The KM team's post-Covid request to senior management

This letter to senior management from the KM team represents the deal you need to strike with the leaders in your organisation. 

This is a post which I reprise very 5 years or so, given its importance. It's even more important now, as your leaders start to consider what the post-Covid landscape might look like

Dear Senior Managers

Over the past year, our experience in remote working has shown that there is huge value to be delivered to the organisation through introducing a systematic managed approach to knowledge (insert here some evidence of the value KM has brought).

As we consider the post-Covid world, we can see that this value needs to continue and to grow.  We, the KM team, commit to delivering this value to you, but we need something in return.

Here are our requests for you

1.  We need you to steer our program. Help us to understand what knowledge is strategic to the organisation, so that KM activities can fully support your own strategic agenda. Let's work together to make KM a core supporter of the business strategy.

2. We need your endorsement. We need you to be talking about the importance of knowledge. We need you to be asking the questions "Who have you learned from?" and "Who will you share this with?" Eventually we will be asking you to set clear expectations for KM in the organisation in the form of a Knowledge Management Policy.

3. We need your example. As someone once said, "I cannot hear what you say, for the thunder of what you do", so you need to be acting, as well as talking. Get involved in KM. Hold your own learning reviews. Capture and share and build knowledge at senior management level.

4. We need you to reward and recognise wisely. KM requires a change in culture, and people will be very alert to how you recognise behaviours. If you reward and recognise the wrong things, such as internal competition, or the lone hero who "doesn't need to learn", or the knowledge hoarders who keep it all "in their heads", then our good work of culture change will be in vain. Recognise instead those who learn before doing, those who share hard-won lessons, and those who show bravery in admitting to mistakes from which others can learn.

5. We need you to be consistent in how you follow up expectations. The company will watch how you deal with the project that doesn't hold a learning review, or the expert who neglects their community. If you let them get away with bad KM behaviours, you have sent a strong message to the organisation; that you can refuse to be involved in KM, and nobody will make a fuss.

6. Finally, we need you to challenge us. We know the value of KM, and you need to challenge us to use it to make a real step-change in business deliverables.

Together, we can make a real difference through knowledge management.

Sincerely,

the KM team

Why leaders have to let go of the need "always to have the answers"

If leaders are to empower their knowledge workers, they have to let go of "always having the answer"

Image from wikimedia commons

The book "It's Your Ship: Management Techniques from the Best Damn Ship in the Navy" tells how Captain Michael Abrashoff took command of the USS Benfold and turned it from being the worst performing ship in the fleet, to the best.

One key factor he mentions is familiar to all of those wishing to instil a Knowledge Management culture, and that is the willingness of leaders to let go of the "need to know all the answers", and to start to make use of the knowledge of the organisation.

 As Abrashoff says

"Officers are told to delegate authority and empower subordinates, but in reality they are expected never to utter the words “I don’t know.” So they are on constant alert, riding herd on every detail. In short, the system rewards micromanagement by superiors— at the cost of disempowering those below..... 

"I began with the idea that there is always a better way to do things, and that, contrary to tradition, the crew’s insights might be more profound than even the captain’s. Accordingly, we spent several months analyzing every process on the ship. I asked everyone, “Is there a better way to do what you do?” Time after time, the answer was yes, and many of the answers were revelations to me. 

"My second assumption was that the secret to lasting change is to implement processes that people will enjoy carrying out. To that end, I focused my leadership efforts on encouraging people not only to find better ways to do their jobs, but also to have fun as they did them". 

What Abrashoff discovered was the difference between managing knowledge workers, and managing manual labourers. Knowledge workers generally know more about their work than their boss does.  They use knowledge to make decisions and take actions on a daily basis, and they know what works and what doesn't. The manager's role is not to be the arbiter of those decisions, even less to be the decision maker, but to empower and enable the knowledge workers with the tools they need to get the right knowledge to make the right decision. Often the right response from the leader is "I don't know the answer - why don't you go find out what others do, and learn from them".

