What to do if you don’t know the answer?

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A comment from Ivan Webb in Tasmania on this post contains a link to an excellent site, exploring the issue of - What to do when I don't know what to do?"

Ivan says “Many years ago a class of 10 year olds and I worked on this problem and came up with a really practical answer - it made a profound difference to the learning of many students”.

The rules that Ivan and his team came up with are as follows

What to do when you don't know what to do:

1. Read (or listen to) the question

2. Stop and think: what does the question mean?

3. Look in your mind for the answer

4. Can't find it? Look again!

5. Re-read the question and so on ...

6. Look for something similar

7. Look it up (charts, references, atlases...) then

8. Try something (drawings, dots, words, ...) and check it out to see if it makes sense

9. Ask a friend for help

10. Finally ask the teacher

So how do we translate this into a work setting? It would look rather like this

What to do when you don't know what to do:


1. Analyse the problem

2. Stop and think: what could be going on here? What are the facts, the ground truth? What could be the root cause?

3. Look in your mind for the answer

4. Can't find it? Look again!

5. Look at the problem again ... have you missed anything?

6. Have you come across something like this before? Does this give you any insight?

7. Look it up (wiki, corporate knowledge base, technical guidance)

8. Ask the community of practice for help

9. Finally ask the expert

(I have removed the option for “try something”, as sometimes in business, trying something could be a disaster. For example, when operating a complex piece of machinery in a factory, trying the wrong thing may make a bad situation much worse.


Part of the purpose of a KM system or a KM approach is to make sure that people who do ask, receive an answer. IN other words

7. When they “look it up”, there should be an answer there, it should be helpful, it should be easy to find, it should solve the problem

8. When they ask the community, there should be a community there to ask, they should be easy to reach, and they should solve the problem

9. When they ask the expert, there should be an expert there to ask, they should be easy to find, and they should solve the problem

And does it made a difference?

“Absolutely” says Ivan, in the context of his school. “These students have probably increased their overall productivity by 500%. Their independence has increased even more (conservative estimates). They are much better behaved, happier and in fact life is easier for them”.

Let’s see if we can do the same in the context of work.

Jefferson quote

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I do not take a single newspaper, nor read one a month, and I feel myself infinitely the happier for it.


- Thomas Jefferson

(I bet he didn't Twitter or blog either)

"I don’t know how" - fixing the knowledge gaps that cause the pain

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I have blogged already about how powerful it can be to use Knowledge Management to remove the managers' pain points, to “take the thorn out of the lion’s paw”.

But how do you find the pain points, that KM can fix?

Quite simple – you ask them what it is that they don’t know but wish they did. What are the business "I don't know"s that are keeping them awake at night?

You will get answers like these

I don’t know how to .....

• Sell Chocolate in rural China
• Halve the water use in my brewery
• Close down, maintain, and start up my refinery in just 3 weeks
• Avoid agglomerates in my Polyethylene plant
• Reduce my well costs by 25%, and still drill safely

These are the pain points. These are the thorns in the paw.

If you use KM to answer these questions, you remove the pain, demonstrate the value, and make powerful high-level allies!

You don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone - a plea for the little knowledge

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A lot of the crucial knowledge in an organisation is the “little knowledge”, the "small technology " and "little ideas" that disappear when the people leave. With offices and factories running very lean nowadays, there is not much room to revitalise this knowledge, and it is vulnerable to loss.

The Press and Journal in 2008 described such a situation

"After a maintenance technician retired from a plant producing soybean oil, large batches of oil suddenly started to go bad during production. It took the company two years to rediscover the simple trick that this retired technician knew made the difference. Unexpectedly losing this veteran employee’s knowledge cost the company millions of dollars in lost product and sales revenues".

Part of the problem is that this knowledge is not be "valued" by the organisation. Even worse, it might not be valued by the person who holds the knowledge. A couple of years ago I did some retention interviewing with an guy who was very experienced in a particular manufacturing process. When I called him to say I was coming for a couple of days, he said “Oh you won’t need that long. I really don’t know much, you will be done in an hour”. He valued his knowledge too low – I was there for a full 2 days, and we captured enough material to write a new manual.

