UNDP KM strategy

Linked below is an excellent video on the 2022 KM strategy from the UN Development program. 

Good to see the focus on culture and networks.

The Learning Maniac Pledge at WD40 - an example of how to set cultural expectations for learning and sharing.

Described in a Harvard Business School article from 2016, here is the pledge that WD40 staff take to commit to organisational-wide sharing and learning. 

This is the Learning Manic Pledge; part of WD40's "tribal culture".

The pledge is as follows:

I am responsible for taking action, asking questions, getting answers, and making decisions. I won’t wait for someone to tell me. If I need to know, I’m responsible for asking. I have no right to be offended that I didn’t “get this sooner.” If I’m doing something others should know about, I’m responsible for telling them.

This is a really great way to give permission, and set the expectation, that people will ask, learn, and share as part of the culture, and as a daily habit. 

In the video below, WD40 CEO, Garry Ridge, explains how this pledge is used to decentralize the responsibility for accountability and learning out to the employees within the organisation. Also see the way he talks about "learning moments" as opportunities to improve. 

KM at PWC Middle East (video)

Here is a link to a video of my ex-colleague Rupert Lescott talking at a virtual KM event about the application of KM to projects within PWC. 

Thanks Rupert for letting me share the link below (you will need to ckick the link rather than the picture.

PWC Case Study: Applying KM to projects - learning before, during and after - Rupert Lescott, Director of Knowledge Management at PwC Middle East - 2021 Knowledge Management Conference

 According to the website, 

This talk covers the way we have built our KM function and now use it to leverage consultants’ experience of engagements. It will look at the following areas: 

● Overview of KM framework elements - i.e. roles, processes, technology etc. 

● KM Governance - policy, performance management, support 

● Knowledge domains - project delivery, research & benchmarking, clients & consultants 

● KM tools - to aid learning before, during and after each project 

● The knowledge pipeline - from a client engagement to our portal

Thought you might like to see this knowledge product

The video below is a product of the Olympic Games Knowledge Management program, as part of their methodology for transferring experience from one organising committee to another.

The 27-minute video is introduced here, and was created during the Rio Olympics to describe the work of press photographers at the Olympic games. It won the prestigious Candido Cannavo Award at the Milan Sport Film Festival 2018. That's pretty good for a KM product!

If you have 27 minutes to spare, it's a thrilling watch.

The current NASA toolbox for KM

In 2016 NASA published their toolbox for KM. Here's what is in it. 

See NASA source page

This post is an update to my previous post on the NASA toolbox, which is getting rather out of date! 

NASA APPEL introduced their new organisation-wide HQ KM toolbox at the beginning of 2016, under the heading "a new toolbox for a new year". You can find further details of each tool via this page, with the common elements of the KM toolbox being listed as "HQ" items. These tools are a mixture if processes and concepts. Individual NASA centres have additional tools which are not in the HQ toolbox.

The text below is largely NASA's headline description, with some commentary from me.

After Action Review needs no introduction for readers of this blog. It is the default small-team process for learning from experience. The process has been adapted from the U.S. Army’s “AAR” to become NASA’s “Pause and Learn” methodology popularized by the Chief Knowledge Officer at Goddard Space Flight Center.

Case studies are a great way of encapsulating knowledge from past missions. 

Collaboration enables individuals to work together to achieve a defined and common business purpose

Diversity of Thought (or Multiple Perspectives) is an effective approach used to obtain opinions, identify weaknesses in concepts, improve on ideas, and brainstorm new possibilities

Gamification is the use of game mechanics and game design techniques in non-game contexts.>

Knowledge Audit is an assessment of an organization’s knowledge capabilities. It identifies the gap between available knowledge and what’s needed based on the organization’s strategic objectives. Knoco offers a knowledge audit service. 

Knowledge Management Process. The Knowledge Management Process is the architecture used to acquire and benefit from knowledge resources and capabilities. What we in Knoco would call a KM Framework.

