conversation matters

Tips for Making Virtual Meetings Effective

2012-02-10T19:39:57-08:00

Before the Meeting

• Keep virtual meetings small; no more than twelve, even if that means you have to hold five different virtual meetings. You can hold a discussion with a small group but that is not possible if there are thirty or more people on line.

• If you hold a series of virtual meetings keep the same small groups together each time. After several virtual meetings twelve people can begin to feel like a community, recognizing each other’s voices, remembering what each person sounds like, what ideas are important to him or her. In other words members get to know each other, which in turn makes them more willing to offer their ideas and thinking on the call.

• Contact people personally before the meeting to build rapport. Reach out to participants whose participation is particularly important.

• Create a picture collage of people who will be on the call. Pictures help make the others on the call real to us. We have a much better memory for faces than for names. We have a sense that we “know” another person if we can recall how they look. If a few people don’t send a picture, you can still include their names in the circle.

If pictures are not possible use a clock face to help yourself and others know who is on the call.

At the Beginning of a Virtual Meeting
• Have the pictures of the people on the call up on the webinar screen. If it is a teleconference, send an email of the collage ahead of time and ask people on the call to have it up on their screen.

• Ask people to always say their name before they speak. The format is: “This is Joe Fitz, I agree that ………” If someone forgets, ask them to say their name after they have finished. “That was very helpful, who was just speaking?” The facilitator should also say his/her name each time he/she speaks to help to set the norm.

• Provide time at the beginning for a check in. Get each person’s voice in the room at the beginning. Checking in creates a friendly atmosphere. People need an example to know how long they should talk. As the facilitator, provide your answer first so others will have a model for how detailed they should be. But before you provide your example, give everyone a moment to think about what they want to say. Here are some possible check in questions:
o What is something about (x) you’ve learned in the last week?
o What do we need to be working on together?
o What was the highlight of your month?
o What have you learned from others that you have tried?
o What is the most interesting thing that happened in your shop this week?
o What are you most grateful for this morning?
o What has inspired you this week?

• Call on people individually early in a meeting which sets the expectation that you might call on them at anytime.

During a Virtual Meeting
• Many virtual meetings are scheduled as presentations by either faculty or members. However virtual meetings can have a broader range of goals than just informing. Virtual meetings can also:
o Problem solve
o Make decisions about how or what work will be done
o Generate ideas

• In actuality, virtual meetings are a poor medium for presentations. As listeners, we simply don’t experience enough cognitive stimulation to keep our attention on an audio presentation. However, there are alternatives to having a speaker present for an hour.

o Send an article or report out ahead of time so the call can be a discussion of the content. When you send out content put it in a separate email and put in the subject line, “Action required.” Send the content out about 3 working days before the call. Let members know, “You will need about 20 minutes to read this.”

o Send an article or report out ahead of time and ask participants to prepare questions for the presenter. Then during the virtual meeting call on each member to ask his or her question. Because questions are often based in a specific context, give the question asker time to provide enough context for the speaker to develop a useful and thoughtful response. Some questions may even become more of a dialogue as the speaker asks other members for their response to that question.

o If you must have on-line presentations keep them to no more than 15 minutes before giving the group an opportunity to interact for at least 10 minutes. Group interaction does no mean asking the presenter questions. Rather the facilitator asks the group a question (see attached questions) that gives them space to offer their thinking about what the speaker has said. Then the presenter might continue again for 15 minutes, then again group discussion. "Ted Talks" must surely have convinced us all that 15 minutes is adequate to present even the most complex of ideas.

o Keep a list of participants in front of you and check names off each time someone speaks. That way you will know who you might need to call on to get their thinking.

Near the Meeting End
• During the meeting create a list of “to dos” and list them verbally at the end of the call.

• One of the most effective ways to end a meeting is to ‘check-out’ with each member to gain closure.
- Name one take away from this meeting
- Give a number from 1 to 5 that represents your confidence with this solution
- Say one thing you are going to do about this issue before our next meeting

After the Meeting
• Summarize the call and send the notes to everyone. If the chat function is used clean it up (clean up names, correct spelling, remove small talk) and send the script.

• Send the to-do list to everyone on the call.

Questions to ask during a Webinar or teleconference to get a discussion started after a presentation or after another member’s comment.

• “John has just raised an interesting issue. I’d like to hear other’s thinking about that issue.”

• “Mary has told a story about a frustrating experience. I’m sure many of you have had similar experiences. I’d like to hear a couple more examples.”
• Jack has explained how his team does “X.” What are other ways you have accomplished “X?”
• What are the 3 most important things to consider when doing “X?”
• “Fred has given us a very interesting presentation. What did you hear that really stuck with you?”
• “How would you complete this sentence? ‘The greatest difficulty we face with XXX is _________________.”
• “Sue has told us about an improvement in a rural hospital.
o What did you hear that would work in your setting?
o What did you hear that would need to change because your setting is so different?”
• “What did you hear in Joanna’s presentation that you could put into practice next week?”
• “We’ve heard three examples, what did you hear that was similar in all three examples?”
• “What possibilities come to mind based on what you've heard?”

These questions maybe equally useful in a face-to-face format.

Methods to Use to Ask the Questions
• Ask one of the questions above, and then say, “Let me give you a minute to write a few notes to yourself before people start to answer. (then count to 60 before opening the microphone or calling on people)
• Poll the group – If the group is under 10, call on each person in turn. Then summarize what you heard in the poll. “It sounds like we are divided between (X) and (Y).” or “I’m hearing general agreement about XX.”
• Poll in a random fashion if the group is large – “I’m going to call on a few people to get a sense of the reaction to (Bill’s) idea.” Then call on 5 people. Then ask, “Who else has an idea to offer?” And wait at least 20 second before moving on.
• If all the responses to a poll are similar ask, “I’d like to hear from anyone with a different view. Who sees it differently?” Then give it 20 seconds.
• Present a simple scenario and ask each participant to share how they would respond in that situation
• Use the chat function to get responses to a question on a 1-5 scale. “Just type a number from 1 to 5 into the chat area.” Then ask, “Most of you put in a 4 or 5 but there are a few people who were at a 1 or 2. I’d like to hear your thinking”
• Use the voting function on a webinar with pre-designed questions based on the presentation.
• Pause to have a paired conversation. Say, “If there is someone else at your site, talk with them for a few minutes before we call on people for their response. If you are by yourself then make some notes.”
• In the chat function, ask participants to write in brief notes during the presentation about what they agree and disagree with, for example, “X’ was a good point.” Or “I agree with “XX.” These notes are not for the presenter to read, but for others on line to see the reaction of their colleagues. It also is useful for starting the discussion after the presentation. “Many of you agreed with “XX,” Bella, what was your thinking that caused you to agree?”
• Don’t feel you have to answer every question asked of you. It is often useful to ask the group members what their thinking is on a question addressed to you.

Conversational Patterns That Support Telling Truth to Power

2012-01-27T11:08:47-08:00

The Defense Intelligence Agency’s (DIA) Knowledge Lab faced the challenge of how to move accurate intelligence up the chain of command. Too frequently the intelligence analysis, painstakingly generated by front line analysts, was delayed and often severely modified by a chain of superiors before it reached policy makers who could act upon it.

Zeke Wolfberg, the Director of the Knowledge Lab and I, as the knowledge management consultant to the Knowledge Lab, recently published an article about how we addressed that problem at DIA. The article appeared in Reflections, the SOL Journal on Knowledge, Learning and Change (Vol. 10, 4). I provide a summary of the article in this post. The full article can be downloaded under My Publications on the left.

DIA provides military intelligence to prevent strategic surprise and deliver a decision advantage to warfighters, defense planners, and policymakers. The analysts who develop intelligence assessments are divided into teams of 30 plus with each team focused on a different region (e.g. South East Asia) or a different functional area (e.g. missiles), as well as task forces that are periodically assembled to address crises (e.g. the Mumbai terrorist attack).

The intervention we undertook to enable telling truth to power, was called “Critical Discourse.” The format was to bring together a team of analysts along with their supervisor, to jointly analyze the actual conversations that occurred between members of the team and between team members and their supervisor. The conversation analysis was based on the work Chris Argyris, using his left and right hand case format to create scripts of difficult past conversations. Each analyst and supervisor selected and wrote out the dialogue that occurred in three difficult conversations they had engaged in. Each team met over a period of three months to analyze each other’s cases and to practice Argyris’ Model II skill set with the goal of reducing the misunderstandings occurring in their conversations. Each team member also received individual coaching between group meetings.

Model II is a way of interacting that results in knowledge and learning for everyone who is engaged in the conversation. The goal of Model II interaction is not to win an argument, but to create a space for joint learning. A person using the Model II skill set holds in their mind the underlying assumption that, “I have part of the information and others have other parts that I may not be aware of.” The skills are used to get all the information that is available and pertinent into the conversation. The Model II skills that produce full and accurate knowledge are:
 Advocate your own position and share all relevant information related to the issue, not just the data that supports your view
 Encourage others to question your position so if your reasoning is faulty or if there is information you have missed you will discover it
 Ask questions about the position of others, not to find where you might “catch them” in a mistake, but to fully understand their reasoning and data.

The Argyris Model II skills are simple to state, but take a great deal of practice to put into place in a real conversation. The difficulty occurs because the default way of interacting in difficult situations in nearly every organization is Model I, which defeats gaining learning through conversation. Model I skills are:
 Advocate my position in a way that discourages inquiry into it
 Keep my reasoning private so others cannot challenge it
 Don’t ask others about their reasoning
 Assume I understand the situation and anyone who sees it differently does not

A team using Model I skills in a contentious or potentially embarrassing situation would exhibit interactions that are familiar to all of us. For example, 1) a team leader states his opinion on an issue in such a way that it is clear he doesn’t want to be challenged; or 2) a team member offers an idea that no one understands, but other team members don’t ask him the questions that would make his thinking available to them - his idea just dies on the table, or 3) a team member offers a solution, providing convincing evidence about why it would work, but doesn’t reveal the very real risks he knows are involved.

Using Model I interaction teams make poor decisions because all of the available data about the issue does not get into the discussion. Team members are more interested in winning their point than in learning. Yet Model I interaction is so ubiquitous that team members are largely unaware they are employing it in a conversation. To use Model II interaction skills, team members first have to become aware of their Model I interactions. Fortunately, others can see what we cannot see in ourselves. So a team’s joint analysis of their cases allows members to help each other become aware of and then unlearn Model I skills. And provides them a safe place to practice using Model II skills.

Over a two year period, I worked with 15 DIA teams using the Critical Discourse intervention, including teams at the highest executive level. During that time team members wrote hundreds of conversational cases. The analysis of those cases resulted in two outcomes that shifted the culture of DIA; 1) both seniors and analysts developed the skills to challenge each other effectively – to tell truth to power, 2) dysfunctional patterns that were preventing accurate information from being exchanged across the whole of DIA were identified. These patterns, that Argyris calls defensive routines, had become embedded in the fabric of the culture in such a way that made it unlikely any that any individual, on his or her own initiative, would be able to act in a manner other than Model I.

To illustrate the process through which the culture changed I will focus on one of the teams that was set up to look at an emerging intelligence issue. The code name for this team was “Fresh Look.” Fresh Look is discussed in the article but in less detail than I write about it here.

The Situation
Fresh Look was given the task of finding a solution to a long-standing problem that many other teams had been unable to resolve. The team was to report their findings to a high level executive team – tell truth to power.

Previous DIA teams that had struggled to find a solution to this issue had worked virtually, dividing the work up so that people could function as individual contributors with minimal interaction. Fresh Look, however, was co-located to give them the advantage of bringing together their collective knowledge to solve this difficult problem. But co-location meant that to be successful in using all the team’s knowledge, the team would have to interact in a Model II manner to jointly address content issues. To assist the team, early in their time together, the Knowledge Lab provided the Critical Discourse intervention described above.

Using the Critical Discourse format, each team member wrote three cases about their interactions with other Fresh Look team members. By reading and discussing each other’s cases, team members were able to see, laid out in black and white, the negative impact of their actions. With practice they began to recognize the conversational tactics that were in the cases being exhibited in their real time conversations and begin to call each other on it when they recognized Model I tactics. With further practice of the Model II skills, they began to be able to share their knowledge more fully and to speak openly about their concerns related to the problem they were addressing.

A turning point in terms of new thinking for the Fresh Look team came about six weeks into the project. For some time the team had been struggling with how to organize themselves to deal with the central issue of their analysis. This issue was not only at the heart of the Fresh Look topic, but was an issue that touched on the very nature of how DIA does analysis – so how the team structured themselves and their work was a very relevant topic for the team.

At a Friday meeting, with two of the team members absent, the team finally made a decision to organize into several smaller teams, each devoted to a piece of the larger question. The norm within the intelligence community is that when a meeting is convened and decisions are made, those who were absent are expected to accept the decision and support it. The rationale being that there is not enough time to rehash decisions. There is also an implied perception that if the team member had really wanted to be present at the decision meeting, they would have attended.

On the following Monday the absent team members were back in place for the morning meeting. The absent team members respectfully challenged the decision-making norm by asking the rest of the team to go over their logic for reaching the decision of dividing into several smaller teams. Instead of rebuking the two, the team not only discussed their logic of the previous Friday, but the entire topic of methodological pursuit was reopened for debate: should the team employ the status quo method of structuring itself or should they behave differently? During that discussion, the team members who were present on Friday acknowledged that their decision was likely driven by being tired at the end of the week and wanting to end the day to start the weekend. The willingness to challenge and be challenged that had begun to develop within the team during the previous weeks of practice using Model II was for the first time being fully exercised.

Encouraged by the group’s response to this initial challenge, a few days later another team member was willing to raise a much more critical issue that had been troubling her - how the team had framed the analysis question. Her position was that the team was restricting the analysis by unthinkingly accepting as their starting point the assumption currently held among subject matter experts. The team took her concern seriously and was able to hold an honest and open interaction that resulted in significantly broadening the scope of their analysis. The reframing of the question eventually led the team to discover a remarkable finding - that the intelligence community had ignored a plausible counter-assumption without ever collecting data to prove or disprove it! Essentially leaving the intelligence community blind on a critical issue.

The on-going practice the Fresh Look team had in using their inquiry skills to elicit knowledge from each other and to respectfully challenging each other prepared them to speak truth to power when their scheduled briefing with high level DIA seniors occurred at the end of the project. By the time of the executive briefing, team members had grown confident in using the Model II skills in increasingly challenging situations.

The following are two descriptions of that meeting, first from the perspective of a senior executive who was in attendance. The second from the perspective of one of the Fresh Look team members who engaged the seniors in conversation.

Senior Executive Perspective

"I was one of five senior executives attending the debrief of Fresh Look. When I walked into the meeting room I could see that the physical arrangement of the seating area was very different than what I was used to. Normally, seats were arranged in rows facing a podium. On this day the seats were arranged around a set of tables so that everyone sitting at the table could see each other. During the team’s introductory remarks they mentioned how they intentionally designed the physical space to promote mutual learning between the seniors and themselves rather than the typical transmit then respond mode of communication.

The Fresh Look team explained that their briefing content would be different from the usual format as well. The team said that the goal they had in mind was that everyone around the table would learn with and from each other. I felt okay with this approach but wondered if they could pull it off. They started with brief presentations of their findings during which several members of team offered their own perspective, providing a variety of views, again not a typical debrief. Instead of just saying, “Here are our findings.” the team spoke about the challenges they had faced and how they had navigated those challenges, providing context for how their conclusions had been reached. Having laid out their findings, the team indicated they were ready to open the floor for dialogue.

I noticed that during the give and take of the conversation the team members were able to strongly advocate the findings they had developed as well as demonstrate their openness to our (the executive team) views. However, one of the team members, Carrie (not her real name), said something that really bothered me. She made a claim that a certain piece of information was non-existent. Now, I was aware that she was wrong, that piece of information was available. I said just that, perhaps a bit more forcefully than I intended. And I said that if the team had been thorough enough in their search they would have found it. However, rather than becoming defensive, Carrie said she found my comment interesting, because even the senior member of their team who had full clearance to look at all the available data did not come across it. She began a discussion among us all about the availability of information across silos. Out of that discussion I gained a new understanding about the issue of information availability from the perspective of analysts doing a search. It was a very stimulating conversation."

The Fresh Look Team
"The meeting with the executives was even more successful than we had thought it would be. The executives were impressed with the quality of our findings. And we were pleased with the skills we were able to exhibit in being able to respectfully detect and overcome the “old guard” approach.

As a team we were particularly proud of our interaction with Sam, the senior executive who reacted critically when he realized that the team did not know about the existence of a critical piece of information, saying, “Everyone knows it exists.” We were able to recognize the role-based behavioral pattern in Sam’s remark and were able to avoid the emotional trap that could have deflated and sidetracked us away from the issues. We were able to detail the process we went through to find the data, what was made available to us, and what had been hidden from even the most senior analyst member of our team who specialized in the issue. This detailed explanation led to a more general discussion of how information is shared and accessed which brought new insights both to us and to the high level executives present. Through using the critical discourse skills, our goal of using review meetings to jointly develop knowledge was realized.

