The Learning Maniac Pledge at WD40 - an example of how to set cultural expectations for learning and sharing.

Described in a Harvard Business School article from 2016, here is the pledge that WD40 staff take to commit to organisational-wide sharing and learning. 

This is the Learning Manic Pledge; part of WD40's "tribal culture".

The pledge is as follows:

I am responsible for taking action, asking questions, getting answers, and making decisions. I won’t wait for someone to tell me. If I need to know, I’m responsible for asking. I have no right to be offended that I didn’t “get this sooner.” If I’m doing something others should know about, I’m responsible for telling them.

This is a really great way to give permission, and set the expectation, that people will ask, learn, and share as part of the culture, and as a daily habit. 

In the video below, WD40 CEO, Garry Ridge, explains how this pledge is used to decentralize the responsibility for accountability and learning out to the employees within the organisation. Also see the way he talks about "learning moments" as opportunities to improve. 

KM and culture - interview with Dana Tessier on her recent book

 Culture is one of the major issues with KM implementation, as we have discussed regularly on this blog. A recent book, edited by Dana Tessier, throws new light on this topic, as discussed below. 

The book is entitled "Organizational Culture Strategies for Effective Knowledge Management and Performance" and can be ordered here. Use the code IGI50 at checkout for a 50% discount. 

I discussed the book with Dana, and our discussion is below. My questions are in bold.

Hello Dana; tell me about yourself, and how you came to edit this book? 

"I am a KM practitioner with over 10 years experience with a master's degree in Library Science from McGill University where I specialized in knowledge management. I happened upon the field of KM somewhat accidentally and I became fascinated by it and have always looked for opportunities to contribute to the community by sharing lessons learned and best practices, and this book is no exception. I began working on the book in the summer of 2020 and so while I was researching and preparing my proposal, the world was still reckoning with the Covid-19 pandemic and organizations were having to figure out how to operate in a rapidly changing environment. Many organizations needed to move to a remote and distributed way of working to keep people safe and this was straining their ways of working, and I began to see a rising need for KM. So the work felt very relevant to the time, and was also inspired by my own understanding and processing of how organizations were changing and what we needed to do to adapt". 

Why did you choose this particular topic? 

"While studying KM and implementing it, I became fascinated at how processes and procedures would be successful in one organization, and then completely fail in another. I started researching why this was happening and that is when I noticed how big an impact organizational culture can have on a KM strategy and I wanted to do more research in this area. I found that often organizational culture is one chapter within a book about KM, and for this book, I wanted organizational culture to be the through line". 

Tell me about the people you involved, and why you chose them?

"The authors are academics and KM practitioners from around the world with experience in different industries like technology, engineering, manufacturing, finance, and more. They were able to include stories about government agencies, public and private companies, as well as from small, emergent teams to large, complex organizations. It was important to me to include a variety of voices and experiences so that we could look at the problem from different angles and develop a broad and deep understanding of potential solutions. Just to mention a few of the authors;  Colin Furness - a professor at the University of Toronto - authored two chapters, one with Anindita Bose, and one with Dr. Chun Wei Choo.  Ian Fry has over 50 years of IT experience spanning many different sectors and organizations, and his chapter on lessons learned included several real-world examples from his work.  Leland Holmquest is currently the Communications and Change Management Lead at Microsoft, and I met while presenting on the same panel at KM World in 2016.  Leland wrote a chapter on Motivation. Kathleen Cauley & Kristy Popwell are my team members at Shopify and they authored a chapter about our experience replacing our internal wiki. Both are accomplished KM practitioners who hold Master's degrees in Information Studies from McGill University".

What new things came out from the book? What did you learn from the contents about KM culture, that you did not know before? 

"Organizational culture is the through line of this book, and each chapter looks at knowledge management strategies and best practices through the lens of organizational culture. While there are different ways to observe culture, one that stands out to me is celebration. What an organization chooses to celebrate, and how they celebrate can provide some great insight into their culture and what they value. A great way to integrate knowledge management into a culture will be by celebrating its activities and outcomes. 