Knowledge Strategy. A Knowledge Strategy (for NASA organisations) specifies how specific knowledge services will be implemented to bridge the gap between an organization’s current knowledge capabilities and the capabilities needed to accomplish its strategic objectives.

Knowledge Transfer  for NASA is described as the ability to efficiently locate existing knowledge and get it to where it is needed.

Learning organisation is one that acquires knowledge and innovates fast enough to survive and thrive in a rapidly changing environment by embracing characteristics that encourage, support and promote participation.

Reflective practice refers to learning from experience when observing one’s own action, thoughts or feelings; and utilizing these observations in building new understandings.

Search and Findability.  As the ability to search and find relevant information has become more challenging and complex, when developing information architecture to enhance the search and findability experience, it is important to consider that unstructured information is growing at an astounding rate. As a result, there is a negative impact on findability.

Social networks are relations among people who share interests, activities, backgrounds or real-life connections (i.e., work, community, or groups).

Storytelling One of the most powerful ways to make your point memorable or to persuade people is by telling a compelling story that unites an idea with emotions.

Taxonomy and Metadata,

There is also an addition to the HQ toolbox since 2016, which is the KM Plan.

KM Plans. NASA NPD and NPR have requirements for Knowledge Management (KM) Plans within a Project Plan  

Thank you NASA for making your common toolbox available. 

An evaluation of a KM strategy - example from Oxfam

It's not often you see a public review of a KM Strategy - here is a good example.

Image by Stefan Erschwendner, on Flickr

I blogged yesterday about Oxfam's KM strategy. Oxfam referred to knowledge and to knowledge management several times in their 2013 to 2019 strategic plan, which allowed me to recreate the KM strategy map for the organisation displayed in yesterday's post. 

More recently Oxfam have published an evaluation of how well that strategy has performed, including an entire section devoted to knowledge and learning. This is excellent practice, and provides an example of how such evaluations may be conducted.

I am not going to reproduce that evaluation here - there are pages and pages of it - but want to identify a few points.

Firstly, I like the Vision they present:

Oxfam expressed its ambition of becoming a knowledge-based organization in this way: “A modern organization is about knowledge and how we accumulate it and how we share it amongst each other and the world.” (Oxfam, 2015: 4. Internal) This ambition comes with the demand that knowledge and learning be used internally to implement better quality and more impactful programs (and more), and externally to better position Oxfam to influence change.

Oxfam's investment in knowledge has been clear, including regional "learning labs", increased research effort, new KM-focused processes and  technology, 5 "global knowledge hubs", and a number of thematic networks (communities of practice). Examples are cited of where these investments have added significant value, while recognising that there are still opportunities for improvement, especially in "closing the learning loops" (they say "A knowledge and learning approach to unlocking this beneficial cycle would mean that we insist on the use and re-use of knowledge"), and also in ensuring that knowledge spreads laterally through the organisation, and out to stakeholders and others.

I very much like the following statements:

Focusing on its people is the best step that Oxfam can take to strengthen its efforts to become a knowledge-based organization. All Oxfamers hold knowledge and the ability to learn and help others learn... Our task is to let them know that every time they tweak a process they are engaged in because last time it did not work so well, or help someone else fix a process that is not efficient, or capture what they have done and send it to a colleague, they are using knowledge and learning. It is the responsibility–and more importantly,the right–of all Oxfam colleagues and our partners to develop and use strong and consistent reflection and learning practices in support of individual and organizational goals. This is true “knowledge citizenship.”

Also

If knowledge and learning processes and practice are not immediately related to what people do, applied to their daily goals, jobs, tasks and approaches, it will continue to be an add-on that is not fit-for-purpose. We must first understand and internalize that functioning as a knowledge-based organization is not a task, an initiative, or a formal network or hub we set up but a way of being: a way of thinking, a way of communicating, and a way of working. Then, we must communicate that we value what people learn through their work and how they help others to problem-solve. Finally, we must reward efforts to reflect on both success and failure, to explicitly build on that in future efforts, to question why we do something the way we do it, and to try the same thing differently.

All of this is very good KM practice. 

