Don't make Knowledge Management an Extra-Curricular activity

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RT Library Lunchtime Book Group 2010, a photo by RTLibrary on Flickr.

A client said to me recently, while describing the use of KM in his new organisation,

"At my previous company, KM was seen as a resource; it was on your screen all day long, and one of first things you did was to log into the system. But in this company where I am now, its treated like one of those "lunchtime clubs" that you have at high school - not really part of Real Work at all".

 At high schools in the UK and US, lunchtime and after-school clubs are set up for "Extracurricular Activity", which means all activities that are not related to the real educational work of the school.

These are clubs like the chess club, the football club, the gardening club. Good for added development of children who volunteer to be involved, but not part of the Real School Day.

In this client's new organisation, Knowledge Management is treated as a "lunchtime club"

• It is voluntary, not required
• Many of the events are relegated to lunchtime or out-of-work hours ("lunch and learn", "breakfast and learn")
• CoP activities are primarily social rather than focusing on business value
• It is not treated by management as part of Real Work

This is a very precarious place to be as a knowledge manager. 

No business has time for optional activity, nor for things that are not seen as Real Work. There will come a time of reduced budgets, and "tightening of belts", and that is when the optional, additional, "lunchtime activity" gets cut, and yet another Knowledge Management program is wound down.

Ladies and gentlemen of the KM world, please avoid this trap.

Please do not be seduced into using out-of-hours times for Knowledge Management, as if it were a lunchtime club. Knowledge Management IS real work; it's how we continuously improve the way we operate as an organisation. If the company does not see it as real work, then create the evidence to convince them. Focus your KM activities on solving real business problems. Create the KM business case. Schedule your Peer Assists and Knowledge Exchanges for prime business hours.

Don't treat it as Extra-Curricular.

How to build a business case for Knowledge Management

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When we run our Bird Island Knowledge Management simulation, we put people into separate teams, working out of sight of each other, and we give them a task to build a construction; as tall as possible while passing simple tests.

At the end of 20 minutes they have finished their construction, they feel proud of what they have achieved, and think they have done pretty well. maybe they could have built a little higher, but not by much.

Then we open the doors and let them exchange knowledge with each other. Invariably they find that the others have got different designs, smarter approaches, and sometimes have built constructions to a height that others thought impossible. The teams begin to re-use each others' ideas, and their next construction is much higher as a result. Performance has increased through knowledge sharing.

This is "KM in a laboratory setting" but exactly the same can be true at work.

Let's assume you are working in a business with multiple operating or manufacturing sites. Operations cost or manufacturing cost will vary from site to site, and often each site will use different approaches, different designs, different management systems. They work in isolation, they don't know what good ideas the others are using.

Knowledge Management gives you the opportunity to reduce these costs, by sharing learnings and good practice from low cost sites, to improve the performance of high cost sites.

In order to be make to make a business case for your knowledge management intervention, you need to know what the performance difference between the sites currently is, and make an estimate of how much you can reduce this difference. You need

• A good set of benchmark data on current operational costs, broken down as far as possible into the different factors
• An estimate of how effective knowledge sharing and re-use could be in normalising those costs through reusing good practices
• A desire across the business to improve. The high cost sites need to want to improve. The low cost sites need to want to help them.

As an example, in the 1990s we worked with the refineries in BP to help reduce the costs of planned shutdowns. Historical data showed that if all refineries could reach the level of top quartile, there was a prize of £30m available to the business. The business estimated that an improvement on the existing level of knowledge sharing could deliver $5m of this, while no knowledge sharing could lose $10m. This return more than justified an investment of $230,000 in a community of practice, an online knowledge asset, and a series of Retrospects and Peer Assists, and so a robust business case was constructed.

Another one of our clients looked at one of their major cost elements, water usage, and benchmarked this around their global sites. They set a target of top quartile, and assumed that KM, at the very least, would move each site 10% of the way towards this top quartile target. Even this modest estimate of improvement was worth $7m annually to the organisation, which would more than cover the costs of the Community of Practice required to facilitate the exchange of knowledge.

