Monday 31 March 2014

Life of a lesson #4: "Cheeky bugger, I never said that! What I meant was...."

Recently, we’ve been looking at the following ten steps in the life of a lesson:
  1. Event takes place – an experience, idea, incident or accident
  2. Analysis and capture – through interview, AAR, workshop, report-writing etc.
  3. Packaging – write-up of lessons
  4. Review for accuracy – editing and improvement by person who identified the lesson
  5. Validation – quality check, ownership assigned and upload into a management system
  6. Review for accountability – periodic checks on progress
  7. Implement recommendations – to avoid/ensure recurrence of bad/good alike
  8. Review for effectiveness – observe changes to ensure they have had desired effect
  9. Closure – lesson status updated but retained in system for reference and to aid analysis
  10. Assurance – as part of risk management, periodic review to ensure closed status remains justified
Last time we looked at the third step – the write-up and packaging of lessons.  Now we’ll look at reviewing, editing and improving lessons.
Independent interviews and impartial facilitation of lessons capture meetings ensure that assumptions are challenged, difficult questions are asked and lessons will be understood by people that did not take part in the meeting or, for that matter, the event from which lessons have been identified.
However, with no reference back to the people taking part in the lessons capture, there is a danger that the written up lessons become too far removed from the conversations from which they originated.  Risks include:
  • Insufficient detail, notably on technical matters;
  • Over-simplification of complex issues;
  • Recommendations that 'miss their target'.
Therefore, the first draft of a lesson should always be returned for review by someone that was at the meeting or, in the case of an interview, the interviewee.

This ensures that originators of lessons retain a sense of 'ownership' and guards against their name being put against something with which they disagree.  In the words of T.S. Eliot's 'The Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock'; "
 “That is not it at all,
  That is not what I meant, at all.”
Ideally, reviewers should:
  • Read through the whole lesson promptly, checking that its overall message is sound;
  • Add technical detail where this may be lacking;
  • Add supplementary reference material (e.g. diagrams, pictures, report templates etc.);
  • Re-word sentences whose meaning may be misunderstood if quoted out of context.
Importantly, however, reviewers should not:
  • Leave the lessons for weeks so that their memory of the meeting or interview becomes hazy;
  • Weaken the overall message for fear of causing offence higher up;
  • Decide to re-write the lessons in order to 'sell' the strengths, diligence and all-round excellence of themselves and their colleagues.
Once this is complete, lessons are all but ready for uploading into a management system for action, a step that we will look at next time.
For more information on lessons, knowledge management (KM) and organisational learning, please visit the Knoco website.

Friday 28 March 2014

How on earth do we do KM? - Knoco KM Global Survey 2014

The Knoco Global Knowledge Management survey 2014 will gather data from companies with experience or aspirations in the KM field. The survey imposes no definition on the term "Knowledge Management" - if you say you are doing KM, you can take part.
Please take the survey if you can answer on behalf of an organisation (not a single person) of any size, sector or geography, which:
  • Is currently implementing Knowledge management,
  • Has already implemented Knowledge Management,
  • Is currently planning to implement Knowledge Management,
  • Has reviewed Knowledge Management and decided against it, or
  • Has tried to implement Knowledge Management in the past, but gave up. 
 

What you get from the survey


Filling in the survey will take you about half an hour. The survey has 50 core questions, then some optional detail on Communities of Practice, Lesson Learning and Best Practice development. In return we will email you a free copy of the survey report once all results are in. We expect this will be in late April or early May. We currently intend to sell the survey report to non-participants.
Your name, email and company name will not be shared with other participants, nor included in the final report, nor shared with third parties, nor added to the Knoco newsletter distribution list.
 

What the survey covers

The survey contains a number of sections:
  • A Demographics section, to capture data on company size, geography, industry sector and current KM status, to allow us to filter results to show how KM may vary with any of these parameters;
  • A Resources section, to gather data on KM investment in terms of KM team and budget;
  • A scope, focus and value section, to gather data on where people are focusing their KM activity, the value they have delivered to date, and from where that value has come;
  • A Technology section, to identify the most popular KM technologies and those that deliver the most value;
  • A processes section, to identify the most popular KM processes and those that deliver the most value;
  • A Governance and culture section, to look at barriers, enablers, metrics and incentives;
  • An optional section on Best Practices;
  • An optional section on Lessons Learned;
  • An optional section on Communities of Practice.

For more information on Knowledge Management (KM) and the services we provide, please visit the Knoco website.

Wednesday 26 March 2014

Life of a lesson #3: Everything that matters and no more....