This empowerment, and this leadership move from being a Knower to being a Learner, are components of the culture shift that KM brings about, and which in turn liberates the knowledge, and also the performance, of the whole organisation. This cultural shift may be harder in some national cultures than others. However the message is clear - 

If you are managing knowledge workers, you need to let go of "always having the answers".

Do learning leaders produce learning organisations?

Do learning organisations require learning leaders? Almost certainly they do, but will learning leaders require their organisations to learn as well?

How well do leaders learn?

There is the stereotype of the bull-headed CEO, hanging on to their dream, forging ahead single-mindedly until they dominate the industry. But is that reality? Can leaders win in today's world without being continuous learners?

A lot of work has been done by the Korn Ferry institute on what they call "Learning Agility" in leaders (see this book for example).  I quote from one of their online reports (now no longer available).

"Successful executives learn faster than those who ‘derail’, not because they are more intelligent, but because they have the necessary skills and strategies, and are therefore ‘learning agile’. By contrast, those that do not learn from their jobs, and simply repeat their previous performance in each new role, will never become the most effective leaders"

I was reminded of this when reading a Guardian article about the All-Blacks Rugby coach, Graham Henry, describing how his autocratic leadership style changed under challenge. Here is an excerpt

Henry says. “I was arrogant, just so up myself. And it killed me. I’m still alive but it killed me. I realised then that I had to change.” In 2005, Henry was approached by the All Black captain, Tana Umaga. “Coffee, Ted?” he said. “Alright, T,” Henry replied, thinking to himself ‘What’s going on here?’ After a while, Umaga asked: “Ted, what do you give those team talks for?” Henry thought about it. “Well, T, I thought they might provide the team with a bit of motivation, a bit of direction, before the match.” Umaga paused. “Ah, but are they for you, Ted, or are they for us?”  

 The team talk had been part of Henry’s ritual for 30 years. “You spend the week before each game building the momentum of the group. As you do that, you transfer the responsibility from the coaches to the players but then an hour before the game, there is a fella up the front telling them what to do. I realised it just didn’t fit.” He never gave another team talk.

Thats the story of a leader willing to change under challenge.  But if a leader is willing to learn and change, will they come to expect that from their organisations? And will they enable and expect their teams to give them clear and honest feedback, so the organisation and leader can learn together?

If the future CEO is learning-agile, can we expect them to develop a similar learning agility in their organisations?

Building an agile learning organisation

The Graham Henry story certainly goes on to describe how, having dropped his autocratic style, he set about building an agile organisation involving

• Empowerment - involving the players in building the culture and strategy of the team
• Delegation of decision making - the decision making within the match was delegated, with the team overriding the coaches instructions if they felt there was a better way
• Inclusivity - bringing new players into the coaching set-up to start building their knowledge and experience
• Contingency planning - working out what might go wrong, and having contingency plans

 And ultimately Henry was successful, coaching the All Blacks through a winning World Cup in 2011 before retiring. 

Leaders who learn could, and should,  build learning organisations around them. That's how you win. 

Driving the desire to learn by pushing people out of their comfort zone

Nobody will look for knowledge from others if they think they already know what to do, and you cannot teach anyone anything if they think they know it already. Therefore the most effective way to promote a desire to learn in an organisation, is to move people out of their comfort zone.

An honest post-it, by Hilary Perkins, on Flickr

If people are in a familiar situation, where they think they know what to do, then they  will just rely on their own knowledge. After all – they know its provenance, and they trust it more than they trust anyone else’s knowledge.  Why look for new knowledge, if your existing knowledge is sufficient?

This means that the best way to promote learning and re-application of knowledge across an organisation is to give people challenges they don't know how to meet. To push them out of the comfort zone of “I know how to do this”, into a zone of “this is tough – I’d better see what knowledge is out there that can help me”. Then they will look for knowledge from others, to help them solve the problem.

