CAPTURING CRITICAL KNOWLEDGE IN ORGANISATIONSKM Survival Skills for Practitioners

CARLA SAPSFORD NEWMAN

PEOPLE OFTEN DON’T WANT THEIR CRITICAL KNOWLEDGE CAPTURED… (it isn’t in their best interests!)

THE BAD NEWS:•Telling the truth is often penalised in organisations•Changing a corporate or public sector culture from one of sweeping undesirable knowledge and lessons learned under the rug to one of transparency and honesty is painful and takes a long time•Without mechanisms for employees to safely and anonymously report undesirable behaviours, KM might become limited in its effectiveness…•Management often wants a silver bullet: something cheap, easy and fast yet ultimately somehow a game-changer. But human nature and cultural barriers to communication and sharing are often very tricky to navigate

YOU CAN’T MANAGE KNOWLEDGE LIKE A DINOSAURNOT IN THE ERA OF SOCIAL MEDIA• Technology has to be part of your solution. But IT alone can NEVER

replace a human-focused KM strategy.

• Checklists alone will never drill down to the most critical knowledge your employees carry with them.

• Experiential learning and sharing tend to be the most effective in most organisations.

CULTURE IS KING

• In the feedback thus far in Asia, the most attention has been focused on how to make information ‘anonymous’

• And how to get your line manager out of the way so you can talk about what is really going on

• Or how to record information without putting your name on it…• So more attention would seem to be paid to how to NOT make

you or your boss look bad, than to the long-term good of the organisation or team

• You have to find ways for people to tell their stories their own way – often off-the-record

• Talent attraction and retention can also benefit from gathering and feeding back employee critical knowledge (and has much to do with culture): • Do new hires feel supported in their roles? • Do they know who to go to for help? • Do experienced hires feel like someone cares what they

think and asks how the organisation could be better? • Do women feel respected and valued enough to stay

on? etc etc.

FAILURE IS GOOD……to learn from

•Failure is just as important to discuss and share as success. Yet it is often the one area that companies wish to avoid.

•Culturally, failure is seen as negative. If your company really wishes to be a learning organisation, it needs to embrace failure as much as success.

•Failure doesn’t always have to be written down, but it does have to be acknowledged and communicated in a culturally relevant way.

•If focus on serious KM falls down or goes away, it is often AS IF IT NEVER EXISTED. Leave a legacy that lasts.

YOU’RE LIKELY TO BE WORKING ALONE IN A WILDERNESS OF PEOPLE (Who Don’t Understand What You Do…)

• Almost all KM practitioners fall into it by accident• KM often starts as the flavour of the month• Once an initial godfather or mother shifts roles, interest in KM

often withers and dies• Most people don’t even know what KM is, until you tell them…

and often times, in the beginning you don’t know either!• The way you begin to execute KM will make or break your

success – if you don’t gain some short-term wins, you aren’t likely to maintain your success

AWARENESS WITHOUT ACTION IS POISONOUS

• When you start to capture people’s critical knowledge, in whatever way you do it, you set up expectations

• You are also setting up a trust relationship – and expectations that something positive and meaningful will be done with the information

• Once that trust is damaged through mismanaging information or senior management inertia to act upon it, trust is destroyed

• Without buy-in from both the top and bottom, KM is likely to fizzle

• I liken it to a neighbourhood beat cop: people have to see the cops walking the streets many times and see they aren’t going away, before they start to come to them with the useful insider information (consultants come and go)

PERCEPTION PROBLEM

• If you don’t define what KM is early and often, and tie it in to the strategic goals of the organisation, someone else will

• KM is often seen as a poisoned chalice, to be handed off asap, as the results aren’t seen to be sexy enough to boost careers or burnish reputations

• Without champions in the organisation, the best portals in the world will not be used

• Word of mouth is still the best advertisement• With social media, and informal networks,

people will share their often negative view of KM quickly and turn off potential champions from ‘getting it’

COMMON SENSE ISN’T COMMON:So just what IS ‘critical knowledge’?

• You’ve learnt that there is a distinction between tacit and explicit knowledge. But which should you go after? Depends.

• In my opinion, critical knowledge is that which makes an individual better, a team better and an organisation perform better. The sum is worth more than the parts.

• Often this is just common sense knowledge based on hard experience that every old timer knows but is hard to transfer

• Communities of Practice, After-Action Reviews, Project Stage Gate Knowledge Audits, Post-Mortems, Peer Assists – these are all potentially useful in gathering critical knowledge but few employees initially know what you’re talking about when you start them

KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT IS NOT…

• Information Management • Information Technology

IT alone cannot solve your KM challenges. And knowledge is notoriously hard to measure/quantify.