Treating KM as a strategic enabler, putting investments in place to improve KM, and then reviewing both the strategy and its KM components, are things that every organisation can copy. If Oxfam learns from the review quoted here, and puts in place activities to further improve knowledge and learning, then even greater things are possible in the future, and their KM afforts will deliver more and more value for Oxfam, their donors and partners, and their beneficiaries.

These behaviours of review are also prompted by ISO 30401:2018, which requires that a knowledge management system be regularly audited, that corrective actions are taken, and that the system is continually improved.

See if you can do something similar in your own KM program. 

KM implementation case study - Texas instruments

This is a Knowledge Management story from the early days - about 20 years ago - but is interesting because although it was an old-style approach, it worked and delivered huge value.

Texas instruments calculator, image from wikimedia commons

In 1994, the CEO of Texas Instruments, Jerry Junkins, gave is organisation an ultimatum. "We can not tolerate having world-class performance right next to mediocre performance simply because we don't have a method to implement best practices." The response to this was the development of an Office of Best Practices.

The TI approach, based around the Best Practices office, had a number of elements:

1) A network of about 150 Best Practice Sharing Facilitators around the business. These were 'knowledge brokers' who:

• collected best practice from a number of sources 
• distilled information on these into more formal best practice documents that can be shared to close gaps. They document just enough to be a useful pointer to the appropriate contact or to further information. 
• sought out and documented best practices in their part of the business 
• distributed and promoted the use of best practice sharing across their part of the business 

 2) 2-3 people in the centre to manage the network
 3) a best practice knowledge base structured around a set of Generic Process Definitions.   Any new distilled best practice were put into this database under one of these processes. People can then easily find good practice for any particular business process.

In addition to the formal database, they made use of a more loosely structured Intranet for more informal sharing. This was one of the sources used by the network of facilitators for identifying new best practice.

They claim to have saved $0.5 billion just on following best practice in the fabrication plants.

The approach they took to introducing this is interesting.

1. they started off with a 'Year of Supply', where they concentrated on identifying, distilling and documenting good practice. 
2. they then had a 'Year of Demand', where the focus was on getting people to use these practices, and identifying gaps where people were looking for best practice but not finding it. 

TI also took incentivization seriously. Their approach was to link best practice sharing to bonus payments, where best practice sharing was measured using evidence of supplying examples of best practice, running learning workshops, etc. They concluded early on that it was important to reward behaviour not value - they felt that if they tried to base rewards on the value added by sharing this would kill the initiative.

KM implementation case history - the BBC

Here are 9 lessons from a KM implementation at the BBC.

Image from wikimedia commons

A great case history of Knowledge Management Implementation at the British Broadcasting Corporation can be found in Tom Young's book "Knowledge Management for Services, Operations and Manufacturing".  The case history is written by Claire Garwood, now Claire Chaundy, currently at the lawfirm Macfarlanes.

Claire describes the history of the development of the "Sport" community of practice within the BBC Nations & Regions in the early 2000s (a community designed to share and co-create knowledge between Sport camera crews and program makers) and concludes with the following 9 lessons:

Don't be pushy; Use Schein's process consultation principles.

This means being opportunistic and ensuring that every interaction is helpful. In Nations and Regions, this involved not being proud about the type of support the KM team provided; typing flip chart pads of knowledge exchange events for busy community hosts was just as important as facilitation and event design. Loaning out KM team members is also a great way to build relationships and foster knowledge flow. 

Use organisational culture to its advantage. 

Select approaches that enable people to stay within (or to step just outside of) their cultural comfort zone. BBC staff are naturally excellent networkers. This meant they would foster excellent CoPs provided they had the focus and support from dedicated community hosts. 

Use local language, not ‘KM speak’. 

This case study [in Tom's book]  was written using KM terminology as it has an informed readership. In contrast the BBC’s N&R Sport champions simply saw themselves as people who wanted to improve their story telling by meeting more regularly to discuss their output. The KM team did not therefore talk about "strategic CoPs with hosts promoting knowledge sharing" as this would have not have meant anything to them at a personal, local level. 