It's a question of receptivity. You can't transfer knowledge unless the recipient is receptive. To be receptive, they have to feel a need to learn something. If they feel they don't need to know, they won't be receptive to external knowledge. Epictetus knew this in 2nd century Rome when he said "It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows." See also the story of the nurses.

Examples from industry

John Browne (the BP CEO in the 90s and early 00s) recognised this issue, and offered a challenge.

He said that he expected every project to deliver better than the previous project (often radically better), and his budget allocations and performance targets reflected this. He forced continuous improvement in delivery and cost, and the only way to continuously improve was to continuously learn. For the project manager, these "stretch goals" were often seriously uncomfortable ("How on earth does he expect me to cut the budget by another 20%?”) and it pushed them to seek advice, look for the best of the best, and build upon the entire knowledge base of the organisation. As a result, these stretch targets were drivers of innovation, knowledge management and continuous improvement.

Ford did this as well, in the days of the Ford Best practice Replication System. Through applying continuously decreasing operating budgets, they forced their plants into a situation where they were outside their comfort zone, and had to learn in order to deliver to the new budgets.

In both cases, the strong delivery push from management was supported by an organisational framework that made knowledge management possible.

Just increasing the pressure without providing the framework would not have worked – it would have added stress to the organisation. Increasing the pressure while also providing the ability to learn, on the other hand, provided the incentives for knowledge to flow around the system to where it was needed (driven by “demand Pull”), and fuelled continuous performance increase over a number of years.

So remember, if you want to promote a knowledge seeking culture in your company (and a knowledge seeking culture is a far better driver of KM than a knowledge sharing culture), then you and your senior managers need to push people out of the comfort zone, so that they can no longer rely on what they already know.

If they think they know what to do, there is no incentive for them to learn

Expectation, metrics, rewards, support - the KM Governance quartet

Four elements make up Knowledge Management Governance. Expectations, metrics, rewards and support.

Governance in the cloud, by Blue Coat Photos, on Flickr

Governance is often the missing element in Knowledge Management, and although it is one of the four legs on the KM table, it is the one that gets least attention.  This is partly because governance is not easy, and partly because there is no clear published model for KM governance.

Governance represents the things that the organisation does, and the management of the organisation does, that drive the KM behaviours and adoption of the KM Framework. We see four elements to governance - expectations, metrics, rewards and support.

Knowledge Management Expectations.

The first thing management needs to do in terms of governance is to set the expectations for KM. This requires a set of clear corporate expectations for how knowledge will be managed in the organization, including accountabilities for the ownership of key knowledge areas, and the definition of corporate KM standards, KM principles and KM policies. These documents should tell everyone what is expected of them in Knowledge Management terms.

Different departments can then add to these expectations, and individuals with KM roles will have KM expectations written into their job description (see examples here).  Within a project, the expectations are set by the Knowledge Management Plan.  Expectations may also be set using the competency framework.

If there are no clear expectations, nobody will know what they should be doing in KM terms.

Knowledge Management Metrics.

If standards and expectations have been set, then the organisation needs to measure against these expectations. For example, if the corporate expectation is that every project will conduct a lesson learned session, and every knowledge topic has an owner, then you should measure whether this is happening.

There are other types of KM metric as well - see these blog posts for more discussion.

If there are no metrics, then nobody will know what people are actually doing in KM.

KM rewards and recognition.

If you are measuring people's performance against the expectations, then this needs to be linked to rewards and recognition. If people do what they are expected to, this should be reflected in their rewards. If they don't do what is expected, then there should be a sanction. See these blog posts for a wider discussion of incentives.

If there are no links between metrics and reward/recognition, then nobody will care about the metrics. Particularly important are the sanctions for not doing KM. If people can dodge their expectations and get away with it, then this sends a strong message that the expectations are actually options, and not expectations at all.

Knowledge Management support

It is unfair to set expectations, measure people against them, and then reward people based on these measures, unless you make the expectations achievable in the first place. Therefore you need to set up the systems, the training, the coaching, reference materials and so on, that make it possible for people to meet their expectations.

