; as was intentionally explore differences (Gilmore)(

Several additional elements that facilitate Collective Sensemaking at K&S emerged from the interviews   

• Members have input into the agenda – a few days before the meeting consultants are solicited for items that need to be on the agenda.       
• Encouraging and taking care of each other - what Johnson and Johnson called promotive interaction. From the interviews it is clear that it is not only the meeting designers, but all of the consultants that are aware of and active in taking care of each other. The Apple Trees are a visible manifestation of this element but it was equally evident the comments about needing to stay connected.
• The need for a clear agreed upon structure to function within and the recognition that any structure is temporary, open to continuous change and experimentation 

(Note: This is the first of several articiles I will publish about how organizations use Collective Sensemaking and the Oscillation Principle.  If you have managed to read to the end of this very long blog post, I assume you must be interested in the topic. And my hope is that you might know of other organizations (your own or others) who employ many of these same principles. If so, please let me know about them. I am interested in studying
other examples.) 

 

 

Creating a Culture in Which Teams and Workgroups Can Engage in Collective Sensemaking

For teams or workgroups to be effective and competitive they must, 1) understand their customers’ requirements and the frequent changes to those requirements, 2) take action
and be fully cognizant of the consequences of those actions, both intended and unintended, 3) detect changes both in the internal and external environment, and 4) develop their collective understanding of the complexities these many factors create.

(In the rest of this paper I will use the term “team”, to refer to both workgroups and teams.)

To accomplish those tasks team members need to engage in a number of learning behaviors, for example, seeking feedback from each other, customers, and other parts of the
organization; sharing information with each other; asking each other for help; talking about errors or problems; challenging the interpretation of others, experimenting to gain insight; and reflecting together.

However, many of those learning behaviors are perceived by team members as risky. For example, members may fear that admitting an error will make them appear incompetent to others, likewise, asking for help. They may be concerned that if people in positions of power notice such actions it could reduce their chances for promotion or job assignments. Individuals who offer opinions that differ from the rest of the team risk being seen as “not a team player” or worse, as being obstructive. At a minimum the individual risks damaging his or her own self-image. Teams may choose not to risk conducting experiments that would gain them insight or trying out new processes that could potentially improve their performance, fearing that they would be blamed for failures. Argyris (1982) has shown that when team members perceive the possibility of embarrassment or threat, they act in ways that inhibit the team from learning; in short they remain silent or resort to meaningless generalities rather than risk negative consequences.

To overcome the reluctance to speak up, team members need to feel “psychologically safe,” a term Amy Edmondson (1999) applies when team members have a sense of confidence that the team will not embarrass, reject, or punish members for speaking up. Psychological safety is a shared belief, held at the team level, that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking. For the most part, this belief is tacit, that is, “taken for granted and not given direct attention by either individuals or by the team as a whole.”

Psychological safety is, however, not the same as group cohesiveness, which, as Janis’ (1982) research has shown, can reduce the willingness to disagree with others’ views – the phenomenon labeled “groupthink.” Nor is psychological safety a matter of team members getting along well together or having no conflict. In fact, psychological safety makes it possible for conflicts to be openly raised and discussed. Edmondson notes that psychological safety is the “presence of a blend of trust, respect for each other's competence, and caring about each other as people.”

If as Edmondson, Argyris, Janis, and others point out, talking about the need for members to trust each other or the leader will not engender psychological safety, how then can psychological safety be achieved in a team?

Edmondson Study
Edmondson conducted a study in 2002 that provides hope that psychological safety can be achieved without lengthy training, special facilitation, or a large-scale change effort. The study was conducted within a large organization where Edmondson held extensive interviews and observations with twelve teams, who were spread across a variety of team types and varying levels. Remarkably, Edmondson found that within the same organization some teams were able to engage in learning behaviors while other teams were not. The findings from this in-depth study indicate that:
• The learning process itself occurs at the team level and is focused on a bounded task(s) or opportunity (e.g. development of a product, strategic planning, delivery of service) and occurs through reflective conversations within the group.
• Culture is localized. It is not the culture of the organization that encourages or discourages the learning behaviors needed for effective reflection on complex issues, it is the culture developed within each specific team.
• “When the group’s belief is that the team is not psychologically safe, individual team members are unwilling to actively and honestly contribute their ideas, evaluations, or suggestions. As a result groups are less able to make sound decisions and implement timely decisions in response to changes in the environment.” (Edmondson 2002)
• Team leadership impacts whether a team is able to develop a sense of psychological safety. In the study, teams that reflected effectively and implemented resulting changes had minimal power differences. The leaders of those teams encouraged input and debate. Where power differences between leader and members were high, little learning occurred.
• Teams at the highest level were as likely to be impacted by power differentials as were frontline teams and were therefore unable to seek feedback from each other, customers, or other parts of the organization; share information among themselves; ask each other for help; talk about errors or problems; challenge each other; experiment to gain insight; or reflect together.

Implications of Edmondson’s Study for Collective Sensemaking
A very hopeful implication of Edmondson’s study is that it is possible to create a culture that supports collective sensemaking within a team or unit, even if other parts of the same organization do not have a compatible culture. This means that it is not necessary to wait on top management support in order for change to occur locally. Nor is it necessary for the whole organization to change in order for any one team to make use of effective learning behaviors.

Another positive implication is that it does not take special skills or facilitation to engage a team in collective sensemaking. The successful teams in this study had no special training or help, yet were able to develop psychological safety within the team.

Power Differential
The study found that the manager/leader role was markedly different in those teams that had less power differential between manager and team members. Thus to develop a culture that supports collective sensemaking may require a role shift for managers from the more traditional “boss” role to one that is coach and convener. Edmondson reports on an interview held with a design consultant who worked with many different teams across the organization. The consultant contrasted the leadership of “Beanstalk,” a team that reflected effectively together and was able to implement resulting changes, with “Radar,” a team that did not reflect together and was unable to make needed changes or course correction. The consultant explains, “’[For Beanstalk] I pick up the phone and call anyone…but for Radar, I have to go through Jan.’ In Beanstalk, any of the members spoke for the team. In Radar, Jan held onto the role of spokesperson. In team meetings, Jan was a ‘boss’ who took on the role of making final decisions. In Beanstalk, Martha was a facilitator who encouraged input and consensus.”

Meeting to Make Sense
Collective sensemaking is the very human action of jointly creating meaning out of the incredible amount of data and input that continuously surrounds an organizational unit or team. Collective sensemaking is a creative act, rather than an act of discovering or uncovering what is already there. The meaning created through collective sensemaking does not exist before the conversation that creates it. In conversation the meaning that is created is continually revised as new data and new patterns in the data emerge.

Teams cannot learn unless they take the time to bring the whole team together to collectively make sense of what is happening. A leader, who prefers to talk with team members one at a time, can not produce this level of learning. Nor does bringing a team together to hear announcements or presentations produce understanding of complex situations. For learning to occur meetings need to be convened in a conversational format where team members address their comments and questions to other team members rather than focusing primarily on the leader.

Learning occurs when team members take action and then meet together to reflect on the intended and unintended consequence of that action. It requires the multiple perspectives of all the team members, each of whom has experienced the consequences in a different way and each of whom interprets the meaning of those consequences differently, in order to provide the rich medium needed for the team to make sense of what happened and what needs to happen next. Weick (1995) notes that “the understanding that results from sensemaking is not a definitive answer, rather it is a configuration that is adequate for the organization to plan and take its next action.”

The Quality of the Conversation
Edmondson’s study indicates that taking the time to reflect together was necessary but not sufficient for members to engage in the risky behavior necessary for learning to occur. Some teams in the study took the time to discuss issues but the discussion was of such a low quality that neither new understanding nor action resulted. As an example, the task of a high level team, labeled “Strategy,” was to create a new business strategy for the organization. Although the team met frequently and held lengthy conversations, during the six months of the study, no plan was developed. Edmondson provides this example of “Strategy’s” dialogue in which, George, a senior manufacturing executive, responds to an earlier metaphor about directing the “ship” of the company by turning the rudder.