The Director of DIA attended the debrief and told us later that what he witnessed was the embodiment of team behavior - the kind of team behavior DIA needs for detecting new threats. He said the discussion with the team was cathartic for him."

Fresh Look is one of many examples of changes in the ability to speak truth to power at DIA. To do so analysts and seniors first needed to recognize their own contribution to the dysfunctional patterns that existed inside DIA. Secondly, they needed to learn a new way of interacting and practice those new skills in a relatively safe environment. Finally, they needed to use the skills to interact in real world situations to gain confidence in their own ability to interact more openly and honestly. Through this slow developmental progression they were able to bring knowledge into a conversation that otherwise would have been hidden and they were able to speak truth to power.

Guidelines for Leveraging Collective Knowledge and Insight

2011-05-03T10:53:14-07:00

Knowledge workers in any organization have a wealth of insights that are available to their organization to address the difficult issues the organization is facing. Drawing out those insights requires bringing knowledge workers together in meetings that are expressly designed to take advantage of collective knowledge. Over the years, as I have designed such meetings, I have come to rely on seven principles that work together to make the most of collective knowledge in conference settings as well as in-house meetings. The principles have been assembled from the work of many researchers and thought leaders. Where possible I have identified the sources.

1. Connection before content
Knowledge workers attending a meeting or conference need to get connected to each other before they try to construct new ideas together (Peter Block). In order to work effectively with others, they need to know:
a. who is in the room
b. what knowledge others have
c. how others think about the issue of the meeting, and
d. the group’s strengths and weaknesses

In a business context, connecting is best accomplished by engaging knowledge workers in small group conversations about strategic organizational issues. To build connections, those conversations have to be structured in a way that allows knowledge workers to frame themselves in a positive light, relative to their experience and successes. Icebreaker type exercises are less useful when the intent is to leverage collective knowledge because they do not provide adequate understanding of others’ knowledge and experience.

When a group has come together many times, the period of connecting can be brief, but not neglected altogether. Just as two friends typically engage in “small talk” for a few minutes each time they meet, any group that comes together regularly also needs a brief period of re-connecting before turning to content. In both situations the “small talk” affirms the relationship and the readiness to engage the topic.

2. Circles connect
Circles represent unity. They help individuals in the group view themselves as part of the whole. For example, the UN meeting hall is designed in concentric circles to provide a visual representation of what the UN stands for – unity among nations.

I was reminded of the benefits of seeing oneself, and being seen, as a part of a whole, when I conducted an exit interview with Lieutenant General Maples, then Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. He told me that one of his first actions as Director had been to remove the large rectangular conference table in his office and have it replaced with a round table. He very clearly understood the difference a circle would make to the many, very difficult conversations he would have in the coming years.

It is a useful symbolism to begin and end meetings with chairs in a circle. It can be a big circle of 30+ or many small circles of 5. Ideally it is a circle of just chairs, without a table. Knowledge workers have a profoundly different experience when they converse in a group, absent a table.

3. Learn in small groups – integrate knowledge in large groups
We learn and create new ideas through our conversation with others in small groups. A small group is 3-5 members. This is the size that produces the richest and most in-depth thinking. It is large enough to contain diverse views yet small enough for members to engage each other.

Engaging each other means asking questions to clarify the meaning another has expressed and it means challenging as well as building on others’ ideas. The give and take of the small group serves to exchange existing knowledge as well as generate new knowledge.

In meetings designed to draw on the organization’s collective knowledge, after small groups have been in conversation, their ideas are brought together in a large group setting to integrate their insights into the thinking of the whole. In a lengthy meeting, small and large group discussions regularly alternate.

4. Diverge then converge
Any meeting that is focused on collective knowledge must first diverge in order to draw new ideas out and to stimulate thinking. “Knowledge diversity facilitates the innovative process by enabling the individual to make novel associations and linkages” (Cohen and Levinthal). Meeting leaders who want to leverage collective knowledge, intentionally invite people from other disciplines, stakeholder groups, and outside experts to introduce that diversity.

Without time for divergence the many differences within a group are not expressed and without their expression they cannot be made use of by the group. It is in the critical space that lies between divergent ideas that innovation often emerges (Scott Page).

Knowledge workers are reluctant to turn their thinking to what they have in common until they have had an opportunity to give voice to their differences (Marvin Weisbord). The way the human brain works is to first recognize differences and only after those are clarified to focus on similarities.

The first part of a meeting, whether it is half a day or 3 days, is dedicated to divergence. The second part of a meeting converges to put those divergent ideas to work in terms of a complex issue that needs to be addressed.

5. Outside experts inform the thinking of others, not provide them answers
Bringing outside experts into a meeting can provide much needed cognitive diversity, but experts cannot provide solutions. It is the knowledge workers of an organization, who function within its context and who together understand the complexity of its issues, who are uniquely capable of developing workable solutions.

Experts can stimulate the thinking of knowledge workers by talking about what others have done in similar situations. But any practice from another organization or team always has to be adapted, not adopted. Even the best of examples have to be modified to fit a new context.

Fifteen minutes is adequate time for an expert to stimulate a group’s thinking. A presentation by an expert needs to be immediately followed by a period of time dedicated to participants connecting what the expert has said to their own knowledge and to thinking with others about how that knowledge can be used. Without committed time for processing, an expert’s ideas are forgotten within a couple of hours. Unfortunately, the ubiquitous Q&A does not provide the needed processing time; rather what is needed is time for colleagues to talk with each other in small groups.

6. Connect new ideas to what knowledge workers already know
Processing is about moving new ideas from short term to long-term memory by connecting the new ideas to knowledge worker’s existing knowledge. The term, absorptive capacity (Cohen and Levinthal), references the ability of knowledge workers to recognize the value of new, external information, assimilate it, and apply it to their organization’s issues. An individual’s or an organization’s absorptive capacity, is a function of their prior knowledge. That means that without related knowledge to connect new ideas to, new knowledge will not be absorbed.

In meetings designed to exploit collective knowledge, a more robust environment for knowledge linkages to be made is provided when knowledge workers from varying disciplines are present. A knowledge worker from engineering, for example, will have different prior knowledge than one from R&D, and different yet from a knowledge worker from legal. The greater the cognitive diversity of prior knowledge in the room the more likely that new knowledge, from outside or internally, will be connected to prior knowledge which will spur insight. To process new knowledge, group discussion, made up diverse participants, is most effective. If the group is small (3-5 participants) each knowledge worker has enough airtime to put their ideas into words – which leads to the last principle.

7. We learn when we talk
This principle is central to leveraging the collective knowledge of a group. Listening provides us new ideas but as long as those ideas are just swimming around in our heads, they are neither fully formed nor implementable. It is only when a knowledge worker puts an idea together in a way that allows him or her to explain the idea to others, that the idea takes shape for the knowledge worker, as well as for the person the knowledge worker is talking with.

Johnson and Johnson, researchers at the University of Minnesota, have shown that we organize information in a different way when we are preparing to explain our thinking to others. The information not only becomes more logically organized, but new connections are made, often in the act of speaking. It is fair to say, “We don’t learn when we listen, we learn when we speak,” or write, or even create a visual representation of our understanding. Giving knowledge workers the time needed to put their thinking into words, not only shares the organization’s knowledge, but creates it.

Implementing these seven principles requires considerable change in how we design meetings and conferences - but then the idea of leveraging collective knowledge itself requires considerable change. More expansive thinking about who within the organization has valuable knowledge with which to address organizational issues, necessitates new approaches to how we meet and work together. These seven principles, tested through research and practice, provide a way to design those new approaches.

Conversations That Share Tacit Knowledge

2011-04-21T09:16:47-07:00

I was doing some work on knowledge transfer at Erickson in Sweden. As I interviewed technicians I kept hearing Hans’ name come up as the person to go to if a technician had a question about the computer language C++. Finally I checked with someone, “So Hans must be the resident expert on C++?” and was quickly told, “Oh no, the resident expert is Joachim, but he’s not very good at explaining. Now Hans, he can really help you understand how C++ works with our switches.”

Later when I interviewed Hans I told him that I kept hearing his name as the person a technician should seek out if they want to understand C++. I asked him how he got that reputation. Modestly he said, “Well, I’m not sure how I got the reputation, but I’ll tell you how I try to help people who come to me with a question. Is that what you want to know?” I agreed it was what I was after. So he explained, “When a technician comes to my office he usually starts by explaining what he wants to know about. But before I try to answer his question, I ask a few questions to see how much he already knows about C++. Then I ask a few more questions to find out what he’s planning to do with the information. By that time I’ve formulated an idea about where to start and what I need to say. And we just go from there talking back and forth.”

Now when I’m asked, “What's the most effective way for people to share their tacit knowledge?” I always think of Hans and the answer I give is: “Tacit knowledge needs to be shared through conversation.” My reasoning is as follows.

Our tacit knowledge is drawn from our experience as well as our years of study and is stored in bits and pieces in our brain, that is, it is not stored as answers or explanations but as fragments. What we call “tacit knowledge” is the human ability to draw on those fragments to construct a response to a new problem or question.

Tacit knowledge is particularly useful when we are faced with a complex problem. By complex I mean a problem that does not have a factual, right or wrong answer, for example, "What architectural design would best fit this physical space and meet the needs of the client?" or “How would you stop an oil leak 5000 feet under water?” When an expert like Joachim faces a complex problem he brings together those bits and pieces of his experience and study that are relevant to that specific problem situation and puts those together to form a solution. Because he is embedded in the situation he knows the context and the end goal. In bringing together those bits and pieces that are in his head, he conducts, what Don Schon would call, a “reflective conversation with the situation.”

But when someone like Hans is asked a complex question he faces difficulties that Joachim does not have to deal with. Hans knows very little about the asker’s situation. Without that knowledge he can only provide a general answer - rules of thumb, for example. But he can’t give an answer that takes into account the asker’s situation. If Hans wants to respond to a specific situation he will have to learn much more about it. To share his tacit knowledge he will first have to have a conversation with the asker and then create the knowledge that applies to that situation in the moment of answering the question. The knowledge he supplies never existed in that form before he spoke it aloud. If he were to be asked the same question tomorrow his response would likely be different because he would have new fragments of knowledge stored in his brain. One of those fragments might be more recent and so more readily come to the fore. Tacit knowledge, then, is constructed in response to a question or to a problem at a specific moment in time. It is a magnificent human capability we have to be able to continually reconstruct what we know into new forms to face new situations.

The conversation between an asker and an expert is necessary because it affords the opportunity for a number of important exchanges:
o the asker can offer information about the situation in which the knowledge will be applied,
o the expert can probe deeper about that situation,
o the expert can gain a sense of what the asker already knows so the expert can determine at what level to construct his/her answer,
o the asker can ask the expert about the meaning of a term or concept the asker is not familiar with,
o the asker can seek the reasoning behind a conclusion that the expert has offered, when it is not evident to the asker,
o the expert can correct any false assumptions the asker is making about what the asker needs to do or about concepts the asker holds,
o the asker can correct any assumptions the expert is making that do not fit the asker’s situation,
o and on and on

It is in the back and forth of conversation, that is, both parties actively trying to understand the meaning the other is attempting to convey, that tacit knowledge is exchanged.

The reasoning I’ve just offered begs the question of whether the conversation can take place virtually, in other words, “Does it have to occur face-to-face?”

From my perspective, there is a great deal of useful information that people can share virtually, for example, in an on-line discussion or a list-serve. I’m a great advocate of such discussions and have written in CompanyCommand about their value. Members of the community can share their experience, support others, and provide solutions or answers to some types of questions. For example, a member can write, “I need some new ideas about how to do a safety briefing, because having given them too many times, my briefings have become old and stale.” then others can respond by describing how they do safety briefings. Or a member can ask, “Has anyone had trouble making an HP printer scan from a Mac?” and others can offer their own suggestions.

However, my experience with these kinds of on-line discussions is that members who respond to a question rarely ask for any context. Rather they respond in declarative statements about their own experience or they offer their own rules of thumb. Seldom is there an attempt for asker and responder to probe the meaning that the other is attempting to convey. For this reason I think on-line discussions are not an effective way to share tacit knowledge.

What about phone or email exchanges?
A phone call has greater possibilities for sharing tacit knowledge than does email, but still has limits that can reduce the extent of the back and forth of conversation. Any conversation has two levels of meaning that are constantly being conveyed. One is about content and the other is about who the asker and responder are in relation to each other. The second conveys such information as, “Can I trust you to not think less of me if I don’t understand immediately?” or “I don’t really have time to answer your question in detail.” That conversation is expressed through intonation, gestures, and facial expression, little of which can be conveyed over the phone and none of which can be conveyed by email – thus the profusion of misunderstandings that email generates! Either medium is more likely to serve the transfer of tacit knowledge if the two people are well acquainted, which provides past experience with which to fill in or interpret the second conversation. But by-and-large, email and phone are less effective mediums for transferring tacit knowledge than is a face-to-face conversation like Hans had with the technician.

As I studied the way Hans transferred tacit knowledge, I identified two simple elements that helped Hans earn his reputation for being good at explaining C++, 1) he conducted his conversations face-to-face, and 2) it was an exchange in which Hans took the time to understand the current knowledge level and the context in which the question was situated.

A Model Lessons Learned System – The US Army

2011-02-03T11:49:02-08:00

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.

How to Make Use of Your Organization’s Collective Knowledge – Accessing the Knowledge of the Whole Organization - Part I

2011-01-04T08:28:48-08:00

Collective knowledge is the next step beyond knowledge sharing for organizations. More than just making use of the existing knowledge employees have, collective knowledge makes use of the sensemaking capabilities of employees.

Sensemaking is the very human act of creating meaning out of the incredible amount of data and input that continuously surrounds everyone within an organization. Sensemaking is a creative act, not an act of discovering or uncovering what is already there. The meaning created through sensemaking did not exist before the conversation that created it. In conversation the meaning that is created alters as new data and new patterns in the data emerge. The understanding that results from sensemaking is not a definitive answer, rather it is an understanding that is adequate for the organization to plan and take its next action.

The need for leveraging collective knowledge arises when organizations face difficult, complex issues – the kind of situations that are marked by disagreement on what the problem even is and certainly disagreement on what would constitute an acceptable solution. I have written a number of blog posts about organizations that have faced such issues, e.g. the US Army facing the issue of changing how doctrine is produced, the World Health Organization’s eradication of smallpox, the cancelation of NASA’s Constellation program.

Understandably most leaders see it as their responsibility to come up with answers for the complex issues their organizations face, ascribing to the manager-as-problem-solver model of leadership. That has certainly been the predominant model for thirty years - taught by most (but not all) business schools, management development programs and propounded by best-selling management books. However, over the last few years a new way of thinking about leadership has been gradually emerging. The leaders of the organizations I have written about in this blog are people who have come to understand that no one person has the sensemaking capacity needed to deal with truly complex issues, no matter how highly placed the leader is. These leaders have redefined their role from problem solver to conversational architect, designing ways to leverage the knowledge of the whole organization when faced with complex issues.

Collective Knowledge can be accessed at different levels within an organization, that is, the whole organization, divisions, teams/groups, or even between two individuals. Here I am focusing on accessing the knowledge of the whole organization.

I told the first story about a leader recognizing that he needed the sensemaking capability of the whole organization in a book I published in 1994, The Organizational Learning Cycle. It was the story of Ralph Stayer, the CEO of Johnsonville Foods. Johnsonville Foods was faced with a complex issue in the form of an opportunity. It was a small, family owned sausage company known in Minnesota for its quality. The issue the company faced was whether to “accept an offer from a food-processing company to buy large quantities of product on a regular basis. It was a complex issue because Johnsonville did not have the capacity to handle the job so accepting it would mean everything would have to change.

Stayer called a meeting of the whole organization, giving them all of the information he had and asking them to work in teams to answer three questions: What will it take to make it work? Is it possible to reduce the downside? Do we want to do it? The teams struggled with the questions for almost two weeks, wrestling with the risks, which were considerable, and figuring out how they would have to operate to accomplish that much increase in production. In the end the teams almost unanimously recommended taking on the new business. Reflecting on the process, Stayer said, ‘If you issue orders you’re telling people, don’t think; just do. But if you’ve got 1000 people, you’ve got a 1000 minds. And if you issue orders from the top, you’re using only 3 of them, or 2, or one. That’s stupid.’”

The second story is one that Ron Heifetz wrote about in Leadership Without Easy Answers. I’ve summarized it here but the full story is woven throughout his book and he uses it to build the case for leaders moving from the role of problem solver to convener of the conversation.

William Ruckelshaus was the head of the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 1983 when he dealt with a case involving a copper plant near Tacoma Washington. The Asarco plant was the only one in the nation to use copper ore with a high content of arsenic. Ruckelshaus was expected to decide what to do about the plant; in particular, he was expected to determine what constituted an "ample margin of safety" in the plant's operation to protect public health.