SO beware of losing the “little knowledge”. Little knowledge has big value, even it it’s not immediately obvious. Don’t wait until its gone before finding out the value of what you know!

KM, an idea coming into it's time

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NOTHING is as POWERFUL as an IDEA coming in to its TIME


Reg Revans, Origins and Growth of Action Learning

The quote above is is a word of comfort to those who have been struggling for years to get people interested in KM. Sometimes it seems as if your message has been falling on deaf ears for years, but suddenly something changes. Maybe it’s the planets finally lining up, maybe its a change in the wind, or a change in the market, but I have seen many times that all of a sudden, the doors oien to you, and senior people start to listen.

Your task, as an implementer of KM, is to be ready for this point, and to capitalise on it fully when it happens.

No new tricks please!

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Knowledge management is hard enough to implement, without asking people to radically change their work habits as well. You will find the KM implementation journey easier if you can (at least at first) work with the habits and tools that people already have and already use.

Take Communities of Practice – one of the core tools within Knowledge Management. There are a number of technologies that communities can use to collaborate and communicate, but any new tool that requires new work habits may well be a step too far. For example, if people need to regularly log onto a community website to interact with their peers, this is a new habit, and people forget, or don’t bother, or get busy and distracted, and the community dies.

Better to link the community to established work habits such as email. Everyone has the email habit. Everyone checks their email several times a day, often in the evening and at weekends, or on their Blackberries and iPhones. If every community query comes through your email, you will be aware of them all. If every important community announcement or new Best Practice announcement comes via email, you won’t miss it. (Obviously, don’t overdo this! An email or two a day from the community is OK. 20 or 30 is too many!).

Here are the words of a pioneer in community building from the 90s

"I did not want people to have to acquire a new habit. I knew this would most likely kill the network! So I wanted to build on a habit they already had in their daily routine; the e-mail habit. At the time, the only thing our mail system could offer was a static mailing list, so I set up a Listserv. Once we had it rolling in October 1996 it took off, and there was plenty of e-mail traffic. People got the hang of being able to reach over 40 technical professionals reliably, and get messages back”

Another example comes from a colleague who set up a Knowledge Sharing hub within a Legal Department. He built a lovely knowledge repository to handle shared documents, supported and built by legal communities. Unfortunately he let his enthusiasm run away with him.

“I underestimated how unfamiliar the lawyers are with technology. I thought it was a simple system, but it was too complex for them. The learning curve was tiny, but still too much for the lawyers. We had to strip it right back to its simplest elements before it would work”

You need to reduce the barrier to entry to KM whenever you introduce new tools and new processes. Make them as simple as you can, and then simplify them again. Build them into existing work habits, such as email.

Don’t expect people to learn new tricks, or make new clicks.

Keep it simple!

Why KM plans?

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I spent Friday in the Midlands with a big engineering multinational, looking at the topic of project knowledge management plans.

One of the push-backs we often get when we introduce KM plans is “why do we need a plan? Any good engineer will naturally do all the learning they need; surely a KM plan or learning plan is just added work for no added value?”

My usual reply is to draw the analogy with a risk management plan. Any good engineer will naturally be aware of risk, and will put in place mitigations against all the risks he or she can think of, but there is still value in the whole team sitting down and discussing the risks to the project, and developing a risk management plan to address those risks. By adding structure, and by involving the whole team, the project comes out with a better approach to risk.

The same is true for knowledge. There is value in the whole team sitting down and discussing the knowledge needed by the project, and developing a plan to acquire that knowledge. By adding structure, and by involving the whole team, the project comes out with a better approach to learning.

Larry Prusak quote

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"Those companies that don’t adapt to understanding knowledge as a force of production more important than land labour and capital, will slowly die, and will never know what killed them".