George: Listening to Bob talk about the ship, I’d like to explore the difference between the metaphor of the ship and how the rudder gets turned and when, in contrast to a flotilla, where there’s lots of little rudders and we’re trying to orchestrate the flotilla. I think this contrast is important. At one level, we talk about this ship and all the complexities of trying to determine not only its direction but how to operationalize the ship in total to get to a certain place, vs. allowing a certain degree of freedom that the flotilla analogy evokes.

CEO interrupting: There’s a question of doing what you want to do and doing it how you want to do it. But you can’t have people just going off and doing what they want to do. You know, some of them may be playing baseball all day long. But, we have to have some alignment with the corporate directives.”

Reading this dialogue, we can assume that the CEO believes George is advocating an absurd amount of that freedom, yet neither says what he means nor offers concrete suggestions. By speaking abstractly both protect themselves from criticism, and in so doing prevent the group from reaching an understanding that would allow them to move forward. Although this group meets, and even has a spirited dialogue, members do not feel safe enough to say what they mean nor to challenge each other openly. As a result no new knowledge or action is created.

Psychological Safety as a Product of Experience
The power differential is not the only factor that impacts psychological safety. Psychological safety is also a result of the interaction experience members have in the group, both with each other and with the leader. Psychological safety begins to grow when a member of a group admits an error or challenges another and then experiences the response of other team members as curiosity rather than blame. Other team members, witnessing a non-blaming interaction are more likely, perhaps at a later time, to offer an idea of their own. When enough safe interactions have occurred, the group as a whole begins to feel the environment is safe. Edmondson gives an example of a dialogue in Beanstalk that represents how conversation might function when psychological safety exists.

After one member, Angela, described, ‘printer problems with those labels’ and asked, ‘Who can we ask for help?’ another member, Rob, responded, ‘How about asking the vendors who make the labels? They probably know how to fix it.’ And Ken offered to make a phone call – closing the loop. Rob also reported on his use of new, trial equipment for conducting these tests, ‘I used the “color analyzer” [he paused} I know it’s not the right word' and looked to Ken for help. Ken responded supportively, ‘photospectrometer.’ Rob continued, ‘It’s worth the $12,000 because we will save $25,000.’ Ken agreed with Rob’s assessment and promised to follow through on acquiring the machine.

As this dialogue illustrates, although a courageous team member is needed to initiate the dialogue, it is the way others respond that is significant in creating psychological safety.

Silence and Support
The silence of other team members is as discouraging to a member who raises a different opinion or challenge, as is a blaming response. Other team members may agree with a person that speaks up, and after the meeting may even tell the challenger that what he said was right. But the fact that the listener does not chance agreeing during the meeting reinforces the belief that speaking up is too risky.

However, an interesting phenomena identified by Ashe (1952) is that if, during the meeting, even one other person on the team responds in a supportive manner, the member who raised the issue is encouraged to speak up again. Thus team members themselves can begin to alter the culture of a group by supporting each other in meeting settings.

Conversations That Build Relationships
A more deliberate technique to begin to change the culture of the group is structured socialization – time set aside during a meeting for small groups to talk about issues that allow them to learn about each other’s competence and allow them to establish relationships at a deeper level. The issues for discussion should be work related, but also topics that provide the opportunity for each person to disclose values and beliefs. For example:
• “What gives meaning to your work?”
• “Tell a story about the best team you’ve ever been a part of.”
• “Talk about a highlight experience you’ve had in working for this company, a time when you felt you made a real contribution.”

These appreciative topics are best discussed in groups of two or three that are small enough for the listeners to express their positive reception to what is being said. That expression might be verbal, a nod, or a smile - any of which indicates to the speaker that what he is saying is accepted. As mentioned earlier, Edmondson found that psychological trust is the “presence of a blend of trust, respect for each other's competence, and caring about each other as people.” Respect for competence to some extent grows out of daily interaction while working on a project or task, but structured socialization can provide the opportunity to learn about past projects and successes, extending that knowledge in ways that may not occur in daily exchanges. Likewise to build “caring about each other as people” there must be opportunities for team members to reveal aspects of self that are not part of normal workplace discourse and to reveal it in a way that listeners recognize themselves in the telling.

Shared Experience
A final suggestion comes from the work of Karl Weick (1995) who acknowledges that many theorists see shared meaning as a way to produce effective teams. However, Weick suggests that it may not be possible for team members to create shared meaning since any meaning an individual creates is a product of their past experiences, which is necessarily unique to each. He explains, “…so if people share anything, what they share are actions, activities, moments of conversations, and joint tasks, each of which they then make sense of using categories that are more idiosyncratic. ....if people want to share meaning, then they need to talk about their shared experience in close proximity to its occurrence and hammer out a common way to encode it and talk about it.” Some shared experiences naturally occur because of the joint work teams engage in, (for example, "that difficult client we worked for" or "the well we drilled in the North Sea"). He notes that “in those situations the critical element is time to process (reflect) what we learned from the experience. Not everyone will learn the same thing from the same experience but that is not critical, what is critical is that they are able to reference the same event that others recognize. The question always is ‘What does it mean?’”

In situations where the work itself does not provide shared experience it is helpful to design events. An example of a designed shared experience comes from Kaiser Foundation Health plan (KFHP) and Kaiser Foundation Hospitals (KFH). The health care system practices a form of Process Improvement that requires employees from a unit, for example the emergency room, to work together as a team. Alide Chase, Senior Vice President of Quality and Service, explains the joint experience each team has before beginning their Process Improvement training.

Before each new team begins their PI training, they engage in Borrow Forward. A team of 4-5 persons from, for example the neonatal unit, makes a visit to a neonatal unit in another location that has already successfully implemented adaptive design. The visiting team goes in a state of inquiry. Each visiting team member shadows his/her counterpart for 2 to 3 days. Before leaving, the visiting team holds a meeting with those they shadowed to talk with them about the observations and insights they experienced. This is a reflective meeting in which both parties learn. The visiting team articulates their insights (see we learn when we talk) which helps them clarify what they learned for themselves and the host team gains new understanding of their own processes by seeing those processes from a different perspective.

After their return, the visiting team begins their PI training and implementation. They hold weekly meetings to reflect on the actions they have taken and the results achieved. Borrow Forward provides a shared experience from which they derive shared meaning, and provides a lens through which they are able to think about their work.

Summary
For a team to be effective and competitive it must be engaged in learning behaviors that are too often perceived as risky by members of the team. To take that risk, team members need to feel psychologically safe, that is, “have a sense of confidence that the team will not embarrass, reject, or punish members for speaking up.” The actions that help to bring about collective sensemaking are:
• reducing the power differential between leaders and members
• teams taking the time to reflect together on a regular basis about their actions, results, concerns, and innovative new ideas
• members actively providing support for each other in meetings
• holding small group discussions about appreciative topics to build relationships and enhance the knowledge of others’ competence
• engaging in shared experiences that serve as a reference point for meaning.

References
Amy Edmonson, Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, June, 1999

Amy C. Edmondson, The local and Variegated Nature of Learning in Organizations: A Group-Level Perspective, Organization Science, March/April, 2002

Chris Argyris, Reasoning, Learning and Action: Individual and Organizational, San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 1982

Solomon Asch, Social Psychology, New York: Prentice-Hall, 1952

Irving Janis, Groupthink: Psychological Studies of Policy Decisions and Fiascoes 2nd Ed, Cengage Learning, 1982

Karl Weick, Sensemaking in Organizations, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1995

How Knowledge Workers Learn Judgment

In today’s world employees often must deal with tasks and problems that require much more that simply following a predetermined step by step procedure – the problems require the exercise of judgment. Judgment is needed when we are faced with thorny questions about which there are no right or wrong answers. When asked one of those thorny questions we often say, “Well, it’s a matter of judgment.” Soldiers, for example, face many situations in which one correct course in not clear, as in this example from one of the US Army on-line communities, PlatoonLeader.

