How Covid has affected KM in organisations

A month ago, I opened a survey to investigate how KM has fared during the pandemic and associated recession. Here are the results.

We conducted the last of our three triennial Knoco Global Surveys of Knowledge Management in 2020, and these reflect the state of KM in organisations prior to the pandemic. So we decided to conduct an additional survey in April/May 2021 to investigate how the pandemic affected the state of KM in organisations, and also how KM supported these organisations.

The 2021 Covid Survey was released through Twitter, Linked-In, this blog, and also direct emails to respondents to the 2020 global survey. A total of 83 responses were received. 

Not all respondents answered every question, as respondents who reported that their KM program had been closed down were not required to go on to answer questions investigating changes to the KM program. Please note that no demographic data were recorded from respondents. However 59 responses were previous respondents to the 2020 survey, where we had already recorded a suite of demographics. This will allow some further analysis at a future date.

Continued existence of the KM program

The first survey question covered the continued existence of KM programs during the Covid period. 6 options were offered, and the proportion of responses to each option is shown below. 

In the vast majority of cases, the KM program either remained the same, or expanded. Only in 6% of cases had the KM program had been cancelled or put on hold, and 5% reported a contracted program. 

Despite all the difficulties Covid has brought to various industries, organisations and businesses, KM has largely survived as a function, and often increased in scope.

KM budget.

Although KM continues, has the level of investment remained the same? The responses are shown below.

In the majority of cases (58%), the KM budget remains unchanged. There are roughly equal segments where the budget has increased (16%) and decreased (19%). Given that, in the previous pie chart, only 5% of respondents reported a contraction in the KM program, then in some cases the KM program must have continued with less money. Also the 46% who reported an expansion of the KM program is not matched by an expansion in budget. So although KM continues, it seems KM professionals are often being asked to contribute more. 

 Continuity of KM roles.

Given the continuity of KM programs, it is no surprise to see continuity of KM roles. Very few respondents have left their KM programs, and only 3 people out of the 83 surveyed reported losing their KM job during the pandemic. Although the loss of these three jobs will have been a huge issue to the people involved, it seems in general as if there has been a reassuring level of role continuity during Covid.

However it must be acknowledged that the survey sample set is biased in favour of people who remain in KM employment, are still answering email addresses linked to the 2020 survey, and are still following KM blogs and twitter feeds. The true percentage of people who have lost a KM job due to the pandemic and associated recession may well be higher than the 6% recorded here. 

Whether KM was easier or harder during the pandemic.

For those respondents whose KM programs continued during the pandemic, the next series of questions looked at how the programs changed. The first of these questions addressed whether KM had been easier or harder during Covid-induced lockdowns and remote working. The pie chart below shows that respondents were roughly even split between those who found it harder, those who found it easier, and those for whom there was no difference.

 

We asked respondents what had made KM easier/harder. 

There was a wide range of responses from people who had answered that it was harder. The most common theme was the relative difficulty of remote KM interaction compared to face-to-face. Other themes included a reduction in ad-hoc knowledge sharing, the general overloading of staff during the pandemic, and the need to learn new skills. 

 There was a smaller range of responses from people who had answered that it was easier. The most common theme was the fact that remote working exposed a need for KM and that there was therefore a wider recognition of its value. Other common themes were improved (remote) access to people across the organisation, and easier collaboration. 

 Changes in focus for KM

Respondents were asked whether the focus of their KM program had changed. Answers are shown below. About half said there was a slight change in focus, a quarter said a significant change, and a quarter reported no change in focus.



Participants were asked what new work items had been added to the KM scope. 31% reported no new work items. The most commonly reported new work items were collaboration, digital transformation, expansion within the organisation, and delivery/facilitation of online events. Other than these, there was a very wide range of new items, each mentioned by very few people.

Participants were asked what old work items had been removed from the KM scope. 77% reported no removal of old work items, which perhaps continues the theme of KM programs expanding and doing more, albeit not always with more budget. The most commonly reported removed work item was the facilitation of face to face events.

How else has KM changed?

Again there was a range of responses to this question, and the free-text responses from the respondents were grouped into themes as shown in the pie chart below. As you might expect, the most common theme reflected the move to online/virtual working, but other responses include an increase in demand for KM, a contraction of KM in those organisations where the budget reduced, and a reorganisation of KM.