The plant had spent 40 million dollars on equipment to reduce emissions even before the EPA got involved. They were ready to install new converters at a cost of four million dollars that would reduce deaths from cancer from four persons a year to one. But there was no technology available to reduce the emissions further.

If Asarco were to close the plant it would be a devastating economic blow to the region. The former mayor of near-by Ruston, told reporters, "I've worked in the plant all my life. So have my brothers, and so have my neighbors. We're not sick. This town was built around that plant. People came here looking for fire and smoke in the 1900's to find work. Now the government's complaining about that same smoke and trying to take our children's livelihood away."

Ruckelshaus refused publicly to decide on his own. He said, "For me to sit here in Washington and tell the people of Tacoma what is an acceptable risk would be at best arrogant and at worst inexcusable." He wanted to solicit the views of those that would be most affected by the EPA ruling. He decided the usual public hearings would be preceded by public workshops. The three public workshops held that August were controversial and packed with people, including a large number of smelter workers, union representatives, local citizen organizations, and environmental groups. After a formal presentation by EPA, the audience was divided into small groups to discuss the issues while the EPA staff circulated to answer questions.

The workshops and hearings surprised the EPA staff. As Ruckelshaus put it, local citizens had shown that they were "capable of understanding [the problem of the smelter] in its complexities and dealing with it and coming back to us with rather sensible suggestions." After the three EPA sponsored workshops, local groups began holding their own workshops.

It was not easy for Ruckelhaus to take such a radical position. Throughout the months of discussion Ruckelhaus was frequently vilified in the press. He was likened to Caesar who was asking the crowd to signal thumbs up or down on whether a defeated gladiator should die. The Sierra Club said it was the EPA’s job to protect the public health not to ask them how many people should die from cancer.

Through the EPA workshops and the community’s own workshops, local people began to see the situation in a new light. Rather than view it solely as a conflict between jobs and health, many people began to see a new possibility, the diversification of the local economy. That idea was obvious in retrospect, but at the time no one had seen it. By the time the plant closed in 1985, (due to falling copper prices) Ruckelhaus had still not made a decision, but Tacoma and Ruston had already begun the task of diversifying its economy. People had come to the early workshops displaying buttons labeled either "Jobs" or "Health." By the final workshops, people were sporting buttons that said "BOTH."

What a conversational architect does, as illustrated in these two stories, is to convene a conversation about the tough issues that the organization needs to face. The leader brings together those who are impacted by the issue and creates a setting in which he/she can draw on the collective knowledge to arrive at a workable solution.

In the post The Power of the Conversation Architect I discuss the critical tasks of the leader/convener in detail:
• Frame the conversation
• Identify who needs to be in the conversation
• Design highly interactive activities to fuel the conversation
• Use small groups as the unit of conversation
• Forge connections before discussing content
• Configure the physical space to serve the conversation

In Part II I will describe some of the conversational processes (e.g. Future Search, Appreciative Inquiry, Knowledge Café, etc.) that organizations have found useful in leveraging the collective knowledge of the whole system.

A Knowledge Management Conference that Actually Used KM Principles

2010-11-30T18:11:19-08:00

Like many organizations, the US Army holds a Knowledge Management Conference each year. And like most conferences there are three kinds of activities, 1) keynote speakers, 2) practitioners telling about their KM successes, and 3) long breaks for people to network. The speaker format is also typical - three or four speakers in a row with a few minutes of Q & A at the end of each speaker’s time and then on to the next speaker.

I’ve had the honor of speaking at all of the Army KM conferences since they began in 2005, including the one just recently held. For at least the last three of those conferences, I have patiently explained to the conference organizers that having speaker after speaker is no way to run a KM conference because it violates everything we know about how people learn from one another.

This year, the 6th annual conference, was run by a very savvy group of folks at Strategic Knowledge Solutions (SKS). They heard what I had been saying year after year and asked me to help them design the conference so it would be more in keeping with the principles of KM.

The 6th annual US Army KM Conference was indeed different! On six occasions during the two and a half day conference, there was time for the audience to process what they had just heard – time to connect what the speaker said to their own knowledge and experience.

The way it worked was that after a major speech I or my colleague, Kent Greenes, would pose a provocative question based on the content. Then we would ask the members of the audience to talk to each other about that question. As I have written (see We learn when we talk) putting what we have just learned into our own words helps us build new connections in our minds and not surprisingly results in a huge jump in retention.

Each time that we took the stage we asked the audience to arrange themselves into a different configuration, (e.g. trios, pairs, etc.). And each time we gave them a different way to process what they had just learned from the speaker. Each time the room of 400 people was abuzz with noise. And each time we had great difficulty in getting them to end their group conversations – they had a lot to say to each other! When we did finally manage to get their attention back, we used the popcorn (see A Rant on Report Outs) approach to get a quick sense of what had been talked about in their small groups.
I preceded each discussion period with a brief four sentence lecture on what we were going to be doing and the principle behind the activity. This is a critical part of my practice, that is, explaining not only what I am asking audience members to do, but also the learning principle it is based upon. That practice enables audience members to use the activity in their own settings.

After the final period of time that had been set aside for processing, I asked the audience to reflect on how the experience had been for them, explaining that it had been an experiment and we wanted to know how to improve it. What I got back was an overwhelmingly positive response, surprising even the folks at SKS. We heard, “The small groups were the best part of the conference.” and “I liked how the discussion format changed each time.” The audience also had ideas for taking it even further, for example, “Some of the time put us in cross functional groups and at other times group us by similar job functions.” and simply, “Give us more time in the small groups.”

The audience’s positive response means that next year we can make the 7th Army KM conference based even more on KM principles. I can’t wait!

The Three Eras of Knowledge Management - Summary

2010-08-01T07:58:22-07:00

I have posted lengthy descriptions of each of the three eras of knowledge management and here I have made a brief summary of all three. I have also made substantial changes to the third era in this post. If you would like to view each era in more detail just click on the heading of that era in this post.

Since the term “knowledge management” came into popular usage, there have been three significant changes in how organizations have thought about their knowledge. Each successive era has expanded the type of knowledge that organizations considered important without eliminating the need for and use of the previous type of knowledge.

Knowledge management began in the mid 1990’s. Before that time knowledge was typically considered the province of training and was thought of as an individual capability. However, in the mid-90s Peter Drucker began to write about “knowledge workers” and the “knowledge economy” and proposed the idea that knowledge was a critical organizational asset that was as important as capital or property.

Leveraging Explicit Knowledge
The initial idea of knowledge management was that an organization’s knowledge needed to be documented and then placed in a database where everyone could access it whenever they needed it - no longer would employees only be able to learn when attending a training class. Efforts were made to capture an organization’s best practices and lessons learned. Organizations spent large sums of money creating repositories and databases and employees were encouraged, sometimes even badgered, into contributing to them. The prevailing way of thinking about knowledge management was as a library or a warehouse with inputs and outputs, the more inputs the better.

By 2000 the limitations of content management were becoming evident:

1. Organizations found it difficult to get people to document their knowledge, and even more difficult to get others to make use of what had been documented and stored. Users found tools (checklists, steps in a process) useful as well as reusable documents (PP presentations, proposals) but lessons learned and best practices were largely ignored.

2. Organizations began to recognize that they had only been supporting explicit knowledge that could be written down - they had disregarded what might be the most critical knowledge to organizational success, tacit knowledge. Employees would not, and in fact could not, write all of their tacit knowledge down, first because the tacit knowledge that resides in an employee’s mind is immense and secondly because tacit knowledge is primarily useful in response to specific contexts, and much less useful when written as generalizations.

Leveraging Experiential Knowledge
Given the limitations of content management, by 2000 there began to be glimmers of a new perspective on knowledge within organizations. This new perspective held that:

1. much of an organization’s knowledge is in the heads of employees, with only a small percentage residing in documents, still recognizing that some explicit knowledge is needed and should be maintained

2. much of an organization’s knowledge is dynamic and rapidly changing so that what is “captured” is soon out-of-date

3. knowledge is essentially social and is developed and held by groups of people who engage together in a specific practice.

Etienne Wenger’s book Communities of Practice, that named and explained this phenomena, came out in 2000. Organizations began to support communities of peers, providing a way for them to ask for and receive knowledge on a just-in-time basis and thus keeping fast changing knowledge up-to-date. The Q&A that is ubiquitous in communities provided a way for employees to share their tacit knowledge in response to specific situations. By 2005 nearly every Fortune 500 Company had established Communities of Practice, acknowledging the growing understanding that knowledge is largely a property of groups of people.

My book Common Knowledge also came out in 2000 and talked about the knowledge management processes through which teams and projects could share their knowledge. Organizations put After Action Reviews into place to promote continuous learning in teams and projects so that what was being learned in the field could be continually updated. Expertise Locator systems helped employees draw on the knowledge of experts across an organization and Knowledge Harvesting helped to move knowledge from one team/project to another.

However by 2005 the limitations of even this expanded perspective on organizational knowledge began to be recognized:

1. It became obvious that knowledge was flowing primarily between peers and was largely limited to frontline employees. Senior and even middle management were supporters of knowledge management but not users of knowledge management processes.

2. Knowledge management was primarily dealing with existing knowledge, attempting to bring all units up to the best in class of the organization. But it did not help organizations create new knowledge or spur innovation.

3. The focus of knowledge management was tactical issues to the exclusion of strategic issues. Thus, although GM had an outstanding knowledge management program, that program did not address the difficult strategic issues that put GM into bankruptcy.

Leveraging Collective Knowledge
Although the first thinking about Leveraging Collective Knowledge began to appear around 2005, there are only a few leading edge organizations that have developed new practices for making use of their organization’s collective knowledge. Most organizations are still centered in the perspective of the second era and some, who have come late to knowledge management, are still struggling with getting good content management in place.

Those that are inventing processes for collective knowledge are finding ways to bring the whole organization to bear on strategic issues. Process like Knowledge Café’s, Appreciative Inquiry, and Search Conferences bring together all levels of the organization – the whole system in the room. The processes used to leverage collective knowledge are conversation based, alternating between small group and large group configurations. Even regularly held organizational meetings such as staff meetings, team, and project meetings in these organizations are turning to conversational forms to address their most difficult organizational issues. There is a growing understanding that in an age of increasingly complex organizational issues, leaders cannot be expected to have all the answers; rather the task of leaders becomes convening the conversations that can come up with new answers.

Leading edge organizations are taking advantage of Web 2.0 social media, building more user controlled platforms such as Wiki’s, blogs and social networking (e.g. Facebook) that bring with them greater organizational transparency and give rise to more diverse perspectives in the organizational conversation. The use of crowd sourcing, cognitive diversity, and predictive markets draw on a wider base of thinking, both internally and externally, that increases organizational innovation.

Over the three eras, each new set of knowledge management practices has been created in response to an ever-expanding understanding of 1) where knowledge lives within organizations and 2) what knowledge is important to organizational success. We can anticipate yet greater understanding as organizations move further into the third era.

Leveraging Collective Knowledge: NASA’s Constellation Program

2010-07-05T17:05:23-07:00

Every organization has the problem of how to save the knowledge it has created, but after the cancelation of the Constellation program (CxP), NASA has that problem in spades. NASA has been working on Constellation, the human space flight program that was to replace the Shuttle, for 5 years now, at a cost of 9 Billion dollars – so saving that knowledge is
critical. On February 1, 2010 the Obama administration announced the cancelation of Constellation. The administration’s intention is to pay private companies to shuttle astronauts to and from the Space Station, while NASA is suppose to turn its attention to developing advanced technologies and demonstrations, including heavy-lift propulsion research research.

In the 5 years NASA has been working on Constellation it has accrued an enormous amount of new knowledge, for example, new habitats for astronauts living on the moon or Mars, more sophisticated space suits, and of course many new vehicles including, Ares I and V, the
Orion crew capsule, and Altair Lunar Lander. With the ending of the Constellation program, the engineers and scientists who created all that knowledge will now disperse to other NASA projects, or in many cases leave NASA altogether to work for other organizations. Without some direct intervention the “know how” accumulated over 5 years will be lost.

NASA learned its lesson about losing knowledge early in 1990. They experienced the sad recognition that much of the knowledge about how to build the Saturn V rocket that took the astronauts to the moon, had retired along with the engineers who had been encouraged to take early retirement. David Delong wrote about NASA' loss in Lost Knowledge, Oxford Press 2004.

Dave Lengyel, who heads NASA’s Risk and Knowledge Management Program is committed to ensuring that Constellation’s knowledge will not be lost. But the task of saving it is an enormous one. The program is spread across NASA’s ten centers from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida to the Jet Propulsion Lab on the West coast, each working on a different aspect of the program.

What Lengyel needed in order to meet his commitment, was a knowledge capture strategy that would provide direction over the next year as the program shuts down. The capture strategy needed to include:
* how to identify the most critical knowledge to be retained
* effective methodologies for capturing knowledge
* how the captured knowledge should be formatted so it would be most useful to other parts of NASA or to the commercial companies that might eventually use it
* effective knowledge transfer techniques for a wide range of explicit and tacit knowledge
* an estimate of the potential cost of capturing and storing five years of work
* a way to prepare engineers with the skills to effectively capture and then transfer what they have learned

Lengyel chose to address that need by leveraging NASA’s collective knowledge to create a knowledge capture strategy. He invited 35 people who had worked on the Constellation program to a two day meeting in Huntsville Alabama for the purpose of jointly developing the knowledge capture strategy. Before arriving each had been asked to construct a knowledge map that identified and prioritized the knowledge in their part of the project. The group was given only minimal instruction in how to construct such a map, which resulted in a great variety of formats and content.

The first afternoon of the meeting, following the usual introductions and welcomes, the group did a walk-around their maps, each of which had been blown up to poster size. During their walk-around, which was formatted much like a poster session, they examined each other’s maps and gained ideas about how they might revise or add to their own. They learned different ways to prioritize the knowledge, ways to illustrate levels of
expertise, the need for more than one POC, etc. The knowledge map session ended with high-spirited voting for the most useful map. Each attendee was given three dots to distribute among the maps based on what each found to be most useful. The many discussions about the merits of the maps led to a number of insights about the elements a knowledge map needed to display in order to make it a valuable tool for knowledge capture.

A second activity that same afternoon was a panel discussion of KM thought leaders, myself among them, who were asked to talk about best practices in knowledge capture and transfer from other organizations. The panel got the NASA engineers thinking about what did and did not work in other organizations and generated a lively conversation about what had worked at NASA in the past.

The next day was a day-long knowledge café, complete with all the trappings including red and white checkered tablecloths and menus. The menus had nothing to do with food, rather
each menu was a list of questions to be discussed at that table. We called the table facilitators, Sous Chefs, and the Maître D’ was Dave Lengyel himself, wearing a chef’s apron. The idea behind a knowledge café is for participants to have a conversation that is as open and as fervent as they would have at a sidewalk table on the streets of Paris. And that is exactly the kind of conversation that happened in Huntsville. Each table addressed a different issue related to knowledge capture and transfer, with participants moving from table to table until they had engaged in all of the topics. Each facilitator stayed at his own table to help jump-start each new conversation and to take notes on what was being said.

At the end of a very busy day a number of the engineers commented on the experience:

“I got 6-8 new things to put in my plan.”

“It was huge dose of reality and grounded me in the difficulty in doing this. It needs to be carefully planned out.”

“Very powerful. There were experts from different disciples and I sure took away more than I gave. The networking was good.”

“I was blown away by the diversity of ideas on frameworks.”

By the following morning the table facilitators were ready to formulate a draft plan based on their table discussion. A sophisticated framework for the knowledge capture emerged as
well as detailed steps in the process. Even in this final step everyone in the room was able to comment and improve upon what the facilitators offered using Think Tank. The Think Tank software enabled each person to use their own laptop to project their reactions and comments for everyone to see during the facilitators’ summaries.

This meeting was an excellent example of leveraging collective knowledge and illustrates the three elements that need to be in place to make use of the knowledge that resides in the minds of those doing the work, 1) joint sensemaking, 2) cognitive diversity, and 3) organizational transparency.

1. Joint Sensemaking.
Dave Lengyel could certainly have sat at his desk at NASA headquarters and drawn up a knowledge capture strategy, but that plan would not have been able to take into account the unique aspects of each of the Center’s needs. It would not have been as rich nor as comprehensive as the plan the group was able to develop together. Moreover, had Lengyel constructed it on his own, he would then have had the job of selling the plan to those who would implement it – never an easy task with a plan conceived at headquarters! The Knowledge Café gave everyone the opportunity to fully express their thinking and needs and to understand the needs and thinking of their colleagues.

For joint sensemaking to occur the leader, in this case Dave Lengyel, has to take responsibility of convening the conversation – and that task itself requires a number of skills.