“We were headed out to a pretty easy mission. My front truck reports that there’s a dead body under a car in the middle of the road. He was on the ground. He had been in his car and he had been shot. At that point, the gunner from my lead truck noticed a double-decker bus that had stopped. And there was a guy up on the top deck who appeared to have a blue video camera, and he was just hanging out the window video-taping us. Our rules of engagement permitted us to engage anybody video-taping an attack. I looked down my sight and noticed the same thing. The gunner looked through binos and noticed the same thing. He asked me, “Hey sir, can I go ahead and shoot him?”

In the above example the Platoon sergeant must figure out if the video-taping implies an ambush or if it is just some guy video taping a strange scene.

Weick provides an example in which a nurse in a neonatal unit must make two judgment calls.

“I took care of a 900-gram baby who was about 26 or 27 weeks many years ago who had been doing well for about two weeks. He had an open ductus that day. The difference between the way he looked at 9 a.m. and the way he looked at 11 a.m. was very dramatic. I was at that point really concerned about what was going to happen next. There are a lot of complications of the patent ductus, not just in itself, but the fact that it causes a lot of other things. I was really concerned that the baby was starting to show symptoms of all of them.”

You look at this kid because you know this kid, and you know what he looked like two hours ago. It is a dramatic difference to you, but it’s hard to describe that to someone in words. You go to the resident and say: “Look, I’m really worried about X, Y, Z,” and they go: “OK.” Then you wait one half hour to 40 minutes, then you go to the Fellow (the teaching physician supervising the resident) and say: “You know, I am really worried about X, Y, Z.” They say: “We’ll talk about it on rounds.”

The nurse faces two situations that require judgment, the first is to recognize that the baby is in trouble and the second is how to convey that information to a physician in a way will cause him to turn his attention to the infant.

Such situations occur more and more frequently, not only in the military and hospitals but in much of the work we think of as knowledge work, everything from an architect thinking about a design for a steeply sloping site, to an intelligence analyst determining whether the troop build up on a border signals a threat, to a manager faced with how to implement a change initiative.

In order to respond to these kinds of situations, employees need more than the skills they learn in training, more than what is provided in a manual of regulations, and even more than what can be picked up through reading the best practice of others. There is no way to anticipate all the possible situations a knowledge worker could face during their daily work, and therefore no way to provide sufficient procedures or directions. Rather knowledge workers need to continuously read the situation in front of them and then, based on that interpretation, determine the appropriate next action to take - in other words, to use their judgment.

In Talking About Machines, Julian Orr describes the lunch meetings that copy repair technicians hold to solve the difficult problems they face fixing copy machines. He notes that much of their talk is telling stories about the machines they have been working on. The stories serve to make sense of diagnoses confronting them, but also to reaffirm what it means to be a “competent” repair technician in terms of work habits, what clothing is worn to a client site, how a repair technician approaches a problem, how one works with colleagues and a host of other values and norms that turns a person into an effective repair technician.

In contrast to these informal lunch meetings, Orr describes the view of the corporation about how repair problems are solved, that is, that problems are solved by using the documentation issued to the repair technicians. “The diagnostic procedures prescribe a series of tests, with each action defined in considerable detail, and each branching condition presented as a simple Yes/No choice. Such documentation is based on the scientific management principle that if instructions are detailed and complete, the organization can hire cheaper employees, with less skill, who can do the job by following the instructions contained in the documentation. However, to the technicians the actual question to which they are asked to respond Yes or No is often extremely convoluted… The technicians are quite philosophical about the shortcomings of the documentation, saying that, ‘the machine is far too complex to anticipate correctly all of the possible failures.’ ... They view the documentation as a useful resource to consult when their own expertise cannot solve the machine’s problem.” But it is in the conversations where they learn to deal with the tricky problems that never show up in the documentation.

The corporate view, as reported by the copy repair technicians, is that knowledge and skill are a matter of individual competence, which is gained by attending training, reading journals, and/or listening to lectures. The underlying assumptions of that view are that, 1) there are individuals with expertise who can provide the knowledge required to be effective, through documents or lecture, and 2) that the required knowledge is relatively stable, it changes little over time.

As more and more of the workforce is populated by knowledge workers our premise about of how people develop the judgment to be effective is changing. The newer view holds that:
1. complex knowledge and skills are distributed across the practitioners who use that skill, with no one individual knowing all that the group knows, and
2. knowledge is continually changing as the group of practitioners learn from the act of practicing their craft. Ideas are not fixed and elements of thought are formed and reformed through experience. Knowledge then is not stable, but is ever changing.

The newer view takes into account the difference between “know what” and “know how.” For example, it is possible, to learn the “know what” of negotiation strategies by reading the books about negotiation. But books cannot make a person a skilled negotiator. To be an effective negotiator, requires “know how” or what I have earlier called judgment.

How then do people learn to make judgments? There are three elements involved in developing judgment:
• The most fundamental element is the individual taking action and observing the results – in other words experience. Experience is gained, not through one occurrence, but over enough occurrences that a pattern begins to emerge across all of the actions taken. This implies the liberty to experiment, to try new things and, of course, to fail. Edmondson calls this “intelligent failures at the frontier.” Judgment cannot be learned in the absence of failure because the breadth of experience would be too narrow. If an organization punishes failure or if employees feel the need to hide failure, there is little opportunity to develop judgment.
• The second element is reflection on those actions and patterns. Reflection requires thinking back on the actions taken, the reasoning behind the choice of action, the context in which the action took place, and the outcomes that resulted from the actions, many of which are unintentional. While experience is inevitable, learning is not. To learn from requires deliberate reflection. Reflection is most effective when it is done in the company of others who are involved in the same kind of work. When we summarize what happened for someone else, we begin to understand it better ourselves. We learn when we talk. Each practitioner functions within a somewhat different context, responding a bit differently. Consequently the learning of each practitioner is unique. When those practitioners reflect together on their actions, “creative abrasion” occurs, which leads to greater understanding in those engaged in the conversation. There are a number of processes to choose from that are both conversational and systematic in nature, for example Action Learning, Knowledge Café, Anecdote circles collective sensemaking, coaching ourselves.
• The third element is associating oneself with a community of practitioners and thereby understanding the work and it’s talk from the inside.” One learns to be an effective nurse, copy repair technician, or soldier by talking with others about their work. Such talk develops not only the necessary understanding of technique, but also of values held, norms of behavior and how to think like a practitioner in that field. In other words, how “to be.”

These elements, to a great or lesser degree, are present in the informal interaction among people doing the same work, as we saw in the copy repair example. But in a world where the community of practitioners is spread across the globe, and many practitioners work at locations out of the office, the development of judgment cannot not be left to chance and proximity. It must be designed and supported by the organization including: 1) experimentation that leads to learning, 2) treating failure as an opportunity for learning, 3) establishing a systematic process through which reflective conversation occurs about both team and individual actions, 4) and promoting communities of practice.

The Three Eras of Knowledge Management

In this video I describe the Three Eras of knowledge management that I have previously written about on this blog, Where Knowledge Management has Been and Where it is Going – Part One, Part Two, and Part Three. My understanding about the third era continues to grow so I have elaborated the third era in this post.

 

In the earlier blog post I called the third era, “collective knowledge” and I remain convinced that collective knowledge is at the heart of this change. It is the "means," but what is being managed are ideas. So I am using “Idea Management" as the label for the third era both in this video and in the accompanying chart. The first two eras, Information Management and Experience Management dealt with existing knowledge, that is, knowledge that an individual or a group has gained and is available to be shared with others. The third era is about the creation or development of ideas that have not existed before. It is not the management of anything organizational members have learned through their work experience, but what they create jointly when they are brought together in an environment that supports the use of collective knowledge. That support includes convening, cognitive diversity and transparency.

In the last couple of years I have had the opportunity to work with organizations that are using third era practices and that experience has sharpened my thinking about what is occurring and why. I’m still not sure I have all the words right, but the big change I see is that management has begun to value the sensemaking capabilities of employees, that is, the ability of employees to jointly make sense of complex situations. Over the three eras management’s awareness of the kinds of knowledge that are valuable continues to expand. Initially management only valued explicit knowledge as evidenced by the resources put against building repositories, then they developed an appreciation for the experiential knowledge of employees and allocated resources to build communities, and now there is a growing acknowledgement of the sensemaking capabilities of employees and an accompanying willingness to provide the resources to convene groups for that purpose.