If there is no support, then you have set up an unfair system which people will resent.

Together, the quartet of Expectations, Metrics, Reward/recognition and Support form the basis of an effective Knowledge Management governance system.

The leaders who grew up with KM

Knowledge Management is now, in some industries, old enough that that leaders "grew up" with KM as a resource.  What difference does this make?

Average length of time different industries have
been doing KM. Data from the 2014 Knoco KM survey.

We are many of us familiar with organisations where KM is a new discipline, and where leaders need reassurance that KM will add value.  But what about where it is no longer new?

In many industries, as the table above shows, KM has been in place for nearly a decade (this table was created in 2014), and in some companies for nearly 2 decades.  That is long enough for managers to have come up through the ranks with KM already in place.  So what difference does this make to leadership attitudes?

Here are two stories; one positive, and one less positive.

The positive

I talked recently to a knowledge manager from a company who has been working with knowledge management for over 15 years, and has developed an enviable reputation for having for the backing of senior management for their knowledge management initiatives. 

She was explaining to me about their long term approach for communities of practice, and how over the 15 years, many of the initial community leaders have now been promoted into senior management posts. They are beginning to really reap the benefits of this, as the new generation of senior managers have “grown up” in the organisation with knowledge management being a way of life.

 As a result, these managers see KM not as something extra, or as a new initiative, but this or part of the natural way of working. They have been there, they have been involved, they have seen the benefits, and knowledge management for them is now as natural as financial management or safety management.  For these managers, KM is "part of the job", and they expect their staff to do KM.

The less positive

Then earlier this week I had another conversation, which perhaps shows a potential downside. In this company, KM has been running since the late 90s, with Communities of Practice being a very powerful mechanism. However the CoP forum is still running on late 90s technology, and really needs an upgrade.  Unfortunately the managers, who came up through the ranks using this forum and know it to be a massively valuable resource, are saying "Don't mess with the forum. Whatever you do - don't compromise its effectiveness".

In many ways I sympathise with them - upgrading technology for the sake of it can be risky and if something continues to do the job needed, then why not stick with it. However in this case, they may well be standing in the way of needed progress.

When leaders grow up with KM, their support is assured, but make sure they do not stand in the way of KM developing even further.

Taking a risk can pay off in a Knowledge Management career

Sometimes playing it safe in a Knowledge Management role is the worst thing you can do, and you need to take a risk, and live dangerously.

Jon Harman is the head of Knowledge Management at Syngenta crop protection. I know him quite well, and admire the work he has been doing. In 2010 John had been in post for many years, making steady though slow progress. Then, in 2011 he had a breakthough - he had the most productive year in KM that he has ever had.

The reason? He had lost his job.

Or perhaps to be more exact, he was under notice that his KM post was closing.

For Jon, this was liberating. Released from the fear that he might lose his job (because he knew the axe had already fallen),  Jon decided to live dangerously. Instead of waiting for permission, he acted. Instead of working through is boss, he went direct to the CEO. Things started to happen, the CEO liked what he saw, and the KM train started to accelerate. Not only that, but Jon was offered another KM post within Syngenta.

So what's the lesson, ladies and gentlemen?

If you are going to make Knowledge Management work, you have to be bold. You have to live dangerously, because (as I said in yesterday's post), "it needs courage and it needs dedication and it needs perseverence and a thick skin, and it needs you to work at some very difficult conversations".

Jon learned the lesson through the risk of losing his job. If you learn the lesson, rather than making your job more risky, it may actually make your job safer.

Sometimes a knowledge manager needs to take a risk

Sometimes playing it safe in Knowledge Management is a dangerous approach. Sometimes we need to be bold.

Jon Harman is the head of Knowledge Management at Syngenta Crop Protection. I know him quite well, and admire the work has has been doing. In 2010 Jon had been in post for many years, making steady though slow progress. Then, in 2011, he had a breakthrough - he had the most productive year in KM that he has ever had.

