You wish to point and sneer? How will that help, precisely?

There have been recent news reports about leaks on-board the new British aircraft carrier, HMS Queen Elizabeth.  The ship is currently undergoing sea trials, during which all systems and crew will be tested before being declared fully operational.

The purpose of the trials is to check that the ship is fit for purpose, and to familiarise the crew with both it, and each other.  In knowledge management-speak, this is part of what is known as 'learning before'.

High-performing organisations invest time and resources in deliberate learning before (i.e. through KM planning), during (i.e. through Peer Assists) and after (i.e. through Retrospects and Knowledge Harvesting Interviews) key activities, to identify key knowledge that can be reapplied in the future, thereby saving time, money and improving performance, quality and safety.

Is the ship meant to be fully operational yet?  No.

Are the crew meant to be fully trained on it yet?  No.

Have time and resources been allocated to enable this 'learning before' to take place? Yes.

Are these so-called 'leaks' normal in ships at this stage of their life?  Yes.

Are they attended and reduced so that the risk is as low as reasonably possible? Yes.

Is highlighting a so-called leak like this helpful in any way?  No.

Does the media care?  Of course not.

In his book, 'Just Culture' (reviewed on this blog here), Sidney Dekker sets out the tensions between learning and accountability and reminds us that the clamour for 'heads to roll' after each and every mistake and oversight almost always has the opposite, unintended effect.  Instead of encouraging others NOT to make mistakes, such caterwauling merely warns others to cover up their errors, thereby ensuring learning does not take place and performance does not improve.

Pointing the finger when things appear to go wrong, finding someone to blame, using words like 'fault' - these are all evidence of a workplace culture that is anything but 'just'.  In such places, learning from experience is all but non-existent and performance way below where it could be.

For a chat about how to develop a workplace culture where learning from experience, before, during and after key activities, please contact me direct or via the Knoco website.

6 killer knowledge management quotes

"Knowledge Management is not an end in itself.  Companies do not exist for the purpose of propagating and advancing knowledge - they exist to sell products and services. But to the extent that competitive advantage relies on informed decision making within the business - knowledge management has a crucial role to play."  Bechtel Corporation

"It is the attempt to recognise what is essentially a human asset buried in the minds of individuals, and leverage it into a corporate asset that can be used by a broader set of individuals, on whose decisions the firm depends."  Larry Prusak, IBM

"Most activities or tasks are not one-time events. Our philosophy is fairly simple: Every time we do something again, we should do it better than the last time.” John Browne, BP          

"Sharing knowledge occurs when people are genuinely interested in helping one another develop new capacities for action; it is about creating learning processes."  Peter Senge

"It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change." Charles Darwin

"Knowledge is experience; everything else is information."  Albert Einstein

More KM resources, tools and templates are available on the Knoco website.

Leading the way - latest Knoco newsletter - KM and leadership

The latest Knoco newsletter on the relationship between Knowledge Management (KM) and leadership is now out!

Follow this link for:

• How does leadership affect KM?
• What do good and bad KM leadership look like?
• How to manage leaders in lessons capture meetings
• How to win leaders' support
• The power of the 'CEO video'
• KM tools to deliver good leadership
• News from around the Knoco family

For a conversation about KM leadership, please get in touch direct or visit the Knoco website.

Black Box Thinking by Matthew Syed – a review

This is the book that I wish I had written.

Indeed, I will even go so far as to say that some of its ideas can be found in my blog – albeit in this book they are set out far more clearly and with greater insight than I normally muster.

This is truly an excellent book, vital reading for anyone with an interest in knowledge management, organisational learning, lessons learned, organisational design, leadership development and much more.

Matthew Syed’s book looks at how we normally deal with failure (i.e. not well) and how this hinders our ability to learn, and therefore to improve.  He provides case-studies from healthcare, criminal justice, aviation, manufacturing and sport, to show how a different approach to ‘failure’ enables better performance.