"Also Leaders are incredibly important when working with organizational culture because employees will look to them for what behaviours they model, and they can easily reinforce behaviour change by what they reward. Renée López-Richer and Caroline Thompson wrote a chapter about the Knowledge Leader as a multiplier by leveraging findings from Liz Wiseman's book The Multipliers. This chapter provides some great insight for how leaders can effectively engage in knowledge management, and how they can encourage their teams' mindsets and behaviours which will be critical to influence the existing culture of the organization. 

"Also Rick Nucci and Steve Maynerick shared several best practices for creating a knowledge-driven culture in their chapter and this included several real-world examples from some great organizations. What I found especially helpful in this chapter is that it includes a maturity model so that organizations can understand where they are currently sitting and identify some critical next steps so they can continue their journey. While shifting cultures can be difficult, by identifying the current state and an appropriate next step, organizations are more likely to make a successful transition".

Were there common themes in the chapters? 

"Once I received all the chapters, I actually completely re-organized my plan for the order of the chapters and organized them into people, process, or technology. Without trying, I found that naturally the authors' findings were fitting into one of these categories. In the People section, the chapters focus on personal motivation, trust, leadership, and other interpersonal behaviours and structures to promote successful knowledge management. In the Process section, the chapters focus on methodologies for both implementing knowledge management strategies, as well as facilitating ongoing knowledge transfer and use. For the Technology section, these chapters focus different methodologies and tools, and the book ends with a case study about Shopify's lessons learned from rebuilding their company-wide wiki and is a great example of bringing together the different learnings from each section as they used the people, process, technology model as a way to set up their project team for success". 

What sort of consensus can you derive for the book about the best way to address cultural issues in KM? 

"The first most important thing is not to ignore organizational culture. I know a lot of leaders who want to move fast and in the face of all the disruption we are experiencing right now, they need to move fast. But you cannot ignore culture forever - it will catch up with you and impact your results one way or another. It is difficult to change culture and it takes time, and so understanding how to work with the existing culture, and make nudges to it over time is a great strategy unless there is a lot of executive and top level support for a bigger change strategy. Next, it is very important for the people impacted by the strategy to understand what is in it for them, and ideally, the tasks and activities being requested of them should help make them more successful within their role. Once people feel that sharing and using knowledge is critical to their success within the organization, they can hopefully be leveraged to solve other cultural issues as they come up".

 Who would you recommend this book for? 

"This book will benefit KM practitioners, business leaders, educators, and students. KM practitioners will be better equipped to build and implement KM strategies that effectively navigate culture and are more successful as a result. Business leaders will learn about the benefits of learning organizations and the different elements needed to deliver their intended outcomes. Educators will benefit from a rich discussion of knowledge management practices that includes real-world examples, and ultimately that will benefit students learning about knowledge management. This book furthers critical research on how organizations can thrive and adapt due to emerging global disruptions, and this will benefit the fields of information science, knowledge management, and business".

Thank you Dana

The 5 key skill areas for a KM implementation team

Here are 5 key skill areas you must not ignore when putting together your Knowledge Management implementation team. You need to have all of them on the team.

Image from wikimedia commons

You know the four enablers of People, Process, Technology and Governance? What we call the four legs on the KM table?

These four areas should be reflected in the people and skills you choose to drive Knowledge Management implementation.

KM covers the area of overlap between IT, HR (or Learning and Development), Organizational Process and Management, and so the KM implementation team needs a blend of people who can cover these areas. So we need the following skills on the KM implementation team, plus one more skill as described below.

People Skills
If the aim of the KM team is to introduce new behaviours and practices to the organisation, they will need people skilled in training, coaching, mentoring and facilitation. It may be useful to have someone on the team with an HR, training or business coaching background. Get some facilitation training for whole team as well.

Process skills
The team need experience and skills in the operational processes of the business.  The KM team should contain people with good and credible backgrounds and skills in each major organisational subdivision. This is really to establish as much credibility as possible. When members of the task force are working with business projects, they want to be seen as "part of the business", not "specialists from head office who know nothing about this sector of the business". They have to be able to "talk the language" of the business - they need to be able to communicate in technical language and business language. They act as Best Practice champions within their area of business, and when the working task force is over, may take a leading Knowledge Management role in their subsidiary.