Framing the conversation: Before the meeting was held Lengyel had thought through what the issues were that were facing this group. Early on he provided the rationale for the meeting, then developed the topics to be addressed, and just before the meeting posed questions for the facilitators to ask.

Identifying who needs to be in the conversation. In more traditional meetings people are invited on the basis of who needs to be informed. For joint sensemaking the criteria is different, it is who can inform the conversation. Lengyel convened people who had been working on the project and would therefore know the most about what needed to be captured. He also invited engineers from the space shuttle program who had already been engaged in knowledge capture for shuttle. Others that would be tangentially impacted by the plan were invited, e.g. a CxP information systems representative, the head of CxP records management and the head of CxP security. The meeting was by invitation only - no one was required to attend - so of course Lengyel had more people wanting to come than he had room for.

Designing high interaction activities: The meeting involved several different interactive processes; the walk-around and voting for the maps, the knowledge café that
generated content, and Think Tank to refine the plan. This was the first time Lengyel had used walk-arounds, but knowledge cafés were a process he had used several times before. Several of the participants had also been involved in other knowledge cafés.

Using small groups as the unit of conversation: Smaller groups create conversations with more depth, authenticity and rigor. The café groups in Huntsville ranged from 3-7 and were different each time the group moved from table to table, which greatly enhanced networking. One of the practices of joint sensemaking is to alternate between small group conversations, where the hard work of knowledge creation is accomplished, and large group meetings where the knowledge can be integrated. This alternation was practiced and effective at the Constellation meeting.

Forging connection before content: To work on difficult issue, participants need first to gain a sense of who others are, the skills they bring, the experience they represent, and the hopes they have. Round table introductions, as useful as they are, are never enough to build the kind of connections needed to do difficult work. The Constellation meeting started in the afternoon, with the panel and the knowledge maps, and then spent the first evening with a group dinner and drinks to that built the connections this group needed to do the hard work in the knowledge café the following day.

Configuring the physical space: One of the responsibilities of a convener is to make sure the space is conducive to the type of activity planned. As happens in many situations, the
meeting space in Huntsville turned out to be too small for the number of people who showed up. Lengyel quickly re-configured the physical space by rounding up enough patio tables so that several of the café sessions were held outside in true sidewalk café style.

2. Cognitive Diversity
Cognitive Diversity (as differentiated from identity diversity) increases the possibility that a group will generate new and more creative ideas. The inclusion of people from different disciplines provides a larger set of problem solving strategies and perspectives on an issue.

The Constellation group was naturally diverse coming, as they were, from many NASA Centers across the country. Even so their experience was limited to NASA’s culture and an engineering approach to issues. By bringing in KM thought leaders, myself and Larry Prusak, Lengyel provided the group with new ways of thinking about knowledge capture and transfer. Lengyel invited in several other sources of cognitive diversity:
• Ed Hoffman from NASA’s Project Management program, APPEL, who brought a social science perspective
• a representative from Lockheed (a likely recipient of Constellation knowledge)
• a Marshall Space Flight Center History Office representative
• a NASA Engineering and Safety Center representative
• John Adams from the Defense Acquisition University (DAU) who brought in-depth knowledge about how other government organizations have dealt with shut downs based the work DAU has been doing developing insight into smart shut downs. The cognitive diversity at the meeting made a difference. As one participant noted,

“It opened my mind. I had in my head what KM was and now I have a very different way of thinking about it.”

• Organizational Transparency
Organizational transparency is the willingness of an organization to be open both about its knowledge and its problems. It is, of course, not possible to leverage the collective knowledge of an organization unless the collective is fully apprised of the issues the organization is facing. Being a government agency funded by Congress, NASA had the advantage of all employees being fully apprised of the pending shut down of Constellation. So in this situation a certain level of transparency was built in.

In two additional ways the meeting in Huntsville demonstrated organizational transparency. First, as just described, the meeting made itself open to ideas from outside NASA. This meant that those of us from outside became privy to the problems and complaints voiced by the participants, but more importantly allowing us to offer a new way of thinking about many of the issues participants raised.

Secondly, organizational transparency was demonstrated by Lengyel himself who was willing to say to NASA seniors as well as to participants at the meeting, “I need to draw on the collective knowledge of the organization to address this issue.” The acknowledgement by leadership that “I don’t have all the answers” is the pre-requisite and the first step in leveraging collective knowledge.

The Complexity of Transferring Lessons Learned from Projects

2010-05-10T13:35:46-07:00

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.

Collective Intelligence: The Eradication of Smallpox

2010-03-27T18:22:10-07:00

All of the recent talk about collective intelligence has reminded me of one of the best examples of making use of collective intelligence – an example which occurred without benefit of social media or even the internet. I wrote about the World Health Organization’s (WHO) eradication of smallpox in The Organizational Learning Cycle, presenting it as one of four exemplary organizations. There has probably never been a better illustration of an organization learning from it’s experience; of workers freely sharing their knowledge with each other; and of drawing on the ingenuity and knowledge of frontline workers.

Smallpox is the only major human disease to have ever been eradicated. The goal was established by WHO in 1967 and ten years later the eradication of smallpox had been accomplished. But before its eradication in 1977, every year over 10 million people in Asia and Africa, where the disease was still endemic, were inflicted with smallpox and 20-40% died, with the rest left scarred and many blinded. Once smallpox is contracted, there is no treatment.

Support for a world-wide campaign to eliminate smallpox grew when it became evident that North America, Western Europe, and Japan had all been able to eradicate the disease. More recently the Philippines and much of Latin America were free of smallpox. The decision to take on this enormous task was also influenced by the US military’s recent invention of the jet injector that was capable of handling up to 1000 vaccinations an hour and could be used effectively by untrained workers. Deeming the time had now come, in 1967 the World Health Assembly began an intensive effort that would focus on Africa, Asia, the Indonesian archipelago and Brazil.

By 1967, the start of the campaign, past experience in epidemiology overwhelmingly indicated that the most successful strategy was surveillance and control – a strategy that relied on containment teams quickly moving into areas of outbreaks, insolating infected persons and rapidly vaccinating all those around them. Despite the epidemiological evidence, The WHO chose mass vaccination, a strategy that involved immunizing 80% of the population on the supposition that smallpox would then decline more or less automatically. The choice of mass vaccination over surveillance and control was influenced by a number of factors, 1) the success of a recent test of the jet injector for mass vaccination that was conducted in1963 on the island of Tonga, an isolated and remote location; 2) the push from the national governments of the cooperating counties who saw mass vaccination as a highly visible display of government action, and 3) the large investment that had been made in creating a vaccine infrastructure, including jobs and salaries. So the campaign began with a strategy of mass vaccination.

Donald Henderson led the WHO headquarters team dedicated to smallpox. He had only 150 staff to work with 150,000 fieldworkers, mostly volunteers, in 50 countries. Headquarters had no authority over the fieldworkers yet chose to deal with them as co-researchers. Headquarters treated requests for help from the field with absolute priority providing immediate responses. To diminish the gap between fieldworkers and headquarters, all headquarters staff and regional advisors were expected to spend at least one-third of their time in the field, visiting each country at least once and preferably twice a year.

Within a year of the start of the campaign an outbreak occurred in Nigeria, where 90% of the population had already been vaccinated. Fieldworkers did not have adequate supplies for mass vaccination so they quickly sent for more. But the supplies of vaccine were late in arriving. Working with the limited supplies they had, the fieldworkers sought out smallpox cases and then vaccinated those who were in the immediate geographical area surrounding each case – surveillance and containment. By the time the mass campaign supplies arrived there were no detectable cases in Nigeria – containment had worked where mass vaccination had not.

With the lessons from Nigeria, the WHO smallpox team’s strategy changed to surveillance and containment. In hindsight it was recognized that the Tonga context, an isolated island with a limited population, was very different than countries like Nigeria with contiguous areas and large populations. Even so, the decision to change the strategy was not easily taken given the factors that had influenced the original decision.

Experimenting with surveillance and containment (which fieldworkers called the Bank Robber Theory, as in "go where the money is") fieldworkers discovered they could contain an outbreak when as few as 50% of the population was vaccinated. The process involved discovering new outbreaks before the smallpox had time to spread, then vaccinating the victims families, neighbors, and then the village in an ever-widening circle until no more cases occurred.

The focus on the new strategy meant the need for new practices and policies. Considerable attention was turned to the practice of reporting, a critical element of surveillance and containment. In some countries a reward was offered to the first person in an area who reported an undiscovered outbreak to authorities. The rewards were large, sometimes equivalent to one month’s income for poor villagers. A network was established through radio connections to report outbreaks. A manual was produced detailing the philosophy of surveillance and outlining methods for improving case detection and notification. A major breakthrough in reporting occurred when each local unit began to be visited regularly by a mobile surveillance team that provided instruction and assistance. The fact that someone was actively and visibly concerned with receiving reports and then acted on those reports encouraged increased reporting.

Early on the WHO smallpox team recognized the need to constantly learn from fieldworkers’ experience and adapt and change based on that learning. Although policies were established centrally, control resided at the local level. Fieldworkers were able to alter their practices to fit local culture. For example, in some locations where tattooing was used to ward off witchcraft, the vaccination scar became a part of that custom; in others midwives were used to encourage vaccination, in yet others the radio was a major tool.

Fieldworkers thought of themselves as researchers as well as workers, systematically recording their practices and tracking data. They religiously made those practices and data available to other fieldworkers. Every 2-3 weeks a summary was made of new approaches and distributed to fieldworkers. The variation in practice and the emphasis on collecting and sharing findings allowed the WHO smallpox team to innovate and learn continuously.

One of the changes fieldworkers brought about by their collection of data was the method of vaccination. Initially the WHO used the newly developed jet injector. But over time fieldworkers realized that speed was not a factor when staff were going from house to house, or waiting at local watering holes. The jet injector proved to have maintenance problems, breaking down in the field with no way to repair it. Through the influence of fieldworkers, the bifurcated needle, a simple device that had two prongs with a wire between them on which a drop of vaccine could be suspended, replaced it. The bifurcated needle was inexpensive to make and could be flamed with a match over 200 times without dulling – so was more field-worthy.

Even longstanding techniques were questioned and changed. Headquarters learned from field reports that the time-honored technique of swabbing the vaccination site made no difference in bacterial infection – so supplies that were costly both to purchase and then transport could be eliminated. They learned, again from field reports, that adult women rarely contracted small pox, so the time consuming task of vaccinating them could be eliminated.

It would have advantaged the WHO to track the number of vaccinations given and the number of areas free of small pox. But they chose instead to track trends in the incidence of smallpox. Those data were frequently embarrassing both to the WHO and to the cooperating countries – yet it allowed the WHO smallpox team to learn in a way that could not have been possible from data that was more sensitive to public relations. Negative as well as positive results were widely publicized.

Looking back at the effort from 1999, Donald Henderson, who led the smallpox team, said, “… research initiatives were encouraged at every level. This occurred despite the opposition of senior WHO leadership who insisted that the tools were in hand and the epidemiology was sufficiently well understood and that better management was all that was necessary to eradicate smallpox. Research initiatives included the development of new vaccination devices to replace traditional lancets; field studies, which revealed the epidemiology of the disease to be different from that described in the textbooks and, in consequence, the need for modification of basic operations; the discovery that the duration of vaccine efficacy was far longer than that normally stated, making revaccination much less important; operational research, which facilitated more efficient vaccine delivery and case detection; and studies which demonstrated conclusively that there was no animal reservoir. The principle was to ask again and again, how could this programme be made to operate more efficiently, more effectively. And, indeed, without the fruits of these research efforts, it is highly unlikely that eradication would have succeeded.”1

The story of the WHO’s success is a story of learning from experience, both successes and failures. Among them:
• The initial strategy of the WHO smallpox team did not succeed and they were able to shift strategies in mid-stream
• The initial technology proved difficult, and although the jet injector was one of the reasons the project had originally seemed feasible, they switched to the simpler solution of the bi-furcated needle
• Field workers considered themselves co-researchers, creating testable hypotheses in the field and reporting the results
• Field workers had authority to experiment, adapting their practice to local situations
• Data collected in the field about both practices and results were systematically distributed
• Everything was open to question – even long standing practices like swabbing the vaccination site
• All headquarters staff spent one third of their time in the field to reduce the gap between themselves and fieldworkers
• Policies promoted the collection of accurate rather than politically correct data

We Need More Examples of Collective Intelligence
We need more examples like this story to really understand what collective intelligence means. I’d appreciate it if you would suggest organizations you know of that provide other good examples. Add them to the comments so we can all see them, and I’ll write about any here that I can dig out enough information on.

1. Henderson, D. “Eradication: Lessons from the past.”

2. Hopkins, J.W. (1998).The eradication of smallpox: organizational learning and innovation in international health administration. The Journal of Developing Areas 22, 321-322.

3. The World Health Organization Smallpox Eradication Programme

4. Smallpox: 30th Anniversary of Global Eradication, CDC

Learning From Failure - It's Possible

2010-03-07T12:49:00-08:00

Organizations may think they have taken care of the problem of learning from failure once they’ve put in a lessons learned database. But the research of Cannon and Edmondson indicates that managers greatly underestimate the difficulties that are involved in learning from failure.

They define failure as “a deviation from expected and desired results.”(p. 4) Using that definition, failures not only include disastrous events like the Columbia shuttle disaster and Enron, but also the many small failures that occur everyday. A major conclusion Cannon and Edmondson draw is that looking at small failures can head off those catastrophic failures.

…one of the tragedies in organizational learning is that catastrophic failures are often preceded by smaller failures that were not identified as failures with examination and learning. In fact these small failures are often the key “early warning signs” that could provide a wake up call needed to avert disaster down the road (p.9).

A number of industries have taken that philosophy to heart. The FAA has developed practices that make it a model in learning from failure. Pilots can report near misses with out fear of retribution and major accidents are thoroughly investigated. Patient safety work in hospitals, which began to be addressed in the early 90’s, drew heavily on what had been learned about flight safety and has since saved countless lives. If you are a patient in a clinic or hospital and find yourself being asked for your birth date over and over again, that is patient safety at work – preventing any chance of an error like, for example, the technician putting the wrong name on your tubes of blood. The nuclear industry has also put practices in place, for example tracking anything that is even slightly out of the ordinary and quickly investigating and reporting the results to the entire system.

But these industries are far from the norm. In most organizations failures are hidden or down played as one-off incidents. There is pressure to “move on” rather than “dwell” on past mistakes. In part this results from the very human desire to be highly regarded by peers and bosses, but in part it is people's recognition that success is rewarded while failure often prevents promotion. Added to that are the very strong negative emotions that all of us experience when we have to confront our own failure. These factors are so powerful that without a very intentional and concerted effort, learning from failure just doesn’t happen.

What is needed is a clear model of what it takes to learn from failure and that is what Cannon and Edmondson have provided in their article, “Failing to Learn and Learning to Fail.” (Download Edmondson - Failing to Learn and Learning to fail) They identify three organizational activities that need to be in place if an organization is going to take advantage of this valuable knowledge.
• A systematic way of identifying failures
• A process in place for analyzing failures, and
• A culture that promotes deliberate experimentation
I discuss each of these practices below, providing examples from Cannon and Edmondson and adding examples from my own work.

Identifying failures
One of the challenges in identifying small failures is how to make the failures visible enough that they can be identified as such. There is no problem with identify catastrophic failures – they are well publicized. But if the goal is to identify small failures that are precursors to those catastrophes – then a well thought through system has to be in place. As this example from Cannon and Edmondson shows it often takes someone with good research skills to format data so that others can see it.

X-ray errors
Across the medical profession there is a 10-15% failure rate in reading mammograms accurately - even among experts. So the discovery that a technician has missed identifying a tumor is not viewed as a topic worth spending time on. This well-known error rate is an example of small failures that need attention - yet are easy to consider as “just the way things are.”

When Dr. Kim Adcock became radiology chief at Kaiser Permanente Colorado, she used HMO records to identify failures and produce systematic feedback including bar charts and graphs for each individual x-ray reader. The graphs allowed readers to become aware of their own error rate and more importantly to return to a specific x-ray to investigate why they missed a tumor – allowing them to learn not to make the same mistake again.

Without Dr. Adcock’s skill in putting the data together in a usable format it was largely invisible. An x-ray reader might never even realize he/she had made an error since the patient’s next visit could be months away and an altogether different reader might look at that x-ray.

Cannon and Edmondson note that the inaccessibility of data is one of the issues that prevent learning from mistakes. In many organizations, to make failure visible enough that it can be addressed requires someone with the research and analytic skills to ferret it out. Learning from failure may also require a courageous choice about what data to collect. The eradication of smallpox accomplished by the World Health Organization (WHO) begun in 1965 provides a useful example.

Eradication of Smallpox
Before its eradication 10 million people a year were inflicted with the disease and 20-40% died, with many of the rest left scarred and sometimes blind. Because of WHO’s ten year vaccination campaign, by 1977 the last case of small pox occurred in Somalia – small pox had been eradicated. The story of that success is a story of learning from both failures and successes and being willing to change strategies in terms of what it was learned.