Larry Prusak

Sophocles on KM

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REMEMBER it’s the DOING thing that COUNTS. You may think you know, but you have no certainty until you TRY IT

Sophocles ca. 1750BC

Attention to the speed of learning

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For the knowledge management culture change to take hold, the organisation must not just benefit from KM, it must be SEEN to benefit. And that means that the speed of learning, and the speed of change, must be fast enough to be visible.

Lots of people are sceptical or suspicious of knowledge management. They say "well, it sounds OK in theory, but I want to see it happen in practice". So if you engage them in KM activities, they expect to see something happen as a result. If they spend time and energy in KM, sharing their knowledge, or identifying lessons, then they want to know that this time wasn't wasted, and that the business is benefiting as a result. If they see nothing, then their scepticism is reinforced.

So let's look at two examples of lessons-learned systems.

In one, knowledge and lessons are collected from projects; through dialogue, through group discussions, and through storytelling. These lessons are used to update company processes, company standards and guidance. The standards and guidance have a rigorous review process, and a 2-5 year update cycle. The speed of update, and thus the speed of company learning, is so slow, that many folk don't realise that their lessons have had any effect at all. As far as they are concerned, the lessons have disappeared into the ether. And of course there are countless opportunities for repeat mistakes in those intervening 2-5 years.

In another system, lessons are reviewed very shortly after identification by a senior team, and guidance documents and processes are updated very quickly - within weeks if not days. And the knowledge manager in charge of the system puts wall-posters together to take out to the team who contributed the lesson (as well as other teams) to acknowledge the contribution of knowledge, and to state what's happened as a result. In this system, the speed of learning is high, and is highly visible.

Here's another example - a drilling-team leader talking about how he made learning visible in his team.

"The very first well was only 22 days, but we had a hundred and fifty ideas come in from offshore. There were some were good ideas, and some were not so great ideas. But we very quickly took them, worked on them, and sent them back out, and they saw we were serious about learning when we quickly put their ideas back into the program."

So in your organisation, if you are to win over the sceptics, think about the speed of learning. Is it years, or weeks? Is it fast enough to be visible? Or is learning invisible, in which case people will rapidly some to feel that they are wasting their time, as nothing seems to happen as a result.

Pay attention to the speed of company learning, and the speed of the learning cycle.

Learn fast, and learn visibly.

Listening quote

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No one really listens to anyone else, and if you try it for a while you'll see why.


- Mignon McLaughlin

Knowledge headlines; Lesson first, then story

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The last couple of weeks I have been involved in some major knowledge handover exercises (a knowledge handover being a meeting where a project invites other projects to come hear and discuss the lessons they have identified from their project activity, with rich storytelling and questioning).

These exercises have been very successful, with 100% of attendees saying they have been either very hepful, or extremely helpful events. However as with everything in life, we can always see room for improvement.

One piece of feedback we recevied was to do with the relative roles of lesson-stating, and storytelling. Many of the presenters started with the story, and ended with the lesson. "This is what we planned, this is what happened, this is what we learned, this is what we recommend to others".  However this approach did not go down well with all attendees. As one person said later

"We need to push presenters even harder to present in a language of 'recommendations' for next projects, as opposed to reflecting on what happened in their project. We should coach presenters to get to the lesson quickly, perhaps even starting with the lesson and then returning to the story of where it came from".

This at first sight is counterintuitive. How can people understand the lesson if they don't hear the story?

But thinking about it a little more, I begin to ask "why will people pay full attention to the story, if they don't know that there is a lesson for them?"

It's a bit chicken-and-egg; you need both story AND lesson, but certainly in some cases last week we got it the wrong way round - too much story, not enough lesson.

Possibly the answer is to treat the sessions as if they are newspaper articles. Start with the headline, summarise the key lesson, then give the detailed story that backs this up. For example -

"We have come to the conclusion that a project like this needs to involve the marketing department from day 1, as part of the core project team. Let me tell you what happened in our project as a result of bringing in marketing only towards the end of preliminary trials."

A start like this will engage the reader, and give them context for the story.