Technology skills.
The KM team needs at least one person who has strengths in the details of the current in-house technology, understands the potential of new technology as an enabler for knowledge management, and can help define the most appropriate technologies to introduce to the organisation.

Governance skills.
Finally the Km team needs a person who can look at KM from a high level - who can understand how it fits into the governance systems of the organisation, and who can work at a high level to introduce the policy changes and the governance systems that are vital to the long term survival of KM. This person can be the KM team leader, or even the executive sponsor.

Change Management skills

Even if you have the 4 skills areas that map to the legs on the table, there is still one more skill area you need - Change Management. The knowledge management implementation task force has a hard job ahead of them, changing the culture of the organisation. They will be working very closely with people, often sceptical people, and they will need very good influencing skills. Look for people with skills as change agents and influencers. Also the early stages of implementing knowledge management are all about raising awareness, and "selling" the idea. The KM team needs at least one person who is skilled at presenting, communicating and marketing/selling KM. This person will also be kept busy raising the profile of the company's KM activities at external conferences. 

If the KM Table has 4 legs, then make sure there are people on the team with enough skills to look after each leg, to  make sure your final framework is sturdy and sound, and then add one or more people who are skilled in fostering Culture Change. 

Incentivising Knowledge Management; lessons from NASA

Here is insight into how NASA tackles the issue of incentives and motivation for KM behaviours.

 

Image from wikimedia commons

Incentives and motivation has long been a topic on this blog. 

Here in Knoco we believe in intrinsic motivation rather than motivation through rewards or prizes, preferring to use recognition, peer pressure and management expectation to bolster the behaviours of people sharing and seeking knowledge and to reinforce that it is the "right thing to do". 

This is partly based on experience of what works, and partly on a belief that people generally come to work in order to do a good job, and in the hope they will be recognised for doing a good job. Knowledge Management therefore needs to be presented as "part of doing a good job", that people should be proud of doing.

Here is a story which shows that NASA takes a similar view; namely avoiding extrinsic rewards and focusing on that "sense of doing the right thing". The story comes from a CKO newsletter from 2016 where Michael Bell, the Chief Knowledge Officer at NASA Kennedy Space Center, tells us this:

"Experience has shown that using games and offering material rewards to encourage knowledge sharing in organizations can have serious downsides. Paying people a bit of cash for sharing their expertise or entering them in a lottery for gift certificates can seem to trivialize the essential activity of collaboration and even be seen as an insult to professionals who take pride in their work. And games with prizes sometimes tempt people to try to “game” the system. Offering cash for lesson submissions often means that quantity goes up and quality goes down. And one NASA center that tried giving cash for contributions to the lessons learned repository found many attempts to cheat the system".

Instead NASA focuses on using a common sense of purpose and a desire for social interaction within Communities of Practice as driving forces for Knowledge sharing and seeking.  This story is a great example of how such intrinsic motivators operate.

"Recently the Morpheus project manager came to Kennedy Space Center from Johnson Space Center to share lessons learned. Morpheus is developing a prototype lander that can land and take off vertically. The PM shared some technical lessons but really became passionate when he shared the lessons learned about how he communicated the project’s risk profile to stakeholders and senior management. He described how he was successfully able to “fail forward” because of the rapport he established with his stakeholders even within a NASA culture that is risk averse and under a 24-hour-a-day media microscope. My impression was that he was spreading the good news with the hope of making the agency better—a goal that the audience shared".

 So, tempting though it might be to offer money, prizes or badges to incentivise knowledge sharing, please think twice. Think how prizes may be gamed, and how badges may trivialise something which is far more important, namely a shared sense of community and purpose. 

 The NASA article ends with this note of recognition that things could be improved still further, and that you need to incentivise knowledge seeking and re-use as well.

It is possible we do not yet put enough emphasis on sharing knowledge with others and seeking the best knowledge from others. An employee once told me, “I don’t recall anyone being recognized for looking at a lessons learned.”

So if you want to use incentives to start to support KM behaviours and culture, position KM as something which is good to do, which is part of a good job, and which supports the community and purpose of the organisation. Then recognise, publicise and acknowledge the people who do it. This is far more powerful than prizes and cash.

2 questions that show KM is broken

The two questions in this little conversation are evidence of a broken KM culture or system.

