Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Quantified value stories - a negative example
An old one, but not one I had in my colklections
"How the US forgot how to make Trident missiles
heraldscotland
Inquiry cites loss of files and key staff as reason for $69m repair delay
By Rob Edwards, Environment Editor"
Plans to refurbish Trident nuclear weapons had to be put on hold because US scientists forgot how to manufacture a component of the warhead, a US congressional investigation has revealed.
The US National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) "lost knowledge" of how to make a mysterious but very hazardous material codenamed Fogbank. As a result, the warhead refurbishment programme was put back by at least a year, and racked up an extra $69 million.
According to some critics, the delay could cause major problems for the UK Trident programme, which is very closely tied to the US programme and uses much of the same technology. The US and the UK are trying to refurbish the ageing W76 warheads that tip Trident missiles in order to prolong their life, and ensure they are safe and reliable. This apparently requires that the Fogbank in the warheads is replaced.
Checklists in KM
I don't know if you have read the Checklist Manifesto? You ought to. It's extremely interesting for the KM professional. I read it recently, and something clicked for me as I went through it. It answered a question I have been struggling with for a long time - which is, how do we get knowledge back out into the organisation?
Identifying new knowledge is relatively easy. Updating practice, as a result of new knowledge, is not too hard either. Getting people to change their behaviour as a result is extremely difficult.
But listen to this story.
17th Jan, 2008, Times Online “Passengers aboard the BA38 from Beijing were reflecting on their lucky escape, after all 136 were safely evacuated when the stricken aircraft tore into the tarmac. Only three suffered minor injuries. A formal investigation is under way to find out what led one of the safest aircraft in the world to crash land at Heathrow airport this afternoon”.
13 May 2008, London Evening Standard “The British Airways plane that crash landed at Heathrow may have suffered from "fuel freeze" caused by cold weather, according to investigators. First Officer John Coward was forced to glide the Boeing 777 to safety after both engines failed at 600ft on flight BA38 earlier this year. The Air Accident Investigations Branch (AAIB) interim report into the incident on 17 January has indicated a drop in temperature to -76C (-105F) while flying over Russia may have caused the fuel to thicken, depriving the engines of the additional thrust needed to land”.
As a result of this investigation, new knowledge was created - How to stop ice forming in the fuel on polar flights, and how to recover flight control if icing causes engine failure (counter-intuitively – you cut the throttle instead of increasing it. This allows the heat of the engine to melt the ice and restore the fuel flow).
New knowledge.
And how long do you think it took for every 777 pilot in the world to update their flight practices with this new knowledge?
According to Atul Gwande, author of the Checklist Manifesto, it took 30 days.
Only 30 days for every 777 pilot in every airline in every country in the world.
How long does it take your company to incorporate new knowledge? 30 weeks? 30 months? Atul reckons that a new surgical procedure, in contrast, takes 17 years to be globalised. The difference is that pilots codify everything they know into checklists. They share them widely, and use them rigourously.
Most jobs nowadays are incredibly complex. The human brain can only remember so much at one time, and suffers easily from overload. Most mistakes are made, not because we don’t know what to do, but because we forget (or skip) a crucial step, especially in emergency situations. We need to be reminded of what we know, and what we need to remember. Checklists force us to stop and review, remind us of what needs to be done, take us through the critical steps, ensure we remember the right things, ensure we ask the right questions, and ensure we have the right conversations. And updates in checklists as a result of new knowledge, can remind us to do new things.
Atul has some fascinating stories to tell of introducing checklists into hospital surgery theatres, the pushback that he received and the difficulties that he met, but also the remarkable improvements in patient safety statistics that were made as a result.
However here's an anecdote to close out our story.
November 26, 2008, Delta Airlines from Shanghai to Atlanta.
39,000 ft above Montana the flight crew experienced “uncontrolled rollback of the right engine” due to ice in the fuel line. The pilot and co-pilot followed the revised checklist, the engine restarted, and none of the 247 passengers knew that anything unusual had happened.
That's effective learning in action.
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
Bertrand Russel quote
There is no nonsense so arrant that it cannot be made the creed of the vast majority by adequate governmental action.
- Bertrand Russell
The epistemology crapper endeavor, and the owlish decision-making processes
Some more machine-translated nonsense on KM
"Inquiring Organizations: Moving from Knowledge Management to Wisdom assembles into digit intensity a broad assemblage of the key underway intellection regarding the ingest of C. West Churchman’s Design of Inquiring Systems as a foundation for computer-based investigatory systems organisation and implementation. Inquiring systems are systems that go beyond noesis direction to actively communicate most their environment. While self-adaptive is an pertinent procedural for investigatory systems, they are critically assorted from self-adapting systems as they hit evolved in the fields of machine power or staged intelligence. Inquiring systems entertainer on epistemology to pass noesis creation and organizational learning. As such, we crapper for the prototypal instance ever, begin to contemplate the idea of hold for “wise” decision-making. Readers of Inquiring Organizations: Moving from Knowledge Management to Wisdom module acquire an approval for the persona that epistemology crapper endeavor in the organisation of the incoming procreation of noesis direction systems: systems that pore on activity owlish decision-making processes".