Of course, management being interested in the opinions, ideas, and knowledge of employees is not new. Organizations have long made use of employee surveys, fireside chats, suggestions boxes, and town hall meetings to collect ideas from employees. But in the past management has reserved for itself the right to make sense of what was collected from employees. The subtext of such practices was, “Tell us [management] your concerns and suggestions and we [management] will figure out a way to fix it.” Now working with leading edge organizations that are, by their actions, saying something quite different, I hear, “Let's convene the people who do this work and have them think together about how to make sense of this issue.”

A recent example of convening is a meeting I facilitated for NASA. Over the years each of the ten NASA Centers has grown its own KM strategy, quite independent of the other Centers and Offices. NASA administration, in recognition of the variability in the effectiveness of the various KM strategies, and spurred by a somewhat critical government report, appointed a CKO, Ed Hoffman, and asked him to develop a NASA-wide KM strategy. Ed is a seasoned KM professional, fully capable of developing such a strategy. But rather than doing that, he chose to convene a three-day meeting that brought together fifty KM professionals from across the ten NASA Centers, to think together about what the knowledge strategy of NASA should be. The meeting made use of the collective knowledge and analytic capabilities of the KM professionals. Outside perspective was provided by Christos Kostopoulos, Senior Economist at Knowledge and Learning Department- Corporate, from the World Bank and Grigg Gurvais, CKO from the FBI. All available information about NASA’s KM programs, internal NASA documents, and the government report was provided to the group. By the end of the meeting the group had identified the elements of a system-wide strategy. The following illustration shows the commitments participants made at the end of the meeting.

The NASA example illustrates the three enablers of the third era, 1) convening, 2) cognitive diversity and 3) transparency.

1. Convening
Convening is the skill and practice of bringing groups together to develop understanding of complex issues, create new knowledge and spur innovation. It is about:
• designing meetings as conversations rather than presentations
• identifying who needs to be in the conversation, including those who do the work and are impacted by it
• framing the question in a way that opens thinking
• arranging the space to facilitate conversation
• using small groups as the unit of learning
I have written about convening and the role of the leader in The Power of the Conversation Architect to Address Complex, Adaptive Challenges

Cognitive Diversity
Cognitive diversity is the deliberate use of difference to bring new understanding to an issue. When faced with complex issues our inclination is to collect more data, survey, or assign a task force to conduct interviews; when what is needed is a new way to frame the issue. Cognitive diversity brings people trained in different heuristics, problem solving strategies, interpretations, and perspectives into the room. Cognitive diversity can be found in different parts of the organization (e.g. marketing, finance, engineering), in different disciplines (e.g. biology, neuroscience, archeology), or outside the organization (e.g. suppliers, customers, consultants, academicians, alliances).

Transparency
Transparency includes the willingness of management to say, “I don’t know” and therefore to employ the organization’s collective knowledge. It is also about management providing all the available information and data on an issue so that those convened have what they need to do the work of sensemaking. Organizational members also have a role in transparency, that is, to be open about what is happening at their level, rather than hiding or discounting bad news to appease management – to bring the best available knowledge to bear on organizational issues

I would welcome other’s thinking on the third era and the supporting elements of convening, transparency and cognitive diversity, as well as useful references and examples.

My thanks to Xuehui Liu, a KM Professional in the Strategy and Planning Department of Huawei Technologies Ltd., Zhenshen, China. In addition to being a skilled knowledge management professional, Mr. Liu proved to have great skills as a videographer.

The Hallways of Learning

A number of years ago I wrote an article, “The Hallways of Learning” published in Organizational Dynamics, in which I suggested that we might look at the creative, open ended conversations we have in the hallways of our organizations as a metaphor for the kind of conversations we need in the many organizational meetings we hold each day. Our hallway conversations have several useful attributes; they remove some of the sense of hierarchy making participants in the conversation more equal; they invite multiple perspectives because anyone who wanders by is invited in; and likewise, people are free to move on if they find the conversation uninteresting.

The article was read by some members of a research group at the National Institute for Working Life (Arbetslivsinstitutet) in Stockholm, Sweden and they saw the ideas as a way to enhance their own collective learning. This was a group of about 20 researchers and, as the name implies, they studied workplace issues, including, environment, safety, labor, and management. The normal practice of this group was for each researcher to work on a different project, although infrequently 2 or 3 would collaborate on a project. The group was in temporary quarters while waiting to move into a new building.

In the new building the research group was to occupy one whole floor of individual offices.

They began to contemplate what a design would look like that would facilitate greater collaboration and learning among them and decided they needed a “Hallway of Learning.” One of the researchers was an architect who was very interested in how space impacts the way people work and learn together. The small group met with her to explain what they were thinking about and asked her help to design a “Hallway” in the new space which they wanted to call Researcher’s Square.

I was doing some consulting work with the Institute and while I was there they told me about their plans to build a Researcher’s Square. Together we constructed a small study to test whether having a “Hallway” would make a difference in their ability to learn from each other and to collaborate. We agreed that I would interview all the researchers before they moved into their new quarters and then return in six months after they moved in to conduct a second set of interviews to see what impact the “Hallway” had on the way they worked together.

In the initial interviews I asked each person five questions. Following are the questions and the general response I got to each:
1. “Tell me about your own project”
Everyone was able to explain their own project in great detail. The researchers were doing some very interesting work and as the interviews proceeded, I began to see connections between the projects that were being described, although the interviewees themselves did not suggest any connections between projects.
2. “Describe the projects of others in the research group.”
The responses I got about others’ projects were vague. Each person knew something about one or two other projects, but when I probed, I quickly reached the limits of their understanding. No one mentioned any successes or difficulties other projects were having.
“Jan does something with municipalities.”
“Tommy studies union issues.”
“Marianne and Lena are working on the Ericsson project. But I’m not sure what it is about.”
3. “How would you explain the overall mission of the research group?”
On this question the responses were quite varied. There seemed little agreement on what the mission of the research group was.
4. “During any given week, how many people would you casually stop by their office to chat for at least 5 minutes, maybe just standing in the doorway?”
Each person was able to name 2-3 individuals they chatted with for at least 5 minutes once a week.
5. ”How do you anticipate using the Researcher’s Square?”
Except for the group that had invented “Researchers’ Square,” responses were primarily about food rather than conversation. Most saw it as a glorified coffee bar.
“I don’t think I will use it much, I have too much work to do to spend time there”
“I might go down to get a newspaper and read it for a few minutes while I drink my coffee.”
“I think I’ll probably eat my lunch there and chat with others.”
“It will be good to be able to get a quick cup of coffee.”

A few months later the research group moved into the new building. Researcher’s Square was in the middle of a long hallway and took up the space of 4 offices. The real hallway proceeded through Researcher’s Square, so to get from one end of the hall to the other people had to walk through Researcher’s Square.

On the Northwest side of the space there was a coffee bar with a number of bar stools and opposite it on the Northeast, were several café tables and chairs. On the South side of the hallway was a large conference table with chairs around it. At one end of the conference table was a white board and on the other end a rack that held the recent publications of the researchers. For illustration purposes (I have only shown three office on either side of the Researcher’s Square, but their were actually 10 per side for a total of 20 offices.)

This conference table was the only one on the floor. If a group wanted to have a meeting they conducted it in Researcher’s Square, which allowed passersby to overhear the conversation. Passersby could also read whatever was on the board and if it was a topic that interested them could stop and listen for a few minutes or even add their own ideas to the conversation going on around the table.

Six months after the researchers moved into the newly designed office space I returned to continue working on the project I had started earlier and I took the opportunity to interview the researchers again using the same questions.