Recently, we’ve been looking at the following ten steps in the life of a lesson:
  1. Event takes place – an experience, idea, incident or accident
  2. Analysis and capture – through interview, AAR, workshop, report-writing etc.
  3. Packaging – write-up of lessons
  4. Review for accuracy – editing and improvement by person who identified the lesson
  5. Validation – quality check, ownership assigned and upload into a management system
  6. Review for accountability – periodic checks on progress
  7. Implement recommendations – to avoid/ensure recurrence of bad/good alike
  8. Review for effectiveness – observe changes to ensure they have had desired effect
  9. Closure – lesson status updated but retained in system for reference and to aid analysis
  10. Assurance – as part of risk management, periodic review to ensure closed status remains justified
Last time we looked at the second step – the processes used to capture lessons.  Now we’ll look at how lessons are written up.
Format
As already discussed, when capturing lessons from people in workshops and interviews, they will often be elicited using the following format:
  • What was expected or meant to happen?
  • What actually happened?
  • How does what happened differ from what was expected?
  • What were the root causes or contributory factors?
  • What can we learn?  This learning comes in two forms:
    • What should we do next time round, when faced with this issue?
    • What changes should the host organisation make to prevent or ensure recurrence?
  • What impact did this issue have?  How much money/time did it cost or save us?
However, regardless of whether this format was used during the capture phase, any material gained now needs to be written into this structure or an equivalent one.  This will take time as well as trial and error.
Enough detail but no more
Lessons capture will often produce more material than you need and writing up lessons requires striking a balance between comprehension and brevity.  Often, an issue will manifest itself in numerous ways but merely repetition of each adds little; instead, you should choose two or three examples that show sufficiently different ways in which the issue affected performance, for good or bad.
Clarity, clarity, clarity
As already mentioned in the last post, an over-riding principle of writing up lessons should be clarity for the end-user – namely, the people with the ability to change things, budgets, processes etc.  For their benefit, explain any acronyms and avoid any project/team/activity-specific jargon.
Value-added, not verbatim
Slavishly reproducing what was said in the interview or workshop is pointless, not least because none of us is as clear, concise or comprehendible as we would like and our musings can all benefit from ruthless editing.  Additionally, the logical flow of a lesson can be enhanced if our thoughts can be re-ordered by someone who sees what we were trying to say, if we’d had the time, training etc.
Boldness not bullshit
Whilst writing up lessons, you might spot a deduction that was all but stated but got missed; or you might think up a recommendation that was not raised in the room but might well solve everything.  If in doubt, include it.  Where judgement is required, be more forceful rather than less and produce a hard-hitting lesson that tells it how it is – it can always be amended in the next step, where we get the lessons reviewed for accuracy by those that identified them.
For more information on lessons, knowledge management (KM) and organisational learning, please visit the Knoco website.

Monday 24 March 2014

Life of a lesson #2: Make me understand, argue your case, convince me!


Recently, we’ve been looking at the following ten steps in the life of a lesson:
  1. Event takes place – an experience, idea, incident or accident
  2. Analysis and capture – through interview, AAR, workshop, report-writing etc.
  3. Packaging – write-up of lesson
  4. Review for accuracy – editing and improvement by person who identified the lesson
  5. Validation – quality check, ownership assigned and upload into a management system
  6. Review for accountability – periodic checks on progress
  7. Implement recommendations – to avoid/ensure recurrence of bad/good alike
  8. Review for effectiveness – observe changes to ensure they have had desired effect
  9. Closure – lesson status updated but retained in system for reference and to aid analysis
  10. Assurance – as part of risk management, periodic review to ensure closed status remains justified
Last time we looked at the first step – the events from which lessons may be identified.
We’ll now look at the analysis and capture processes used to extract lessons from such events.

Lessons can be captured from different sources, such as:
  • Interviews – conducted 1-1 with key project team members or employees approaching retirement;
  • After Action Reviews – regular, informal meetings conducted within teams;
  • Lessons capture workshops – deliberate, formal sessions at end of stage or project closure;
  • Reports – from project closure or following an unplanned event such as an accident.
Each of these has advantages and disadvantages.  For example, 1-1 interviews give only one perspective and anonymity will encourage honesty whilst limiting credibility and ‘right to respond’.  Conversely, workshops may provide a broad overview whilst lacking detail and few participants will be truly honest in front of others, not least when it comes to discussing personal errors.
These are simple facts relating to how people and organisations handle reflections on past performance but a good KM team will ensure that lessons are captured from as many sources as possible.
Whilst sources vary, lessons are captured consistently by analysing past events in the following way:
  • What was expected or meant to happen?
  • What actually happened?
  • How does what happened differ from what was expected?
  • What were the root causes or contributory factors?
  • What can we learn?  This learning comes in two forms:
    • What should we do next time round, when faced with this issue?
    • What changes should the host organisation make to prevent or ensure recurrence?
  • What impact did this issue have?  How much money/time did it cost or save us?
People may observe that this seems an artificial structure and they would be correct.  The thing is, without a logical flow of inquiry such as this, people will launch thus, "Right, what we need to do next time is...."  The priority for any lessons capture method should be consideration of the end-user (i.e. the person, team or department that can use the lesson to drive change).
The end-user is not in the room when the workshop takes place, nor are they reading over your shoulder as you write your report; so we have to do as much as we can to help them understand the issue, by giving them background and an understanding of what was meant to happen.
If they are to act upon our recommendations, by spending budgets differently, or by endorsing and embedding new processes, we need to make our case, which requires logic and persuasion, hence the flow of the lesson and the need for quantifiable impact.
Having captured answers to each of these questions, the lesson now needs to be written up in neat form, which is our next step.
For more information on lessons, knowledge management (KM) and organisational learning, please visit the Knoco website.