Some of the key ideas include:

·        Cognitive dissonance – the discomfort we experience through our inability to cope with evidence that challenges our fundamental beliefs or assumptions, which leads to twisting facts to suit our preconceived conclusions;

·        Marginal gains – using many small improvements, both lateral (i.e. in different areas) and sequential (i.e. iterative) to produce a large improvement overall.  He uses the Team Sky approach under Sir David Brailsford, as well as Formula One teams like Mercedes, to make this point;

·        The ‘blame game’ – the toxic tendency to look for ‘fault’ in others when things go wrong – a noxious feature of what passes for political and media discourse in most Western countries; in examining this, Syed references Sidney Dekker’s excellent book, ‘Just Culture’, which I reviewed here;

·        ‘Growth’ (as opposed to ‘fixed’) mind-sets – the mature and confident outlook of those happy to fail and eager to learn in so doing.  Examples here include James Dyson and David Beckham.

Feedback that has not been sought but is offered anyway would include:

·        No mention of the former England rugby coach, Sir Clive Woodward’s approach of improving ‘100 things by 1%’ which is almost identical to that of Brailsford’s ‘marginal gains’ (and in fact preceded it);

·        Many of the case-studies and statistics from healthcare, criminal justice etc. are from the United States, with fewer data from the UK.  Not a major issue but, as a British reader of this book by a British author, this was notable; perhaps there is greater transparency there – if so, I would not be surprised;

·        No mention of Chris Argyris and his work on ‘organisational defensiveness’.  The book is full of sources and texts, many of which I will now seek out and read for myself.  I was just hoping to find Argyris’s famous ‘undiscussables’ and noted their absence;

·        Public life and the inter-action of the media and politicians were examined but I rather think both sides were let off far too easily, as were we, the readers and voters who permit and perpetuate what Syed calls our “blame-orientated…public culture”. 

It is in this final area (political discourse) that I think there remains much to reveal and discuss and perhaps I can do that in a book before someone else beats me to it!

Overall, this was a fascinating, thought-provoking and entertaining read and I strongly recommend it to anyone with even a passing interest in making things better – which should be all of us.

Seven things I learned in 2015

·        ‘Not invented here’ remains the default response of too many people in too many organisations to any initiative;
·        Leaders are more powerful than they themselves realise – not because of what they say but what they do, and how!
·        Initiatives survive and prosper when we first agree on the effect we wish to achieve, and then work backwards on how to do it;
·        Good knowledge management needs both the ‘push’ from those that have acquired knowledge and the ‘pull’ from those that need it;
·        ‘Lessons must be learned’ continues to be trotted out by the media, politicians, chief executives and football managers alike – almost all of whom do not know what it means or requires;
·        Brevity helps;
·        Time spent understanding the client’s needs and desires is seldom wasted.

What will 2016 bring??

It’s always what we do that matters, not what we say (Part One)

We’re all individuals, keen to be treated as such but, put us in big groups and I’ll wager we’re most of us all the same. 
Why do I say this?

This weekend I was meeting a friend of a friend who had heard what I do for a living but wanted to know more; so I explained briefly what knowledge management is.  My new acquaintance asked me, “Do you enjoy what you do?” and I replied, “I love it.”  He asked me why and so I said, “Because what I do brings me directly into contact with the human condition.”

His frown showed I needed to explain what I meant and he seemed interested enough to hear my take on what.

“Because basically, no matter what we do for a living, where we live or how old we are…we’re pretty much all the same.  We want to be respected, to feel like we make a difference.  We want to be rewarded and we want security, as far as possible.  Most of us prefer to be popular than unpopular and we don’t like hurting other people, or even merely embarrassing them.  We want people to think well of us and most of us avoid conflict whenever possible.”

He nodded along and then said, “So?”  So I continued, “So, when faced with a situation that we fear will put these things at risk, we all do the same thing.  We minimise embarrassment for ourselves and others; we avoid awkwardness and far prefer choppy waters to be smoothed than stirred up even more.  We mostly tell people what we think they want to hear or, at the very least, will pull our punches so as not to make things any worse.  In short, we won’t tell anyone what we really think or how we really feel unless we feel 100% safe and secure and whoever feels like that at work?”