Upcoming KM trends

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There's a thread going on at Linked-In about KM trends for 2011. Most of the answers talk about trends in KM approaches, like increased application of social tools etc. But I think there are a couple of industry or context changes beginning to show up, which (if they materialise) would have a far greater impact on the KM industry.


A few of the large multinationals are now beginning to ask their contractors to demonstrate that they have an effective KM system (or at least an effective lessons-learned system) as part of their qualification for contracts. If this continues, then the contractors will pass this down to their own subcontractors, and so on. Like an effective safety system, an effective knowledge system may well become a prerequisite for gaining work in many industries, which will spur the adoption of serious KM.

And a second trend which I am catching faint inklings of - there are some indications that in some cases "failure to learn from the past" may put companies at legal risk. Particularly any sort of repeat incident - if the company or organisation can be shown not to have learned and applied lessons from the first incident, they may be at risk of being deemed negligent.

Either or both of those would create a real external commercial and/or legal pressure to develop effective learning systems in organisations. That's when KM could really go mainstream

One for the librarians

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The 20-year lesson

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I have spent the last two days working with a large engineering company, sharing the lessons from one of their large mega-projects.

One thing that became quickly apparent was that many of these lessons were not new. They had been identified many times before.

One of the participants described them as "20 year lessons". As he described it - "we have known about these things for 20 years, yet we keep on making the same mistakes time and again".

This was a case of the organisation knowing what to do and how to do it, but somehow that knowledge not reaching the individual decision-makers in the individual projects. So people ended up making decisions and choosing solutions which were known to be faulty.

The solution, the meeting decided, was to standardise equipment and processes wherever possible. The best knowledge could be embedded into the standards, and if people followed the standards, then faulty solutions would not recur. Then perhaps we will see the end of the 20-year lessons.

Live and learn poster

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Thanks to http://www.motifake.com/ for this great poster

The magnitude of the KM culture shift

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In this post I talked about the KM culture shift as being like crossing a river.

However, the question is, how wide is that river? How big is the culture jump? What is the magnitude of the KM culture shift?

The answer, of course, is that it is 8 inches.

Just 8 inches.

That 8-inches between your ears.

Thats how big the shift is, and those 8 inches are what the KM culture has to transform.

great quote for knowledge hoarders

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"Anyone who keeps knowledge "in their head" without documenting it should be regularly called at 3AM at random to clarify routine issues".

Brian Martin, via linked-in

KM culture change and "thin threads"

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Back in the 90's, when we were starting Knowledge Management at BP, we asked Colonel Ed Guthrie to come in and share with us his learnings from KM in the US Army. One of the things he discussed at length was culture change.

He was very clear that the culture change associated with Knowledge Management is a step change, not a gradual change. It's almost like a phase transition. And with a phase transition, you can't change everyone all at once.

Colonel Ed explained it as if it were an Army crossing a river. The Army is your organisation, the river is the step change, the far bank is "KM culture".

To cross the river, the first thing you do is fire a gun-line across - a thin thread fired across the river, which you make secure to a tree or boulder.

Once the thin thread is across, you use it to haul a thicker line, then a hawser, then another hawser, until you have a firm support. Then you use these hawsers to anchor pontoons, lay a roadway on the top, and pretty soon you can march the Army over the bridge.

(Disclaimer - I probably have the details of this this entirely wrong, and I know there are other ways to build bridges, but this was the story Colonel Ed gave us).
Crossing the KM culture gap is similar. The first thing you do it take one small part of the organisation across that culture gap. This is your thin thread - your gun-line - your KM pilot projects. These are vital. They prove that the culture gap can be crossed. They allow the rest of the organisation to see that KM can be "made secure" on the other side of the gap. They provide a foundation for bringing the rest of the organisation across. They prove the concept, and its applicability, and give people a glimpse, or a model, of "the far side of the gap".

However one thin thread is not enough. Next you need some larger scale trials, some first followers. Once these are complete, and you can begin to anchor KM in company structures and company expectations, then you can build the bridge over which the rest of the company can march.