It's the sort of conversation most of us have had at some time on our lives. In this conversation we can see evidence of a missed opportunity to share knowledge ("I could have told you...") which had negative consequences ("... it wouldn't work").  

This is what we call the "Cost of Lost Knowledge", and the elimination of such consequences is the primary value that Knowledge Management will deliver.

Why was this opportunity to share missed?

Firstly there was no supply of knowledge ("Why didn't you tell me?"), and the knowledge manager exploring such a Lost Knowledge Incident would want to explore this lack of supply. Did the knowledge supplier not want to share? Did they not know how to share? Or did they not even know they were supposed to share? Either they were unwilling to share, unable to share, or unaware of the need to share (these are the three main barriers - lack of willingness, ability or awareness).

Secondly, and perhaps more fundamentally, there was a lack of demand for knowledge ("Why didn't you ask me?"). Again, this needs to be explored - was the knowledge seeker unwilling to ask (they didnt want to appear stupid), unable to ask (there was no system in place for asking for knowledge) or unaware that asking for knowledge was a sensible and expected behaviour.

If you know why the transfer did not happen, then you can address the awareness, the willingness, and the mechanism, and ensure that the sort of conversation shown here never happens again.

If this conversation reminds you of your organisation, and you would like help sorting it out, give us a call.  We can help.

5 steps to KM culture change

There are 5 generic steps to go through when introducing a Knowledge management culture. These are as follows.

1. Define the culture you want to develop. Don't define it in woolly terms - "we want a knowledge sharing culture" - but define it in terms of the attitudes and behaviours you wish to become the default within the organisation (culture can be seen as a set of default attitudes and behaviours). These might be things like

• People are open about their successes and failures 
• We welcome new knowledge, whatever the source
• People feel valued for how well they learn, rather than what they already know
• People’s default behaviour is to share knowledge with others 
• Collaboration gets you noticed and is rewarded, etc. 

2. Measure the culture you currently have. Again, measure specific beliefs, attitudes and behaviours. Measure leaders and knowledge workers alike. Measure what people think about their own behaviour, and what they think about the behaviour and attitudes of others. Use focus groups and/or surveys. We have a KM culture survey which we can run for you, if you like, which measures 10 dimensions of a KM culture.
    
3. Identify the main gaps between the existing and desired attitudes and behaviours. What are the main behaviours and attitudes you want to address first?
    
4. Identify what is causing those gaps. Focus groups will help you here. Look at factors such as 

• The reward, recognition and bonus scheme
• The messages leaders give
• The stories people tell
• The reasons why people get promoted
• The organisational policies (for example information security)
• The layout of the building
• etc

5. Address these factors in order of priority.

• Revise the reward and recognition scheme so knowledge seeking and sharing are rewarded rather than individual heroics
• Revise the bonus scheme in a similar way 
• Give the leaders new messages
• Tell new stories
• Promote different people
• Change or clarify the organisational policies. 
• Write a KM policy.
• Change the office layout if needed.

We can help you with this if you like - contact us to find out more about our KM culture services.

7 cultural barriers to KM, and how to break them

There are many cultural barriers to Knowledge Management implementation, and all of them can be broken

Break Through by Joel Bombardier on Flickr

There are several cultural elements that can stand in the way of successful Knowledge Management. Some of these barriers are listed below, with thoughts on how they may be successfully overcome

Knowledge is power

Despite the real meaning of the term, "knowledge is power", as used nowadays, is the barrier where people fear that sharing knowledge will harm their status. Instead, help people realise that sharing knowledge increases collective power, that being generous with your knowledge helps their status, and that accessing the knowledge of others makes them more effective. Tell them stories like this one to show that hoarding knowledge actually decreases your power and influence. 

Not invented here

"Not invented here" is a symptom of an unwillingness to learn, and there is absolutely no point in creating the best knowledge sharing system if your organization has a learning problem. Set people challenges that they can't solve using solely their own knowledge; drive the desire to learn by pushing them out of their comfort zone. Make sure leaders set the example by not having to have all the answers themselves. Redefine “here”, so “here” could mean “this community” or “this company”, not just “this team”. Then outlaw NIH completely.

