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Fundamental Change to Oranization Structure and Governance

For the first time since the industrial revolution, organizations are changing at a fundamental level. The change is very much a work in progress in most organizations. But we now have many examples of organizations that are fully functioning in an entirely new way –  that is, new ideas about how the organization is designed, about how work gets done, how people relate to each other

The elements of this fundamental change are:

1. Networked structure. The structure of organizations is changing from being hierarchical to being flatter, networked organizations. One of the recognized problems in hierarchical organizations is that information travels too slowly, making adaptation difficult. Networked organizations are growing because social enterprise software has made the more immediate and broader exchange of knowledge possible, thereby facilitating the coordination between parts of the organization. The labor-intensive task of information traveling up the chain of command, across departments, and down another chain of command in order to coordinate, is greatly reduced by social enterprise software.

 

2. Teams as the unit of work. Within networked organizations teams are now the unit of work. Tasks are assigned to teams rather than to individuals. It is teams that create new products, interact with customers and resolve the organization’s problems. This change has been necessitated by the increased complexity of the issues facing organizations, which require a diversity of expertise as well as greater manpower to accomplish. Increasingly, no one individual is capable of addressing these complex issues/problems by themselves.

 

3. Self-governed teams. Given that there are no known answers to the complex issues teams face, the teams themselves invent the answer. To do that they continually try new ideas and learn from their actions, including their successes, and failures, and from their interactions, including other parts of the organization, customer requirements, customer satisfaction, and competitors. In order to learn, team members hold frequent conversations to reflect on their actions jointly. And based on that reflective sensemaking, arrive at decisions about what to do next, rather than relying on a manager to tell them what they should do next. They self-select the most appropriate tools and work practices to carry out their decisions. Each team develops work practices unique to their situation, and those practices change over time. Self-governing requires team members to have frequent and authentic conversations where they learn with and from each other.   

 

4. Focus on human relationships. To have authentic conversations team members give greater attention to developing more human and personal relationships among team members than would be found in traditional teams. Such relationships are based on 1) shared purpose, 2) respect for others’ expertise, and 3) greater knowledge of each other as human beings (Schein). Psychological safety, based on these three attributes develops only when these three conditions exist. Psychological Safety makes it possible for team members to enact learning behaviors such as, sharing mistakes, seeking feedback on their own actions, and discussing differences among team members openly rather than privately. Such behaviors are essential for team learning (Edmondson).

 

5. Changed role of leaders. In self-governed teams the manager/lead is a coach or servant leader, rather than the decision maker. The traditional role of a manager in hierarchical organizations is framed as “power over” as in master-servant, parent-child, or teacher-student.  Such relationships block team members from cooperating and collaborating internally by putting too much power in the hands of one individual (Jarche). Edmonson’s research found that “teams with minimal power differentials were better able to reflect effectively.” In many self-governed teams a lead is selected by the team or the role is rotated among team members (Laloux). This change in the role of managers/leaders also serves to increase the authenticity of team conversations because without the “power over” of a manager, the fear of speaking out is greatly reduced.   

 

6. Deployment of virtual teams. Whether a team is spread across the globe or co-located with members periodically work from home, social enterprise software has made effective virtual teams possible. The need to leverage in-house competencies, resources and capabilities have made virtual teams a necessity. Virtual teams are a new form of teaming, but like co-located teams they hold frequent conversations to 1) reflect, build and maintain close relationships, learn from their actions, and make decisions related to work practices. The more remote team members are, the greater the number of practices and tools are needed to establish and maintain close relationships. Virtual teams are most effective when they oscillate between face-to-face exchanges (in a variety of forms) and online communication (Dixon).

 

7. Decentralized Governance. In a networked organization, governance is decentralized. How that decentralization is implemented depends on the organization’s size and the interdependency between its parts. In organizations with extensive interdependences, such as the US Army, the governing body is a team of teams, that is, a representative from each team meets together as a unit for coordination (McCrystal).  Others hold frequent town halls both in-person and online (Turco). And still others, convene task forces composed of volunteers that manage issues like budgets, new projects, or changes to current policies. However, most networked organizations have merely developed, at the local level, a set of agreed upon practices to address issues such as conflict resolution, hiring, decision making, performance management, etc. (Laloux).

 

All of these changes require a higher level of collaboration among team members, as well as, between teams.  And they require teams to have autonomy in how they accomplish their tasks, to hold more productive conversations, and to build deeper and more personal relationships.  

 

A Model Lessons Learned System – The US Army

The US Army Lessons Learned system has evolved over 40 years to become a model lesson learned system. What began as an AAR process in the 1970s has become a robust system of identifying, collecting, analyzing, transferring, and moving lessons learned at all levels of command. I have detailed the progression of this system using the model I constructed for The Three Eras of Knowledge Management.

The Center for Army Lessons Learned (CALL) in Ft Leavenworth is the center of the Army’s LL program. Since the beginning of the Iraq war CALL has become a subset of the larger Army Combined Arms Center’s Battle Command Knowledge System located in Ft Leavenworth. The goal of the US Army Knowledge Management System is to capture, integrate and use organizational knowledge to gain an advantage over the enemy.

Elements of a Robust Lessons Learned System

There are five strategic elements in a robust and effective lessons learned system; Collection, Repository, Transfer Process, Implementation, and Analysis and Data Mining. Each is illustrated here in the description of the Army’s lessons learned system. For many of the elements the US Army has multiple processes through which that element is accomplished, adding to the robustness of the system.

