Knoco newsletter - KM value

The latest Knoco newsletter - on KM value - is out now!

If you'd like to discuss how knowledge management creates value with a KM consultant, please get in touch, either direct or via the Knoco website.

KM UK 2016 - Come and learn about learning...

I'll be speaking at the forthcoming KM UK Conference on 16th June.

My old boss, Colonel Ian Tinsley (Retd) and I will be talking about how the British Army learned from both the operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and how it managed the knowledge it gained.

Frequent readers of this blog will have read the article linked at this post in which I examine the ways in which the Army increased its learning capacity from 2009.

Building upon some of the material in that article, we'll cover:

• What does 'good military KM' look like?
• What does it take for a lesson to be actually learned?
• Why does the Army do KM?  What should anyone?
• Top tips and things to watch for when managing lessons.

The agenda for the conference is listed here.

Come along and let's learn about learning.

If you'd like to chat about knowledge management, or 'lessons learned', please get in touch direct or via the Knoco website.

Let's compete with those outside, sure but not with our team-mates, colleagues etc...

I recently conducted a KM assessment at a multinational chemicals firm, interviewing over 20 people with varying levels of experience, seniority and from across all functional teams.  The aim is to understand what KM capabilities are in place, how well they are doing and what’s missing.  One of the things we look at, when assessing a client’s KM governance, is the culture of the place.

What is it like to work there?  What do people think about KM?  What do senior managers think about it?  How are mistakes and errors viewed?  Is there a ‘blame culture’ or a ‘learning culture’?  Also, is there any internal competition between individuals, teams or departments?  How willing are people to share knowledge and information with one another?  To what extent does the maxim, ‘knowledge is power’ hold sway?

Regular readers of this blog will recall my review of Margaret Heffernan’s excellent book, ‘Wilful Blindness’ in which she examined many examples of organisations where leaders either don’t want to hear the truth or the led don’t want to tell it.  This phenomenon, common to many (most?!) organisations, is caused by a view that passing on bad or embarrassing news leads to unpopularity, demotion, or even getting fired.
In the excellent ‘Ted talk’ linked below, Margaret discusses how successful teams (and wider organisations) are those where there is a desire to help one another with knowledge and information.  She doesn’t mention the term ‘knowledge management’ but the positive examples she offers (i.e. chicken farming, engineering, responses to environmental regulations) would, if assessed using our methodology, get high ‘KM governance’ scores.
Four more quick points:

·        It’s not about technology – Margaret Heffernan recognises that technology is just an enabler and achieves absolutely nothing without the right people, processes and governance in place;

·        Knowing one another – She argues that people have to know one another in order to establish trust as well as knowing who has what skills, knowledge and experience.  I would argue that, whilst true, shortening this time is possible, not least by senior managers who lead by personal example rather than directive;

·        “Companies don’t have ideas, only people do” – Again, this is true but one of the key ‘lightbulb’ moments for senior managers on a KM journey comes when they realise that the ideas generated within their organisations should be at least be ‘possessed’ by the company. However, most knowledge remains locked in the heads of people who refuse to share it because the status quo has made it clear there is no incentive (or supporting culture) for them to do so.  So what?  Organisations should:

o   Reward teams for sharing their knowledge instead of hoarding it;

o   Create knowledge assets for the critical knowledge areas;

o   Build Communities of Practice around knowledge areas where there is strength in depth;

o   Retain experts’ knowledge rather than letting it walk out of the door when they do;

·        “Conflict is frequent because candour is safe” – yes, yes, yes.  Being honest is often hard, especially when discussing things we wish had turned out differently.  But in environments where honesty is rewarded over success, or dishonesty punished before failure, people can challenge old ideas, as well as new ones – in such places, real innovation is possible.

If you’d like to chat about these ideas, tools or more with some knowledge management consultants, please get in touch, either direct or via the Knoco website.

How can organisations stop forgetting?

This morning, a Linkedin connection pointed me towards this BBC article about the issue of institutional memory loss and I look forward to listening to the programme it mentions later on this evening.

However, I was struck by the article’s lack of any formal mention of knowledge management (KM), which has been addressing the problems of knowledge loss for over 20 years now.

Regular readers of this blog will be aware that we at Knoco work as knowledge management consultants, helping organisations to identify critical knowledge, through knowledge scans, and then help them develop knowledge retention strategies.  This is done through knowledge retention interviews and the creation of knowledge assets. 

We have some freebie downloads on our website with template and guidance notes on some of these and other tools.

I recommend blog readers to read the article, listen to the programme and, for those that find the problems therein familiar, feel free to contact me for a chat about how KM can help prevent (let alone address) these problems!

The NHS is starting to learn - keep it up!

This blog has previously looked (here, here, here, here and here!) at the various ways in which the British National Health Service (NHS) has grappled with knowledge management in general and, specifically, has sought to learn from both managerial and clinical mistakes.
Today brings some new developments to the story that began with the ‘Mid Staffs’ scandal a few years ago.
The Health Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, will today be announcing a series of measures aimed at encouraging both openness and honesty about mistakes, as well as demonstrable learning from them.
Details will no doubt emerge later today but this article on the Huffington Post website summarises the expected announcements, with the key points, and my comments thereon, being:

·        Legal protection for anyone coming forward with information relating to hospital mistakes – this is a welcome move that may yet embed the elusive ‘just culture’ approach to handling error and balancing the need for accountability and learning;

·        Independent review and confirmation of the causes of all deaths in UK hospitals from 2018 – whilst this sounds a good idea, more details are needed as there remains the risk that good governance is simply being outsourced and that another adversarial interface has been created;

·        A so-called ‘Learning from Mistakes League’ that will measure the level of openness across NHS organisations – again, more details are needed but this sounds good as it is making it clear that learning and openness are expected; however, this needs to be managed carefully as inter-organisational learning will not happen if such a league is used as some form of internal competition – nothing kills the sharing of good practice dead more effectively than rewarding people for what they know, rather than what they share.