YOU MAY HAVE IT TOOLS…(but no silver bullets)

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KM SURVIVAL SKILLS:The Basics

1. Assign value to KM

2. Find champions and create committed stakeholders

3. Undertake a knowledge audit – you MUST prioritise knowledge

4. Paint a negative future – the more dire the better

5. Develop and evangelise a long-term sustainable plan

SURVIVAL SKILL #1:Assigning Real Value to KM

• You have to learn how to speak the language of your management – numbers, value, profits, ROI

• What is the cost of knowledge loss – use a consistent and relevant set of metrics

• What is the price of hiring in new talent/knowledge• Calculating time to autonomy and assigning value• Calculating what doesn’t happen – accidents etc.

When companies say, ‘people are our greatest asset’ what they mean is…It is too expensive to replace them and start all over again!

KNOWLEDGE IS EXPENSIVE TO REPLACE

So if you can be a KM hero in your organisation, you can help save a LOT of money for your boss.

If you ARE the boss, you can help reduce churn and diminish lost downtime as new employees get onboard.

Example:

Kenneth Derr, former CEO of Chevron, told the KM World Summit in 1999 that managing knowledge was crucial to reducing his operating costs by $2 billion a year in the previous seven years. He also cited a 30% productivity gain and an improvement by 50% in safety performance. Not to mention the value to the reputation of the company.

SURVIVAL SKILL #2:Creating Internal Stakeholders

• It’s like a survival movie: you can’t go it alone

• Capture the critical knowledge of key people who can be crusaders for the cause

• Enlist the help of HR and IT good eggs who can help you create the tools and incentives to institutionalise KM

• Spend one day a week generating ‘new business’ or demand for KM

• Spend at least 10% of your time generating your own lessons learnt

• Find people you respect to bounce ideas off of

• Train up your successor(s)/partners

• Use KM to help plan for major transitions (and in times of economic crisis, there will be many)

• Have a mission others can buy into, by describing KM in practical terms

KM SURVIVAL SKILL #3:Thou shalt set priorities

• Undertake a knowledge audit – you MUST prioritise knowledge

• Start small and select key KM targets• You must be clear on how KM fits into the overall mission

and vision – otherwise it’s all just window dressing• If YOU don’t believe in what you are doing and it’s value,

who will?

KM SURVIVAL SKILL #4:Paint a Negative Future

• Fear is a fantastic motivator – fear of losing money, fear of looking bad, fear of fatalities, fear of slipping in the rankings, fear of not having a hot project, etc.

• Never let a crisis go to waste• Find relevant examples of what happens when KM or

critical knowledge capture DOES NOT happen• Illustrate what the stakes are, graphically, anecdotally

and numerically• Know what your key stakeholders are most afraid of and

use this knowledge to make your case

KM SURVIVAL SKILL #5:Keep the Long-Term in Mind

• Develop a long-term and sustainable KM plan, but build in quick wins in the short and medium terms

• Benchmark your results against similar organisations doing top quartile work – a selling point and a reality check

• Figure out where the leadership sees the organisation in five to ten years and steer KM towards that goal

• You know the leadership will come and go…but they don’t!

• Stay the course and slowly build up your core group of KM evangelists

KM Survival Skill #6:Become Buddies with HR and IT

• Identify the knowledge that is the most valuable/critical to your organisation.

• Make it a contractual requirement or build into your HR practices a guided or structured knowledge transfer.

• If people aren’t required to do it, chances are they won’t bother.

• Must build in incentives for behaviour which benefits not only the organisation, but the employee.

• HR can help flag key people or moments in a the project cycle which will set off a KM intervention.

• Communities of Practice leadership often has to be initially delegated and put into the KPIs of subject matter experts, etc.

• IT can help you build or adapt tools – but they CANNOT solve your KM problem.

CASE STUDY: ANECDOTAL FACTOIDS KM @ McKinsey

• Spend 10% of annual revenues on KM• Everyone MUST write a lessons learnt report following

each project• Reports are in PowerPoint format,‘anonymised’and

enjoy a high reuse rate• Subject matter experts determine metadata, including

shelf life• Shared via a bespoke intranet• At the start of each new project: 50% of time is spent

on prior project research and 50% calling other people in their networks

• Personal details are kept up to date, key for next assignments

• Staff appraisals: 20% of final score linked to KM

A FINAL WORD ON CONSULTANTS: Results Can be Temporary

• Consultants are a temptation• They can be useful, but not a sustainable, long-term solution• Use them wisely• Don’t have consultants consistently execute what you need to learn

internally• Yet some skill sets are very difficult to find internally – like facilitation

and knowledge audits – so hire them in selectively• A good consultant does themself out of a job

Q&A

THANK YOU!

CARLA SAPSFORD NEWMAN

Carla.Y.Newman@gmail.com

carla@strategicknowledge.org