The reason? He had lost his job.

Or perhaps to be more exact, he was under notice that his KM post was closing.

For Jon, this was liberating. Released from the fear that he might lose his job (because he knew the axe had already fell),  Jon decided to live dangerously. Instead of waiting for permission, he acted. Instead of working through is boss, he went direct to the CEO. Things started to happen, the CEO liked what he saw, and the KM train started to accelerate. Not only that, but Jon was offered another KM post within Syngenta.

So what's the lesson?

If you are going to make Knowledge Management work, you have to be bold. You have to live dangerously, because (as I said in the post "KM, simple but not easy"), "it needs courage and it needs dedication and it needs perseverence and a thick skin, and it needs you to work at some very difficult conversations".

Jon learned the lesson through the risk of losing his job. If you learn the lesson, rather than making your job more risky, it may actually make your job safer.

Teachability and the desire to learn

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Learn by J Delventhal on Flickr

You cannot teach someone something if they think they know it already, and you can't share knowledge with someone who doesn't want to know.  They are like a Rock - the knowledge just bounces off.

We talk so much about developing a "culture of sharing", but that will achieve nothing without a "culture of learning".

The most powerful thing that leaders can do to help Knowledge Management succeed is to drive that desire to learn.  If the drive to lean is there, the drive to share will follow. The desire to learn makes Knowledge into a valuable commodity, and where a commodity has value, a market inevitably arises.

But how do you instil a "desire to learn"?

The answer is simple - show people that they could be doing things better.

Building a team of sponges.

Sir Clive Woodward, the sport coach and Elite Performance speaker, calls it "Teachability" - another word for a "Learner Mindset". He says

"To have a great team you need great individuals, but you also have to have Teachability ... In business or in sport you are a sponge or a rock. A sponge has a hunger for learning and taking on new knowledge  ... building a team full of sponges will lead to an exciting and vibrant environment where new ideas flourish and the norm is challenged".

When Sir Clive took over the England Rugby team, he was faced with the challenge to turn a group of rocks into sponges. He did three things;

• He built the desire to be the best
• He showed people, through data and statistics, how far from The Best they were, and
• He bought laptops for the whole team, so they could study and learn about themselves and their opponents.

There is a story about how Sir Clive was working with one of the players, and showed him a flipchart of statistics demonstrating that he was the best player at his team position in England.  He was obviously pleased! Then he turned over the page, and showed that in world terms, he was the seventh best player.  This was a shock, and immediately the player began to think and plan about how he could  learn and improve.

Desire to improve drives the desire to learn

Sir Clive Woodward used the power of data to instil the desire to improve amongst his team, which developed the necessary teachability, and which led to victory in the 2003 Rugby World Cup.

We see the same influences in our Bird island game, when we finally show people the benchmark data, and they realise how much they can improve. The emotional shock they receive destroys the mental barriers to learning.

Sir John Browne did the same at BP, with his vision that "every time we do something, we should do it better than the last time". 

Business leaders can do the same - by showing their teams where they are under-performing compared to their peers, and challenging them to improve.

If we are to implement Knowledge Management in our organisations, then we need to be changing rocks into sponges, and introducing a culture of Willingness to Learn, by instilling a culture of Desire to do Better.

Only when these are in place, will Knowledge Management reach its full potential.

Creating "Learning Urgency"

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When I give my Knowledge Management Training courses, I start proceedings by presenting three stories from organisations who are doing knowledge management, showcasing some of the benefits KM can bring.

I then ask the class to discuss the stories, and to identify the success factors that lie behind each one. Often these are a mix of successful interventions, and successful cultural elements.

Last week, in the South of France, one of the success factors they identified was a "sense of urgency". In each case, the protagonists in the story treated learning as Urgent - one of the first things to be done - and as a result, delivered great results.

This was a really good insight.