The final question asked how KM has supported the organisations during the pandemic. 

Again, free-text responses from the respondents were grouped into themes as shown in the pie chart below. 

The most common benefits KM has provided to their organisations have been the provision of knowledge to staff working remotely - both generic knowledge, and knowledge of the Covid response itself - and support for new ways of working - remote working, use of collaborative tools, and collaborative behaviours. 

Summary

I think that the responses to the survey, as shown in the graphs here, demonstrate that Knowledge Management has stepped up and played a significant and valuable supporting role to organisations during the Covid pandemic. 

This supporting role has generated an increased understanding and demand for KM, which meant that KM programs generally have not suffered significantly but have often expanded in reach and scope, if not always in budget. KM has had its challenges (new ways of working, the difficulties of remote knowledge sharing, a loss of the ad-hoc opportunities for knowledge exchange), but has also found some things easier, like better access to staff, easier virtual collaboration, and a greater level of organisational support. 

The pandemic has been KM's time to step forward, show its value, and support people and organisations through an astonishingly difficult time. Let's hope we can continue to build on this role as we move towards a post-Covid world. 

Is Covid-induced remote working exposing Knowledge Management problems?

The surge in remote working triggered by Covid lockdowns is exposing the need for Knowledge Management, especially when it comes to tacit knowledge.

Image from wikimedia commons

That is the argument of an interesting article from the Irish Times entitled Covid taking a toll on companies’ reservoir of workplace knowledge, which claims that remote working during Covid has not harmed short term productivity, but has stifled longer term innovation.

The article is based on work by Prof Claire Gubbins from Dublin University, which compares what's happening during the pandemic with  knowledge loss after the 2008 recession. According to Gubbins;

“We know that between 70 and 90 per cent of learning in the workplace occurs through what people experience on the job and informally. This is because 90 per cent of the knowledge on which performance in real-world settings is based is tacit knowledge or knowledge that is not on paper or in manuals, but embedded in people’s heads. 

"During the post Celtic Tiger recession, organisations lost vast amounts of this tacit knowledge and suffered noticeable consequences. What’s happened (now) with remote working is that people with valuable tacit knowledge are no longer co-located and there is no informal access to the traditional social interactions at work that enable sharing and thus learning. Tacit knowledge is central to organisational competitiveness. Without it they suffer.”

The article also draws on a study by Microsoft (which they do not reference) which suggests that workplace productivity has not suffered due to remote working, but that innovation has suffered. Professor Gubbins relates this to the lack of informal tacit knowledge transfer when people are isolated at home.

“These findings are not surprising because innovation is grounded in social interaction and a combination of tacit knowledge sharing and new learning. The statistics show that formal training cannot replace that which is learnt informally and with increased remote working, social distancing in the workplace and fewer people in the office, the opportunities for these learning behaviours have been significantly reduced. Organisations need to be aware of this".

This of course is a tough situation. The informality of being side-by-side or face-to-face with a co-worker cannot be replicated at home. Interactions have to be mediated by technology, and have to become more planned and formal. Tacit knowledge transfer becomes something which has to be more planned and structured.

They key must be to program in these more social and tacit interactions, even if it is just a morning online catch-up which can spin off into side conversations. I certainly find I have my best conversations after scheduled zoom calls, when a couple of people stay on the line and chat. However there may be other approaches, for example:

• providing newer staff, who do not have wide networks to call on, with defined mentors who can check in with them on a regular basis;
• building communities of practice;
• rationalising the channels for knowledge sharing, so people are not confused which channel to use;
• appointing KM focal points in teams and departments, who can act as knowledge brokers.

The key is to recognise the risk, and do what you can to mitigate it. 

Lessons learned in Emergencies

 In the video interview below with  Santhosh Shekar, my Australian colleague Ian Fry talks about lesson learning in the Australian emergency services, both on the recent Bush Fires, and also during the Covid pandemic. He also shares his thoughts on ISO 30401:2018; the ISO management systems standard for KM.

Quantified KM value story number 142; 7-figure increase in sales revenue from simple knowledge sharing meetings

 HBR have published a case study showing the impact of simple structured knowledge sharing meetings. 

Although the article is entitled "how virtual teams can better share knowledge", the study was held using face to face knowledge transfer meetings, pre-Covid.