Building empires

This is a result of rewarding internal competition, which means that people build silos for personal security and reward. Focus instead on building communities which cross-cut organisational divisions, on removing all incentives for internal competition, and on bridging the silos. Build bigger tribes, and empires that cross the silos.

Individual work bias/Local focus

Here people are incentivised solely by their own contribution, which disinentivises sharing with others. Promote and reward work in teams and communities, and show how this gives better results

Fear of "not knowing"

This is the Knower v Learner issue. Here people are unwilling to look for knowledge from others, in case they appear personally incapable. Help people realise that it is better to look widely for solutions that to rely on your own personal store of knowledge, and that the wisest person asks the most questions. Address the knower behaviours, and turn the knowers into learners.

Penalising errors

Help people learn that mistakes are OK so long as you learn from them and share that learning, and so long as you are not repeating someone else’s mistakes (or even worse, repeating your own). Introduce a just culture, and provide "rubber rooms" where sharing knowledge from mistakes can be done in safety.

No time to share

This is the "busy trap" in KM. Very often people say "we don't have the time for Knowledge Management".  But in fact, it's not a question of time, it's a question of priority. Capturing and sharing and resusing knowledge needs to be seen as part of the job, not an add-on, and just as much a priority as many other management aspects of the way we work.

For an in-depth analysis of the cultural barriers at your organisation, and for further guidance on how to remove them, contact us.

How to introduce a KM culture? You probably already know!

Many client organisations ask us "how do we promote Knowledge sharing and learning to become part of our culture"?  I tell them that they probably already have the answer to that question.

Culture change model from wikipedia

Knowledge Management is probably not the only culture change program they have been through, and "sharing and learning" is not the only cultural trait that they want to promote. They have probably already introduced, and are promoting, a culture of one of the following:

• Safety
• Quality
• Diversity
• Customer service
• Financial prudence
• or some other cultural trait important to the organisation.

Knowledge Management therefore has an internal cultural change model from which to learn.

Therefore my suggestion for answering this question would be to look at activities that support and promote any existing positive culture in the organisation, and then find out a) how they were introduced, b) how they are sustained, c) how (with hindsight) they could have been done better, and d) how Knowledge Management can learn from this.

One of the key tenets of KM is "learning before doing", and learning about how to effect internal culture change is core knowledge for the KM team.

Find the people involved in previous cultural initiatives in your organisation. Talk to them. Hold a Peer Assist with them. Ask

• How do you promote a culture of Safety?
• How do you promote a culture of Quality?
• How do you promote a culture of Diversity?

Learn the lessons from their success or failure. Learn what they did, and what they wish they had done. Learn how behaviours associated with the safety culture/quality culture/diversity culture have been changed, set, embedded and sustained.

Then apply that knowledge to your Knowledge Management Implementation initiative.

Awareness, willingness, ability: the 3 main challenges to KM

There are three main classes of challenge to introducing KM. We can call them Awareness, Willingness, and Ability

Mountain challenge
Cresta route, Ben Nevis

The awareness challenge can be summed up as follows

The people who have the crucial knowledge, are often unaware that they have it, unaware how valuable it is, unaware who needs to know it, and  unaware that sharing knowledge is something they should do.

The people who need the knowledge are often unaware that they lack it, unaware that they need it, unaware that it exists already, unaware of who holds that knowledge, and unaware that seeking knowledge is something they should do.

The willingness challenge can be summed up as follows

The people who have the crucial knowledge, are unwilling to share it. They fear that sharing knowledge will cost them time and effort, and may in some way disempower them. If the knowledge is gained through trouble or failure, they may be unwilling to admit to this, or discuss it. If the knowledge is gained through success, they may be unwilling to appear as if they are "showing off".

The people who need the knowledge are unwilling to look for it.  They fear that admitting a need for knowledge makes them look incompetent, or they prefer the fun of creating the knowledge for themselves. They are unwilling to say "I don't know - please help me".

The ability challenge can be summed up as follows

The people who have the crucial knowledge, are unable to share it. They don't know who to share it with, where to put it, or how to share it. They don't know, or don't have, the tools, processes and roles to help them. 

The people who need the knowledge are unable to find it.  They don't know where to look, who to talk to, or how to search. They don't know, or don't have, the tools, processes and roles to help them. 