All too often, learning (and Knowledge Management in general) is seen as important, but not treated as urgent. In these stories, the urgency was there, and learning followed.

So how had the organisations in the stories created that sense of urgency?

• In the first story, the organisation gave a high-profile task to an individual who had never done that sort of thing before, with clear instructions not to "screw up". A risky move, were it not for the Knowledge Management system which gave the individual all the knowledge they needed to succeed.
• In the second story, the organisation challenged a team to improve on the past benchmark performance by nearly 20%. An impossible challenge, were it not for the access the team was given to all the lessons and knowledge from past performance.
• In the third story, the organisation gave the same audacious goal to twelve different teams simultaneously. A crazy thing to do, were it not for the way they set up knowledge-sharing between the teams, so they reached the goal far faster collectively, then they did individually. 

There is a saying, by the Greek philosopher Epictetus, that "you cannot teach someone something they think they already know". This means that if you give people problems they know how to solve, they will not look for additional knowledge, and they will not think outside the box. 

Learning, for them, will not be urgent. They will use the knowledge they have, do what they have always done, and deliver the performance they have always delivered. Safe, but no improvement.

An organisation can really drive Knowledge Management by giving people challenges they don't know how to meet, or putting them in positions where they don't know what to do. This is not as risky as it sounds, once KM is in place. 

Once KM is in place and is trusted, KM and management work together in delivering breakthough performance. Management gives people challenges they don't know how to meet, KM provides the knowledge they need to meet them. 

Learning becomes both Urgent, and Easy. Everybody wins.

Roles in the Knowledge Management organisation

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A fully mature KM organisation will contain several recognised KM positions in order to ensure and facilitator the creation, transfer and re-use of knowledge. Some of these are listed below. Sometimes several of these roles are combined into a single position.

Note that, in this list, I am assuming that the KM organisation is in place, so do not include any task force, or KM implementation team. I have not given names to these roles - each company seems to use a different set of names (some examples are given). Not all roles are required in every organisation - many are optional. Each company will need to do their own knowledge management organisational design - look at the list below as a series of options, not a template.

• There is one role, to monitor, champion and support Knowledge Management for the entire organisation. This can be referred to as the Chief Knowledge Officer, and this role is described here

• The CKO can lead a small team to help with the support activity. The role of that team is described here.

• There is often a senior management role to which the CKO reports, who provides steer, high level support and resource to Knowledge Management, This could  be known as the management sponsor for KM.

• This sponsor could be supported by a high level steering team. The role of this team is described here.

• There can be a similar role in each business division, to monitor, champion and support Knowledge Management within that division. The Samsung version of this role is described here - they call it a Knowledge manager role, other companies call it KM Champion. In Legal firms, this role is often taken by paralegals. Our view of this role is here. 

• In the US Army, there is a role within each operational  unit, which is less about championing KM, and more about acting as the conduit for lessons. This role is described here, and is called the Lessons Learned Integrator.

• In project-based organisations, that run major capital projects, there may be a KM-specific role within the project itself, to monitor, champion and support Project-related KM activities (learning Before, During and after).

The Communities of Practice, or Social networks also require roles, with a whole variety of names (here are 32 options). These include the following.

• The role that facilitates communication between community members on a day to day basis. This could be known as the community facilitator or moderator role.

• The role that takes ownership of the health and effectiveness of the community, and delivery of its purpose and aims. This could be known as the community leader or network leader. In smaller communities, the community leader is the same person as the facilitator.

• The management role which gives direction, steer and high level support to the community or network. This could be known as the community sponsor.

• A series of roles who support the leader, sometimes known as the community or network Core Team.

Often linked with the community are the roles associated with documented knowledge, with knowledge bases, or with areas of knowledge.

• The role who takes ownership for an area of technical knowledge, ensuring that it is well supported, well documented, that the training is in place, that the organisational capability is in place, and that knowledge on this topic is well managed. This role can be known as the practice owner, process owner, functional chief, subject matter expert, knowledge owner, technical authority, or many other names. This role is often combined with network leader, and is described here and here.