The study attempted to test whether incentives or structure were more important drivers of knowledge transfer. The researchers worked with 3 groups of sales staff;

• The first group were incentivised to improve their sales performance by working in pairs, but without providing and structure to the knowledge transfer.

• The second group were not given any incentives, but were provided with a structured knowledge transfer approach, where each of the pairs created a "self-reflection" worksheet which was then shared in the pairs to identify knowledge which could be shared, and the pairs were then encouraged to interview each other.

• The third group were given the same structure AND incentives as well. 

The study claims that 

The second and third groups realized a 24% increase in sales productivity, on average, during the four weeks that the meetings took place. Worker pairs who only received explicit incentives (group 1) saw a 13% lift in performance during these same weeks.

Several months later, workers who participated in these meetings averaged 18% higher sales production than those who had not. By contrast, the group that received incentives alone had no long-term gains.  The greatest beneficiaries of the meetings were employees who had been paired with high-performing peers. 

"Over the 24 weeks that we tracked sales data, the firm realized a 7-figure (>$10 million)  increase in revenue among those who participated in the guided meetings. The implementation cost was less than $15,000".

They also conclude that the role of management is to ensure that reflection and knowledge transfer is expected and structured by creating "opportunities and directives" within routine work. 

KM and Covid - an overview (video)

 Courtesy of Patrick Lambe, please find below my video related to KM and Covid, presented at the ISKO singapore meeting on KM and the Covid Crisis

ISKO SG KM and Covid Event - Nick Milton from Patrick Lambe on Vimeo.

Why simple rules are important in KM

How do Simple Rules help share or prompt knowledge in a complex world?

Image from wikimedia commons

Donald Sull and Kathleen Eisenhardt's book "Simple Rules: How to Thrive in a Complex World" describes the development of what we might call heuristics, or "rules of thumb" as simple ways to guide behaviour (see an excellent review here).

As they define them, simple rules refer to “a handful of guidelines tailored to the user and the task at hand, which balance concrete guidance with the freedom to exercise judgement.” These rules “provide a powerful weapon against the complexity that threatens to overwhelm individuals, organisations, and society as a whole. Their simplicity increases the odds that people will remember them, act on them, and stick with them over time ”. They also suggest that "collective action, like the honey bees choice of a nest, can arise from simple rules even when ... no one individual understands the situation in its entirety).

An example of simple rules comes from the initial UK response to Covid - "Stay at home, protect the NHS, save lives". Just one rule really - "stay at home". This later changed to "Stay alert, control the virus, save lives" which was widely criticised as being ambiguous and not helpful. Not simple, in other words.

Here are the simple rules for using simple rules.

1. Simple rules consist of a handful of guidelines applied to a speficic activity or decision
2. Simple rules are tailored to the situations of specific people who will use them, rather than one-size-fits-all
3. Simple rules are most effective when they apply to critical activities and decisions that represent bottlenecks to accomplishing an important goal
4. Simple rules give concrete guidance without being overly prescriptive

I think another rule might be to ensure the simple rule does not become a "motherhood". I heard a really interesting story recently, and the "rule" the teller drew from it was "when you run out of planned solutions, you need to think aboutside the box". This I would suggest is a truism or a motherhood, rather than anything particularly helpful.

Simple rules are used by experts all the time as a shorthand for knowledge, and in Knowledge Management terms, a community of practice can co-develop their own "simple rules" as a shared framework for sense making and decision making. Experts can also identify and share the simple rules they use unconsciously, as a way of sharing knowledge with less experienced staff. As the billionaire Charlie Munger described -

If you’ve got a full list of tools [simple rules], and go through them in your mind, checklist-style, you will find a lot of answers that you won’t find any other way". 

Some of these rules - the most robust ones - can be written down in the form of external checklists, and the checklists used by surgeons and pilots represent a set of shared rules, built up from years of safety analysis, which allow them to perform their jobs effectively and efficiently.

 Other simple rules can be used as a framework for mentoring more junior staff, by providing them with a set of ways to think about a problem. Charlie Mungers mental checklist could be used as the basis for training or coaching aspiring business people, but will certainly need the presence of the trainer or coach for the knowledge to be effectively transferred.


Sometimes simpler is better.

Sometimes its best to develop and discuss  in your communities of practice, until they are fully internalised, the simple rules that give concrete guidance, and then leave further details up to the individuals.