1. Collection: A robust LL system has multiple ways to identify and collect lessons learned

• After Action Reviews (AAR’s) are systematically conducted at all levels on all events. In 2008 alone 20,000 observations, insights, and lessons were collected.
• Collection and Analysis Teams (CAATs ) – Teams (of 10 or fewer) are sent to the field for 1-2 weeks to study issues identified by the command element. Ten to fourteen teams are deployed annually. Members of these teams are from proponents related to the issue being studied. They are directed to work together, assuring that multiple perspectives are considered. Members go to Ft Leavenworth for training in the collection process. While there, they develop a collection plan with sub issues, a question list and a list of people and units to interview. Before returning to Ft Leavenworth to write the final report, the team provides an initial report to the unit Commander for approval. After the final report is written at Ft Leavenworth collection and analysis teams brief the Commanding General of CAC. All of the issues collected are quickly moved out through the L2I network (see below).
• On-line community discussions - peer-to-peer knowledge exchanges that allow soldiers to quickly adapt to rapidly changing situations. There are 60 BCKS functional communities (CompanyCommand, Platoon Sergeant) and as many field communities (CAVNET). A fulltime facilitator supports each community.
• Lessons Learned Integrators (L2INET) – Analysts are deployed with units, as well as being stationed at Schools, the National Training Center, TRADOC and Headquarters. L2INET members are responsible both to actively collect what is being learned in the commands and to disseminate the lessons learned from other commands. The network of 29 members meet regularly on-line and in monthly teleconferences to exchange what they are learning in the field and to understand what other members need.
• Theater Observation Detachment Program (TOD) – Primarily reserve volunteers deployed with the commands for a period of 6-12 months. They are the eyes and ears of CALL. Observers write topical products based on collection in theater and have reach back capability for units. They share information electronically with other units in-country and between theaters. The network of 48 DC0’s hold weekly sessions for the exchange of knowledge.
• Umbrella weeks – Returning deployed units remain in garrison for one week to be debriefed by any proponent that needs their up-to-date information, e.g. replacement units, seniors, policy makers. The event is run by the unit, which solicits interested parties to collect data and makes key people available in response.

2. Repository: A central repository that stores documented lessons learned and makes them available to the whole system.
CALL serves as the central repository for the US Army. Two hundred employees work in the CALL center checking documents for classification, adding metadata and archiving data. CALL center employees also respond to RFis, monitor web sites in operational theaters, and download documents.

3. Knowledge Transfer Processes: Active as well as passive processes for moving the knowledge to targeted areas
o RFI – CALL has 11,000 requests a year that are answered drawing on knowledge stored within the repository. RFIs from deployed units are answered within 24 hours. Sixty percent of RFIs are at the battalion unit level or below.
o L2I network - The L2I analysts deployed with units disseminate lessons learned through other L2I members. L2INET has made a significant difference in the dissemination (flash to bang) of observations, insights and lessons (OIL) and best practices
Example
The 2nd BCT, 10th Mountain Division reported they were using a device called the Rat Claw, a specially designed steel hook, to rapidly pull open HUMVEE doors in order to rescue soldiers trapped in an overturned vehicle. The L2I analysts at 10th Mountain posted a video with specifications and within 24 hours other operational units were able to construct similar devices
o Community Discussions – both functional and in-theatre
Examples
An Army Reserve major in Wisconsin wanted to develop a training capability for logistics units deploying to Iraq. The officer contacted a LogNet facilitator and discovered that the Army had no written doctrine or useful instructional materials, so he summoned the logistics community via LogNet. The responses pointed him to a major at Fort Hood, Texas, who had set up a logistics support area in Iraq. The two connected, and the Wisconsin officer found the insight he needed.

Iraqi insurgents placed an IED behind a poster with anti-American slogans. A soldier noticed that the poster looked different from others he had observed, so he entered information about the suspicious sighting into CAVNET. A threaded discussion developed on-line while specialists evaluated the potential threat. When they confirmed the soldier’s suspicions, the Army sent a message via the system to alert other units about the insurgents’ new method of concealing IEDs

4. Implementation methods: Processes to put lessons learned into practice and resolve issues raised in the lessons
• L2I network members have a direct line of communication to unit Commanders who have authority to implement changes within their units
• Community members implement lessons from their peers in the community.
• Issue Resolution Cycle: a quarterly cycle of councils sort, make recommendations, and take action on identified issues

If through collections and observation there is enough evidence that there is a problem, the first level action officers working group vote to take it on, for example instruction in new TTPs. They decide who should be the lead and forward the issue to the Council of Colonels. Issues that cannot be addressed at a lower level go the General Officer Steering Committee. Since funding is above the army level the COS submit some issues to the joint committee

5. Analysis and data mining: Processes, Analytic tools and resources for reviewing and analyzing large numbers of lessons to gain insights that would not be obvious from examining a specific lessons learned. Analysis and mining data:
• Allows for the identification of weak signals that can provide early warning about an issue
• Facilitates finding trends across units and across periods of time
• Identifies gaps in knowledge
Example:
One of the troubling realities of combat is that soldiers are in the greatest personal danger at the beginning of their combat experience. Lessons about how soldiers should protect themselves are embedded in many of the AARs CALL receives. But it would be unreasonable to expect soldiers to search through thousands of AARs to find the knowledge needed for their own safety. CALL gleaned lessons from unit AARs to produce a handbook, The First Hundred Days. The handbook is provided to all new combatants before they deploy.

The Army lessons learned system has evolved over time as the model illustrates. As new technology becomes available the lessons learned system has added capability. As new challenges arise in theater, the system adapts. New processes are introduced to meet new situations but the five strategic elements Collection, Repository, Transfer Process, Implementation, and Analysis and Data Mining remain as a constant.

The Complexity of Transferring Lessons Learned from Projects

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Complexity of Knowledge Transfer

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

Do We Really Need So Many Kinds of Social Media?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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