• The role of "go to" person for a topic, though without the weight of accountability described above. These are the subject matter experts in the organisation.

• People who are accountable for specific areas of online content - the content owners.

• People who are accountable for managing the entire content of knowledge bases - the cyberarians or librarians (see here).

There are other specialist roles which certain organisations may need, including the following.

• A role, or set of roles, for managing the Lesson Learned process.  This could be known as the Lessons team, or (in the case of the British Army), the Lessons exploitation centre. These roles ensure lessons are collected, validated, actioned, acted on, and closed out. They are accountable for, and report on, the effectiveness of lessons learning.

• A role for collecting observations and converting these into lessons. This is sometimes referred to as an Analyst role, and is often seen in military and government organisations.

• A field role, for collecting observations and lessons, through personal observation or through interviewing or facilitating meetings such as AARs. This role can be known as a Learning Engineer, a Learning Historian, an Operational Learning team, etc.
• A role for facilitating knowledge management meeting processes, such as Peer Assist, After Action Review, and Retrospect. 

Have I forgotten any? Are there additional KM roles in your organisation?

Where does KM report?

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Here's the result of a couple of quick online surveys, combined with our experience with a variety of clients. The question was, where does Knowledge Management report in your organisation?

The graph here shows a range of reporting lines, with the most popular being through IT, Strategy, and as a direct reporting line to management (the last one often favoured in the early days).

The main conclusion however is that there is no one most popular reporting relationship!

If you would like to add to the statistics, let me know, in the comments section, what the reporting line is for KM in your organisation.

Don't rely on Personality when implementing Knowledge Management

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A strong passionate leader is essential for an effective Knowledge Management implementation team, connecting with strong "first followers" in the business. As discussed in previous posts, the leader needs to be a change agent, with a strong profile and good influencing skills, who has some hard-won experience in KM, who can translate KM into business terms.

But there is a risk in relying on the Personality of the leader to drive transformation, because when the leader moves on, transformation can falter or "tip back".

Here is just such a story.

A project manager was working in a major project in the Far East. He was a KM Believer, one of the "first followers", eager to lead change in his part of the business. He set up a community of practice, or knowledge network, of project managers who would meet, exchange documents, and swap lessons learned for further re-use. And it worked - in his area he cut costs, shortened timelines and improved safety statistics. He acted as champion, thought leader, and role model for Knowledge Management within the wider business. 

Then he left - moving on to another part of the business.

The community stopped functioning. Knowledge capture ceased. Many people in the business claimed that they were unaware of what he had been doing. Knowledge management in the Far East Division dwindled away and died. The culture "tipped back" to where it had been before.

No matter how strong your personality, no matter how much you can get done by personally driving it, there comes a time when you have to pass over the reins. Not to another strong personality, but to an embedded system that is going to function no matter who is driving it - a system of KM expectations, embedded processes, roles within the business, and governance.

Jon's dangerous year in KM

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Jon Harman is the head of Knowledge Management at Syngenta. I know him quite well, and admire the work has has been doing. He has been in post for many years, making steady though slow progress. Then, last year, he had a breakthough - he had the most productive year in KM that he has ever had.

The reason? He had lost his job.

Or perhaps to be more exact, he was under notice that his KM post was closing.

For Jon, this was liberating. Released from the fear that he might lose his job (because he knew the axe had already fell),  Jon decided to live dangerously. Instead of waiting for permission, he acted. Instead of working through is boss, he went direct to the CEO. Things started to happen, the CEO liked what he saw, and the KM train started to accelerate. Not only that, but Jon was offered another KM post within Syngenta.

So what's the lesson, ladies and gentlemen?

If you are going to make Knowledge Management work, you have to be bold. You have to live dangerously, because (as I said in the post "KM, simple but not easy"), "it needs courage and it needs dedication and it needs perseverence and a thick skin, and it needs you to work at some very difficult conversations".