Here are some examples of simple rules from the book

 Surgeon General WWII triage rules:

1. Sort into following categories
Stable vital signs: Green
Unlikely to survive even with heroic medical intervention: Black
Badly injured (a shot at survival, but only if they receive immediate attention): Red Others: Yellow
2. Give those with black tag palliative care
3. Treat the rest in the order Red, Yellow, Green 

 HF rules for investing in Yeltsin Russia:

1. Have revenues of $100 million to $500 million
2. Compete in an industry in which we have previously invested
3. Offer products the typical Russian family might purchase if they had an extra $100 to spend per month
4. Work only with executives who know criminals but are not criminals themselves 

Loeb's stopping rule:

If an investment loses 10 percent of its initial value, sell it 

Donald Sull's bouncer rules:

1. Don't let trouble in the door
2. Stay sober until the last patron leaves
3. Double up for heavy metal, ska and punk bands
4. Keep the bikers on your side 

 Lobby's sports commentary how-to rules

1. set the scene;
2. describe the action;
3. give the score or results, regularly and succinctly;
4. explain, without interrupting, the stadium's reaction to the game's event;
5. share "homework," such as historical facts and figures or personal information;
6. assess the significance of the occasion and key moments 

 US Forest Service how-to rules

1. start an escape fire in the path of the advancing fire if possible;
2. go to where the fuel is thinner;
3. turn toward the fire and try to work through it;
4. don't let the fire choose the spot where it hits you 

Google hiring rules:

1. look for eccentricity;
2. look for strong referrals from other Google employees;
3. avoid anyone with even the smallest inaccuracy on their resume

Napoleon's "coordination" rule:

"march toward the sound of gunfire" 

Note that these rules leave a lot of room for further judgment, but help rapidly guide decision making in a complex environment.

Does Covid-induced remote working expose the need for knowledge management?

I was asked last week whether Covid-induced remote working promotes KM. I don't think it does yet; but the opportunity exists to make KM part of the New Normal.

Image from tradoc.army.mil

Firstly let's recognise what the response to Covid has delivered, namely a "burning platform" to drive digital transformation. Organisations under lockdown can no longer work the way they used to, with paper reports and face to face meetings. Suddenly remote working is the norm, as are shared files, and digital documents. Digital transformation is no longer an option but a neccessity, and this has short-circuited the need to drive behaviour change and adoption. Covid  itself has driven adoption.

But does this mean that suddenly knowledge is being managed as never before?

I don't think it does, or at least not yet. It offers new potentials for knowledge management, for sure, but remote working and digital transformation are not enough to deliver knowledge management. Let me explain what I mean.

An organisation that cares about an asset (and for the purposes of the Knowledge Management discussion, we will look on Knowledge as an asset) will talk about that asset. They will talk about knowledge, track knowledge, identify knowledge gaps, create new knowledge, combine knowledge into new solutions, and above all, will discuss it.

The bulk of the conversations I have seen online during the lockdown have been team conversations talking about work. Progress reporting, assignment of tasks, prioritisation etc.  Very little about knowledge. I have heard of one online knowledge cafe, but no online peer assists or after action reviews. I am sure online knowledge-focused discussions have happened, but my impression is that these are rarer than before, not more common. In other words, the work delivery stream has been digitally transformed, but the knowledge delivery stream seems not to have benefitted, and potentially has suffered. People are working differently, but they still don't seem to care much about the asset that is Knowledge. 

The Covid-induced digital transformation holds the potential for enhanced KM, which then holds the potential to deliver more of the value that digital transformation makes possible. However we (the knowledge managers) still need to do some work!

• Now people are used to remote working, lets broaden the conversations. Let's not just talk remotely about team progess, lets talk about lessons we have learned, what knowledge we need to build, what knowledge we need to gain.
• We can talk around the world now - so why just talk with your own team? Decide what knowledge you need, and find the people in the world who have that knowledge. Let's talk with other teams, and share our lessons with them. Let's learn their lessons in return. Digital transformation makes these conversations possible, but we have to make them happen.
• Let's talk with (or form) the communities of practice. Once we know what knowledge is important, let's find the poeple who are working with that knowledge, get together and share experiences. Compare solutions, build better practices. 
• Now we are moving to digital documents, let's think beyond the concept of project work and project deliverables. Let's make sure we have a knowledge stream with knowledge deliverables as well. 
• Let's make sure the roles are in place to manage the knowledge work streams, and build and curate the collections of knowledge products. Now we have gone digital, these digital collections can add huge value, so long as the knowledge products are created, organised, synthesised, owned and managed. This takes resource, but adds huge value. Covid won't make it happen, but  Covid-driven digital transformation makes it far easier.