Again, he asked, “So?” “So…if we are ever going to improve anything, if we are ever going to learn from the past and make the future better, we need to know all that there is to know about whatever problem we face.  We need people to be honest, which means we need to let them feel it’s okay to be honest, which means they mustn’t fear demotion or the sack if they tell the truth, or even just embarrassment for offering a different point of view.  That takes time and effort and real, brace leadership from those at the top.  They need to show by what they do and say that they value integrity and honesty and moral courage because otherwise all they’ll get, indeed all that most organisations get is defensiveness, dishonesty and fear.”

I pulled out a pen and piece of paper and drew this picture of 2 stick-men with ‘speech bubbles’ representing their conversation and ‘thought clouds’ above each man’s head.  “Most problems in the world are down to poor communication, with people either unable, or downright refusing, to express what they think and feel. This is because they’re unsure what they think or feel or because they know all too well what they think or feel but are uncomfortable with sharing that with others.  Now, we tell each other the things in the speech bubbles and yet everything we do is shaped by what is in the thought clouds. Getting people to share those inner thoughts and feelings is at the heart of what knowledge management and organisational learning is all about.  It’s incredibly difficult and, quite frankly, a thankless task but, when it works, if only briefly, it’s very rewarding.”

He smiled and bought me a pint.

To be continued….

'Ello, 'ello, what's all this then? Rewarded for knowing, or for sharing also?

Today the UK’s College of Policing published a report following a review into leadership, with recommendations to improve performance across the police service.  Details are available on their website here.
Regular readers of the blog will recall our examination (here) of the Hillsborough Inquiry and the issues it raised about honesty, defensiveness and poor police leadership.  So it is great to see serious efforts to address some of these issues.

In the report, there are some ideas that will appeal to those keen to learn from other’s experiences and manage their knowledge more effectively.
One encouraging point, on how the review was conducted, is revealed thus, “The review recognised the importance of capturing the lessons of leadership development from the widest range of sectors outside policing.”  So far, so good – using lessons is almost always a good idea, and to seek them from ‘outsiders’ introduces new perspectives and guards against ‘group-think’, one of the dangers highlighted in Margaret Heffernan’s excellent book, ‘Wilful Blindness’, which I reviewed here.
Welcoming fresh inputs is further encouraged through the recommendation for “a structure where officers and staff can exit and re-enter the service, bringing with them their new skills and experience.”
The value of skills, experience and knowledge is recognised in further recommendations, such as:

·        “Existing police leaders should influence and drive the required culture of change by demonstrating their own commitment to personal development….;

·        Develop career opportunities which allow recognition and reward for advanced practitioners.

·        Offering staff and officers reward and recognition for advanced skills and knowledge. We recommend that the Home Office should consider what amendments to pay and conditions are required to allow professional expertise to be appropriately recognised and rewarded.”

Again, that’s all well and good but, without explicit encouragement and enforcement of knowledge-sharing and collaboration, there is a danger that these proposals will result merely in rewarding people for what they know, without further recognition for what they share.
Incentivising the accrual of knowledge without any balancing expectation that it be shared produces employees that are reluctant to help others, or will only do so when they can spare the time (i.e. rarely).
This is common across many organisations, where the unintended consequences of rewarding knowledge are disincentives to share, reluctance to be honest and open (especially about shortcomings) and expensive losses when those with the know-how depart, leaving the remainder struggling to fill that gap.
Far better for the recommendations to read thus (my edits in bold):

·        “Existing police leaders should influence and drive the required culture of change by demonstrating their own commitment to personal development, openness and collaboration.”

·        “Develop career opportunities which allow recognition and reward for advanced practitioners that gain new knowledge and actively seek to share it as they do so.”

·        “Offering staff and officers reward and recognition for advanced skills and knowledge. We recommend that the Home Office should consider what amendments to pay and conditions are required to allow the accumulation and sharing of professional expertise to be appropriately recognised and rewarded.”