Simple calculations such as these can be used to help build a business case in any multi-site operation where performance varies between the sites, whether it is operational cost (as described above), sales results, time to market, customer satisfaction, cost of quality, or any other metric you care to mention.

And if you really want to convince the business that KM will improve these metrics, take the managers through the Bird Island exercise.

Having the time to halve the time

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2014-365-3 Time, a photo by Michael 1952 on Flickr.

Here is an extract from a conversation last week.

Me: Can you give me any examples where the Community of Practice could add value?
Client: At the last meeting we identified one of these - we found one part of the job where everyone does the task differently, sometimes very inefficiently. It's very junior work, but still, the CoP said "this is a real mess, we have to fix it".
Me: Did you fix it?
Client: No, it didn't go anywhere, because everyone is too busy.

Everyone is too busy to take the time to fix a problem that is wasting lots of time. Huh?

This is a typical situation in any organisation where Knowledge Management is seen as an overhead and not an investment. Knowledge Management is a powerful approach to improving the way we do work, and this client was too busy doing the work, to have time to improve the way they worked.

In the US, they call this "too busy fighting alligators, to drain the swamp"

In BP, we positioned KM as an investment, by urging people "to have the time to halve the time". In other words, if you invest time in learning, you can more than recoup that investment through the increase in efficiency it brings.

• For example, a three day Peer Assist may reduce the elapsed time of a project by three months.
• A 12 day investment in a lesson capture meeting (10 people for a day, plus facilitator, plus write-up) can save 10 months of rework in future projects
• In Shell they believed that every hour spent on Community of Practice knowledge-sharing saved you 7 hours if you applied the learning you gained

In order to get your company out of this time-trap, you need to do two things

1. Position KM as an investment and not a cost
2. Create a proof-of-concept demonstration that shows this to be true. For example, in BP we had several video stories of people saying "I had a problem, I went to the CoP and asked for help, the advice I received was fantastic and solved my problem instantly".

That's how you start to change the mindset from "KM is an added cost" to "KM is the investment that will save me a huge amount of time.

Even Hit-men need KM

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Samurai Assassin: Toshiro Mifune, a photo by Frenkieb on Flickr.

One of my favourite authors for light reading is Barry Eisler.

He specialises in novels about Assassins, and his "John Rain" series about an eponymous Japanese American hit man is a compelling mix of action, introspection and descriptive colour.

Imagine my surprise when reading his latest book, to find Knowledge Management added to the mix, in the form of the After Action review.

Here is a selection from the text, describing how Rain plans to use Military knowledge management techniques and habits (picked up from his background in the US Army) to learn from his first job as an assassin.

"[preparing for the hit] I was about to pull down the extension cord when I remembered I had to be careful about touching things. Damn it, I should have brought gloves as well as a flashlight. All right; I was learning. Afterwards I'd review everything to figure out what I could have done better, and then implement it all going forward - what the military called an After-Action Report........

.....[after the hit] Only when I was back inside the Yamanote did I permit myself a moment of exultation. I had done it. Later I would go through what had gone well and what I might have done better. There would be lessons to be learned. But for now, I had done it".

So all of us, no matter what our profession, can use something like the AAR to get better at our jobs. I guess the motivation for a hit-man to learn is the same motivation as for the soldier - successful learning is a matter of life and death!

3 models of Knowledge Sharing - the role of the centre

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I blogged recently about three models for knowledge sharing - the three models shown here.

We can call them centre-out, out and in, and multiflow.

In our picture here, the red dots are the central group of experts, the white dots are the knowledge users or knowledge workers, and the white arrows are the flow of knowledge. As explained in the blog post, any organisation can use all three models at once for different types of knowledge, often using centre-out for strategic knowledge or knowledge of principles, out and in for operational knowledge or knowledge of procedures, and multiflow for tactical knowledge or knowledge of practices.

In a workshop last week, I had a very interesting discussion about the role of the experts in each of the models.

In the centre-out model, the experts OWN the knowledge. They are the sole source of knowledge, and do all the learning activities themselves. Their primary role is CONTROL. They work with Mandated Practices.