An important part of that learning resulted from the choices WHO made about what data to collect during the long vaccination campaign. It would have advantaged WHO politically to track the number of vaccinations given and the number of areas free of small pox. But instead they chose to track trends in the incidence of smallpox. Those data were openly shared with field workers around the globe. WHO considered the field workers co-researchers, so felt a responsibility to continually provide them accurate and useful data with which to guide their own field vaccination program and research. Such reports were frequently embarrassing both to WHO and to the countries – yet it allowed WHO to learn in a way that could not have been possible from data that were more sensitive to public relations

Analyzing failures
The second organizational activity that is necessary in order to learn from failures is the ability to analyze the failures. Cannon and Edmondson explain that organizations tend to avoid such analysis. They may request that someone conduct a study but studies are of little use unless the organization creates the forum for in-depth discussion of the failure.

And those forums need facilitators who have the skills to create an atmosphere of psychological safety in which a spirit of inquiry and openness can flourish. As Cannon and Edmondson note:

Decades of research by organizational learning pioneer Chris Argyris has demonstrated that people in disagreement rarely ask each other the kind of sincere questions that are necessary for them to learn from each other. People also try to force their views on the other party rather than educating the other party by providing the underlying reasoning behind their views. (p.28)

Edmondson’s work on patient safety is particularly relevant for me, because of my own research and project work in this area. The following report, written by a facilitator of a failure analysis meeting in one of those projects, illustrates that facilitation skills that create psychological safety can indeed be learned. The skills the report writer references in this report were based on Argyris’ Model II skills that are intended to make organizational learning possible. The report is a first hand account written by St Anthony’s Director of Patient Safety following a meeting (which we referred to as sensemaking) she facilitated to look at a small failure that had been reported in the hospital.

St Anthony
We held a sensemaking session on a medication error that originated in the pharmacy. A patient was given a blood pressure medication that the physician had put on hold. The patient had come from the regular floor to our re-hab unit where the medication was wrongly administered. No harm occurred because of this error.

Before the sensemaking session occurred, I, as the Director of Patient Safety, along with the Director of Pharmacy conducted a Root Cause Analysis on the error and based on that developed a causal tree.

We were particularly interested in this error because we were in the process of implementing bar coding throughout the hospital. The unit where the error occurred was trialing the bar coding system so both the pharmacy and the re-hab unit had put in new processes for medication orders.

The sensemaking meeting brought ten people together, including the Director of Pharmacy, two pharmacy technicians and two pharmacists, one of whom had been involved in the error. We also had the nursing unit director from the floor where the error occurred, the VP of administration, the management engineer and the nursing informaticist who had expertise in bar coding. In addition two nurses from the floor had agreed to come, but at the last minute were not able to do so. The meeting lasted about an hour and a half and was held toward the end of the shift to allow some people to come in early and others to stay after their shift.

I facilitated the sensemaking session, having participated in the earlier sensemaking training. At the beginning of the meeting I attempted to set a tone of openness. I explained that the intent of the sensemaking session was to educate ourselves on how we do things and more specifically how this error had occurred and I acknowledged that we all make errors including myself. I recalled an error I had made and asked if the others, whom we had arranged in a circle, would be willing to share a personal experience they had with an error and to say something about what it meant to them. Nearly everyone in the circle did so and this beginning proved valuable in demonstrating to everyone present that we were all on equal footing. The beginning also served to introduce those present to each other, which was important because one of our barriers to fixing medication errors has been that people from the floor don’t know many of the people from pharmacy.

I had printed the events from the causal tree on individual sheets of paper and these were placed one at a time on a wall chart. I explained to the group that this was just our rendition of what had occurred and that what I was looking for was input from them as to the correctness of the items or the sequence. As I placed each component on the tree, the group talked about that item, providing feedback, correcting, and adding new items. I used post-it notes to write additional information or steps. Having the items on individual sheets to be posted and changed proved much less threatening than using PowerPoint. It emphasized the tentativeness of what we had already produced illustrating that it was changeable.

The discussion evolved slowly as the group began to open up. As the meeting continued it became clear to me that the members were really trying to make sense of each other’s reasoning and contributions. Rather than all the questions coming from me, they began to ask questions of each other. For example, one pharmacist asked, “How do you know what medication you’ve put in?” The other pharmacist responded, “I check them off.” The first pharmacist was surprised because he had not been checking them off. Moreover, one of the techs explained that he thought the check meant that the pharmacist had already done a double check, so had not been re-checking those items. So even the pharmacist were discovering differences in how they did things and that often led to a discussion about which practice was safer.

One of the ways this meeting seemed different from a typical Root Cause Analysis that I have conducted was that the sensemaking meeting had a tone of curiosity rather than the urgency to get the form completed and the meeting over with. I found myself exploring more in this meeting, trying to get at staff’s understanding rather than just get the facts. I found myself honestly curious about what happened and did not feel compelled to make judgments. In this meeting we primarily tried to understand what had happened and to reflect those changes in the causal tree. In the end I felt great satisfaction knowing that the discussion did indeed go beyond the surface of the event. The casual tree we ended up with added several.

In two subsequent meetings we created an action plan to address the issues we had uncovered in the sensemaking meeting and based on the same incident we conducted four subsequent Failure Modes and Effects Analysis meetings. So the sensemaking meeting proved a rich source of understanding for our continuing improvement work. The safety culture re-survey conducted in the pharmacy showed a positive change which, in part, was as a result of the conversation we had in the sensemaking meeting.

This report illustrates for me the value of a systematic process to analyze mistakes. It also illustrates the care that needs to be taken with the tone of the meeting, the media that is used to convey the concepts, the facilitator skills, and even how the room is arranged.

Deliberate experimentation
The third of Cannon and Edmondson’s three practices is the need for deliberate experimentation. They call it “learn to fail intelligently – a deliberate strategy to promote innovation and improvement.” This may seem counter-intuitive because experimentation necessarily leads to failure. But a practice of experimentation requires a shift in thinking from seeing failure as something to avoid or punish, to seeing failure as a way to learn. Lewis Thomas in The Medusa and the Snail says,

Mistakes are at the very base of human thought, embedded there, feeding the structure like root nodules... We are built to make mistakes, coded for error.... The lower animals do not have this splendid freedom. They are limited, most of them, to absolute infallibility. (P.29)

Cannon and Edmondson quote research that shows that organizations that experiment effectively are likely to be more innovative, productive and successful than those that do not take such risks.

A well know example is IDEO, the award winning design firm. It uses many slogans to encourage experimentation including, “Fail often in order to succeed.” In the early stages of creating a design for a new product, IDEO encourages many experiments, knowing that most of them will not work, but also knowing much will be learned from those failures.

Another celebrated example is the 3M Corporation that has encouraged deliberate experimentation in a culture that is tolerant of mistakes. “At 3M failures are seen as a necessary step in a larger process of developing successful, innovative products.” (p. 21) The 3M corporation provides incentives and has policies that encourage deliberate experimentation.

The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) Knowledge Lab developed a process to encourage innovation and experimentation called Crossing Boundaries. You can read the full description in an earlier post. But to summarize it briefly here, Crossing Boundaries is a system where many ideas are encouraged and support is provided to make those ideas happen.

Crossing Boundaries takes place in the largest auditorium at DIA with the Director up in front. The meeting starts with an impressive chart that reveals how many ideas have been offered and how many have resulted in change – 47% at last count. As soon as the accounting is over, employees from across DIA stand up, one at a time, and offer the Director solutions, not problems. And they only offer solutions THEY are willing to take personal responsibility for implementing. The Director listens to the ideas, responds to each one, sometimes with questions, sometimes with comments. There are from 5 – 20 solutions offered at each monthly meeting. Immediately following the meeting, a group of coaches gets in touch with each of the idea submitters to assist them, that is, to help write a business case, open doors, connect to others with a similar idea.

Crossing Boundaries illustrates Cannon and Edmonson’s caution that, “Deliberate experimentation requires that people not just assume their views are correct, but actually put their ideas to the test and design (even very informal, small) experiments in which their view can be disconfirmed.” (p. 20)

Summary
It is possible for organizations to learn from failure but to accomplish that requires more than admonitions from seniors about the need to do so. It requires 1) a way to systematically collect data on small failures, 2) designing systems to jointly analyze the data on failures, and 3) encouraging experimentation which deliberately results in failures from which the organization can learn.

Organizational Studies that Don't Just Sit on the Shelf: Participatory Action Research

2010-02-23T20:56:22-08:00

Organizational studies don’t have a very good track record for making a difference in organizations. There are lots of reasons for this. Sometimes the findings offend a high level official so the study never sees the light of day. Other times the client who asked for the study just isn’t in a position to do anything about the findings. Sometimes the findings are not credible, or are too abstract – lots of reasons but in the end, all too frequently, the recommendations are never carry out.

I am using the term "study" here, but you could substitute the terms "lessons learned," "evaluation" or "assessment" and see the same absence of results. In most situations in which an organization asks or is required to take an in-depth, objective look at an issue, the study report is more likely to be the end rather than the beginning of change.

Participatory Action Research is a way to conduct an organizational study that has a very different outcome, that is, change starts to happen while the study is still being conducted. By the time the study is completed there is already a buzz in the organization about the issues and people are trying out changes. There are a number of ways to design Participatory Action Research and I’ll write about other designs in up-coming posts. But central to all Participatory Action Research are four basic principles:

1. employ a social scientist to design the study to insure the reliability and validity of the findings
2. involve a team of internal employees (who will be the beneficiaries of the findings) in all phases of the research, that is, data collection, analysis, recommendations and implementation
3. design organization wide conversations about the findings and recommendations
4. assess the results of the implementation as input to continuing the organization’s learning about the issue being studied.

I’ve just completed a study for a government agency that I want to use here to illustrate how Participatory Action Research works and why it makes a difference when other studies don’t.

The Situation: For some time this agency has questioned the effectiveness of its longstanding process intended to improve the quality of its reports for clients. That process involves submitting the reports to a series of hierarchical reviews before they are released. My task was to take a systematic look at the hierarchical review process to accurately describe how it works and more importantly to learn what impact the review process has on the quality of outcomes. And I had a very important second task - to conduct the study in such a way that the findings from the study wouldn’t just sit on the shelf in some decision maker’s office. The goal was to embed the findings in the minds of organizational members.

The Participatory Action Research study I designed to address this issue used semi-structured interviews. That means there was a standard set of questions, but the interviewers were instructed to encourage interviewees to raise issues the interview team had not yet thought of and to follow those trails when they seemed promising. In a study like this one, where the issue is not well understood, having that flexibility is essential. Had interviewers just stuck with the original interview question a great number of critical insights would have been lost. Using semi-structured interviews and multiple interviewers required adding four research practices to the four principles listed above:

5. ensure consistency across multiple interviewers
6. take verbatim notes to reduce interviewer bias in the data
7. analyze interview data using qualitative data analysis software in order to compare the data from differing perspectives
8. ensure interviewee anonymity and keep faith with those who have offered their insights

The first principle is to have as a principal investigator a social scientist that is knowledgeable about how to conduct qualitative research to insure both the reliability and validity of the study. In this study I served in that role of principal investigator. But with Participative Action Research the social scientist doesn’t conduct the study alone, which leads to the second principle.

The second principle is to involve an internal team of people who will be the beneficiaries of the findings. The beneficiary is not the person who sponsored the study; rather it is those whose work could change based on the findings – often those on the frontline. Participatory Action Research involves this internal team in all phases of the study. Team members become joint researchers, collecting data, analyzing the data, and constructing recommendations.

Identifying Interviewees: In consultation with the agency sponsor, four departments were selected to be involved in the study, making sure a diversity of types of work were included. I met with each department head to outline the parameters of the study and to offer anonymity both in terms of the department and the interviewees.

Each department was asked to identify eight interviewees including both frontline workers who produce the products, and those in the hierarchy who conduct the reviews; and taking into account a distribution of level and experience. Each department was also asked to provide a two person interview team made up of one frontline worker and one person in the hierarchy.

Preparing the Interview Team: I developed a set of interview questions and a protocol for conducting the interviews, which I had tested earlier and revised based on the responses. A protocol is a step-by-step guide of how to conduct the interviews. It includes how to introduce the study to the interviewee, issues of confidentiality, how to probe responses, how to take notes, etc. The protocol satisfied the research practice of ensuring consistency across multiple interviewers.

The interview teams from the four departments came together for the first of three meetings. In this first meeting I demonstrated the interview protocol and the interviewer group made revisions to the questions. Involving the interviewers in refining the questions was important for two reasons, 1) interviewers were able alter the language of the questions so they would have more meaning to their colleagues, as well as adding new questions that were important to the interviewers, and 2) the discussion and language changes helped the interviewers to “own” the questions – the start of making it their study.

Collecting Data: I assigned each interview team to a department to conduct their interviews – a department other than their own. This not only reduced interviewer bias, but served to broaden the interviewee’s understanding of the review process.
The interviewers found conducting the interviews informative, they 1) discovered practices that would be useful in their own department, 2) empathized with the difficulties others faced in departments other than their own, and 3) gained a clearer understanding of their own department process by seeing it through the eyes of others. After interviewing they reported:

“What is illuminating is seeing other processes.”

“It was very helpful. You don’t realize that things could be better or worse in other offices. We asked interviewees what things needed to be fixed and we thought we could profit from those fixes too.”

“It helped us look at our own process. We’ve revamped a number of things.”

“It was also revealing to us that we’re not doing that bad.”

The research practice of using verbatim notes to reduce interviewer bias in the data was employed. Taking down what an interviewee actually said rather than paraphrasing, which is the interviewer’s interpretation of what the interviewee meant, is critical to the validity of the study. Having a team conduct the interviews allowed one person to concentrate on the notes and the other to focus on asking the questions and follow-up probes. Verbatim notes are also useful in writing the report because interviewees’ actual words help to substantiate and bring the findings to life.

The teams conducted half of the interviews and I, as principal researcher, conducted the other half. The comparison between the content of my interviews and the interview teams’ interviews provided a reliability check.

Analyzing the Interviewee Data: After the interviews had been completed, the interview team met again to report to each other on what they had learned. Out of those reports and the discussion that followed the team identified common themes across all four departments. This was an important meeting that served several purposes, 1) it provided the initial themes used to code the data in a qualitative database, 2) it broadened the interviewers’ understanding of how the review process is conducted in different offices, and 3) the insights of this group provided additional data for the study.

A new group of frontline workers and members of the hierarchy were then brought together as a focus group. I provided them a brief written description of each of the themes the interview team had developed, which they then discussed at length. This meeting served to both validate and amplify the themes with new insights.

The research practice of analyzing interview data using qualitative data analysis software was particularly critical with this study because of the large number of interviews. This type of software makes it possible to sort unstructured data and then examine it through multiple lenses, (e.g. role, theme, tenure, etc.) It makes it possible to organize and manage thousands of pieces of related information, explore themes, and make comparisons.

I entered all of the verbatim interview notes into a qualitative database and coded the data with the themes identified by the interviewers as well as a number of additional themes that emerged from the lengthy task of coding. Coding the data entails assigning codes to every sentence of every interview and as new themes emerge, returning to already read interviews to re-assign codes. Based on this analysis I then wrote a first draft of the report.

The draft was sent to each of the interviewers to read and revise. The interviewer team came together for a third meeting to talk through the draft report. They brought with them their corrected copies of the draft. Each team was also asked to bring a thought leader from their own department with them to the meeting to participate in the discussion. In this review meeting the interview team made revisions to the draft and validated the findings. The team then turned their attention to constructing recommendations based on the findings, which then became a part of the final report.

By the third meeting, change related to the study issue had already begun to happen. There was now in each department a group of 5-6 employees (consisting of the interviewer team, the focus group members and the thought leader) who had a thorough understanding of the findings and a vested interest in using them to make change.

The research practice of ensuring interviewee anonymity and keeping faith with those who have offered their insights was followed. Each person who had been interviewed and promised anonymity received a draft of the report and was asked to read through it to make sure none of the quotes could identify them. Before sending them the draft I had taken care to sanitize it as thoroughly as I could, but even so, a handful of interviewees ask for changes in their quotes to further ensure they would not be recognized.

By the time the final report was ready to send to the sponsor, sixty employees spread across the four departments had thoroughly read the draft. Which meant there was already an organizational buzz about the findings of the report.

I now return to the third principle of Participatory Action Research, designing organization wide conversations about the findings and recommendations. To produce change in an organization, the findings of the study have to become a part of the organizational conversation. With Participative Action Research those conversations begin to happen during the study, but that isn’t adequate to bring about change. It is critical to convene small and large group conversations across the organization to provide employees the opportunity to process the findings for themselves and to think through what the findings mean for how their work needs to change. It is necessary to have such conversations among high-level decision makers, but equally critical that those whose work will change hold such conversations and make recommendation specific to their own department.