Jon learned the lesson through the risk of losing his job. If you learn the lesson, rather than making your job more risky, it may actually make your job safer.

Colin Powell, leadership and KM

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Interesting to see on Colin Powells Leadership Skills List For Highly Effective Managers, at number 8, the following;

8.Knowledge management and therefore people management is critical to all businesses.


Leadership has to foster the right environment and people within the company (since this is what powers modern knowledge economies). Focus on technical management 30% of the time, and assign the rest for people management.

and then at number 10
 

10.Business is all about change. Effective leaders realize this and foster an environment where learning and change management is encouraged.


Commanders are always developing leadership skills in their subordinates to foster learning and ownership of tasks within the organization.

The knowledge managers request to senior management

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Dear Senior Managers

Over the past year, our pilot projects in Knowledge Management have shown that there is huge value to be delivered to the organisation, by introducing a systematic managed approach to knowledge. The ROI of these pilots has been in the order of 10-fold, and we believe this can be scaled up to corporate level.

We, the KM team, commit to delivering this value to you, but we need something in return.

Here are our requests for you

1.  We need you to steer our program. Help us to understand what knowledge is strategic to the organisation, so that KM activities can fully support your own strategic agenda. Lets work together to make KM a core supporter of the business strategy.

2. We need your endorsement. We need you to be talking about the importance of knowledge. We need you to be asking the questions "Who have you learned from?" and "Who will you share this with?" Eventually we will be asking you to set clear expectations for KM in the organisation.

3. We need your example. As someone once said, "I cannot hear what you say, for the thunder of what you do", so you need to be acting, as well as talking. Get involved in KM. Hold your own learning reviews. Capture and share and build knowledge at senior management level.

4. We need you to reward and recognise wisely. KM requires a change in culture, and people will be very alert to how you recognise behaviours. If you reward and recognise the wrong things, such as internal competition, or the lone hero who "doesn't need to learn", or the knowledge hoarders who keep it all "in their heads", then our good work of culture change will be in vain. Recognise instead those who learn before doing, those who share hard-won lessons, and those who show bravery in admitting to mistakes from which others can learn.

5. We need you to be consistent in how you follow up expectations. The company will watch how you deal with the project that doesn't hold a learning review, or the expert who neglects their community. If you let them get away with bad KM behaviours, you have sent a strong message to the organisation; that you can refuse to be involved in KM, and nobody will make a fuss.

6. Finally, we need you to challenge us. We know the value of KM, and you need to challenge us to use it to make a real step-change in business deliverables.

Together, we can make a real difference through knowledge management.

Sincerely,

the KM team

Learning, in the genes of the future CEO

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CEO Face
Originally uploaded by rogerimp

Here's an interesting quote from a report by the Korn Ferry institute called "Discover the DNA of future CEOs".

They believe that learning ability (or learning agility) is part of that DNA. I quote from their report.

"According to Ian Smith, Former CEO of Reed Elsevier: “There needs to be openness to learning. It’s a paradox as in order to learn you need to make yourself vulnerable – but great leaders walk a tight rope between being open to learn (vulnerable) and striving forward.”

Here, there is a striking parallel with previous research by the Korn/Ferry
Institute. In our 2008 White Paper “Using Learning Agility to Identify High
Potentials Around the World” De Meuse, Dai, Hallenbeck and Tang underlined
the importance of ‘learning agility’ as a predictor of high potential in business executives. Learning agility is, in simple terms, the ability to learn from experience and to quickly adapt to, as well as drive, change.

Successful executives learn faster than those who ‘derail’, not because they are more intelligent, but because they have the necessary skills and strategies, and are therefore ‘learning agile’. By contrast, those that do not learn from their jobs, and simply repeat their previous performance in each new role, will never become the most effective leaders"

So if the future CEO is learning-agile, can we expect them to develop a similar learning agility in their organisations?