Effective lesson learning requires a framework within which lessons are identified, analysed, managed and then implemented.  Such a framework requires 4 enablers:

·        People with defined roles and accountabilities;

·        Processes by which lessons are identified, captured, shared and embedded in daily practices;

·        Technology through which lessons are captured, shared and managed to completion;

·        Governance by which managers clarify their expectations for lessons to be learned, reward good lesson learning performance and support such activities through the allocation of time, money and people.

The presence and effectiveness of these enablers is best measured through some form of audit or assessment, like the one we offer at Knoco.
Let’s await further details with interest and perhaps also think about how well our own organisations identify, manage and implement lessons from experience, good and bad alike.
For a conversation about lessons learned, please contact me direct or via the Knoco website.

Culture - a self-inflicted wound (or how the BBC and Nokia hurt themselves and how KM can help)

Today, the former judge Dame Janet Smith published her report into the culture and practices of the BBC in light of allegations of abuse by the late Jimmy Savile, during his time as a DJ and TV personality there.

The full report is available here.

Some may recall my writing about this sordid episode before (here and here).

Some key quotes that struck me:

·        “…the management culture in the BBC did not encourage openness in these respects and did not recognise the sense of insecurity which inhibited staff from speaking out.”

·        “An important feature of the culture of the BBC during the period with which we are concerned was the reluctance of staff to complain about bad things which happened to them or to raise concerns about bad things which were happening within the organisation.”

·        “…organisations both large and small find it almost impossible to inculcate a culture where people feel able to report a complaint or raise a concern without fear of adverse consequences for themselves.”

·        “…most staff (other than those who had been in the higher echelons) felt that the management culture was too deferential and that some executives were ‘above the law’.”

·        “…the culture in the BBC and the BBC’s management style did not encourage the reporting of complaints or concerns.”

·        “…fear of reprisal, fear of losing your job, fear of being known as a troublemaker and fear of not being promoted [are the] reasons why complaints might not be made.” 

Now, let’s turn to another well-known organisation – the telecommunications company, Nokia. Formerly the dominant force in the mobile phone market, Nokia sold its mobile devices division to Microsoft in 2013, having been unable to respond to the market challenges presented by Apple and Samsung over the previous 6 years.
This article here, makes a compelling case that it wasn’t Apple or Samsung that damaged Nokia but its very own culture.
Again, some key points:

·        “the company’s top managers had a terrifying reputation, which was widely shared by middle managers….some members of Nokia’s board and top management [were] “extremely temperamental” who regularly shouted at people “at the top of their lungs”….it was thus very difficult to tell them things they didn’t want to hear. Threats of firings or demotions were commonplace.”

·        “Fearing the reactions of top managers, middle managers remained silent or provided optimistic, filtered information.”

·        “…the information did not flow upwards. Top management was directly lied to….There were situations where everybody knew things were going wrong, but we were thinking, “Why tell top managers about this? It won’t make things any better.””

·        “Nokia’s ultimate fall can be put down to internal politics. In short, Nokia people weakened Nokia people and thus made the company increasingly vulnerable to competitive forces. When fear permeated all levels, the lower rungs of the organisation turned inward to protect resources, themselves and their units, giving little away, fearing harm to their personal careers. Top managers failed to motivate the middle managers with their heavy-handed approaches and they were in the dark with what was really going on.”

Two organisations with different purposes and structures but with a common problem – a culture that did not encourage openness and honesty, where only ‘good news’ gets passed on up and whereby senior management don’t have the full picture, forcing them to make decisions based on partial information.
Why?  Because of the culture that they themselves have allowed to take hold. 
But these are extreme cases, right?  That sort of thing doesn’t happen everywhere, does it?
Well, how about we delete ‘sexual abuse’ or ‘touch-screen phone’ and insert, ‘project delays’ or ‘cost over-runs’ or ‘performance issues’ or ‘safety concerns’.  Or any of the other ways in which performance can end up not quite how we had intended.  Are these reported upwards in full?  Or do we only talk about the good stuff? 
In short, many organisations are places where leaders are making decisions whilst not knowing what has really happened and, perhaps more importantly, why.
So what can they do about this?
Good knowledge management requires (amongst other things) the creation of processes to help people talk about how things are going and how they can be improved:

·        After Action Reviews get people in teams to talk openly about how things have gone  and learn from each other;

·        Peer Assists, Knowledge Exchanges and Handovers get different teams to explore issues and come up with solutions that can be embedded into everyday ways working;

·        Retrospects help project teams explore how the project (or stage thereof) went, what has been learned and what can be done differently next time;

·        Knowledge Harvesting Interviews get critical knowledge and information out of the heads of a few experts and available for others to use.

These tools and others can reveal much about what things are really like inside an organisation and, for their potential as learning techniques to be realised, senior management have to show leadership and send out the message that messengers will NOT be shot if they tell the truth.
Leaders must lead by example – which means being brutally honest about their own shortcomings, to send out the message that it’s okay to do so.  Moreover, that to do so is expected and is the essential thing that will lead to better performance – lower costs, higher profits, safer workplaces, motivated employees, better quality products.
For a chat about KM tools or how to create a learning culture, please get in touch or via the Knoco website.

Knoco newsletter - on KM Governance - is out today....

Knoco's latest newsletter is out now - available at this link here.

Let me know if you'd like to join our mailing list, or chat about KM governance, dealing with the 'if my colleague feel under a bus today' problem, lessons (both learned and unlearned), culture, rugby....