Friday 21 March 2014

Ten steps in the life of a lesson - let's get the ball rolling


Lessons are an important element of any organisation's efforts to improve performance.
As trailed in the last post, over the coming weeks, we’ll be looking at the following ten steps in the life of a lesson:

  1. Event takes place – an experience, idea, incident or accident
  2. Analysis and capture – through interview, AAR, workshop, report-writing etc.
  3. Packaging – write-up of lesson
  4. Review for accuracy – editing and improvement by person who identified the lesson
  5. Validation – quality check, ownership assigned and upload into a management system
  6. Review for accountability – periodic checks on progress
  7. Implement recommendations – to avoid/ensure recurrence of bad/good alike
  8. Review for effectiveness – observe changes to ensure they have had desired effect
  9. Closure – lesson status updated but retained in system for reference and to aid analysis
  10. Assurance – as part of risk management, periodic review to ensure closed status remains justified

These are all important but the first of these – the event - is the point of conception, from which the lesson begins to grow!
Lessons can be drawn from any event (or series of events) because we can and do learn from every element of human experience.  These events can be planned (e.g. projects, deployments, bids,, branch openings, product launches etc.) or unplanned (e.g. accidents, unforeseen opportunities, weather events etc.).
These events can be positive or negative.  This is an important point because some people think that we ‘only learn from our mistakes’.
I used to think this too.
It’s rubbish.
When things go well (i.e. when performance meets or exceeds our expectations), we should make an effort to learn to ensure that we repeat such performance in the future.  Neglecting the positives and focussing on the negatives has two potential consequences:
  • We leave things to chance, running the risk of NOT repeating the things that ensured success this time round;
  • We come to view learning as a negative experience, making it unpopular and unlikely to lead to improved performance.
Of course, whilst the event is the immediate source of learning, it is almost certain that our efforts to learn from it will require inquiry and an analysis of those events that preceded it, as well as the context, the conditions and any concurrent activity.  This is known as lessons capture and is the next step in the life of a lesson, to be discussed in the next blog post.
For more information on lessons, knowledge management (KM) and organisational learning, please visit the Knoco website.

Friday 14 March 2014

The life of a lesson

Most organisations don't identify lessons, let alone learn from them.
A few organisations identify them and presume that they have learned from them.
Fewer still identify lessons and use them as agents of change, to drive improvements in performance.
Even fewer identify lessons, learn from them, retain them for the future and use them to manage risks.
Nevertheless, these are the ones that ‘get it’ and show the rest of us the potential value that lessons can provide.
So, for the next few posts, let’s look at how such organisations manage lessons and see how their example can help those of us that seek to use knowledge to improve performance.  I suggest the following ten steps in the life of a lesson:
  1. Event takes place – an experience, idea, incident or accident
  2. Analysis and capture – through interview, AAR, workshop, report-writing etc.
  3. Packaging – write-up of lesson
  4. Review for accuracy – editing and improvement by person who identified the lesson
  5. Validation – quality check, ownership assigned and upload into a management system
  6. Review for accountability – periodic checks on progress
  7. Implement recommendations – to avoid/ensure recurrence of bad/good alike
  8. Review for effectiveness – observe changes to ensure they have had desired effect
  9. Closure – lesson status updated but retained in system for reference and to aid analysis
  10. Assurance – as part of risk management, periodic review to ensure closed status remains justified.
We’ll look at each of these over the coming weeks. 
For help on making your organisation one of the very few that learns and for more information on the part played by lessons in knowledge management, please visit the Knoco website.

Thursday 6 March 2014

How strong is your KM? Take our survey to find out.

We can all feel pleased with ourselves for no good reason.



We can all think we're doing a good job when we don't actually even know what 'good' looks like.



As it is with cooking, swimming, arithmetic or sales, so it is with knowledge management (KM).  It is performance relative to others that matters.



A KM assessment enables an organisation to identify its strengths and weaknesses, relative to others.



For a concise insight into your organisation's KM capabilities, you can have a go yourself with our online survey, here.



For more information on these and other services, please visit the Knoco web-site.