Participatory Action Research is, at its heart, a conversational process, not an impersonal survey, nor an experimental design with “subjects;” rather it is a conversation between organizational members. That conversation takes place between interviewer and interviewee, between members of the interview team, and between organizational members in the conversations set up to discuss the findings. All of the conversations are a part of the change. In the end all change is a result of organizational conversation – the only question is who is invited into the conversation. Participatory Action Research is a methodology to focus the organization on conversations that matter and invite into the conversation those whose work will change.

For the agency study I have used as the example in this post, we are now poised at the step of designing the organization wide conversations. So stay tuned.

The Value of Lessons Learned

2010-02-08T18:56:00-08:00

In common usage the term LL means, something I learned through an experience I’ve had that will cause me to act differently in the future. We learn lessons in obvious ways, for example, we ask someone for help, to which they agree, and then find they don’t come through – lesson: “I won’t ask her for help again.” And in more subtle ways, as when over time we feel we’ve finally mastered how to produce the quality of report that a demanding editor or boss wants - lesson: “Okay, now I see what I need to do.”

In our own minds we usually frame lessons learned as instructions to ourselves that are both action oriented and future oriented – they are not just descriptions of what happened but guidance for our future. Lessons learned are in fact one of the most important ways we learn, grow and change. We greatly value those lessons of experience and they become a part of our sense of self.

The US Army took this valuable every day behavior to a new level when, in the 1970’s, it formalized it into the After Action Review (AAR). In each AAR session the army drew out three levels of lessons:
1. Lessons for the platoon (or battalion or company) that would lead it to take more effective action the next time it was engaged in a similar maneuver - typically a facilitator wrote these lessons on a flip chart for everyone to see
2. Individual lessons that each soldier learned, that would lead him/her to act more effectively the next time that soldier was involved in a similar maneuver - each soldier carried a pocket notebook to write these lessons down during the group meeting
3. Lessons that could be generalized for the use of others – a subset of what was learned in the meeting was sent to the Center for Army Lessons Learned (CALL) to be made available to other platoons.

Formalizing lessons learned, as the Army did, is useful because, let’s face it, we don’t often take the time to pause and think through, “Now what did I learn out of that experience?” “What would I do differently next time?” Consequently we frequently find ourselves making the same mistakes over and over again – and kicking ourselves for not having learned the first time.

Even for individuals, the reflection process is more effective when it is formalized, for example, keeping a journal or a holding a regularly scheduled conversation with a colleague or mentor who can help the individual think through the lessons. We learn when we talk applies to understanding what we have gained out of an experience. As the saying goes, “Experience is inevitable, learning is not.” Turning experience into learning involves an intentional, reflective process.

If it is a group that has conducted a project or team effort, formalizing the lessons learned process is critical. Individual reflection is not enough for a group to improve. After all, in a team or group project it is not just the actions of each individual team member that makes it work, it is also the interaction – how one person’s action impacts (delays or facilitates) another. The interplay between team members in a basketball game is a useful analogy – the star can’t make the goal without the help of teammates that get the ball to him at the right time.

The relationship between cause and effect is always complex. Most of the outcomes of a team’s actions have multiple causes and it takes the thinking of the whole team to tease those cause and effect relationships out. A group discussion moves the knowledge each individual holds into a group or public space where it can then be integrated and made sense of by the whole team. The team then draws on the shared knowledge the next time it takes action.

This diagram borrowed from my book Common Knowledge (p.36), illustrates this concept.

Different organizations have given different names to the process they use to learn from experience. The Army term is After Action Review (AAR). NASA uses Pause and Learn (PAL). The Emergency Preparedness Community term is Hot Wash. Regardless of the name, each has guidelines in place to make such meetings more effective than just having a group of people tossing out ideas. All of us have experienced debriefs or postmortems that were a great waste of time. Here are some general guidelines that help lessons learned meetings be more effective:

* Meetings to construct lessons are held as soon as possible after the outcome because memory fades quickly
* If the project is lengthy, lessons learned meetings are held at milestones along the way
* Meetings focus only on the team/project lessons learned, not on other issues the group may be facing
* Meetings are brief – it is not a meeting to solve a problem only to tease out what was learned
* They focus on what went well as well as what could have been improved.
* Everyone involved in the action is there to contribute to the lessons – no one is too junior or to senior to participate
* It is framed as a meeting to learn, not to judge – so no recriminations
* Meetings have a structure and a standard set of questions the group will address
* There is a facilitator to keep the group focused. Often it is a team member who has had some training in that organization’s lessons learned methodology. Typically the group’s leader participates but does not facilitate.

When KM began to gain prominence in the early 90’s organizations borrowed the idea from the Army and lessons learned became one of the early KM practices. Over time lessons learned became so focused on transferring knowledge to others that organizations tended to ignore the greatest value, what the individuals and teams had learned for themselves.

The transfer part is very tricky. What organizations found is what we already knew as individuals: that although lessons, that are learned first hand, are incredibly impactful, it is very hard to transfer those lessons to someone else. From our own experience as parents, trying to share our lessons from the past with our children, we know how difficult it is to make that transfer. As our children tell us, “But Mom, things are different now than when you were growing up.”

So all those repositories of lessons learned that we built in the early days of KM just didn’t work very well and lessons learned took on a bad name within organizations. In an up coming blog post I’ll talk about ways to make lessons learned transfer more effective.

But it is critical that we not overlook the most important way lessons learned are useful, which is for the group that has achieved an outcome, successful or not, to really come to understand how that happened. In the end, unless the originating group has gained a thorough understanding for themselves, anything they transfer to others will be inaccurate.

The greatest value of lessons learned is for those who took the action.

Do We Really Need So Many Kinds of Social Media?

2009-10-25T18:12:19-07:00

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.

A Wiki for Generals

2009-10-05T12:12:49-07:00

Previously I wrote about the process and benefits of having Soldiers update doctrine through the Army’s new wiki. Eventually there will be 230 manuals up on the wiki. There are 100 additional manuals that won’t be put up. These manuals contain the fundamental approach and language of the profession – the Army’s enduring principles. Here are a few examples of the kind of knowledge in those 100 manuals.

Fundamental Principle 3-2. The Army's operational concept is full spectrum operations: Army forces combine offensive, defensive, and stability or civil support operations simultaneously as part of an interdependent joint force to seize, retain, and exploit the initiative, accepting prudent risk to create opportunities to achieve decisive results. They employ synchronized action-lethal and nonlethal-proportional to the mission and informed by a thorough understanding of all variables of the operational environment.

Definition:
5-6. While command is a personal function, control involves the entire force. Control is the regulation of forces and warfighting functions to accomplish the mission in accordance with the commander's intent. It is fundamental to directing operations.

Construct:
7-7.1. The Army conducts five information tasks to shape the operational environment. These are information engagement, command and control warfare, information protection, operations security, and military deception.

If having soldiers contribute to a wiki in order to keep Tactics, Techniques and Procedures (ATTPs) up-to-date, then there surely is a corresponding benefit for the Generals to keep the policies and enduring principles up-to-date in those 100 manuals that will not become ATTPs. In this time of accelerated change any organization’s principles and strategies require constant examination and challenge.

Too often in organizations senior leaders view KM initiatives including new social media as something they need to provide for the frontline – but do not see it as something they need for themselves – a process that would enhance their own ability to develop new ideas and knowledge among themselves. But the opposite is true, it is at the policy and strategy level that organizations are in most need of the kind of on-going involvement and engagement that the new social media provide.

The Army has a many great examples of Generals participating in knowledge management activities, like Major General Michael Oates holding open chats with the troops, and Admiral Stavridis who blogs regularly and participates on Facebook.

There are even more examples of Generals actively supporting knowledge management activities. The strategic communication that General Caldwell has embedded in the Command and General Staff College is excellent, not to mention General Dempsey’s instigating putting the ATTPs up on the wiki.

These examples show, that as in the past, the Army is leading the way in its knowledge management initiatives. Generals are involved in KM through their efforts to learn from the front line. However none of the examples are about the Generals learning with and from each other.

All Generals have colleagues and trusted advisors with whom they exchange thinking and ideas. That is the one-to-one exchange that is necessary, but that we have learned is not sufficient when dealing with issues of such complexity. With complex issues there is a need for in-depth discussion that makes use of cognitive diversity that can only be achieved by engaging in an on-going dialogue among those most impacted by the issues.

It may be that Generals in the Army already have a top-secret web-site where they hash out the principles of how to fight this new kind of war we are in. But if they do not, then having a corresponding Wiki up where the principles that guide how the Army fights OCO available for an in-depth discussion that might result in a change to doctrine, would seem to be of equal importance to the frontline addressing ATTPs.

This is an issue, not just in the Army, but across most organizations. The task for KM professionals is how to design systems and initiatives that could assist those at the top in creating much needed new strategic knowledge and to share with each other the knowledge they have learned from their experience.

If the Army Can Put Its Doctrine Up On a Wiki, You've Got No Excuse

2009-09-23T12:36:00-07:00

A few weeks ago I had the privilege of watching an astounding event - a room full of Soldiers typing Army doctrine onto a wiki so that Soldiers in the field could make changes as they were discovering new and better tactics in the midst of fighting a war.

There were a couple of amazing things about this event. One was that it was happening at all, because to the Army, doctrine is close to sacred. It is written by doctrine specialists and then verified and authenticated at many levels within the hierarchy. So opening doctrine up to Soldiers is a very big deal. The second amazing thing was how quickly it happened – just three weeks after the General said, “Make it happen.” the first eight manuals went up. A hierarchical organization, of one million plus employees, just shouldn’t be able to move that fast!

But let me begin at the beginning of the story.

TRADOC, the US Army Training and Doctrine Command, has the task of writing and maintaining more than 600 field manuals that specify how the Army is to fight as well as conduct the many support tasks needed to keep soldiers going. Everything from how to drive a humvee to how to throw a grenade has doctrine that specifies the approved way to do it. TRADOC oversees the doctrine, but it is the Proponents, each of which has responsibility for some vital process (Fires, Armor, Acquisition, Chaplin, Field Artillery, etc.), that have the SMEs with the in-depth knowledge. So they have the last word on doctrine about their subject.

Conditions change very fast in Iraq and Afghanistan so it has become increasingly difficult to update the manuals as quickly as change occurs. Faced with overwhelming change as well as diminishing resources, the newly appointed Commander of TRADOC, General Dempsey, made a bold stroke. He declared that not all of the 600 field manuals needed to be doctrine produced by professional doctrine writers. Many of the manuals, he suggested, contained tactics and procedures that could be more easily kept current by the soldiers in the field. And the best way to do that was with a Wiki! The Army had recently developed a trio of social media, milWiki, milBook, and milBlog – so had already got their feet wet with Enterprise 2.0.

General Dempsey assigned the Combined Arms Doctrine Directorate (CADD) the task of determining which of the 600 needed to remain as field manuals and which could go up on the wiki as Army Tactics, Techniques and Procedures (ATTPs). CADD was able to differentiate the “how to” knowledge, for example how to set up a checkpoint in Iraq, from the more conceptual knowledge that provides enduring principles for the Army. CADD quickly determined that 230 of the 600 field manuals could become ATTPs and be available on the wiki for Soldier input.

So then the question was how to get the ATTPs up on the wiki and more importantly how to get Soldiers contributing. The answer, a cooperative effort between The Battle Command Knowledge System (BCKS) and CADD, was a series of Kaizen events. The Kaizen events were a focused, intense, week-long change initiative where change in the organization began to happen during the event.

Business as usual for the Army, or for that matter for most organizations, would have been to pull together a tiger team to identify the issues that needed to be resolved, figure out how to fix them, and then handover the solution to Leadership to be implemented.

The Kaizen events the Army ran were not “business as usual,” rather they were “learn your way to the answer.” The event brought together the people who would ultimately have to implement the solution – the TRADOC and Proponent doctrine writers. They knew more about where the problems would crop up than anyone in the world, so it was that group that spent the week identifying the issues and making a list of what they and the leaders they reported to needed to do next to get the ATTPs working on the wiki. Top leadership including Lieutenant General Caldwell, Commander, Combined Arms Center, and General Dempsey were there - but for guidance and support - it was the group of implementers that did the heavy lifting. Doctrine is interwoven with nearly every part of the army – a classic example of a complex adaptive challenge. There are legal issues about records management, exceptions to policy that will have to be made, implications for having hard copy for a Soldier to take into the Battlefield where there is often little computer access, how to do search, and on and on.

During the event, legitimate concerns were raised about the feasibility of Soldiers changing doctrine. There were many “What Ifs” brought up: What if the ATTP says, “Be at least 15 feet away from where the grenade lands” and some Soldier decides to change it to 5 feet and then his comrades die because of his change? What if some Soldier that didn’t graduate from high school, writes in something with poor grammar and spelling? Or worst yet, what if that Soldier has important knowledge to contribute but doesn’t because of embarrassment about his/her writing skills? “What Ifs” are not to be taken lightly, but for many of these concerns the Army will have to “learn its way forward.”

While all this was happening, in a nearby room Soldiers were busy putting the manuals up on the wiki – the idea being, we won’t really know what the problems are until we start using the wiki. General Dempsey dubbed these first ATTPs as a pilot, to give everyone the freedom to make mistakes and to learn from those mistakes as they went along. The beauty of not having a perfect plan is that you don’t have to stick to it - it can change as you learn.

The second Kaizen event, with another group of Proponents, occurred three weeks later and at the end of that event there were 16 ATTPs up. And one more event is planned so that every Proponent will have at least one ATTP up. They will have all experienced how long it takes to get an ATTP up on the Wiki – before the event that was a great unknown. And as the weeks go by Proponents are beginning to learn how to monitor changes and what kind of monitoring is needed. The complex issues raised at the events are beginning to be addressed by the many parts of the organization that own them.

Being the Army, of course there was an AAR at the end of each event. The comments were not surprising, but were clearly heartfelt. One Colonel said, “Those of us who write the doctrine and manage the process are here in this room, being asked for our thinking about what would work and what would not work – and that puts us way head of the game.” The event uncovered how very many parts of the system this change will impact, which was helpful, if a bit overwhelming. Most importantly, the implementers in the room left with a clear perception that Leadership, because they were in the room, had a clear understanding of the complexity of this change effort and of the difficulties the Proponents will face – Leadership was learning along with everyone else.

One of the open questions is whether Soldiers will take the time to go to the wiki to enter a new tactic or procedure they have found helpful. I asked Jim Benn, Deputy Director of CADD, whether the soldiers in the field wanted a voice in the doctrine. Had they been asking for a wiki or some way to participate in changing doctrine? His response was that soldiers recognized that what they were doing in theatre was not what they were taught in the schoolhouse based on the current field manuals– so thought TRADOC ought to do its job better – but didn’t think of themselves as needing to be the ones to change it.

Since the beginning of July there have been 15,000 visits to the site – so Soldiers are curious and coming in to see what’s going on. There have been about 80 content changes across the 16 ATTPs that are up on the Wiki. And there have been some 40 discussions.

Those figures raise the question, Is that enough? If you look at the typical participation rate of communities and wikis, that is, 90% readers, 9% users who contribute periodically, and 1% making most of the contributions – it seems okay. But the Army is hoping for much more participation than that. However, my guess is that most Soldiers will not contribute from the battlefield; they’ll wait until they’re back. They’ll think of something that ought to be changed while writing up their AARs or attending training between deployments, or even when they look something up and see that what they read doesn’t match their experience. I do think they will contribute, but the Army may have to put some active knowledge management process in place to facilitate contributions.

With doctrine on the wiki the Army will achieve two major benefits. Deputy Director Benn gave voice to one, “If the process works as we conceived it, we will have a body of professional military people that are more engaged in codifying their operational principles - taking some ownership. We will get all the benefits from that expanded involvement, that is, we would become a smarter and more educated force.”

And the second benefit will be the Soldiers’ increased confidence in the viability of the ATTPs they are reading because their colleagues, just back from deployment, wrote them and those guys know what they are talking about.

And I predict the Soldiers will find other ways to benefit from having the ATTPs up - benefits not yet conceived of by General Dempsey or Deputy Director Benn. Because that is the nature of social media that once it is available, uses for it emerge that the promoters would never have imagined.

This has been an amazing change initiative to watch. Each time I reflect on what the Army is doing, I am brought back to the conviction that if the Army, with the all inertia it has to overcome, can make this change happen within a few weeks, then all of us ought to take a hard look at what we can and cannot make happen in our own organizations. Certainly this initiative has a lot going for it, the Army’s strong commitment to transformation, a General who had the courage to commit his organization to a course of action in the face of some legitimate concerns, and a group of very savvy change agents in BCKS who knew this could not be just a top down effort.

Where Knowledge Management Has Been and Where It Is Going- Part Three

2009-07-30T08:32:21-07:00

In this three part series I‘ve classified the evolving landscape of knowledge management into three categories. The first category is Leveraging Explicit Knowledge and is about capturing documented knowledge and building it into a collection - connecting people to content. The second category is about Leveraging Experiential Knowledge and it gave rise to communities of practice and reflection processes. It is primarily focused on connecting people to people. The third category is Leveraging Collective Knowledge and it is about integrating ideas from multiple perspectives. Its medium is conversation in both its virtual and face-to-face forms.