Capture and publish learning about knowledge sharing as it happens. 

This is particularly important – but difficult - when your help is no longer required with ongoing activities, and when those involved become self sufficient. You can't foist yourself onto people, so an easier inroad to maintaining contact is to ask if you can learn from the great work they are doing. People always appreciate recognition of their efforts. Further, profiling their activities via e-bulletins draws in people who aren't yet interested in knowledge sharing but want to keep up to date with what's going on. 

Don't be afraid of focusing efforts on CoPs that are already taking off. 

The most successful CoPs are usually those who receive some KM team support and who nominate and train community hosts. Some people argue that the best groups "just evolve". This is true in some cases, but it is a high risk option for business critical knowledge sharing. It's fine to have a little formal behind the scenes effort to enable the informal contact to flourish. We call this being "formally informal". It is no different to splitting up groups onto different tables at events! 

Make knowledge sharing part of the role. 

 The GPLs and Sport champions were successful because they had knowledge sharing performance objectives, budget and a percentage of their time to devote to the role. Why leave something of strategic importance to the chance that people might have time to focus on it? 

 What we'd do differently-  Use insiders. 

The KM team were careful about the language used but still had some credibility-busting moments (including an appearance in Private Eye magazine). Only two KM team members had programme-making experience but they were focused on developing social tools and did not work directly with the team members who provided internal consultancy. This hampered the consultancy side, who were criticised for marketing services and producing training materials that were "not for" programme makers. Seconding staff members from the areas you are supporting to help translate into their local language is a much better approach. It also builds well-trained KM ambassadors in the business when their secondment ends. 

 Use a robust contact and stakeholder management plan. 

 This ensures you maximise all interactions with staff potentially interested in knowledge sharing. In-house KM teams should think like an external consultancy group. The BBC's KM team didn't do this until the end. As they became overloaded with work they found that knowledge sharing between team members became difficult and opportunities were lost. 

Up-skill your KM team at the outset. 

 Analyse what is likely to be the predominant knowledge sharing solution used in your business, and provide KM team members time and resources to up-skill. The BBC's KM team needed to be well versed in CoPs from the outset. Whilst their learning grew over time, it meant the early adopters such as N&R Sport didn't benefit from some key learning. For example, the KM team discovered late on a key CoP statistic which is that only around 15-20% of your community will be regularly active at any one time. This is critical because, when trying to secure funding for community activities, many hosts set unrealistic expectations with their senior sponsors that large numbers of people will be active. If you set a target of, say, 50% of your invite list attending every community event over six months then you will fail as that is not statistically likely. This could have meant some CoPs failed at the first hurdle.

Quantified Knowledge Management success story number 128; €136 million in one year at Continental

Here is another in our series of success stories quantified benefits, this time from Continental. 

The Tyre manufacturer Continental has a number of Knowledge Management initiatives under way, including

• The collaboration platform ConNext, which links wikis, blogs, and community forums.
• More than 16,000 communities, some of which are more like small working groups, while others have several thousand members.
• Lesson learning
• The innovation platform Contivation, for collaborative development of new ideas.

Innovation is one of Continental's three value creation streams, and gets a lot of attention. As their knowledge management page reports regarding the use of Contivation,

Some 420,000 suggestions were received in 2017, for example, of which more than 360,000 were implemented. This not only resulted in savings of more than €136 million, but is also a testament to the active engagement of our employees with the company and its values.

One of the things to note here is the rate of implementation - nearly 86%. This is at the high end of implementation rates for schemes such as this.

The "Designing Buildings" wiki

The "Designing Buildings" wiki is a nice example of managed industry knowledge

The Designing Buildings Wiki, pictured below and explained above, is a wiki for the construction industry.

It is active - with 5 million users, 14 million page views per year, and plenty of new edits and content added in the last few days. It's 7500 articles cover topics such as project planning, project activities, legislation and standards and industry context, It also contains overviews of iconic buildings such as Number 10 Downing Street, the White House, the Palm Atlantis and the Bank of China Tower.