In the Out-and-In model, the experts act as AUTHORITIES. They do not own the knowledge, but they audit and validate it on behalf of the community of practice. Many of the learning activities are conducted by others, but coordinated by the experts (for example projects might conduct lessons capture meetings, and the actions and lessons are forwarded to the experts so that the Knowledge Base can be updated). The experts' primary role is STEWARDSHIP. They work with Best Practice.

In the Multiflow model the experts act as COORDINATORS and DESIGNERS of the learning system. All the learning activities are conducted by others, but the experts and other leaders set the expectation and provide the resources for learning. Their primary role is GOVERNANCE and GUIDANCE of the learning processes. The network as a whole works with Good Practices.

How much increased production will KM deliver?

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Colorful Old Oil Barrels, a photo by L.C.Nøttaasen on Flickr.

A client from the Oil Sector once asked me - "How many more barrels of produced oil will Knowledge Management deliver?"

This is a challenging question, but very valid. It is aimed at the heart of the question of the value of knowledge management, and is an industry-specific way of asking "what can Knowledge Management do for my business".

 This is how I answered him - first some preamble, then the serious answer.

 To answer the question, you first  need to look at the link between knowledge and performance. The more a team or department of company knows, the better they perform, and if they can learn from performance, they can build up a store of knowledge and perform even better. If knowledge and performance are linked, then knowledge management drives performance improvement. 

This is how the link would work in the oil sector.  

Imagine a drilling team in an unfamiliar area. Using KM techniques, they learn with each well how to drill more effectively, more safely and more cheaply.  KM can help them learn faster, and accelerate the learning curve and the improved drilling performance. 

Lets take the issue of construction projects in the oil sector. KM can transfer lessons from one project to another and so can eliminate repeat mistakes, wastage of time and exploring blind alleys, so allowing you to deliver projects faster, cheaper, safer and more effectively, and so bring production on stream faster. 

Or if we look at producing oil platforms, by sharing and reusing best practices from other platforms they can improve their own efficiency and learn how to work better. 

The answer is  to the question " How many more barrels can KM deliver?" is - it depends how may barrels you are currently wasting through projects delayed by repeat mistakes, production limited by second-best practices, and drilling teams learning far too slowly. All of these are the result of staff not having access to the best knowledge, not having access to the best practice, and not being able to learn effectively.  This is the production you are currently losing through not having Knowledge Management.

42 Countries this blog has not reached (yet)

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This blog has never had a visitor from any of the countries listed below. If you know a resident of any of these - please send them a link to this blog!

				Number of visits			Last visit
1.			Andorra	0			Never
2.			Anguilla	0			Never
3.			British Indian Ocean Territory	0			Never
4.			Cape Verde	0			Never
5.			Caribbean Netherlands	0			Never
6.			Central African Republic	0			Never
7.			Chad	0			Never
8.			Christmas Island	0			Never
9.			Comoros	0			Never
10.			Cook Islands	0			Never
11.			Equatorial Guinea	0			Never
12.			Eritrea	0			Never
13.			Faroe Islands	0			Never
14.			French Guiana	0			Never
15.			French Polynesia	0			Never
16.			Guinea	0			Never
17.			Guinea-Bissau	0			Never
18.			Kiribati	0			Never
19.			Martinique	0			Never
20.			Mayotte	0			Never
21.			Montserrat	0			Never
22.			Nauru	0			Never
23.			New Caledonia	0			Never
24.			Niue	0			Never
25.			Norfolk Island	0			Never
26.			Palau	0			Never
27.			Saint Barthelemy	0			Never
28.			Saint Helena	0			Never
29.			Saint Martin	0			Never
30.			Saint Pierre and Miquelon	0			Never
31.			Saint Vincent and the Grenadines	0			Never
32.			San Marino	0			Never
33.			Sao Tome and Principe	0			Never
34.			Sint Maarten	0			Never
35.			Svalbard	0			Never
36.			Tokelau	0			Never
37.			Turkmenistan	0			Never
38.			Turks and Caicos Islands	0			Never
39.			Tuvalu	0			Never
40.			Vatican City	0			Never
41.			Wallis and Futuna	0			Never
42.			Western Sahara