Although I have suggested dates for each category, the dates are intended to represent the rise of new thinking about organizational knowledge, not necessarily when those changes occurred within any organization. In each section I identified some of the authors that have led the new thinking. My premise is that KM professionals, who read these books and blogs, are influenced by this thinking and then use those ideas to create new KM strategies within organizations.

I speak to the third category in this post. I lived through part one and two thus have some confidence in the summation I wrote for each. For part three, I am in the midst of the journey, as we all, and dealing with the changes as they arise. It is harder to get a perspective on a conceptual frame in the midst of a change than it is to look backward – but here goes.

Leveraging Collective Knowledge
Collective knowledge is not a new term to knowledge management, but in the past it has been used in an additive sense, as in “all the knowledge an organization has.” I am using it in quite a different sense here, to mean the knowledge that is derived from the confluence of diverse perspectives and data from across an organization and that is brought to bear on important organizational issues. But unlike the hierarchical process of passing everyone’s ideas and data up the chain of command to someone at the top who would then made sense of them, with collective knowledge the sensemaking is done jointly by those who hold those many perspectives and who own the data. It is the joint sensemaking that is a hallmark of Leveraging Collective Knowledge.

A second hallmark of Leveraging Collective Knowledge is that the knowledge that results from joint sensemaking is created or constructed. Unlike scientific truths, which are there all along, just waiting to be uncovered, collective knowledge does not exist before the conversation that gave rise to it. It would be a mistake to think of this knowledge, constructed through sensemaking, as being the right answer because collective knowledge is continually being adjusted as new data and new patterns in the data come to light. Collective knowledge is not a definitive answer, rather it is understanding that is adequate for the organization to plan and take its next action.

Just as all organizational knowledge cannot be thought of as explicit or experiential, not all knowledge can be thought of as collective knowledge. Collective knowledge is simply another type of knowledge that we as knowledge professionals need to be able to address under specific circumstances. There are three factors that are creating the need to add a focus on collective knowledge to the existing types of knowledge organizations already attend to:
• Dealing with increasingly complex issues
• Erosion of cognitive authority
• Failure to apply knowledge management to the work processes of top and middle management

What these three factors call for from knowledge management professionals in response is the:
• Inclusion of cognitively diverse perspectives
• Integration of the organization’s knowledge, and
• Increased transparency

I will start by describing the three factors that are moving us toward Leveraging Collective Knowledge and then turn to the responses that are emerging.

Dealing with increasingly complex issues

The need for Leveraging Collective Knowledge arises out of the increasing complexity that organizations face. Globalization, the speed of technological change, and the accessibility of information all impact the level of complexity and increases the number and diversity of players that must be taken into account in many organizational actions.

With increased complexity organizations have to deal with issues for which there are no scientific answers, and often are not even past experiences to draw upon. Heifetz calls these issues, adaptive challenges. Many other theorists (1) have written about such challenges, calling them variously, wicked problems, messes, and puzzles. For simplicity I will use Heifetz’s terms here, adaptive challenges and technical problems.

Characteristics of adaptive challenges are 1) their unpredictability, 2) the lack of agreement on exactly what the problem is, and 3) differing views about what constitutes an acceptable solution. Examples of adaptive challenges are, organizations that have merged and now must create a new and joint culture; hospital systems faced with an interminable nursing shortage; the anticipated retirement of thousands of workers in the government sector; and companies that, in order to survive, must change from selling products to service.

Heifetz contrasts adaptive challenges with technical problems that are predictable and solvable. Technical problems can be addressed by methods and tools that the organization has already developed. If, for example, a well is to be dug in a new oil field, there are established procedures; if a special issue of a journal is to be published, there are steps outlined that will put the issue out on schedule and within budget; if a new cell phone is to be developed, there are well defined phases of the development process. Technical problems have a solution that can be objectively evaluated as right or wrong, which adaptive challenges lack. Technical problems do not require a fundamental change in methods or tools. More importantly, the people who solve technical problems can function within a known set of assumptions about how work gets done in the organization, as well as what kind of behaviors are needed to make that work happen.

With adaptive challenges existing assumptions, methods, and tools are useless. They may even get in the way. Dealing with the complexity of adaptive challenges requires altered assumptions, different methods, and yet to be invented tools. And beyond that, adaptive challenges often necessitate that employees learn and practice new behaviors. Because they are so difficult, many adaptive challenges remain unresolved for years. In some organizations each successive senior management team repeatedly invents solutions for the challenge – solutions that the rest of the organization is unable to implement.

In most organizations KM efforts have been successful in solving technical problems using the processes developed for Leveraging Explicit Knowledge and Leveraging Experiential Knowledge. However KM professionals are becoming aware that there are critical organizational issues that these processes are not effective in addressing. GM is a good example. GM had an excellent KM program that resulted in significant process improvement but did not deal with the very complex issues that brought GM down. For KM professionals to deal with the strategic issues of organizations, they need a very different set of knowledge management tools.

The Erosion of Cognitive Authority

Within organizations and more generally in society, we have experienced an erosion of cognitive authority, that is, a reduction in the belief that those in positions of authority have some understanding or capability that the rest of us lack - that they have knowledge we can trust. We have certainly had adequate justification for this erosion; in medicine - the increasingly awareness of medical errors; in religion - the sex scandals in the Catholic Church; in politics - senators who break the public trust; and of course, in the field of management - CEOs who have shown they had neither the interest of stockholders nor employees at heart.

We have paid CEOs huge salaries, justified in large part by the belief that they had some unique knowledge that the rest of us did not have – a belief in the hero leader who alone would make a difference to an organization’s success. Since 2000 that assumption has increasingly been called into question. Ken Lay (Enron), Bernard Ebbers (WorldCom), William Aramony (United Way), Bernie Madoff (Cohmad Securities Corp), and a host of others have shown us that not only the justification for huge salaries was misplaced, but even among CEO’s whose integrity is unquestioned, there is the growing recognition that, as individuals, they lack adequate knowledge to deal with the complexity of organizational issues.

Failure To Apply Knowledge Management To the Work Processes of Top And Middle Management

Knowledge management processes have largely been focused on the frontline. Middle management for the most part has been ignored, as has senior management. These levels have had few, if any, processes designed to learn from each other or through reflection.

We, as knowledge management professionals, have somehow assumed senior leadership did not need to be concerned about how effective their own knowledge processes were. It is as though their positions somehow made them immune from the needs that were so clearly evident in the frontline. The role senior leadership has played in knowledge management has primarily been to provide the resources needed to apply knowledge management to the frontline, but not to itself.

Yet many of our greatest organizational problems have occurred because accurate knowledge did not flow upward and because senior leaders withheld knowledge from those at the frontline. The inclination of employees to withhold or delay bad news and to distort the seriousness of problems is well known. Likewise the tendency of senior management to withhold knowledge from employees out of concern that it will distract them or reduce morale is all too familiar. The historical examples are legion, from Watergate to the Challenger disaster to Enron. Detert and Edmondson note, “Small, everyday failures [to speak up] have the potential to substantially harm organizational performance, especially when weaknesses in internal processes or changes in the environment go unnoticed.” These are knowledge management issues that knowledge management professionals have only now begun to address through Leveraging Collective Knowledge.

The Challenges KM Professional Face in Leveraging Collective Knowledge
As we move into this third category of knowledge management, Leveraging Collective Knowledge, KM professionals are faced with the reality of 1) a lack of tools and permission to address the knowledge issues of top and middle management, 2) increasingly complex organizational problems that existing KM processes cannot impact, and 3) a general loss of belief that management has answers to address the complex issues facing organizations – formidable challenges.

However, as in the past when KM professionals have faced new challenges, new ideas to deal with these issues have already begun to emerge. Theorist and leading thinkers are writing about these issues and about what needs to change to address them. The terms that are appearing with enough frequency to portent the future of KM are cognitive diversity, integration, transparency and the term that connects all three, conversation.

In leading edge organizations we see knowledge management professionals focusing on the:
• Inclusion of cognitively diverse perspectives
• Integration of the organization’s knowledge, and
• Increased transparency

Inclusion of cognitively diverse perspectives

The good news is that there is knowledge to address the complex, adaptive challenges that organizations are facing. The bad news is that the needed knowledge does not lie within the hierarchical structure, which is too limited in perspective to resolve such issues. What is required to address adaptive challenges is cognitive diversity, which by definition lies outside of any organizational stovepipe and often even outside of the organization’s boundaries.

It may seem odd to address problems of complexity by adding more complexity, but the much quoted principle of requisite variety holds as true now as when Ashby first stated it some fifty years ago; “The internal diversity of any self-regulating system must match the variety and complexity of its environment if it is to deal with the challenges posed by that environment.”

Scott Page, in his book, The Difference, distinguishes cognitive diversity from identity diversity. The latter is related to race, age, and gender; the former is about differences in perspective, interpretation, heuristics, and predictive models and it is the former that is required. Bringing cognitive diversity to an adaptive challenge means involving divisions that may be only tangentially related to the issue, as well as customers, suppliers, academics, and others external to the organization. Putting the best minds within a division on an adaptive challenge does not resolve those challenges because the people within the division share a similar way of thinking.

Page cites InnoCentive as an example of using cognitive diversity to address complex issues. InnoCentive is a kind of match-making organization that brings together complex problems that organizations very much want solved, with people who think they might be able to solve them. InnoCentive claims to make available “160,000 of the brightest minds to help you build a better product.” Organizations that pose problems pay only for success, but offer the innovators who do find solutions five to six figure rewards for their successes. The problems that InnoCentive posts are so difficult that only a third of them are ever solved, however Page notes that when they are solved it is because innovators, from several disciples, e.g. chemist, biologist, biophysics, work together on the problem. If the problems were solvable from a single perspective, then the organizations that pose the problems would have already found a solution.

KM Professional’s Role in Addressing Cognitive Diversity

One of the important new tasks of knowledge management professionals is to encourage the use of greater cognitive diversity in addressing adaptive challenges. That task begins with helping managers recognize the difference between technical problems and adaptive challenges and then educating them about the knowledge processes that most effectively addresses each. Heifetz’s book, Leadership Without Easy Answers is a good place to start as is his new book The Practice of Adaptive Leadership.

The value of cognitive diversity has been popularized in a number of books the most scholarly of which is probably Scott Page’s, The Difference, and the more readable, The Wisdom of Crowds, by James Surowiecki.

There are a multitude of organizational examples of bringing cognitive diversity to complex issues of which InnoCentive is just one. Other well known examples are, Threadless, Wikipedia, IBM’s Innovation Jams, Netflix Prize, Linux, The Open Prosthetics Project. MIT’s Center for Collective Intelligence has identified 250 examples of collective intelligence. The Center has an excellent white paper which lays out a framework that details when to use what type of crowdsourcing.

Conversation
To Leverage Collective Knowledge just having cognitive diversity in the room, whether virtual or face-to-face, is not enough. To create out-of–the-box thinking there must be some way to integrate the cognitively diverse perspectives – and that comes down to conversation. It is the give and take - the challenge and questioning - among people who are cognitively diverse that creates new knowledge. Johnson and Johnson (see Bringing the Flow of Knowledge to a Standstill by Speaking with Conviction), researchers who study collaboration, say that the synthesis of diverse perspectives comes from being able to hold both one’s own and others’ perspectives in mind at the same time. That necessarily means there has been enough conversation that each person understands the perspective of others well enough to have an intelligent dialogue about the different interpretations of the problem.

Conversation itself hardly needs defining. We have all been a part of many conversations where each of the parties involved is trying to understand the meaning that others are trying to convey. We don’t need training to hold that kind of in-depth conversation, but in spite of our natural ability, such conversations are rare in organizations. Roles, positions, organizational norms, formats for meetings, even physical space, all work against having the kind of conversations we need to have to integrate knowledge from diverse perspectives. What is needed in order to break the unproductive conversational patterns of the status quo is new conversational formats.

Integration of the organization’s knowledge

Convening the conversation that brings diverse perspectives together is a leadership task. Pascale, author of Surfing the Edge of Chaos says, “In such an environment, the task of leadership is to frame the challenge and characterize it in such a way that creates immediacy. Leadership must then draw the community that is affected into tackling the new challenge. By definition, leadership in these situations does not have ‘the answer’; it typically emerges piece by piece from the community as a whole.”

Convening the conversation in order to integrate the knowledge (see The Power of the Conversation Architect to Address Complex, Adaptive Challenges) involves four important leadership tasks:

1. Framing the question –
Framing the topic of the conversation requires posing a question rather than a solution. The question needs to be one that gets to heart of the issue, not just its symptoms. That may require the convener to name the “elephant in the room” – the issue that everyone knows about but no one talks about.

2. Configuring the physical space to serve the conversation-
Most large conference spaces are designed for speeches not conversation. Even conference rooms within most organizations’ walls tend to be furnished with rectangular tables that are more suitable for negotiation or adversarial discussions than conversation.

3. Identifying who needs to be in the conversation -
In considering who to bring together, organizations tend to err on the side of homogeneity rather than diversity. Thinking broadly about who impacts and is impacted by the topic of the conversation is one way to broaden cognitive diversity.

4. Design the interaction
The rule of thumb is that 80% of the time those who have come together should be in conversation with each other, leaving only 20% of the time for presentations and speeches. A design that alternates between small group and large group conversations is the most productive for integrating the organization’s knowledge.

Convening the conversation rather than providing the answer is a new and somewhat problematic role for leadership. Business schools and training programs teach managers that their task is problem solving, so to view themselves as conveners rather than problem solvers is a considerable adjustment.

Ecopetrol

The story I told in a recent post about Ecopetrol is an example of convening the conversation. Ecopetrol’s president, Javier Gutiérrez convened a two and a half day meeting of 200 people to develop a knowledge strategy for Ecopetrol. With the help of some savvy KM Professionals, Ecopetrol brought together a wealth of cognitive diversity in the form of representatives from companies that were known to have outstanding KM strategies.

None of the many representatives presented for more than 15 minutes. The conference as a whole followed the 80/20 rule with eighty percent of the time spent in small group discussion, first in a Knowledge Café format and then using Open Space Technology. President Gutiérrez was in attendance for the whole of the meeting, but not as the authority with a solution, rather as a participant in the many small group conversations where new ideas were being formed. His voice was one perspective among many that came together to create the final strategy. Like the President, all those from other companies who presented also were engaged in the small group conversations, where the real work of dealing with this adaptive challenge began to develop.

A-Space

In my own study for DIA looking at A-Space (a FaceBook-like social media) I describe the way analysts interact with their colleagues to test their own theories and modify their interpretations through on-line conversations they hold in the many workspaces they generate themselves. A-Space and Intelliipedia are making use of the cognitive diversity that exists across the sixteen US Intelligence Agencies to address the adaptive challenges the intelligence community faces much more effectively than any that single agency could do.

True to the concepts of Leveraging Collective Knowledge, Wertheimer, the Assistant Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Analytic Transformation & Technology, convened the on-line conversation by providing the software and support, and by thinking carefully about who to invited into the conversation, but not by telling the analysts what kind of conversation to have.

Convening the conversation takes place both through social media and in face-to-face meetings. Social Media alone will not serve to integrate the organization’s knowledge, because that would disregard the many hundreds of staff meetings, townhalls, and team meetings that occur within organizations where frequently it is adaptive challenges that are being addressed. Those meetings, as well, need to be designed in terms of 1) framing the question, 2) configuring the space, 3) identifying who needs to be in the conversation, and 4) designing the interaction. It will surely become too confusing to organizational members to experience the inclusion of cognitive diversity and joint sensemaking through the internal use of social media, yet within the walls of headquarters to still sit in meetings where managers think they alone must solve all the complex problems facing their units.

KM Professionals’ Role in Integrating Organizational Knowledge

If the leadership task is to convene the conversation, then KM professionals’ task is to help leadership design the meetings, retreats, and conferences, so that they fully leverage collective knowledge. Without assistance such gatherings invariably become a series of speeches or report outs with little conversation to integrate organizational knowledge. KM professionals are employing a number of well-tested designs to help leadership convene conversations.

Peter Block in his book Community speaks eloquently about both the need for conversation and the skill of convening it. In the post, Four Conversations to Address Adaptive Challenges, I outline some of his thinking.

There are, as well, a host of well-defined formats for large group face-to-face meetings such as the one I described at Ecopetrol. I have listed a few here, but it is by no means a comprehensive list.

• Knowledge Café is a conversational format where participants move from café table to café table, dealing with a significant question and gaining perspective on the issue as they encounter different ways of thinking about it. There are a number of versions of this conversational format including the World Café (Juanita Brown & David Isaacs) and the Knowledge Café David Gurteen, who has specialized this practice within knowledge management.