That bridge is the KM framework, and marching people over the bridge is a process of rolling out the framework, and engaging people, team by team or person by person, in what it means for them. The framework obviously has to be secure! It must be embedded in the governing processes of the company, or else your "culture change bridge" is not secure, and might just dump everyone in the water.

So remember, to cross the KM culture gap, you will need to start with some thin threads.

if the unexpected always happens - GBS quote

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If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience.

- George Bernard Shaw

Connecting people - cellphones in rural Malawi

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Here's a great post from K4Health that shows the power of connectivity in sharing knowledge. Even something as common (to modern eyes) as a cellphone can have instant benefit if used for knowledge sharing (as well as, in this case, coordinating hospital response)

I quote

"The most important item in Amon Chimphepo’s medical kit is a small cell phone. This single piece of technology has proved to be a lifeline for people living in one of the most remote regions of Malawi..........When you connect community health workers by cell phone to the people, information and resources of a hospital you open a conduit of immediate aid that can save lives. Time telescopes — what took days and weeks before wireless communication, now takes minutes and hours. Visiting with Mr. Chimphepo, we were able to meet the people and hear the stories of injuries and conditions and sicknesses treated quickly and correctly because Mr. Chimphepo has access to professional advice and direct health services through the district hospital".

Candle of knowledge (quote)

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Top KM articles from 2010

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Thank you to everyone who has been visiting my blog - here's a quick overview of how well we are doing

Visits and page views over the last 12 months

In the past 9 months, since I switched on full tracking, the blog has had 34000 page views. The graph to the right shows a steady increase in readership.

The top KM articles from this blog for that period are as follows, and are worth reading if you missed them the first time

How to incentivise knowledge sharing?
Jul 16, 2010, 2 comments 1,061 Pageviews

The Gorilla Illusions
Jul 29, 2010 601 Pageviews

Top 7 reasons why KM implementations fail
Dec 20, 2010, 5 comments 499 Pageviews

Isn't KM everyone's job?
Jul 9, 2010, 6 comments 349 Pageviews

What do your staff want from KM?
Sep 16, 2010, 1 comment 328 Pageviews

The joy of phone conferences
Sep 6, 2010, 1 comment 307 Pageviews

The role of analysis in knowledge management
Nov 8, 2010 291 Pageviews

The emotional shock that destroys “not invented here"
Dec 10, 2010, 2 comments 289 Pageviews

Knowledge Management Incentives
Sep 1, 2010 257 Pageviews

A billion dollars of KM-enabled value at Mars
Jul 20, 2010, 5 comments 235 Pageviews


Readers have come to this blog from the following sites


www.google.com 1,434
twitter.com 787
http://www.linkedin.com/ 543
http://www.google.co.uk/ 515
http://www.facebook.com/ 327
http://www.knoco.com/ 263

and the following countries

United States 15,389

United Kingdom 4,507
Netherlands 2,101
Canada 842
India 736
Australia 696
South Korea 551
Germany 529
China 482
Russia 428

So thank you (Dank U, Shukriya, Kamsahamnida, Danke Schoen, Toa chie, Spasibo) for your visits, and I hope I can continue to entertain and inform in 2011.

Gary's KM picture/Tennyson Quote

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And let thy feet milleniums hence be set in the midst of knowledge. Tennyson
Originally uploaded by GaryColet

Nice one Gary, thanks

Real Men don't follow Procedures

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In my files, I have a copy of an article called "Should Real Men Use Procedures?" - largely repackaged here. It's a very interesting look at an unexciting topic, written by Dr David Embrey of Human Reliability Associates.

Nobody gets really excited about procedures. Or at least, they don't until things go wrong. Procedures are needed to comply with quality systenms, and procedures are needed to document safe and effective operation. In an ideal world, corporate knowledge of the safest and most effective way to conduct operations would be encoded into procedures which everyone would follow (until a better way is found).