It looks like it uses MediaWiki technology, and is edited by Designing Buildings limited.  It has useful features such as a "related articles" box, and a "featured articles" section. It even contains a section on Knowledge Management in construction.

This is a really good showcase for the power of wikis

A timeline of KM at McKinsey

McKinsey is one of the leading Knowledge Management organisations in the world. Here is how they got there.

Image from wikimedia commons

I have referred to McKinsey a few times on this blog, describing their approach to knowledge centers, and some of the KM roles they have in place. McKinsey are one of the leading firms in KM terms, and a many-time winner of the MAKE awards.

Below, from this case study, I have distilled a roadmap of how they got to their leading position. The case study was written in 2006, but seems to take the story up to the end of the millenium.

• 1970s, period of slow growth and increased competition for McKinsey, decision to invest in Expertise and strategy. "One Firm" policy. Various informal networks but no attempt to reuse knowledge from one assignment to the next.
• 1976 - new MD and increased focus on skill development, training and functional expertise. Creation of a standard classification of key tasks.
• 1980 - Fred Gluck (later to become MD) starts a group focusing on knowledge building. Practice bulletins introduced.
• 1982 - Creation of 15 "centres of competence" covering business areas such as finance, logistics, and strategic management. Experts appointed as practice leaders, each area with a full-time practice coordinator. 
• 1980s - still no mechanism or process to capture knowledge. COnsultants encouraged to publish and share, but contributions are rare.
• 1987 - formal KM project set up, with 3 objectives; a database of project details (Practice Information System - PIS), a knowledge base covering the main areas of practice (Practice Development Network - PDNet), an index of specialists and core documents (Knowledge Resource Directory - KRD).
• late 1980s - KRD evolves into McKinsey yellow pages, PIS and PDNet populated
• 1990 - Introduction of client service teams focused on working long term with clients and developing deep understanding of client issues. Staff encouraged to publish books and articles.
• 1993 - McKinsey spending $50 million annually on knowledge building
• 1994 - Rajat Gupta becomes MD, strong supporter of KM
• 1995 - "Practice Olympics" created in order to promote development of practice knowledge. 
• 1995 - establishment of first Knowledge Center in India, focused on provision of research and knowledge to client-facing consultants. 
• Late 1990s - McKinsey develop a "personalisation" strategy for KM, with a focus on dialogue and knowledge sharing between individuals, and the development of knowledge haring networks.  Editors employed to convert client PowerPoint decks into reference documents with quality ratings.

That's where the case study stops. However through this 20-year history we can see the genesis of the McKinsey KM organisation, with its 2000 knowledge professionals, its 6 global knowledge centers, and its practice-focused roles and networks. 

As the McKinsey website states:

"Our work is founded on a rigorous understanding of every client’s institutional context, sector dynamics, and macroeconomic environment. For this reason, we invest more than $600 million of our firm’s resources annually in knowledge development, learning and capability building. We study markets, trends, and emerging best practices, in every industry and region, locally and globally. Our investment in knowledge also helps advance the practice of management". 

Video on KM in a USAID project

The video below is from the USAID-supported Vrisshi project in India, funded to scale up advances in reproductive, maternal, newborn and child health (+ adolescents as well).

The video talks about a knowledge base, or collection of publications, that was created through the project for use by medical and health practitioners. You can read more about Vriddhi here.

The role of the CKO - Video from Ed Hoffman, ex-NASA CKO

In this video, Ed Hoffman - ex-CKO of NASA talks about the role of the CKO, and the role of KM in major projects. This is an audio interview - the pictures on the video are a loop of screenshots of the major projects knowledge hub - so you could treat this as a commute podcast.

He covers key focus areas for the CKO in project-based organisations

• Engagement, particularly with risk and safety management as well as with knowledge
• Accelerated learning, especially from other organisations
• Conversation (what Ed calls "the sound of success")

In conclusion Ed sees conversation, digitalisation, engagement and rapid learning as the response to increasingly complex and fast projects and missions.