• Future Search is a structured participatory process where organizational members work in groups to scan through the turbulent environments facing the organization for desired outcomes and then generate a strategy for achieving the outcome they have selected. Future Search was developed by Weisbord and Janoff. There are other versions of this process including Real Time Strategic Change developed by Dannemiller Tyson.

• Unconference creates a market place of ideas where anyone can offer a topic for a small working group and participants select to participate in the topic of greatest interest to themselves. In this way the Unconference is self organizing. It is based on the concepts of Open Space Technology originally developed by Harrison Owens. In 2009, 500 people working with social media in the U.S. government, came together to hold the Government 2.0 Social Media Un-conference.

• Appreciative Inquiry is a methodology developed by David Cooperrider at Case Western Reserve. It brings the organization together using interviewing to identify examples of where people have already resolved the complex issue the inquiry is addressing, and then in conversation groups makes sense of why those examples appear to be working and finally finds ways to build on what was discovered through sensemaking.

Increased transparency

There can be no integration without transparency. Unless everyone, who is jointly attempting to make sense of an adaptive challenge, has access to the data and perspectives of others, there is no way to integrate those perspectives. If leadership convenes the conversation, but does not reveal issues like a pending merger or a plan to sell a division of the organization, any attempt to address the adaptive challenge will fail. Likewise if frontline employees are unwilling to reveal the problems and failures they have faced in completing their tasks, the attempt at integration will fail. One of the benefits of using tested formats for such meetings is that they establish an environment conductive to disclosure.

For a senior leader to convene a conversation about an adaptive challenge requires that that he/she be willing to acknowledge, “I don’t have the answer.” That is what Ecopetrol’s president acknowledged by convening the strategy meeting and by participating in it as a member. During the second era, Leveraging Experiential Knowledge, we achieved a kind of transparency between frontline peers. It became acceptable for peers participating in community forums to say, “Does anybody know…..” a tacit acknowledgement that “I don’t know.”

The willingness to ask for the ideas of others constitutes a kind of learning in public. Rather than being embarrassed about one’s lack of knowledge, it is okay to reveal it, knowing that in doing so others in the community will learn as well. Moreover there is a sense of reciprocity that comes from knowing that in another situation, one’s own knowledge will ask be asked for and given.

But there has been no such forum for CEOs or their leadership teams to acknowledge a lack of knowledge in a public way. More typically leaders express concern that being seen as not having an answer lessens their credibility with subordinates. What is needed now is a way for leaders at all levels to re-define their role as convener.

Social media holds great promise for creating transparency. Research indicates that people are more honest about their ideas and concerns when communicating over digital media, than they are in face-to-face situations. In many organizations, organizational members use blogs to talk about their concerns and ideas openly. Because a blog is, by definition, the writer’s own opinion about an issue, much of the need to be politically correct is removed. Where an employee might not send a criticism up through the chain of command, it may seem acceptable to discuss it in a blog or on twitter. And leaders as well are finding ways to test their ideas through blogs and using the comments to expand their thinking. For example, in a recent post on the SiKM list serve, John Hovell of ManTech International Corporation, noted that when ManTech’s new President/COO, who had just come on board, held his first all hands' meeting at Corporate HQ there was a flurry of conversation on Yammer around his vision, strategic direction(s), and the tactical approach.

The US Army has actively encouraged blogging to increase transparency. On MilBlogs alone there are over 2000 blogs written by soldiers – making the military much more transparent.

KM Professional’s Role in Increasing Transparency

KM Professionals need to support the internal use of social media (wikis, twitter, blogs, Facebook, communites) to increase the cognitive diversity brought to adaptive challenges and to increase transparency across the organization.

They need to help leadership understand how social media brings value and the need to allow it grow organically rather than placing requirements or demands on those who use it. The success of social media lies in the conversations that arise out of a personal or team need to engage in a discussion about a particular topic. Even requiring people to join violates the implicit cultural contract to some extent and certainly attempting to control the content is counterproductive. As countless organizations have discovered that requiring people to share their knowledge only results in getting knowledge of questionable value

KM professionals can add value by conducting comprehensive and frequent analyzes of what is being said through social media in order to identify issues (elephants in the room) that are adaptive challenges that need to be addressed. And then making these analyzes available to senior leaders so they can convene the conversation. However, it is also possible for KM professionals to take the initiative to convene needed conversations as a way to demonstrate the value to be gained.

Finally, it would be useful to help managers and senior leaders find or build a community in which admitting a lack of knowledge does not threaten their authority. There are numerous roundtables where this is possible as well as coaching relationships.

The New of Tasks Knowledge Management Professional in Leveraging Collective Knowledge
What has always intrigued me about being a knowledge management professional is our expanding comprehension of what we need to take into account as organizational knowledge. Over the last fifteen years we have continually extended and broadened that understanding. In the first category, we saw knowledge as stable truths based on scientific evidence and we built systems to insure that experts provided needed answers to the frontline workers in our organizations. In the second category we expanded organizational knowledge to include the practical knowledge learned from experience and we built COPs and reflection processes to effectively uncover and transfer that knowledge between frontline workers. And now, moving into the third category we again find ourselves adding to the kinds of knowledge that are critical for organizations to deal with, now to include collective knowledge.

This chart lays out the knowledge management assumptions of each category. All three sets of assumptions are accurate and all are needed. But as our understanding has expanded, we have had to create new tools and processes to address the new type of knowledge we have incorporated. I have tried to avoid speaking of these three categories as eras, because we have not dropped any of the types of knowledge along the way. All remain necessary for knowledge management.

It each column it is the assumptions we make that guide the processes we create. As we attempt to deal with the challenges brought on by increasingly complex issues, the erosion of cognitive authority, and the failure to apply KM principles to the work processes of top and middle management, it is this set of assumptions (assuming I’ve got them right) that will guide us toward constructing the new processes we need.

Summary of Tasks for KM professionals
I’ve summarized the tasks here that I discussed more fully above. I recognize that these tasks are very different from much of the current work of KM professionals, but that has been so with each category. Those who were focused on building knowledge repositories were unsettled by having to learn how to build and support communities of practice, when Leveraging Experiential Knowledge became important.

• If the leadership task is to convene the conversation to address adaptive challenges, then KM professionals’ task is to help leadership design the meetings, retreats, or conferences, based on principles of collective knowledge.

• Encourage leadership to invite customers, suppliers, partners and other externals into the conversations to address adaptive challenges. The organizational tendency is to err on the side of homogeneity. Provide examples of other organizations that have benefited from involving externals.

• Support the internal use of social media in order to increase the cognitive diversity brought to adaptive challenges and to increase transparency across the organization

• Allow social media to grow organically rather than placing requirements or demands on those who use it.

• Conduct comprehensive and frequent analyzes of what is being said through social media. to identify issues (elephants in the room) that are adaptive challenges that need to be addressed. Make this analysis available to leadership. If leadership is not yet ready to convene conversations, KM professionals take the initiative to do so.

• Assist managers to design their regular meetings to be more conversational when they are facing adaptive challenges

• Help managers and senior leaders find or build a community.

The chart at the beginning of this post depicts the three categories along the knowledge management journey that I have talked about in these three posts. To incorporate collective knowledge we don’t have to give up on the scientific knowledge we have, or the experiential knowledge we have come to value, rather we have to accept that there are issues and problems which neither of those kinds of knowledge can address – which require collective knowledge.

There are four arrows at the bottom of the chart. The bottom three summarize the major changes we have experienced from KM’s beginning in the early 90’s to where we are as we move into the future.

• The movement from seeing learning as an individual’s task which is necessarily conducted in private to increasingly seeing learning as something that must take place in public. That there is benefit not only in the product of “having learned” but in the process of learning as well, because that is where new knowledge is created.

• The movement from a need to know to greater transparency. A recognition that knowledge cannot be segmented or walled off from those who are attempting to address the organization’s difficult issues – that everything is connected.

• The movement from seeing management as controlling what content people have access to, to users control of the content that is critical to their needs.

1. Many others have made a similar distinction, Reg Revans cite wrote about the difference between problems and puzzles in a similar vane. Puzzles, he said were problems about which reasonale men could disagree.” Jeff Conklin, in "Wicked Problems and Social Complexity"differentiates wicked and tame problems. Ackoff says,“managers are not confronted with problems that are independent of each other, but with dynamic situations that consist of complex systems of changing problems that interact with each other. I call such situations messes"

A-Space (Facebook-like) Is Making a Difference Across the U.S. Intelligence Community

2009-07-16T09:32:44-07:00

I'm posting the Executive Summary of a study I conducted with the Defense Intelligence Agency. You can read the full study - all 30 fascinating pages here.

Executive Summary of How A-Space is Shaping Analysts' Work

This report provides an overview of an exploratory scientific, qualitative study conducted by the Defense Intelligence Agency’s (DIA) Knowledge Laboratory in April- June of 2009. The ethnographic study based on twenty in-depth interviews with analysts identifies how analysts are using A-Space and what impact that use is having on their analytic work within DIA’s Directorate for Analysis (DI).

The primary benefit that A-Space brings to analytic work is a venue for seamlessly incorporating cognitive diversity to address complex analytic issues. Research indicates that cognitive diversity, (e.g. different perspectives, interpretations, heuristics, and predictive models) when applied to complex problems, consistently results in more and better solutions.

• A-Space is an environment in which analysts collaboratively create new meaning out of the diverse ideas and perspectives they collectively bring to an issue. Through this collaboration, analysts have the potential to break through long held assumptions to provide new ways of thinking about complex problems.

Analysts talk about A-Space as a setting where they are able to test out ideas and theories. Analysts, faced with a stream of data from a multitude of sources have the task of finding patterns in that data that will be useful to decision makers. Sensemaking is the term used for that human ability to make meaning out of a stream of seemingly unrelated information. It requires creating hypotheses and testing them against the data and interpretations of others. And conversation, with analysts who have diverse perspectives, is the most effective means to engage in the testing and revision of hypotheses. The peer-to-peer environment of A-Space provides a conversational format to engage in joint sensemaking, which may be the most significant function of A-Space in terms of being a human intellectual force multiplier. As analysts experience the benefits of on-line sensemaking conversations, over time, such conversations could become more prominent in the everyday discourse of analysts.

• Networked relationships on A-Space provide a stream of cognitively diverse information without the costly time investment that maintaining strong ties requires

Networking is highly valued by analysts because it provides access to new ideas and diverse perspectives. However maintaining networked relationships is a time consuming activity. The time cost limits the number of relationships an analyst can invest in. The most productive network relationships for gaining unique or novel ideas are not the close relationships among an analyst’s teammates (what sociologists call strong ties) because team/division members tend to have redundant knowledge. Rather the best source of new perspectives and ideas are colleagues in other directorates or agencies who have access to information from totally different sources or provide unique perspectives or interpretation of the existing data. But these more distant relationships (called weak ties) are the most costly to maintain because they require a planned interaction by phone/email/in-person. A-Space, however, reduces the time-cost of maintaining weak ties by providing analysts a way to establish and maintain relationships through frequent on-line interaction in an informal, peer-to-peer culture of mutual trust. A-Space also greatly increases the number of distant network members an analyst can interact with, again without increasing the time cost.

• A-Space is reinforcing the value of asking questions of colleagues, providing analysts the means to uncover flaws in their own data and reasoning

When analysts ask a question on A-Space they are making a tacit acknowledgement that, even if considered the expert on their topic, other analysts have perspectives and data that can add to their line of reasoning or uncover faults in that reasoning. This willingness to be shown to be wrong – to overcome the natural tendency to only seek confirmation - is facilitated by a culture of openness that analysts themselves have developed on A-Space. Through the on-line interaction, counterparts within and between agencies are coming to know each other as valued colleagues. There is a growing sense of trust and a willingness both to help and to receive help from each other.

• A-Space is providing analysts a set of new practices to: 1) build cross agency networks, 2) gain situational awareness, and 3) hold discussions of interpretation, that operate in parallel with the normal production process. These new practices constitute an emerging model that provides a level of cognitive diversity not previously available.

Analysts appear to be making use of A-Space for practices that were either not available or were very difficult to accomplish before A-Space was accessible – practices such as cross agency networking, situational awareness, discussions, and making available highly classified team products. However, practices like co-authoring and coordinating products, which are part of the normal production process are only rarely conducted through A-Space, even though the functionality is available to do so. Thus two models, operating in parallel, appear to be emerging. The challenge for analysts will be to merge these two models over time - bringing greater cognitive diversity into the normal production process and moving co-authoring and coordination more fully into A-Space.

• The non-hierarchal nature of A-Space, results in analysts feeling that it is okay to offer their thinking even if it is not completely formed or thought through, increasing the speed of product development by eliminating faulty hypotheses early on and quickly settling on those that are viable.

A-Space provides the means to test ideas and theories against knowledgeable others and to do so early in the formulation process. Early testing saves both time and effort that would have been spent on those ideas that do not measure up, and it lends support and expanded rationale for those that do. As valuable as offering thinking early on in the process is, it requires a safe environment in which to risk that thinking. A-Space provides such an environment by being peer- to-peer rather than hierarchal. Research indicates that peer-to-peer conversations are consistently more open and trusting than those that involve hierarchy. Discussions on A-Space can be vigorous and critical without being judgmental in tone. The informality of the language and the friendly banter create the feel of a conversation among equals.

A KM Strategy Built on the Collective Knowledge of Ecopetrol

2009-07-04T21:36:09-07:00

Two years ago I participated in a meeting to develop a knowledge management strategy for Ecopetrol, the state oil company of Columbia, South America. I want to describe it because it has stayed with me as a good example of an organization making use of its collective knowledge. It’s not a perfect example, but it’s one I think back on often.

This was a meeting of the top 200 people in the organization who spent two and a half days talking among themselves about the real issues they were facing at a time of great turmoil at Ecopetrol. The company was moving from being wholly owned by the government to being a mixed stock-holding corporation. Out of that conversation came some amazing plans for moving forward, generated and supported by the participants themselves. Out of that conversation also came professional growth for those involved, new understanding about Ecopetrol and new insight for individuals about how to play their own role in the company.

The organizers invited two keynote speakers who had written books on KM, myself and Larry Prusak. But we were told before we came that we would only talk for 15 minutes! Now Columbia, South America is a long way from my home base in Dallas Texas and that was a lot expense to speak for 15 minutes. It would have been an unsound financial decision on the part of Ecopetrol, except the task I was given was to stimulate the thinking of the participants, not to provide them answers, because the planners for the conference assumed that the answers and innovative ideas they needed could only be found in the minds of those who were going to do the work – an assumption I heartedly agreed with. I had other tasks at the conference, to participate in the small group discussions, to comment on ideas others’ offered, to summarize what I had heard. But each of these tasks I fulfilled from my place in the group, not in front of the room, or as “authority” speaking. True to their intent, my role was not to inform, but to frame issues so that people would comprehend the opportunity and could talk through new possibilities.

Day one was designed to consider a wide diversity of ideas. Those ideas came not only from myself and Larry, but also from a number of speakers that represented organizations from varied sectors who had well-respected KM programs. The presentations of their ideas were also limited to 15 minutes each, but it definitely brought cognitive diversity into the meeting. Following each brief presentation small group conversations were held about the ideas – not the typical Q&A with the presenter, but a conversation among peers- an opportunity to make meaning out of the diverse ideas they had heard.

The morning of day two was convergent - a search for useable ideas, common ground, and limiting the many options they had heard the day before. These were multiple small group meetings using the world café format and focused around the question “What knowledge do we need at Ecopetrol that we don’t have?” The room was set up with 25 tables with a facilitator at each table with participants. There were several rounds of
discussion with people moving from table to table to talk with a new set of people about their ideas. Ecopetrol’s president, Javier Gutie´rrez, participated in the small group discussions. Like everyone else, he moved from table to table offering ideas and listening to others. This act of humility was significant to the participants, it said he was interested in hearing what others had to say and also was interested in giving voice to his own thinking, but not from a position of authority. He was willing to let his ideas rather than his position influence the thinking of the group.

The afternoon of the second day was about constructing actions that Ecopetrol could take. Open Space Technology was used for this section. The ideas from the knowledge café were summarized and posted and participants chose a small group they had the most interest in and worked with that group to identify improvement actions that Ecopetrol could to take to make KM a reality.

The morning of the third day brought it all together with the action summaries from the day before and comments from Larry and I on what we had heard.

Across the whole of the two and a half days, I would estimate 80% of the time was spent in conversation! That is a clear commitment to conversation that leads to change.

The setting for this meeting was as conductive to conversation as a setting can be – open spaces that could be easily re-configured– open even to the outside because of the wonderfully even temperature in Bucarramanga, Columbia. Beautiful views that invited participants to slow down and think together – which of course, is what a conversation is.

I’ve described the technique, the setting, the conditions, but of course what is most important is what came out of these conversations. Out of that meeting came a KM strategy that had the full support of those that had worked together to create it. It was clearly a better strategy than Larry and I, as consultants, could have provided because those who would now implement it had created it.