The difference in their responses were remarkable.
• Question 2 - there was a tremendous increase in knowledge of what others were working on. Some interviewees knew some level of detail about every project and many knew the issues, both successes and frustrations, of at least half of the projects. Moreover, the researchers were able to say how one project connected to another and to find intersections between the projects. They talked about how they had made suggestions to others or asked others for help on their own project. Questions were asked and answered on methodology, statistics, content, proposal writing, references to articles and information about client organizations.
• Question 3 about mission revealed that a much greater alignment had developed among the researchers about the organizational vision and purpose. The responses were broader and more inclusive of other research efforts than they had been initially.
• Question 4 about the number of doorway conversations showed an increase of 300%. Increasing from 2-3 doorway conversations a week to 9-10 a week after Researcher’s Square. Although the conversations were more likely to happen in Researcher’s Square than in the doorway, or to move from the doorway to the Square.

• Question 5 originally was, ”How do you anticipate using the Researcher’s Square?” Since researchers had now been using the Square for six months, I changed that question to, “How are you now using Researcher’s Square?” As opposed to the earlier responses, very few of the comments were about food. Rather interviewees told me about learning from others and building relationships.
“Sometimes when I pass and see a group sitting around the table I can see what others are doing.”
“Maybe that’s the most important thing: since its a living room it makes living here easy!”
“When you go to someone’s room you have a purpose, but in the Square you just bump into each other. I think I have learned something from everyone.”
“The Square makes what everyone does more transparent, otherwise it’s more secret.”
“You can understand one thing in light of the other through discussions in the Square.”
“I can see now that it is easier to go and talk to those people that I get to know during lunch and coffee breaks.”
“I can read on the whiteboard what other things are being done.”

Four Concluding Observations

• Structured Socialization
We see from this example that people, even very smart people, are unable to anticipate the benefits of in-depth interaction with colleagues until they have experienced it for themselves. Before Researcher’s Square, the researchers at NIWL daily saw their colleagues coming in and out of the building, passed them on the staircase, or nodded to them in the hall, but they learned very little from one another. Moreover, when I asked them to anticipate how they might use Researcher’s Square, they could not envision a benefit beyond coffee and food. But when NIWL created a place for structured socialization* they not only learned from each other, the whole organization became more aligned and collaborative - in a word, more effective. Structured socialization named by my colleague, Robert Dalton, is the intentional design of processes and space that bring people together in conversational formats to create and share knowledge.
• Connection before Content
Before people can learn from each other or collaborate on issues, they need to build connections – that is, gain some understanding of who the other person is, including their skills, depth of knowledge, experience, and attitude toward others. People are unlikely to ask each other questions or ask for assistance, until they have built a connection that allows them to learn that the other person is knowledgeable enough and respectful enough to engage. In Researcher’s Square, the coffee, food, and small tables for chats, all provided an atmosphere in which the researchers were able to build the connections that then allowed content to flow.
• Cognitive Diversity
The researchers proved to be more interested in others’ projects than they thought they would be. They assumed that what others were doing would be of little interest to them and likewise that others would have little interest in what they are doing, after all the projects they were engaged in were greatly varied and appeared to have little in common with each other. However, in Researcher’s Square these differences also brought with them an attribute that boosts creativity and innovation within a group, cognitive diversity. When people are cognitively diverse they bring to any problem, a larger set of tools derived from multiple perspectives, problem solving tactics, heuristics and interpretations.
• Conversation Rather Than Presentation
The learning that occurred in Researcher’s Square did not come from presentations, rather the knowledge gained was through conversation. When we think about learning from others our first thought is to have someone make a presentation. But as ubiquitous as presentations are, they are a poor way to learn from peers. Typically, a presenter offers what happened in his or her own situation, but that is not what learners need to hear. Learners are interested in knowing how to adapt the lessons to their situation and for that they need to have a conversation so that the other person can understand their context, and they also can understand the context of the other.

NIWL created a Hallway of Learning that changed the organizational culture.

Why Knowledge Management Didn’t Save General Motors: Addressing Complex Issues By Convening Conversation

Starting about 2000 GM put together a vibrant KM program. At one point GM had 138 best practice teams and 33 centers of expertise working with identified subject matter experts. The KM program produced over 5000 best practices that impacted both quality and schedule and led to millions in cost avoidance. In 2008 KM was alive and well at GM. In the summer of 2009 GM filed for bankruptcy. Why didn’t KM save General Motors? GM was brought down by a flawed strategy, but an organization’s strategy is clearly a product of the knowledge that exists within its walls. The knowledge existed within GM to develop a more competitive strategy. But between 2000 and 2008 knowledge management did not help GM bring that organizational knowledge together in a way that could have saved it from bankruptcy.

Knowledge Management has the capability to address an organization’s very difficult and complex issues, for example how to merge two cultures or how to refocus an organization from selling products to selling service. For these, and many other complex issues, no standard operating procedure exists and no history within the organization is available to draw on for guidance. The knowledge to solve complex problems does not reside in individuals nor even in the executive team – but the knowledge does exists in the collective. The knowledge management task is to bring together the collective knowledge of the organization to bear on complex issues.

To date, Knowledge Management has primarily been in the service of cost cutting or its twin, time saving. The GM example illustrates, that as KM professionals we have not garnered the collective knowledge to address the complex problems that our organizations are facing. That has certainly been true of my own work over the past 15 years. My work has primarily been about creating more effective knowledge sharing processes and communities. But in the last couple of years, more and more I find myself being asked to help convene organizations to address the complex issues they are facing. The realization about how my own work is changing has led me to think that the time is ripe to move KM to a new level and has encouraged me to write this post.

James March wrote a much acclaimed article in 1991 called “Exploitation and Exploration in Organizational Learning.” In that article he says that the exploitation of existing knowledge (which is what knowledge management has been doing) must be balanced with the exploration for new knowledge. Both exploration and exploitation are essential for organizations, but they compete for scarce resources. Exploration is more costly because new ideas often don’t work out. Exploitation of existing knowledge is cheaper because existing knowledge has already been tested, so there are fewer failures.

But the downside of exploitation is that it is a closed loop that can sub optimize organizational knowledge. An organization, exclusively relying on exploitation, will not move beyond the best practice that already exists within its walls. For this reason exploitation can produce a valued step change, but cannot produce the kind of discontinuous change that exploration can yield. KM has been focused on exploitation; we need to now balance the KM effort to help organizations explore new knowledge.

Johnsonville Foods an Example of Using Collective Knowledge to Address Complex Issues
Ralph Stayer, the CEO of Johnsonville Foods was faced with a difficult issue that was also an opportunity. Johnsonville Foods was a small, family owned sausage company of 1000 people, well known in Wisconsin for its quality. Stayer had received an offer from a food-processing company to buy large quantities of product on a regular basis.
Stayer saw this as a complex issue because Johnsonville Foods did not have the capacity to handle such a large job, so accepting it would mean everything would have to change, e.g. shipping, purchasing, equipment, production, packaging, new people, and training. To deal with this very complex issue Stayer called a meeting of the whole organization, giving them all of the information he had about the offer.

He asked employees to work in teams to answer three questions: What will it take to make it work? Is it possible to reduce the downside? Do we want to do it? Teams all across the organization struggled with the questions for almost two weeks, holding meeting after meeting to talk through the risks - which were considerable - and figuring out how they would have to operate differently if they were to increase production that much.
When Stayer brought the teams back together, each team laid out what would be needed and what the problems would likely be for the others. In the end there was almost unanimously agreement that they should take on the new business. Reflecting on the process later, Stayer said, "If you issue orders you’re telling people, "Don’t think; just do." But if you’ve got 1000 people, you’ve got 1000 minds. And if you issue orders from the top, you’re using only 3 of them, or 2, or one. That’s stupid.”

Elements Needed to Address Complex Issues
There are three elements that are necessary if organizations are to use all their knowledge to address complex problems. All three elements are present in the story about Johnsonville Food.

1. Convening
• How to convene the organizational conversation in a way that allows new thinking to emerge
• How to frame the question for the conversation
• The types of issues that require leveraging the collective knowledge
2. Transparency
• Making all the knowledge available so that those who have been convened are as well informed as possible
• The willingness of the leader to say, “I don’t know.”
3. Cognitive diversity
• Who needs to be invited to those conversations
• How to obtain cognitive diversity

1- Convening

How to convene
Convening is about designing a meeting in a way that allows new thinking to emerge. That requires reconsidering all elements of a meeting, e.g. the activities participants engage in, how the seating is configured, the nature of the invitation that participants receive, the length of the meeting, and so on. I have written about the task of the leader as “conversation architect” in other posts. Here I want to focus on the importance of small groups as the source of new ideas.