How Deloitte revisit and refine their KM strategy

This video, hosted by SearchContentManagement.com, is a talk given by Rosemary Amato, the Deloitte program director for global client intelligence, during KM World 2011 during which she describes how Deloitte keeps its KM strategy current.

Deloitte surveys their staff to test how people use knowledge, share knowledge and collaborate. Based on the responses, they can make changes to their KM strategy. The interesting thing here is the way they focus on needs of the users.

As Amato says

"We want to understand the people using our knowledge assets; what they want and how they want to work. The end user needs to value how knowledge can serve them, and without this no KM department can succeed. They need to know what knowledge they need, who to call, where to look for it and how to search for it, and most importantly they get an answer that solves their need."

She also talks about how knowledge sharing is embedded in the way people work, including the need to capture knowledge from departing experts. She describes how one expert worked one on one with younger consultants for 6 months, to share and capture his knowledge.

How the Australian Emergency Services manage lessons

Taken from this document, here is a great insight into lesson management from Emergency Management Victoria. 

 Emergency Management Victoria coosrinates support for the state of Victoria, Australia during emergencies such as floods, bush fires, earthquakes, pendemics and so on. Core to their success is the effective learning of lessons from carious emergencies.

The diagram above summarises their approach to lesson learning, and you can read more in the review document itself, including summaries of the main lessons under 11 themes.

• They collect Observations from individuals (sometimes submitted online), and from Monitoring, Formal debriefs, After ActionReviews and major reviews.
• These observations are analysed by local teams and governance groups to identify locally relevant insights, lessons and actions required to contribute to continuous improvement. These actions are locally coordinated, implemented, monitored and reported. 
• The State review team also take the observations from all tiers of emergency management, and analyse these for insights, trends, lessons and suggested actions. they then consult with subject matter experts to develop an action plan which will be presented to the Emergency Management Commissioner and Agency Chiefs for approval.
• The State review team supports the action plan by developing and disseminating supporting materials and implementation products, and will monitor the progress of the action plan.

This approach sees lessons taken through to action both at local level and at State level, and is a very good example of Level 2 lesson learning.

Sharing knowledge by video - - a firefighting example

The US Wildfire community is an area where Knowledge Management and Lesson Learning has been eagerly embraced, including the use of video.

The need for Knowledge Management and Lesson Learning is most obvious where the consequences of not learning are most extreme. Fire-fighting is a prime example of this - the consequences of failing to learn can be fatal, and  fire fighters were early adopters of KM. This includes the people who fight the ever-increasing numbers of grass fires and forest fires, known as Wildland fires.

The history of lesson learning in the Wildfire community is shown in the video below, including the decision after a major tragedy in 1994 to set up a lesson learned centre to cover wildfire response across the whole of the USA.

The increase in wildland fires in the 21st century made it obvious to all concerned that the fire services needed to learn quickly, and the Wildland Lessons Learned center began to introduce a number of activities, such as the introduction of After Action reviews, and collecting lessons from across the whole of the USA. A national wildfire "corporate university" is planned, of which the Lesson Learned center will form a part.

The wildfire lessons center can be found here, and this website includes lesson learned reports from various fires, online discussions, a blog (careful - some of the pictures of chainsaw incidents are a bit gruesome), a podcast, a set of resources such as recent advances in fire practice, a searchable incident database, a directory of members, and the ability to share individual lessons quickly. This is a real online community of practice.

Many of the lessons collected from fires are available as short videos published on the Wildland Lessons Center youtube channel and available to firefighters on handheld devices. An example lesson video is shown below, sharing lessons from a particular fire, and speaking directly to the firefighter, asking them to imagine themselves in a particular situation. See this example below from the "close call" deployment of a fire shelter during the Ahorn fire in 2011, which includes material recorded from people actually caught up in the situation.




Sometimes lessons can be drawn from multiple incidents, and combined into guidance. Chainsaw refueling operations are a continual risk during tree felling to manage forest fires, as chainsaw fuel tanks can become pressurised, spraying the operator with gasoline when the tank is opened (the last thing you want in the middle of a fire). Lessons from these incidents have been combined into the instructional video below.

