Urinals.  Do you spend much time looking at them?

This is just a guess, but for half of you, I’m assuming that the answer is “no”.  The other half of you are wondering where I’m going with this line of enquiry.

 If you have had the pleasure of using the urinals at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam, you will have noticed that each one is embellished with a lifelike image of a fly, under the glaze – just near the drain.  Initially I dismissed this as merely an example of quirky humour from a Dutch sanitary-ware manufacturer, but I was too hasty. Apparently, since incorporating the fly into their urinals, airports and other public places have noticed a decrease in the amount of cleaning required. Some of these have improved to the extent that they have saved money by reducing the number of cleaning shifts.    If you haven’t figured out the link between the fly and the cost reduction, ask any small boy!

All of this got me thinking about how on-target we are in the way we exchange knowledge, good practices, worst practices and stories.  Despite our best efforts, do people sometimes miss the mark when it comes to knowledge exchange? 

As knowledge professionals, we work hard to use processes and social technologies to bring people together collaboratively.  On some precious occasions, we get to design and facilitate face-to-face knowledge-sharing events.  Occasionally, we even get to work on leadership behaviours and organisational design. 

In all of these worthy activities, we sometimes forget that knowledge management can also help groups of people to agree upon and describe their practices – and hence connect and share more efficiently because they have negotiated a common language.

Here’s an illustration.  In KM circles, we have talked for years about the value of nurturing communities of practice, and rightly so.  However, if we were to turn our “Community of Practice toolkits” out onto the table, the majority of our tools play into the notion of Community: role descriptions and training programmes for leaders and facilitators, templates for community charters, designs for launch events, no end of technology options for social collaboration and document management.

But what about the Practice bit?  Do we have anything in our toolkits to offer groups of professionals who want to agree upon “what’s important” and describe “what good looks like”?  Yes, we can provide wikis where people can discuss and build glossaries, definitions and reference material, but that’s a platform, rather than a process.

I’m advocating that as Knowledge Management professionals, we should be able to offer any group a simple process for describing their practices qualitatively, thereby enhancing their knowledge-sharing.   That could involve the creation of a self-assessment tool (maturity model) – or perhaps a knowledge asset which helps others to navigate through a distillation of past learning, current good practice, examples and key contacts. 

That’s more than installing a wiki, a Drupal community or a set of SharePoint libraries.  It requires  us to roll up our sleeves and engage with the subject  experts and practitioners.  It involves us in helping them to agree and describe their practice in an accessible way.  By helping them to produce a common model of the practices which make up their functional area, they will be able to target their knowledge-sharing far more precisely, and hence get more value from KM tools and techniques.

Or to put it another way – if our knowledge workers have something more clearly defined to aim at, then we’ll have to spend less time clearing up after them.

 First Published in the October Edition of Inside Knowledge

This one from Lotus does a surprisingly good job.  Not perfect, but not at all bad…

Thanks to Geoff Parcell for spotting it.

It was my first trip to India, and, although I was warned to be ready for an “assault on the senses”, and it certainly was – especially the traffic. I’m still getting over it – a whole new take on choas and complexity…

What struck me most though, was the insatiable appetite for learning and improvement demonstrated by my companions for the two days.  Robert Bosch India is already a strong performer in knowledge management, but their dissatisfaction with “good”, and unswerving desire for “great” made them a charmingly demanding client to spend time with.  There aren’t many companies in the West who could fill a conference room at 18.30 on a Friday evening for a two hour seminar on”creating a learning culture”.  Watch out Buckman Labs and Novo Nordisk…

I got back yesterday from the second meeting in a “Learning consortium” series of four events that I am co-facilitating with Elizabeth Lank, supported by TFPL.

We’re working with a group of Public Sector organisations who want to improve their capability in the fields of Communities and Collaboration by meeting, sharing, storytelling and developing new approaches.  Naturally, working with such a group requires that we invest time in building trust levels – and also in having some fun together.

Tuesday evening’s lighthearted community-building exercise involved our participants each recommending a music track which linked in some way (some of them tenuously!) to the Collaboration/Communities theme of our consortium.  Thanks to John Quinn at the Learning & Skills Council for stimulating the idea.