In a small group each participant can not only offer his or her own thinking, each can ask others to clarify their meaning, elaborate on what someone else has said, challenge an idea, and offer data to support his/her own position – in other words, a small group can have a conversation. In a large group participants are limited to declaring their position on an issue. Participants are all aware that "turn taking" is considered courteous and that to take up additional airtime by engaging others in the back and forth of conversation is sure to be viewed by others as discourteous.

Johnson and Johnson, researchers at the University of Minnesota, who study collaboration, say that the synthesis of diverse perspectives comes from being able to hold both one’s own and another’s’ perspective in mind at the same time. Holding both perspectives implies more than having just heard another’s perspective.
It means fully understanding the reasoning behind a perspective as well as the implications that would result from it. That necessarily means there has been enough back and forth between participants for each to gain that level of understanding.

The format for convening is a mix of three elements:

Framing the Conversation
Convening occurs around a question that frames the problem or issue in a way that has relevance to the convened group and that helps to move the group beyond obvious or known positions. One of the difficulties of framing a question is that questions often have an assumption embedded within them. For example, an organization may have a turnover rate of 15% among employees in their first two years of employment. The question, “How do we reduce the turnover rate of employees who have been with the organization less than 2 years?” assumes that a 15% rate of turnover is a problem. The framing of the question prevents participants from thinking about other possibilities such as viewing 15% as a useful weeding out of unsuitable employees, or as a way to bring new ideas into the company. A less biased question might be “What is the optimum rate of new employee turnover for our company and how do we achieve it?” Or even less biased might be, “What experience do we want new employees to have in their first two years, that prepares them and us to make a sound decision about their future with the company?” The task is to frame the question in a way that opens up the space to invite new perspectives on the topic.

Issues that Benefit from Convening
Here I am drawing on the work of Ron Heifitz, who has written a number of books on this issue, particularly “Leadership Without Easy Answers.” Heifetz talks about two kinds of challenges organizations face, adaptive challenges and technical problems.

Adaptive challenges are complex and unpredictable; they have no known answers. People in the organization may even disagree on what the problem really is. To address adaptive challenges organizations must invent their way to a solution. Examples of adaptive challenges are, hospital systems faced with an interminable nursing shortage; the anticipated retirement of thousands of workers in the government sector; the relocation of 45% of an organization’s employees to a new location.” My mentor, Reg Revans use to say, in his rather outdated way, “These are problems about which reasonable men can disagree.”

By contrast, technical problems are predictable and usually solvable by 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 standard operating 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.

Where convening brings great value is in addressing adaptive challenges. Heifitz says, “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.”

Johnsonville Foods faced an adaptive challenge and so did Ecopetrol a few years ago.

Ecopetrol a Second Example of Using Collective Knowledge to Address Complex Issues
Five years ago I got a call from Ecopetrol, the National Oil Company of Columbia. The conference organizers said, “We are having a meeting to develop a knowledge strategy. We have not had a knowledge strategy and we think we need one now as we get ready to be publicly traded on the stock market. Could you come to our three day meeting and make a presentation about what makes an effective knowledge management strategy?” “But,” they said, “we only want you to talk for 15 minutes.” Columbia is over 2000 miles from my home in Austin Texas, so my initial reaction was that 15 minutes seemed a very short time for such a long journey. But when I heard what they were trying to do I got very excited. They were convening the top 200 people from across all parts of the company to figure out what they needed to do about knowledge - a complex issue for which there is no “right” answer.

To obtain the diversity of thought they needed at the meeting, they invited representatives from fifteen MAKE winners to speak on the first day of the meeting. And, like my presentation, each of them spoke for only 15 minutes. After each presentation time was set aside for small group discussions – not Q&A - but pairs or trios talking together to make sense of what they had just heard.

The second day was devoted to a Knowledge Café (some times called the world cafe) where the Ecopetrol managers worked in small groups to incorporate what they had heard the first day. The Knowledge Café questions were, “What are the critical areas of knowledge that Ecopetrol needs to manage?” and “What KM processes should we focus on to manage that knowledge?”
Those of us who had made presentations the day before also participated in the knowledge café, moving from table to table along with all the managers. After six rounds of the knowledge café, with managers listening to and building on the ideas of other managers from different parts of Ecopetrol, the group began to coalesce around twelve knowledge areas and had also developed ideas about what KM processes would be most useful.

The third day was Open Space where participants selected which of the twelve topic groups they wanted to join, based on their own expertise and interest. The goal of each group was to set up action plans for that critical knowledge area. By the end of the third day the Open Space groups had a plan to implement each of the initiatives they had agreed upon during the Knowledge Café discussions the day before.

Ecopetrol had a knowledge management strategy after three days of convening and conversation – one that the 200 top managers were committed to.

2 - Transparency
I have noted the way the Ecopetrol meeting involved the elements of convening and cognitive diversity. The meeting also incorporated the third element needed to solve complex issues, transparency. There are two issues connected to transparency, 1) the willingness to say, “I don’t know,” and 2) providing all the knowledge available about the issue under discussion

The willingness to say, "I don't know."
The President of Ecopetrol, Javier Gutiérrez, attended all three days of the meeting. During that time he never made a speech about the outcome he wanted. Rather he listened to the presentations on the first day and on the second day he moved from table to table in the knowledge café with the other 199 managers to think together about how to build a knowledge strategy. What he said through his actions was, ‘I don’t know how to build a knowledge strategy, but I'm confident we can figure it out if we use our collective knowledge.”

Over the last ten years, KM has been able to develop horizontal transparency in organizations through the implementation of communities. In many organizations it is now acceptable for a peer to say to others, “I don’t know how to do this, can anyone help?” However, KM has not addressed the issue of vertical transparency in either direction, neither from frontline to senior leadership, nor from senior leadership to the frontline. Yet, as KM Professionals, we are fully aware that transparency is necessary for leveraging the knowledge of the organization.

Providing all the knowledge available on the issue
The second part of transparency is providing all the knowledge. And this President Gutierrez did as well. Ecopetrol was considering becoming a publicly traded company and everyone in the room understood the implications of that action for Knowledge Management. There can be no integration of collective knowledge without transparency. Unless everyone who is jointly attempting to make sense of an adaptive challenge has access to all the available data, there is no way to successfully address the problem.

Transparency is two sided, leadership must be willing to reveal what they know that may impact the issue, and likewise, frontline employees must be willing to reveal the difficulties they anticipate facing. One of the benefits of using proven formats for convening, such as Knowledge Cafés, Open Space, Storytelling Circles, and Appreciative Inquiry, to name a few, is that these formats are designed to establish an environment conductive to trust and disclosure. More typical meetings like retreats and townhalls tend to discourage disclosure, because if participants have ideas to offer they must say those ideas in front of a large group. But participants are often unsure about how their ideas will be accepted by a large group. Small groups provide the advantage of, 1) being able to test an idea with peers before offering it more broadly and, 2) having a sense of where others stand on an issue before offering a new perspective.

Ecopetrol successfully implemented the strategy they put together five years ago. The meeting I described was not a one time event. It is the way Ecopetrol continues to manage its knowledge using Communities, Technology Forums, Expert meetings, Knowledge Cafés, Conversation Circles, and Open Space to create new knowledge. In both 2010 and 2011 Ecopetrol was nominated for the MAKE award. I predict in 2012 they will be a MAKE award winner.

3 - Cognitive Diversity
I have spoken about convening and transparency, the third element is cognitive diversity.