This video library is a powerful resource, with a very serious aim - to save lives in future US Wildland fires. 

Lesson learning at NASA - more details

NASA has a well-developed Lesson Learning system - here are more details.

Image from Wikimedia commons

I blogged recently about lesson learning at NASA, based on a report from a few years ago, and observing that the NASA LLIS system seemed to be a passive database where lessons were left until someone came looking.

As a result of this post I was invited to join a NASA webinar on lesson learning, which you can review here, and which provides a more up to date overview of the NASA approach to lesson learning. Here are my take-aways (and thank you Barbara for opportunity to attend).

Each NASA project is required to conduct lessons capture meetings, which they call "Pause and Learn".  These Pause and Learn meetings generally use an external facilitator.  Lessons are entered into LLIS in a standard template, which contains the following sections:

• Subject 
• Driving Event 
• Lesson(s) Learned 
• Recommendation(s) (there is some variation in the way that Recommendations are differentiated from Lessons)
• Evidence of Recurrence Control Effectiveness

Although LLIS is essentially a passive database, there is an external process to control the re-occurrence of lessons, and many lessons seem to be referenced or referred to in standards and guidance.  However even when the lesson has been referenced in standards it still remains in the database, and LLIS contains lessons all the way back to the Apollo program.  I submitted a question to the webinar about how NASA deals with the archival of embedded, obsolete or duplicate lessons, but this was not one of the questions selected for discussion.

Some parts of NASA take the lesson management process further. Dr Jennifer Stevens, the Chief Knowledge integrator of the Marshall Space Flight Center, described the work of the distilling team, who look through the database of lessons and distill out the common factors and underlying issues which need correction. They see lessons as an immediate feedback system from operations, and they compartmentalise and group lessons until they can identify a corrective action; often updating a policy or guidance document as a result. Some lessons, which they can't act on immediately, go into what they call a Stewpot, where they look for trends over time. A lesson, or type of lesson, which is seen many times is indicative of some sort of systemic or cultural issue which may merit action.

Projects at NASA are required to create a Knowledge Management plan, which they refer to as a Lesson Learning Plan, as described by Barbara Fillip, KM lead at Goddard Space Flight Center. This plan documents:

• How the project intends to learn from others
• How the project intends to learn through its lifecycle
• How the project will share lessons with others.

The plan is built on a basic templates of 3 pages, one for each section, and there is no requirement for a planning meeting. Each project completes the plan in their own way. This is similar to the Knoco KM plan - drop me a message if you want a copy of our free KM plan template.

A few more snippets I picked up:

NASA, in their Pause and learn sessions, use "We" language rather than "They" language. The conversation is all about what WE did, and what WE should do, rather than what THEY did and how THEY need to fix it.

A motto they use to promote Learning before doing is "Get smart before you start".

NASA do not refer to success and failure in their Lesson Learning system - they talk about Events. An Event is what happened - a Mistake or Failure or Success is just a label we put onto events.  NASA seeks to learn from all events.

In conclusion, the NASA lesson learning system is as well-developed Level 2 system, and lessons are used to systematically drive change. Although LLIS does not have seem to have the functionality to automate this driving of change, there are enough resources, such as the Distillation team, to be able to do this manually.

Lesson learning roles in the RCAF

Roles and Governance are often overlooked elements of KM. Here is a great example of a set of roles and accountabilities for Lesson learning within the Royal Canadian Air Force.

The example is taken from a web page dated 2015 called "Canadian Forces Aerospace Warfare Centre, Analysis and Lessons Learned".

The RCAF have the following roles and accountabilities, shown in the diagram to the right, and described below:

• A senior sponsor, known as the Lessons Learned Command Authority - this is actually the Commander of the RCAF, and is accountable to the Vice Chief of the Defence Staff for implementing and overseeing the Lesson Learned Programme. Note that the Chief of Defence Staff requires the RCAF to establish processes that add value to the existing body of knowledge, or attempt to correct deficiencies in concepts, policy, doctrine, training, equipment or organizations, and the Lessons Learned Programme is one response to this requirement.