Such recommendations, just by their wording, would send the signal that hard-won knowledge must be valued, shared and used by all.  Once implemented, they would be an important part in wider efforts to create and nurture a true learning culture.
Further material on leadership, culture, knowledge-transfer and retention is available at the Knoco website.

Pay people to share knowledge and they will, funnily enough.

Seeking help from colleagues at work is something that everyone has done; it's common sense.

When asking someone to share their knowledge, and thanking them for doing so, we deepen the bonds that connect us at work.  Moreover, we negotiate implicit deals whereby we agree that we too will help them back, when the time comes.
Encouraging employees to share knowledge with one another like this is at the heart of knowledge management (KM).  It sounds like a good idea, right?  So why do so few organisations actually do it?

One reason is a presumption that these things will happen naturally, with no effort from anyone and certainly with no-one having to spend either time or money to enable such sharing.

Such a presumption would be incorrect because without deliberate effort, even small organisations develop unseen yet powerful barriers to sharing.  One such impediment is the way in which we are rewarded at work, elements of which include:

- Salary
- Bonus
- Promotion
- Awards

Unwittingly, many organisations use rewards that discourage knowledge sharing and effectively penalise those that seek to combine their knowledge with others.  This is because, without firstly identifying and then rewarding the kind of behaviour they seek, employers usually reward people for what they know.

It’s not uncommon for people to be paid more because they have more experience.  Nor is it unusual for companies to encourage competition amongst their employees, either as individuals or as part of wider teams and departments, paying more to those that have gained more valuable knowledge relative to their ‘colleagues’.

However, if organisations actually want their employees to share knowledge then rewarding people on this basis is both counter-productive and confusing.  It’s counter-productive because such rewards encourage knowledge ‘hoarding’, not sharing and lead to defensiveness and the many problems of internal politics.

If someone is rewarded primarily for what they know, relative to their colleagues, why on earth would they share that knowledge with anyone else?

If a salesperson is rewarded mainly for generating higher revenue, relative to their colleagues, why on earth would they share ‘top tips’ or things to avoid with anyone else?

If a branch of a retail company is rewarded mostly for selling more stock, relative to other branches in the region, why on earth would they share good practice or ‘lessons learned’ with anyone else?

Furthermore, such reward systems are confusing because to claim to encourage certain behaviour whilst actually encouraging the opposite shows a lack of alignment between strategy and implementation.

People will actually do what they consider to be in their best (often short-term) interests, so if organisations genuinely want knowledge to be shared then rewards should be designed to encourage them to do so.

This doesn’t mean paying people less for knowing more but paying them more for sharing what they know.

It means openly praising those that share what they learn with their colleagues.

It means paying bonuses to people for coaching and mentoring colleagues over and above their day to day work.

It means rewarding a branch for sharing its lessons with others, perhaps by giving them a share of the other branches’ increased revenues.

It also means promoting those that demonstrate the right behaviour (i.e. honesty, self-criticism, intellectual curiosity) and demoting or firing those that demonstrate the wrong behaviour (i.e. covering up mistakes, defensiveness, resistance to change).

The use of rewards and penalties to promote knowledge management comes under Governance element within Knoco's KM assessment framework, more details of which can be found here.
For a conversation about how to reward the right sort of behaviour to encourage knowledge sharing, please get in touch via the Knoco website.

The expeditionary operation is dead. Long live the expeditionary operation!

The British contribution to the NATO International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan has ended.

 

I served in Afghanistan in the hot and bloody summer of 2008 and left the place convinced that what we were doing was (a) right and (b) working.

I then worked for 3 years in the British Army’s Lessons Exploitation Centre (LXC), helping the Army try to learn from the Afghanistan operation.  Indeed, it was at the LXC that I learnt about Knowledge Management (KM) and Organisational Learning (OL).  Much of what the Army has done in these difficult areas is to its credit and it is rightly considered something of a world-leader in its efforts to learn and share the knowledge that its learning generates.