In many ways, Covid has handed Knowledge Management an opportunity, but the opportunity may well get lost under the pressure of "normal work",  for those organisations which do not see KM as part of "normal work". Our work as knowledge managers is to change this perception, and harness the benefits that enforced digital transformation has offered.

If we can make KM part of the post-Covid "New Normal", then the possibilities are endless.

 

The important lesson for KM from Covid-19 - knowledge is not enough

The current Covid-19 pandemic allows us to compare how different countries are responding to the emergency. However according to a recent article, any variations in response should not be blamed on a lack of knowledge, or a lack of management of that knowledge.

Covid Equipment to GeorgiaFrom IAEA image bank via flickr

Having knowledge, and applying that knowledge, are two different things. There is often a gap between knowing and doing, and this gap is certainly apparent in the current global crisis.

This week's issue of New Scientist magazine contains a section entitled "We knew how to prevent a pandemic like covid-19, so what went wrong? which explores this Knowing-Doing gap. Many of the conclusions are also applicable to Knowledge Management in organisations.


So what knowledge do we have about pandemics?

• We know there will be another one. Pandemics (or at least PHEICs -  Public Health Emergencies of International Concern) are frequent. Since 2007 we have had 6 of them; Swine Flu, polio eradication setbacks, Ebola in 2014 and 2018, Zika virus, and Covid-19. We don't know when the next one will be, where it will start, or how it will behave, but we know it's coming very soon. 

• We have a body to manage knowledge about pandemics - the World Health Organisation (WHO). They maintain a body of knowledge about every pandemic - see their pages on Ebola or Covid for example.

• We had time to respond. WHO declared Covid to be a PHEIC on 30th January, and a Pandemic on 11th March. This should have been enough time for most countries to mount a good response.

• We know how to prepare and respond. We have a best practice document called the International Health Regulations (IHR), to which all 194 nation members of the WHO have signed. This 80-page document, available in 6 languages, deliniates the preparedness needed against pandemics, and the three-fold response strategy - surveillance, interruption of infection chains, and ramping up of prevention and treatment capacity. The IHR also contains detailed preparedness plans.

According to New Scientist, all the world had to do to be ready for a pandemic was to implement the IHR, but concludes "Unfortunately, this is easier said than done".

Why is knowledge not applied?

To explore this question more generally, it is worth reading the book referenced above - The Knowing-Doing Gap. This 2000 publication from Harvard Business School looks at the world of corporate organisations, and suggests several reasons why organisations which know what they should do, often do not do it. Some of these reasons include:

• Internal competition,
• Talking instead of acting,
• Repeating old solutions instead of new ones,
• People are afraid to take risks by acting on knowledge,
• Organisations measure the wrong thing.

The case of Covid shows some of these reasons in action, and maybe points up one or two others. 

The case of Covid

According to New Scientist, the world's response to Covid deviated from known best practice in the following ways:

• There was not enough testing. Early in the pandemic WHO stated several times that countries needed to accelerate testing. Those countries that did, such as South Korea, rapidly contained the virus. Those that did not, saw infection numbers soar.

• There may have been an issue of "recent memory". New Scientist suggests that countries which had been hit by the MERS coronavirus - South Korea, Saudi Arabia, the UAE - responded rapidly to Covid-19. Other countries, unused to recent pandemics, took a lot longer to react.
• The level of preparedness varied widely. The WHO ran a preparedness survey, and found that only 104 out of 196 countries were prepared for the pandemic, and only 38 were at the highest level. There were many examples of lack of preparedness. In the USA, the  government had already disbanded a National Security Council directorate at the White House charged with preparing for pandemics. In the UK, a national stockpile of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) was already seriously depleted. Many of the least wealthy countries were poorly prepared, because preparedness costs money.

• In some cases, according to New Scientist, there was a lot of randomness in government response, quoting one expert as saying "we saw a lot of herd behaviour - governments copying other governments under conditions of huge uncertainty".