How to obtain cognitive diversity
There was a great book published in 2007 by Scott Page called, “The Difference.” Page reminds us that people can be diverse in many ways, race, gender, religion, etc. but Page's research shows that the kind of diversity that makes a difference in solving complex problems is a difference in the way people think, which he calls cognitive diversity. That includes the heuristics they use, their interpretations, problem solving strategies, and their prediction models. A physician thinks in a different way than an engineer and uses different strategies to tackle a problem.
A historian thinks in a different way than a mathematician – their training and experience provide them different approaches. When we convene the members of an organization to address a complex problem, we are not so much drawing on the knowledge they use in their job, as we are seeking the diversity in how they think about issues. Research that Page quotes in his book, shows that bringing diversity into the conversation increases the possibility that a group will generate new and more creative ideas.

A number of organizations have taken this idea of cognitive diversity very seriously. The Intelligence Cells in Iraq and Afghanistan, for example, are US joint knowledge production efforts to address a specific intelligence challenge. The makeup of a cell is multi-INT (i.e. SIGINT, HUMINT, IMINT). A cross section of disciplines (e.g. analysis, collection, legal, enterprise architecture, technology development) are also represented in each cell, as well as, government, industry, and academia. To address the very difficult intelligence issues about terrorists, requires more than spies, intercepted signals and picture taking drones, it requires a conversation among people who think in diverse ways.

Who needs to be invited
When I am asked by an organization to convene a meeting to address a complex issue, I bring the whole system into the meeting. That doesn’t mean every employee, but it does mean representatives from every part of the organization as well as from every level. And often it also means involving outsiders, customers or suppliers who bring a different perspective on the issue we are addressing.

Teams, departments and divisions can face complex issues, as well as issues that impact the whole organization. For example, a Director, in a government organization I was working with, came to me with a problem. He said, “My office chiefs don’t collaborate. They don’t think about what is good for the whole organization, they are just each out for themselves.” I had worked with many of his direct reports and I knew them to be well meaning people that did have the good of whole organization in mind. So I knew the answer lay somewhere other than the poor motivations of his direct reports.

I asked if I might observe several of his staff meetings, which he regularly held on Tuesday morning. What I saw happening was a very typical staff meeting - the Director started off with announcements, sometimes followed by a presentation from some part of the organization that wanted to get their ideas in front of the Office Chiefs. The largest part of the meeting involved the Director asking each Office Chief in turn for an update of what was happening in his or her area. There was very little conversation between Office Chiefs. Almost all of the talk was aimed at the Director – he talked to each in turn and each in turn responded to him.

The next time I met with the Director I asked him if there were any complex issues that he was dealing with but had not yet been able to find a solution for. He assured me there were a great many and named several. I suggested that he 1) devote one staff meeting a month to asking the group of Office Chiefs to help him address one of those issues, 2) that he think carefully about how to frame the question for them so as not to bias the answers they might come up with, 3) that he provide them with all the information he had on the issue, preferably ahead of time so they would be prepared, 4) that he have them work on the issues in small groups for an hour, and 5) that for the last hour he bring them together to have a large group discussion about their ideas.

Some times we held those small group conversations in a knowledge café format, sometimes in an interview format, sometimes we invited in someone who had a particular expertise. After about six months the group had begun to learn how each other thought. They had started talking with each other outside the meetings on other issues, and they had produced thinking on several issues that the Director could not have come up with by himself. The Director was pleased with what he saw as the Office Chiefs collaborating. For me the most significant move toward collaboration was on the part of the Director himself, he was willing to say, ”I don’t know,” and to draw on the collective knowledge of his very diverse and very capable team to address some very complex issues.

Conclusion
It is possible to think about convening conversations as an event – something to do once in a while to change things up. But from my perspective convening conversations to address complex issues is a new way of thinking about knowledge. KM professionals experienced a shift in how they thought about knowledge around 2005 when they expanded their definition of knowledge from explicit knowledge in a repository, to the realization that much of the important knowledge was in people’s heads and could not be captured. To make that shift a reality KM Professionals had to put new processes into play, like communities and peer assists that supported knowledge flow. As KM professionals we are again on the cusp of broadening how we think about knowledge. The shift is from limiting ourselves to drawing on the knowledge that organizational members possess, to also drawing on their sensemaking capability – their ability to bring heuristics, interpretation and perspectives to critical organizational challenges.

Guidelines for Leveraging Collective Knowledge and Insight

Knowledge workers in any organization have a wealth of insights that are available to their organization to address the difficult issues the organization is facing. Drawing out those insights requires bringing knowledge workers together in meetings that are expressly designed to take advantage of collective knowledge. Over the years, as I have designed such meetings, I have come to rely on seven principles that work together to make the most of collective knowledge in conference settings as well as in-house meetings. The principles have been assembled from the work of many researchers and thought leaders. Where possible I have identified the sources.

1. Connection before content
Knowledge workers attending a meeting or conference need to get connected to each other before they try to construct new ideas together (Peter Block). In order to work effectively with others, they need to know:
a. who is in the room
b. what knowledge others have
c. how others think about the issue of the meeting, and
d. the group’s strengths and weaknesses

In a business context, connecting is best accomplished by engaging knowledge workers in small group conversations about strategic organizational issues. To build connections, those conversations have to be structured in a way that allows knowledge workers to frame themselves in a positive light, relative to their experience and successes. Icebreaker type exercises are less useful when the intent is to leverage collective knowledge because they do not provide adequate understanding of others’ knowledge and experience.

When a group has come together many times, the period of connecting can be brief, but not neglected altogether. Just as two friends typically engage in “small talk” for a few minutes each time they meet, any group that comes together regularly also needs a brief period of re-connecting before turning to content. In both situations the “small talk” affirms the relationship and the readiness to engage the topic.

2. Circles connect
Circles represent unity. They help individuals in the group view themselves as part of the whole. For example, the UN meeting hall is designed in concentric circles to provide a visual representation of what the UN stands for – unity among nations.

I was reminded of the benefits of seeing oneself, and being seen, as a part of a whole, when I conducted an exit interview with Lieutenant General Maples, then Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. He told me that one of his first actions as Director had been to remove the large rectangular conference table in his office and have it replaced with a round table. He very clearly understood the difference a circle would make to the many, very difficult conversations he would have in the coming years.

It is a useful symbolism to begin and end meetings with chairs in a circle. It can be a big circle of 30+ or many small circles of 5. Ideally it is a circle of just chairs, without a table. Knowledge workers have a profoundly different experience when they converse in a group, absent a table.

3. Learn in small groups – integrate knowledge in large groups
We learn and create new ideas through our conversation with others in small groups. A small group is 3-5 members. This is the size that produces the richest and most in-depth thinking. It is large enough to contain diverse views yet small enough for members to engage each other.

Engaging each other means asking questions to clarify the meaning another has expressed and it means challenging as well as building on others’ ideas. The give and take of the small group serves to exchange existing knowledge as well as generate new knowledge.

In meetings designed to draw on the organization’s collective knowledge, after small groups have been in conversation, their ideas are brought together in a large group setting to integrate their insights into the thinking of the whole. In a lengthy meeting, small and large group discussions regularly alternate.

4. Diverge then converge
Any meeting that is focused on collective knowledge must first diverge in order to draw new ideas out and to stimulate thinking. “Knowledge diversity facilitates the innovative process by enabling the individual to make novel associations and linkages” (Cohen and Levinthal). Meeting leaders who want to leverage collective knowledge, intentionally invite people from other disciplines, stakeholder groups, and outside experts to introduce that diversity.

Without time for divergence the many differences within a group are not expressed and without their expression they cannot be made use of by the group. It is in the critical space that lies between divergent ideas that innovation often emerges (Scott Page).

Knowledge workers are reluctant to turn their thinking to what they have in common until they have had an opportunity to give voice to their differences (Marvin Weisbord). The way the human brain works is to first recognize differences and only after those are clarified to focus on similarities.

The first part of a meeting, whether it is half a day or 3 days, is dedicated to divergence. The second part of a meeting converges to put those divergent ideas to work in terms of a complex issue that needs to be addressed.

5. Outside experts inform the thinking of others, not provide them answers
Bringing outside experts into a meeting can provide much needed cognitive diversity, but experts cannot provide solutions. It is the knowledge workers of an organization, who function within its context and who together understand the complexity of its issues, who are uniquely capable of developing workable solutions.