To address these challenges, you need to 

• make the case for KM and raise the awareness, for example through a communication program;
• analyse and address the cultural aspects behind any unwillingness, through culture based initiatives or just good governance; and 
• introduce a framework of roles, processes and technology which provides the ability to seek and share.

Once you have addressed these three challenges, KM will be an easy journey

6 things Knowledge Management can learn from Safety Management

I often argue that safety management is a good analogy to knowledge management. Here are 5 things KM can learn from safety.

Image from wikipedia

Safety management and knowledge management are close analogues. 

Both are management systems focused on intangibles and on behaviours. The main difference is that introducing safety management, especially in industries such as engineering and construction, has been widely successful. Introducing knowledge management has been much more hit-and-miss. 

There is therefore a lot that KM can learn from safety management, for example the 5 things below.

1. Behaviour change and culture change are possible.

The success of safety management relies on a change in attitudes towards safety among employees and contractors. The attitude has to change from "there are always risks, we can't really be safe, it's up to me how much risk I can personally accept" to "all risks can be minimised, we should really be safe, it's up to me to help improve the safety of the whole organisation". The fact that safety cultures are now widespread in many industries shows that a culture change like this is possible.

The KM culture change is a similar change in attitude, from seeing knowledge as something personal, to seeing knowledge as something that affects the whole organisation. If we can change the safety culture, then we can change the knowledge culture. Safety gives us a culture-change blueprint we can follow.

2. Leaders and senior managers need to be strongly involved in the behaviour change.

Safety culture goes hand in hand with safety leadership. Leaders are "the keepers and guardians of the attitudinal norms". A safety culture starts with leadership; leadership drives culture, which in turn drives behaviour. Management support encourages accountability and the recognition that safety is everyone’s responsibility.  Without the support of leadership, the safety culture is temporary.

The same is true for the Knowledge culture. Management support encourages accountability and the recognition that knowledge is everyone’s responsibility.  Without the support of leadership, the knowledge culture change will be temporary.

3. Intangibles need a management system or framework.

Wikipedia describes a safety management system as

...a businesslike approach to safety. It is a systematic, explicit and comprehensive process for managing safety risks. As with all management systems, a safety management system provides for goal setting, planning, and measuring performance. A safety management system is woven into the fabric of an organization. It becomes part of the culture, the way people do their jobs.

There are many such systems in place in different industries, and most of them contain elements such as the ones below

• Policy policy
• Organisational roles, responsibilities and accountabilities
• Processes for identifying, reporting and fixing safety risks (processes such as Hazids, near miss investigations and so on) investigation and audit)
• Audits and measures.

As far as KM is concerned, you could replace the word "safety" with "knowledge" in the wikipedia text above and it would make sense (if you remove the word "risk).  KM, like safety management, requires a system or a framework (I prefer the term Framework as "knowledge management system" is often interpreted to mean an IT system). The knowledge management framework would even contain similar elements - a KM policy, KM processes, KM roles, KM measures and audits. We might add "KM technology" as technology has more of a role to play in KM than it does in safety management. 

4. Even when the behaviour change is implemented, you can't relax.

Safety culture needs to be sustained. You don't eliminate the Health and Safety department once your safety record has improved, and leaders don't stop asking for accident statistics once they feel "the job is done". The safety job is never done, it requires constant vigilance, otherwise the culture can revert to how it was before.  Even when safety accountabilities are embedded within the projects and departments, there still remains a safety function, accountable for the safety management system itself.

KM will need a similar accountable sustaining function, even when the KM framework is fully embedded. We cannot assume that the KM team will do themselves out of a job - the job will never stop. At the very least they will need to pass the job on to someone else.

5. For the management system to really drive culture change, it needs to affect people's careers. 

Part of the reason why the safety culture has taken hold so well is that for many organisations, safety has become a non-negotiable.  If people do not behave safely, they know their job is at risk. The safety policy is a mandatory document, and compliance is mandatory.

Knowledge management may need to take the same hard line. We already see this in some organisations. The first words in the NASA KM policy are "compliance is mandatory". And as Bob Buckman wrote, "The people who engage in active and effective knowledge sharing across the organization should be the only ones considered for promotion."  If we believe that KM adds big value to our organisation, then KM should also become a non-negotiable.