I have written at length about these efforts elsewhere and a detailed account how the Army tries to learn is available here.

However, my 3 years at the LXC led me to question why such considerable efforts led to so little achievement.  Why did so many varied and costly inputs produce so few valuable outputs?

My conclusion was that the British Army lacks a learning culture and should try to develop one.

The British Army lacks a learning culture because it does not permit dissent, constructive or otherwise.

The British Army lacks a learning culture because senior officers sing their own praises and those of their soldiers but shy away from self-criticism, thereby most definitely ‘leading by example’ and demonstrating that such frankness and honesty is not the way to get ahead.

The British Army lacks a learning culture because of the ‘can do’ attitude that leads all combat arm officers worth their salt to agree to missions for which they have not been sufficiently well prepared, trained or equipped.

The British Army lacks a learning culture because the current difficult operation quickly loses its appeal and the next one will finally be the chance to do things right.

The British Army lacks a learning culture because every venture has to be successful – we always win…we can’t be seen to make mistakes…we can’t lose face.

In his searing account of the Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns, 'Losing Small Wars', Frank Ledwidge quoted one high-flying officer’s analysis of the outcome of the British Army’s efforts in Basra thus, “We were defeated, pure and simple.”  And yet the public narrative at the time was one of ‘work well done’, ‘worthwhile sacrifices’ and soldiers, sailors and airmen and women of whom ‘we can all be rightly proud’.

To do otherwise, to question (let alone criticize) such efforts is seen as ‘doing a disservice’ to the fallen, or being ‘disloyal’ to one’s former colleagues, or basically contorted in any way possible to deflect from the very real possibility that it was one massive mistake.

And so it is today. With the final troops now leaving Camp Bastion, the message being pushed is that we did a good job, that we can be proud and that we have displayed the utmost professionalism etc etc.  For example, listen to this interview from BBC Radio 4’s ‘The World at One’, between Martha Kearney and Major General Richard Nugee, the current Deputy Commander of ISAF’s Kabul HQ.

Utter rubbish.

Brooking no criticism, permitting no honest enquiry into performance and enabling no consideration of courses of action beyond the safe and self-protecting is no way to learn.

As I have done before, I have to conclude once more with these words, from (formerly) Major Giles Harris DSO, quoted in Toby Harnden’s book, ‘Dead Men Risen’,  

“The British are very good at whipping ourselves into a sense of achievement….we almost have to, to make it bearable.  You can’t do something like this and analyse it all the way through and think: “Actually we got that wrong.”  You just can’t.  It takes so much emotional investment.  I’m not saying we lie to ourselves but there’s an element of telling yourself that it’s all right and it’s going well, just to keep going.”[1]

Such honesty.  We need more of it.

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[1] Toby Harnden, ‘Dead Men Risen’, Page 558.

For us to learn from what happened, tell us what happened. That's all.

Knowledge management gets people to share their know-how with others, to help them learn for the future.  Such learning can be positive - as in, "I found this worked really well, you should consider that approach as well."  It can also be negative - as in, "We simply got it wrong and you need to do something different next time round."
In either case, to learn from what happened, we need to know what happened.
Not what we want others to think happened.
Nor that which will paint us in the best light.
Nor that which protects our feelings.
Nor that which protects the feelings of others.
Nor that which we think may help us get promoted.
Nor that which will save us from embarrassment.
Nor that which may get us a pay-rise.
To learn from what happened, we need to know what happened.
That is all.

Such honesty requires and enables a learning culture and is facilitated by supportive and self-critical leadership.  For more thoughts and information on this and other issues, visit the free resources page on the Knoco website and download the paper on organisational learning culture.

How can George Orwell help us learn about learning?

George Orwell was the famous author of ‘1984’, ‘Animal Farm’ and ‘The Road To Wigan Pier’.  One of his lesser known works is the essay, ‘Politics And The English Language’ which I shall now use to demonstrate the difference between adaptive and generative learning.

We have looked at these two ideas before.  To repeat, adaptive learning is what we do when we respond to a change in our environment.  We change, the environment does not.  Its outlook is short-term.