• A delegated customer/custodian for the Lesson learned program known as the "Lesson Learned programme Authority". This is the Deputy Commander, who is responsible for all Air Lessons Learned matters, including maintenance and periodic review of the programme. 

• A leader for the Lesson Learned program, called the Lessons-Learned Technical Authority. This is the Commanding Officer of the Canadian Forces Aerospace Warfare Centre, who reports to the Lesson Learned Programme Authority for lessons-learned matters, and who is responsible for executing all aspects of the programme with the help of a dedicated Analysis and Lesson Learned team.

• Clear accountabilities for the leaders of the various divisions in their roles as Lessons Learned Operational Authorities, to effectively operationalize and implement the programme within their command areas of responsibility.

• Each of these appoint a Lessons Learned point of contact to coordinate the Lessons Learned activities and functions for their organizations as well as to address issues that have been forwarded along the chain of command.

• Wing Lessons-Learned Officers embedded in the organisation at wing and formation levels, who provide Lesson learning advice to the wing commander related to missions and mission-support activities.

• Unit Lessons-Learned Officers within the RCAF units who coordinate the documentation and communication of what has been learned during daily activities; liaising directly with their relevant Wing Lessons-Learned Officer. These are like the Lesson Learned  Integrators in the US Army.

You can see how accountability for lesson learning comes down the chain of command (the red boxes in the diagram) from the RCAF Commander right down to Unit level, and how enabling and supporting roles are created at many levels - the LL Programme, the Divisional points of contact, the Wing LLOs and the Unit LLOs.

The principle of delegated accountability down the line management chain enabled by supporting resources is a good one, which can be applied in many organisational setting.

Brilliant video on KM at Care

This is a lovely video about Knowledge Management at CARE - the humanitarian agency fighting global poverty - explaining how KM adds value to the workers and to the organisation.

To quote the video - "knowledge management and learning makes our programs better, our communications more powerful, our fundraising easier, and our advocacy efforts stronger"

This can be a great resource to explain KM within your own organisation.

How an industry manages its knowledge - the IAEA KM school

It is not often you see a whole industry uniting around Knowledge Management. Here is a story from the Nuclear sector.

As I describe here, KM in the Nuclear industry is a bit different.

For a start, in the Nuclear sector KM is a shared priority. Every Nuclear orgnization in the world understands that knowledge is of value, which is why we see the KM program within the International Atomic Energy, and the tremendous cross-organisational knowledge resources which it coordinates, such as the NKM Wiki.


However KM is not just about shared online resources, it is also about the KM roles and skills in the organisations.  That is why the IAEA sponsors an annual Nuclear Knowledge Management school, and the twelfth school has just completed in Trieste, Italy, as described here.   Attendees were new graduates and young professionals from many different types of organizations including nuclear power plants, regulatory bodies, universities, and even nuclear medicine departments in hospitals.

As the article describes:

The NKM School is delivered using a modality known as 'blended learning': a pre-training course must be completed several months in advance through the IAEA e-learning platform. The online pre-training ensures that the applicants develop a common understanding of the basics of nuclear knowledge management beforehand. This enables them to participate more actively in the face-to-face part of the course.  

In order to reinforce the knowledge acquired through the lectures, exercises, and practical examples, the students work together during the week to complete a final group project, which is presented and evaluated during the last day. 

However learning is not all about classroom training - much of it comes through networking, and the school also allows the participants to form strong networks, which will be an important source of knowledge and support for young professionals tackling the implementation of their first knowledge management projects.

One of the interesting aspects of this latest school was that it got very close to gender parity, even through Nuclear engineering is traditionally seen as a male-dominated area.

 The 2016 edition of the NKM School had a remarkable characteristic: 46% of the selected participants were women. This is the highest level of female participation in the history of the school. Achieving near gender parity is worth mentioning in the nuclear field, even bearing the school's conscious selection criteria in mind, which takes into consideration gender balance and the added value of cultural diversity.

If you are not in the Nuclear Industry, but feel such training would be of value to you, consider my open KM training course in London in November.