Experts can stimulate the thinking of knowledge workers by talking about what others have done in similar situations. But any practice from another organization or team always has to be adapted, not adopted. Even the best of examples have to be modified to fit a new context.

Fifteen minutes is adequate time for an expert to stimulate a group’s thinking. A presentation by an expert needs to be immediately followed by a period of time dedicated to participants connecting what the expert has said to their own knowledge and to thinking with others about how that knowledge can be used. Without committed time for processing, an expert’s ideas are forgotten within a couple of hours. Unfortunately, the ubiquitous Q&A does not provide the needed processing time; rather what is needed is time for colleagues to talk with each other in small groups.

6. Connect new ideas to what knowledge workers already know
Processing is about moving new ideas from short term to long-term memory by connecting the new ideas to knowledge worker’s existing knowledge. The term, absorptive capacity (Cohen and Levinthal), references the ability of knowledge workers to recognize the value of new, external information, assimilate it, and apply it to their organization’s issues. An individual’s or an organization’s absorptive capacity, is a function of their prior knowledge. That means that without related knowledge to connect new ideas to, new knowledge will not be absorbed.

In meetings designed to exploit collective knowledge, a more robust environment for knowledge linkages to be made is provided when knowledge workers from varying disciplines are present. A knowledge worker from engineering, for example, will have different prior knowledge than one from R&D, and different yet from a knowledge worker from legal. The greater the cognitive diversity of prior knowledge in the room the more likely that new knowledge, from outside or internally, will be connected to prior knowledge which will spur insight. To process new knowledge, group discussion, made up diverse participants, is most effective. If the group is small (3-5 participants) each knowledge worker has enough airtime to put their ideas into words – which leads to the last principle.

7. We learn when we talk
This principle is central to leveraging the collective knowledge of a group. Listening provides us new ideas but as long as those ideas are just swimming around in our heads, they are neither fully formed nor implementable. It is only when a knowledge worker puts an idea together in a way that allows him or her to explain the idea to others, that the idea takes shape for the knowledge worker, as well as for the person the knowledge worker is talking with.

Johnson and Johnson, researchers at the University of Minnesota, have shown that we organize information in a different way when we are preparing to explain our thinking to others. The information not only becomes more logically organized, but new connections are made, often in the act of speaking. It is fair to say, “We don’t learn when we listen, we learn when we speak,” or write, or even create a visual representation of our understanding. Giving knowledge workers the time needed to put their thinking into words, not only shares the organization’s knowledge, but creates it.

Implementing these seven principles requires considerable change in how we design meetings and conferences - but then the idea of leveraging collective knowledge itself requires considerable change. More expansive thinking about who within the organization has valuable knowledge with which to address organizational issues, necessitates new approaches to how we meet and work together. These seven principles, tested through research and practice, provide a way to design those new approaches.

The Three Eras of Knowledge Management - Summary

I have posted lengthy descriptions of each of the three eras of knowledge management and here I have made a brief summary of all three. I have also made substantial changes to the third era in this post. If you would like to view each era in more detail just click on the heading of that era in this post.

Since the term “knowledge management” came into popular usage, there have been three significant changes in how organizations have thought about their knowledge. Each successive era has expanded the type of knowledge that organizations considered important without eliminating the need for and use of the previous type of knowledge.

Knowledge management began in the mid 1990’s. Before that time knowledge was typically considered the province of training and was thought of as an individual capability. However, in the mid-90s Peter Drucker began to write about “knowledge workers” and the “knowledge economy” and proposed the idea that knowledge was a critical organizational asset that was as important as capital or property.

Leveraging Explicit Knowledge
The initial idea of knowledge management was that an organization’s knowledge needed to be documented and then placed in a database where everyone could access it whenever they needed it - no longer would employees only be able to learn when attending a training class. Efforts were made to capture an organization’s best practices and lessons learned. Organizations spent large sums of money creating repositories and databases and employees were encouraged, sometimes even badgered, into contributing to them. The prevailing way of thinking about knowledge management was as a library or a warehouse with inputs and outputs, the more inputs the better.

By 2000 the limitations of content management were becoming evident:

1. Organizations found it difficult to get people to document their knowledge, and even more difficult to get others to make use of what had been documented and stored. Users found tools (checklists, steps in a process) useful as well as reusable documents (PP presentations, proposals) but lessons learned and best practices were largely ignored.

2. Organizations began to recognize that they had only been supporting explicit knowledge that could be written down - they had disregarded what might be the most critical knowledge to organizational success, tacit knowledge. Employees would not, and in fact could not, write all of their tacit knowledge down, first because the tacit knowledge that resides in an employee’s mind is immense and secondly because tacit knowledge is primarily useful in response to specific contexts, and much less useful when written as generalizations.

Leveraging Experiential Knowledge
Given the limitations of content management, by 2000 there began to be glimmers of a new perspective on knowledge within organizations. This new perspective held that:

1. much of an organization’s knowledge is in the heads of employees, with only a small percentage residing in documents, still recognizing that some explicit knowledge is needed and should be maintained

2. much of an organization’s knowledge is dynamic and rapidly changing so that what is “captured” is soon out-of-date

3. knowledge is essentially social and is developed and held by groups of people who engage together in a specific practice.

Etienne Wenger’s book Communities of Practice, that named and explained this phenomena, came out in 2000. Organizations began to support communities of peers, providing a way for them to ask for and receive knowledge on a just-in-time basis and thus keeping fast changing knowledge up-to-date. The Q&A that is ubiquitous in communities provided a way for employees to share their tacit knowledge in response to specific situations. By 2005 nearly every Fortune 500 Company had established Communities of Practice, acknowledging the growing understanding that knowledge is largely a property of groups of people.

My book Common Knowledge also came out in 2000 and talked about the knowledge management processes through which teams and projects could share their knowledge. Organizations put After Action Reviews into place to promote continuous learning in teams and projects so that what was being learned in the field could be continually updated. Expertise Locator systems helped employees draw on the knowledge of experts across an organization and Knowledge Harvesting helped to move knowledge from one team/project to another.

However by 2005 the limitations of even this expanded perspective on organizational knowledge began to be recognized:

1. It became obvious that knowledge was flowing primarily between peers and was largely limited to frontline employees. Senior and even middle management were supporters of knowledge management but not users of knowledge management processes.

2. Knowledge management was primarily dealing with existing knowledge, attempting to bring all units up to the best in class of the organization. But it did not help organizations create new knowledge or spur innovation.

3. The focus of knowledge management was tactical issues to the exclusion of strategic issues. Thus, although GM had an outstanding knowledge management program, that program did not address the difficult strategic issues that put GM into bankruptcy.

Leveraging Collective Knowledge
Although the first thinking about Leveraging Collective Knowledge began to appear around 2005, there are only a few leading edge organizations that have developed new practices for making use of their organization’s collective knowledge. Most organizations are still centered in the perspective of the second era and some, who have come late to knowledge management, are still struggling with getting good content management in place.

Those that are inventing processes for collective knowledge are finding ways to bring the whole organization to bear on strategic issues. Process like Knowledge Café’s, Appreciative Inquiry, and Search Conferences bring together all levels of the organization – the whole system in the room. The processes used to leverage collective knowledge are conversation based, alternating between small group and large group configurations. Even regularly held organizational meetings such as staff meetings, team, and project meetings in these organizations are turning to conversational forms to address their most difficult organizational issues. There is a growing understanding that in an age of increasingly complex organizational issues, leaders cannot be expected to have all the answers; rather the task of leaders becomes convening the conversations that can come up with new answers.

Leading edge organizations are taking advantage of Web 2.0 social media, building more user controlled platforms such as Wiki’s, blogs and social networking (e.g. Facebook) that bring with them greater organizational transparency and give rise to more diverse perspectives in the organizational conversation. The use of crowd sourcing, cognitive diversity, and predictive markets draw on a wider base of thinking, both internally and externally, that increases organizational innovation.

Over the three eras, each new set of knowledge management practices has been created in response to an ever-expanding understanding of 1) where knowledge lives within organizations and 2) what knowledge is important to organizational success. We can anticipate yet greater understanding as organizations move further into the third era.

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

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.