Generative learning is what we do when we develop a capability that will anticipate and respond to changes in our environment.  Its outlook is long-term.

Orwell’s essay includes 6 rules that aim to keep prose clear and concise.  Orwell hated verbosity and obfuscation because of the risk that such devices obscure the truth.  His 6 rules are:

1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.[1]

How do these help explain the difference between adaptive and generative learning?

Let’s imagine a company wants to improve the success rate of its pitches to clients and seeks my help.  An audit of their processes reveals a tendency to waffle, prevaricate, obscure and pad out their proposals, presentations and other communications.

I recommend the company employ me to edit, cut out, reduce and clarify all of the above.  I propose a fee based on the initial size of each document at 50 pence for each word that I remove.

Work begins and becomes a nice little earner for me.  The company is also happy because they notice a reduction in the response time it takes potential clients to review their documents and an increase in the number of successful bids.

This initiative is an example of adaptive learning.  We have addressed the problem of poorly worded proposals and, provided the value of the new business exceeds my fees, everyone is happy.

Some questions:

• Does this proposal help us to identify a root cause?
• If I dropped dead tomorrow or got bored of this work, would the company be able to maintain its current success rate?
• Has the company developed a capability that it lacked before my involvement?

No.

Now let’s look at how generative learning might address the same problem.

Following the audit (the one which identified a tendency to waffle, prevaricate, obscure and pad out their proposals, presentations and other communications), I propose:

• Market analysis for existing and abortive clients (i.e. what sort of proposals succeed in Asia, Africa, Scandinavia etc?  How do we adjust our style to meet their expectations?)
• Exploration of why proposals have been so verbose up until now (i.e. how does the Boss write?  Is there a culture of pretension in place? Do people feel the need to demonstrate overt intellect or education because their daily work provides no such opportunity?);
• All proposal-writing staff to read George Orwell’s essay;
• Design and delivery of a short training package to all proposal-writing staff to help them apply Orwell’s 6 rules where appropriate;
• Update of recruitment criteria for proposal-writing staff to ensure successful applicants can use various styles and understand clarity and conciseness.

If time is short, the initial adaptive response remains valid.  However, the company will only develop new capabilities if it examines root causes and understands its client base.
Those questions again:

• Does this proposal help us to identify a root cause?
• If I dropped dead tomorrow or got bored of this work, would the company be able to maintain its current success rate?
• Has the company developed a capability that it lacked before my involvement?

Yes.

So there we are - an explanation of the difference between adaptive and generative learning, thanks to George Orwell.

Read his essay!

For a conversation about learning, knowledge management or even George Orwell, please contact us direct or through the Knoco website.

 

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[1] Taken from http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit/; accessed 5 Feb 2013.

Do you want to know why so many organisations don't learn? I'll tell you....

Next month I'll be running a masterclass for ARK - details of which can be found on their site here.
The aim of the class is to look at organizational learning (OL) and knowledge management (KM) from cultural and behavioural perspectives. Through a series of presentations, discussions, and exercises, I will help participants will explore:

• Challenges, risks, and behaviours that inhibit OL and KM
• Opportunities, enablers, and behaviours that encourage OL and KM
• The importance of leadership and its impact on learning, for good or bad
• Examples and absences of learning from recent history and current affairs

I'll be using examples from my time in the British Army, the City, and now as a KM consultant to explore why some organizations – and people – find it so hard to learn.

After taking part in this masterclass, participants will:

• Be able to identify, create, and make the most of learning opportunities
• Identify, avoid, and manage some of the risks that limit learning
• Have an awareness of how their own behaviour helps or hinders learning
• Have several new tips and approaches for their ‘learning toolkit’
• Have some recommended reading for further study

The masterclass is aimed at OL and KM practitioners from all sectors, novices and experts alike. If you want to move beyond ‘lessons learned’ and gain insight into how to facilitate improved performance, this is for you!



For more information about knowledge management and organisational learning, please visit the Knoco website.