Possibly the overriding issue with Covid-19 has been that our knowledge has been partial. Every country has had access to best practice in how to counter a pandemic, but there is no best practice in how to control a pandemic with minimal impact to the economy. Every country therefore has to strike a balance, and determine what actions to take to balance saving lives against protecting the economic future. What that best practice balance will look like still remains to be determined, but it seems likely (and this is my own interpretation here) that those countries with a high level of preparedness and which took swift decisive action in the early stages both saved more lives and shortened the lockdown period compared to countries that were unprepared, or were slow to take action. 

What are the implications for Knowledge Management

The case of Covid shows how important it is to identify for an organisation to identify its critical knowledge, and ensure this knowledge is owned and managed by someone, and available to all who need it. The world has determined that knowledge of pandemic management is critical, has asked the WHO to manage it, and make it available through the WHO website, and many other mechanisms. 

However Covid also shows that making knowledge available is not enough to translate this knowledge into action. The world knows how to contain and manage pandemics, but there are many gaps between knowing and doing.

• There are many obvious examples of international competition rather than international cooperation, with governments blaming each other for the pandemic rather than working together to defeat a common foe. We also see internal competition within countries, particularly where liberal vs conservative parties contest the relative importance of saving lives vs restoring the economy.  The governmental parties not only want to do the right thing, they want to be seen as doing better than their opposition. The same may be true within your organisations. You need to enshrine knowledge into policies and practices that all parts of the organisation should adopt, not allow the different parts to compete over how to apply the knowledge. Internal competition is poison to effective knowledge management. 

• Short-termism is also an issue. Democratic governments are driven by two short term cycles - the news cycle, and the election cycle. Such governments are incentivised to make short term decisions at the expense of the long term, such as the decision to invest in a PPE stockpile or a specialist pandemic advisory team, rather than spending the money on something that will make the evening news. The New Scientist quotes one epidemilogist who calls this a "Panic and forget" strategy - "We are already seeing the Forget phase as we ... shift our resources to economic recovery and awat from protection, detection and treatment". The same is true in organisations and projects, where short term urgent issues can override long term decisions. Knowledge Management can play a part here, by reminding the organisation of the long term cost implications and risk that come with short term decisions. KM can, for example, work with risk management to ensure decisions are made with a full knowledge of the risks and potential consequences. 

• Short-termism is also linked to the Availability Bias (one of many cognitive biases). If you cannot remember something happening, you assume the risk is low. Thats why South Korea, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, with their recent history of MERS, were better prepared for Covid than some western countries, where nobody was really taking the risk seriously, and the Spanish Flu of 1919 was a distant memory. This wishful thinking is a common failing in projects, where a lack of knowledge of what might happen leads projects to be overoptimisitic, and to think "it won't happen to us". KM can help counter this trend through the use of techniques like the Knowledge Gap Analysis, and can also inform the use of checklists and audit analogous to the WHO preparedness survey. I worked with one organisation where project lessons were used to build what was called a "trainwreck indicator" - a measure of how likely any one project was to meet a major "trainwreck". This indicator ensured that all risks were assessed, no matter how remote they seemed.

• If corporate knowledge is not easily available, or not palatable, people will copy each other, much as European governments looked to other European governments to copy (a behaviour known as social proof). However where knowledge IS available, such copying can be counter productive, and people can copy the errors of others. Knowledge Management certainly needs to allow people to learn from each other and to copy good practice through social networks or communities of practice, but this learning needs also to be linked to the establishment, and continual improvement, of a set of common practices (much as the IHR will be updated after Covid-19 is past).

The overall lesson from Covis-19 for Knowledge Management is that knowledge can seriously improve decision making in times of crisis, but just having knowledge available is not enough. 

You need ways to bridge the knowing-doing gap; the policies, best practices, checklists, audits, experts and processes that make sure knowledge from the past is seriously considered when making decisions for the cuture. Luckily this is easier in organisations than in countries. Organisations are smaller, and less politically divided, and leadership is less concerned with the news cycle or the re-election cycle and can prioritise longer term investments over shorter term reactions. Organisations can apply KM as a clear and strategic discipline in a way that nations and continents cannot. 

However the lesson remains - it is not enough just to have Knowledge. There can be a huge gap between knowing how to respond, and putting that knowledge into action. We need to be aware of the factors that create the gap, and the strategies to bridge the gap, if we are to deliver full value from Knowledge Management.