What's with all the "crapper"s by the way?
Monday, February 8, 2010
The KM 1.0 myth
There's a lot out there about so-called KM 1.0 - what people see as having been the nature of the early stages of KM, which they often then contract with today's enlightened times.
For example this "The traditional approach to KM, dubbed KM 1.0, is about "deploying" specific knowledge sharing tools to be used for extra "above-the-flow" tasks of capturing and sharing knowledge in the form of structured content. Since those tools are usually quite cumbersome to use, and are justified by potential reuse of content by others in the future, their use is mainly enforced by a culture of recognition and rewards for those who share, and/or sticks for those who don't".
or this "KM 1.0: all about content and collection"
or this "KM 1.0 techno-centric, command and control, centralised monolithic systems, email, databases, KM is extra work, IT select the tools"
or this "the old traditional, corporate, techno-centric, command and control form of KM"
or this "KM 1.0 - is the top-down way to mandate (command and control) “what you know” documents into a database, as a separate job duty, and then seeking this database when you have a need".
or all of this
I am afraid I am going to be controversial here.
If you look back at the beginnings of KM, to where it started, it was not about collection, and not about command an control at all. If you look back to the 90s, you can see the birth of social media in Lotus notes, you can see the storytelling work done at World Bank, you can see the Communities of Practice at IBM, at Xerox, at Shell. Almost all the work we did at BP was about Connection rather than Collection - the Communities of Practice, the Peer Assists, the After Action reviews, the Virtual teamworking using the first generation of desktop videoconferencing.
This may be "Old" in historical terms, and it was of course far from perfect, but it was a long long way from the 1.0 caricatures quoted above.
KM in the 90s was about Connection as much as it was about Collection, if not more. It was about empowerment, not command. It was about conversation, not content. It was about devolution, not centralisation.
I agree that a focus on content, on collection, on monolithic databases, is a Bad Thing if it happens at the expense of connection, conversation, and putting knowledge in the hands of the users. But this change of focus is not a simple historical progession or evolution, and the myth of "they were wrong and we are smarter" is more than simplistic, it is plain wrong.
The Collect/Connect debate is not a question of 1.0 and 2.0, not a quesion of old vs new, not a question of traditional versus radical, and not a question of demonising the past and glorifying the future. It is a debate that is happening now, and will always be with us so long as KM continues.
Sunday, February 7, 2010
The knowledge factory
Lord Browne of Madingley, when he gave his ghost-written HBR interview on KM in the 90s as CEO of BP, said something really really interesting. Well, the whole interview was interesting, but this quote has had me thinking ever since. He said
"Learning is at the heart of a company's ability to adapt to a rapidly changing environment. It is the key to being able both to identify opportunities that others might not see and to exploit those opportunities rapidly and fully. This means that in order to generate extraordinary value for shareholders, a company has to learn better than its competitors and apply that knowledge throughout its businesses faster and more widely than they do. The way we see it, anyone in the organization who is not directly accountable for making a profit should be involved in creating and distributing knowledge that the company can use to make a profit"
Let me stress that last sentence again
"anyone in the organization who is not directly accountable for making a profit should be involved in creating and distributing knowledge that the company can use to make a profit"
That is a remarkable view of an organisation as a profit-focused knowledge factory.
The same "knowledge factory" image came to me last week, working with a public sector educational organisation, who's whole raison d'etre was to create knowledge. Here we took a new process-focused view of the organisation, and started to identify the knowledge and information inputs and outputs for each step in the value chain. It was really illuminating.
And if you think of your organisation as a profit-focused knowledge factory, then you can start to think about applying manufacturing thinking to the flow of knowledge - thinking such as debottlenecking the knowledge flow, or lean approachs to knowledge flow. And who is in charge of production? And can you use Japanese style processes such as Kaizen and quality circles to improve the flow?
It's very interesting to look at your organisation as being a knowledge factory, and ask - just how well do we process knowledge? Does everyone who is not making a profit, actually realise that their job is knowledge production?
The value of knowledge
Knowledge is one of your key assets. Like your staff, your money, your customers, your brand. It is one of your more valuable assets too - just imagine how your organisation would perform if you had no knowledge, and your staff had no knowledge!
If you knew the value of your company knowledge, there is no way that you would leave it unmanaged.
It is good practice to manage your valuable assets. You almost certainly have implemented finanacial management, people management, customer relationship managment, brand management. So it makes sound business sense to implement knowledge management too; to derive maximum business benefit from the invisible asset which is the operational knowledge held in the heads of your employees.
For example, one oil-sector drilling organisation recently estimated the value of its knowledge of drilling to be worth half a billion dollars anually.
Who would leave a half-billion dollar asset unowned and unmanaged?
(Remember, my favourite definition of KM, is "the way you would manage, if you understood the value of your knowledge".
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Blog Archive
Posts