With the magic of iTunes, a colour printer and CD-writer, we were able to present each delegate with their own copy of “Music to Collaborate by…” at breakfast the next day. This compilation will now become the soundtrack for use our next two meetings.   
Finding a way to co-create a tangible, unique and enjoyable product is an important milestone for this particular community.

Here is a selection of the tracks…

Pulp – Common People
Sham 69 – if the kids are united
Bill Withers – Lean on me
Primal Scream – Come Together
Al Green – Let’s stay together
U2 – Somehow you keep me hanging on
Better together – Jack Johnson
The Beatles – I’ll get by with a little help from my friends

I ran a couple of training sessions last week, and in both of them the group ended up in a discussion about the relative merits of “knowledge harvesting”. I have always held however detailed the learning/exit interview with someone leaving a position or an organisation, both parties usually end up disappointed. However, as a salvage operation, particularly one involving a workgroup or community, it is certainly better than nothing, and can reduce some of the short-term risks.

I’d like to think that there are less reactive and more creative contractual ways of retaining access to expertise through phased retirement and voluntary alumni approaches…

Schlumberger have the right idea in the way they manage communities and special interest groups as an integral part of the development of professionals. In order to reach the upper echelons of Schlumberger’s technical professionals – the top rung of the technical ladder – you have to have spent time leading a community of practice. If you have never led a community, then you never become a “fellow”.

In order to lead a community of practice, you have to be voted in, during their annual “community election season” (sounds a little strange, but they manage it very well). Needless to say, in order to be voted in as a community leader, you have to have demonstrated the right behaviours, and been an active, knowledge-sharing member – in addition to having the requisite facilitation skills.

If the community is active and the “expert” is engaged, then there shouldn’t be too much left for the hasty harvest when the time comes for pastures new…

Far better perhaps, to consider your whole career as a 40-year exit interview!

I picked up a copy of Business Week earlier in the week, attracted by the cover story : “3M’s Innovation Crisis – How Six Sigma almost smothered its idea culture”.

It provides an interesting commentary on the leadership styles of CEOs, McNerny and Buckley at 3M, and their respective attempts to introduce (or sheep-dip?) and then refocus Six Sigma to avoid that particular cuckoo pushing all the golden eggs out of the nest…

Some choice quotes:

“Perhaps one of the mistakes that we made as a company – it’s one of the dangers of six sigma – is that when you value sameness more than you value creativity, I think you potentially undermine the heart and soul of a company like 3M.”

Whilst I allowed myself a private smirk at the critical stance of the article, it got me reflecting on whether some of the tools of knowledge management, inappropriately applied, could equally easily undermine the heart and soul of a company. Too intense focus on continuous improvement and good practice sharing, at the expense of boundary-scanning, making connections and opening up resources, relationships and organisational boundaries…

Jeneanne Rae follows up the main story in Business Week with a short article on how Ambidextrous Companies can “have it both ways” and simultaneously handle incremental change and bold initiatives. She references O’Reilly and Tushman’s HBR article on the Ambidextrous Organisation – I must read this, as some of the organisations I know (and have worked in) struggle to have the left hand know what the right hand is doing, let alone successfully harmonise their activities!

Jeneanne finishes with three strategies for managing incremental and disruptive innovative initiatives simultaneously:

• Separate the efforts. Don’t expect people running mature businesses to behave the same as those in charge of startups. Each type has its own incentives, organizations, and talent needs.
• Appoint an ambidextrous senior manager to oversee both efforts. A general manager with responsibility for both traditional and new businesses will foster efficiency by sharing such resources as HR, marketing, and finance, and by promoting integration of the initiatives when the time is right.
• Support both teams appropriately. Don’t shortchange one over the other. It kills me to see so much investment in reengineering, training, and employee time being poured into Six Sigma initiatives in the name of cost savings when innovation gets starved for critical research requirements like white-space analysis, ethnographic research, or prototyping. It’s as if leadership believes companies can shrink their way to greatness.

That final quote is one to savour – and will be going into my favourite quotes list…

“It’s as if leadership believes companies can shrink their way to greatness.”

I ran a workshop for “Connecting for Health” yesterday, and someone gave me this little story, entitled “A classic example of knowledge in practice”.