Unfortunately, people don't always like to follow procedures.

As the article explains

In one project, a questionnaire was distributed to nearly 400 operators and managers. The first set of questions related to the extent that procedures were actually used for different categories of task. For tasks perceived to be safety or quality critical, the use of procedures was high (75% and 80% respectively) but by no means universal. For problem diagnosis (regardless of whether a system was safety critical or not) only 30% of the respondents used procedures. In the case of routine tasks, only 10% of the respondents said they used procedures. When a task is described as ‘proceduralised' there is an implicit assumption that the procedures will actually be referred to when performing a task. However, the results of the survey indicated that even in tasks where procedures were said to be used, only 58% of the respondents actually had them open in front of them when carrying out the task These figures imply that the actual average 'on-line' usage of procedures for safety/quality critical, problem diagnosis and routine tasks is quite low, i.e. 43%, 17% and 6% respectively

That's pretty low!  And even when the procedures were referred to, they were generally taken as being advisory guidelines

Another dimension assessed by the study was the extent to which procedures should be regarded as being guidelines, or needed to be followed 'to the letter'. Although there was considerable agreement that safety and quality instructions should be followed 'to the letter' (90% and 75% respectively) for most other categories of task about 50% of respondents believed that they were primarily guidelines. This came as a considerable surprise to the management of the companies included in the survey.

Now it might be assumed that for routine tasks, people did not refer to procedures because they could remember them perfectly. Alas this is not the case

The results indicated a very high usage of 'Black Books' by both operators and managers (56% and 51% respectively). Although there is no reason in principle why such informal job aids should not be compiled by individuals, their existence suggests that there may be considerable variation in the way that tasks are actually performed. There are obvious implications for quality critical operations if some of these variations in performance do not achieve the required objectives.

So people don't refer to company procedures, but they do refer to their own personal version in their own black book. Some of the reasons for this are shown below.

Procedures are not used because. (percentage agreeing)
Accuracy

• they are inaccurate (21)
• they are out of date (45) 

practicality

• they are unworkable in practice (40)
• they make it more difficult to do the work (42)
• they are too restrictive (48)
• too time consuming (44)
• if they were followed 'to the letter' the job could not get done in time (62)

optimisation

•  people usually find a better way to do the job (42) 
• they do not describe the best way to carry out work (48)

Presentation

• it is too difficult to know which is the right procedure (32)
• they are too complex and difficult to use (42)
• it is difficult to find the information you need within the procedure (48)

Accessibility

• it is difficult to locate the right procedure (50)
• people are not aware that a procedure exists for the job they are doing (57)

policy

• people do not understand why they are necessary (40)
• no clear policy on when they should be used (37)

Usage

• experienced people don't need them (19)
• people resent being told how to do their job (34) 
• people prefer to rely on their own Skills and experience (72)
• people assume they know what is in the procedure (70)

So the procedures are innacurate, are not the best way to do the job, are difficult to follow or find, and people don't understand why they are needed, son instead they follow their own noses.

The way around all of this is pretty obvious, namely to involve the workers themselves in the creation and update of the procedures, and then to make them as user-friendly as possible. In other words, work with the operators to create the procedures from the black books themselves, and then apply a system for continuous improvement.

The old story about the knowledge sharing system applied at Xerox arose from a situation exactly as described in the article. Here there was a company manual which everyone was supposed to follow. Unfortunately it was wrong, out of date, and ineffective. The technicians kept two sets of manuals - a clean set to show management, and a set full of their own scribbles and annotations which was effectively their own "Black Book". Eventually Xerox introduced communities of practice, who took ownership of developing, applying and continuously improving their own procedures.

REAL men and women WILL follow procedures, provided they are involved in creating and improving those procedures in the first place. That's when they know that they are REAL procedures!

Knowledge is ....

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Brilliant picture from Flickr. Mouse-over for details

5 key lessons in Knowledge Management

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Happy New Year

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As a new year dawns, I wish a Happy and Successful 2011 to all readers of this blog