They have no physicians, but when a man is ill, they lay him in the public square, and the passers-by come up to him, and if they have ever had his disease or have known anyone who has suffered from it, they give him advice, recommending him to do whatever they found good in their own case, or in the case known to them; and no one is allowed to pass the sick man in silence without asking him what his ailment is.

Histories of Herodotus: A history source of Persian Empire of Achaemenian era.
Herodotus (c. 484-225 BC); Translated by: George Rawlinson. Connecting for HealthConnecting for Health

In our “knowledge-sharing civilisation” I wonder whether we have the equivalent of too many physicians, no public square, a lack of passers-by or just a lack of intellectual compassion?

I was with the Henley KM Forum last week running a workshop with Christine Van Winkelen. I’m part of a project team looking at the relationship between knowledge management and innovation, and in particular, at the way in which KM practices can support innovation.

A number of the members organisations conducted local research drawing out their innovation stories, which were scanned for recurrent themes. As a group, we then put some “flesh on the bones” and created a self-assessment tool (maturity model) , based on the combined experience of the room, plus an analysis of current research. I thought I’d share the high-level headings here:

Recognising/finding high-value opportunities to innovate, Re-using Knowledge, Internal collaboration, External Collaboration, Learning from Innovation activities, Building a learning organisation.

Next step is for the member organisations to self-assess and identify areas where they can share and learn from each other using the “River Diagram” approach – setting off a number of new conversations, and a whole lot of new learning…

The little Peer Assist animation I blogged recently has become a subject of discussion in the Coognitive Edge blog.

I’ve responsed in the discussion there, but my comment hasn’t come out of quarantine yet (it’s my first one on the cognitive edge, so I guess I’m being screened), so I’ll pick up the thread here for now.

Dave Snowden (whose intellect I respect) makes a few points in his post – an assertion (provocatively distorted) about the nature of the peer assist process, and a comment  about the way in which simple methods can be turned into recipes (which I entirely agree with), all sugar-coated with a back-handed compliment.

It’s been frustrating to watch the comments build whilst beng unable to respond myself, but interesting to see the way in which the thread has developed.  In many ways, it makes the case for Peer Asists better than I could argue it!

The critical distinction that is missing in Dave’s assertion and most of the responses which follow, (and this is where Peer Assists are different to the activities that competent managers have been doing naturally for years) is that Peer Assists are primarily designed to share experience – not advice or opinions.
(To give credit to the red facilitator in the animation – she does state that people “offer suggestions based on personal experience”. Nancy Dixon echos this in Common Knowledge, where she details the origins of the approach in BP)

Sure, you can get up from your desk and wander around the office picking up advice and opinions. You can Google for them too. But that’s not the same as setting up a short meeting in which people only share suggestions based on personal experience.
It’s all too natural to shake up a cocktail of opinions, advice, and experience together without checking the ingredients. The Peer Assist process is unnatural insofar as it limits input to personal experience only. And that’s where the facilitator, whether red, blue or green, adds value.

So to return to the thread in Cognitive Edge blog - we can see a number of Opinions about what Peer Assists might be, but very little voiced Experience from people who have participated or facilitated one.  Rather than exploring the topic openly from the standpoint of experience, there is a natural tendency by some (and perhaps an element of group-think – curmudgeonliness is more contagious than appreciativeness) to deconstruct and conform the approach to elements other models.  ”Oh a Peer Assist is just …”  “x + y + z = peer assist”

My suggestion is – try one out!  Use as much of the recipe as you need for the context of your organisation (thanks Bill Kaplan).  For BP’s highly facilitative culture where most teams included someone with good facilitation skills, the process needed very little guidance.  To quote from Nancy Dixon’s Common Knowledge:  “BP wisely chose to offer it as a simple idea without specifying rules or lengthy “how-to” steps.”  In other cultures and contexts - perhaps those for whom the animation was designed – there may be more of a need to provide a recipe. 

As I said in my reponse on Cognitive Edge, I suggest watching the animation with a large half-full glass of wine in one hand. Curmudgeonliness just fades away. 

NB. Don’t try it with a half-empty glass though – somehow it’s just not the same.

Ever wondered how a “Peer Assist” works?  It’s a meeting designed to help a team “learn before doing” by drawing on the experience of others.  Simple eh?  But not many people do it, because we like to get straight in to the action…

Here’s a fun flash movie from the University of Ottowa that explains how it all works…