6. You can even use similar metrics.

The primary difference between the two disciplines is that safety is more visible and more measurable. This makes it easier to implement. However we can even start to learn from the way safety is measured, which is through the reduction of safety incidents such as "lost time" incidents (when someone loses work hours through injury) or "near misses".  We can start to look for lost knowledge incidents, where people should have had access to knowledge but didn't, and so repeated a mistake or ignored a proven practice. We can even look for knowledge near misses, where someone found a critical piece of knowledge, but only by luck or chance. If we can eliminate these, then we have implemented successful KM, as well as adding value to the organisation.

So there are 6 ways in which you can treat KM like you treat safety management. Hopefully you can get KM to succeed in the same way as safety.

Why incrementalism doesn't work for KM change

Incrementalism will not work as a way to introduce Knowledge Management. KM is a mindshift - a giant leap - not a series of small steps.

One giant leap by Vivobarefoot on Flickr

Incrementalism is a method of working or changing by using many small incremental changes instead of one giant leap. Logical incrementalism implies that the steps in the process are sensible, and together each small step makes progress towards large change.  It is a preferred approach in many organisations, because it doesn't upset the status quo too much.

But Knowledge Management has to upset the status quo!

The status quo in most organisations is that the value of knowledge is unrecognised, people treat knowledge as personal asset not a valuable corporate asset, and knowledge work is not seen as "real work".

This status quo generally results in knowledge mismanagement.

I have already talked about the culture leap for Knowledge Management - the 8-inch shift from "Knowledge is MINE" to "Knowledge is Ours". This is a jump across a chasm, a polar switch in attitude, not a series of shuffles from one state to another.  Knowledge Management cannot effect this culture change in incremental steps, it requires a paradigm shift.

We see the same effect in our Bird Island exercise. People build a tower, and then start to think how they might improve the tower. They think, they discuss, they conduct after action reviews, and decide that next time, their tower could be 20% higher. They think they can improve incrementally.

Then we show them a picture of the World Record tower, which is often 3 or 4 times the height they have managed. They realise that a big leap is needed, not a series of little steps. As one of our participants said:

"That's the difference between the top learners and the rest: it will take the incrementalists all eternity to catch up with the best learning organisations. A shift from an incrementalist standpoint is quite a fundamental shift"

The "top learner" takes learning from everywhere any anywhere - from other people, other companies, and from records from the past. They challenge their thinking, they throw away their design if its unsatisfactory, they have open minds and they welcome challenge. That's where we see the giant leaps in performance in Bird Island - with performance increases of 300% or 400%. This is true also in KM implementation.  we need a giant leap, not baby steps.

So if we can't use incrementalism, how then do we effect the KM change?

We effect change through standard change management techniques.

• Make the case that the Status Quo is unacceptable. In the Bird Island game, this is done by showing how pathetic the current performance seems against World Class performance. In the organisation, this is done by showing the unacceptable costs or risks of lost knowledge.
• Show what the future will be like. Present case studies of embedded Knowledge Management where true value is being delivered. Show how people treat knowledge as a really valuable asset, and how they work differently as a result.
• Find someone who "gets it" (your first follower) and work with them to pilot KM in one small part of your own organisation.  Capture your own case study.  
• This pilot is a big leap in a small area, as opposed to incrementalism, which is a small change over the whole company. 
• Communicate the success from the pilot. Use this as social proof to find the second follower, and the third.
• Communicate, communicate, communicate.
• When you have a big enough body of proof, use this to gain senior management support for roll-out.
• Communicate, communicate, communicate.  Recognise the good performers. Publicise their successes. Continue to show the others what the future will look like. Coach, support, cajole, encourage.  Roll out KM area by area, business problem by business problem, department by department.
• Embed KM, so the culture does not change back.

Big changes don’t happen incrementally, they happen dramatically through choice or by circumstances.  Knowledge Management is a big change in culture, and you cannot get there through small incremental steps.

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

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

Image from wikimedia commons

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

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

 As Abrashoff says

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

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

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

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

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

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

What does data tell us about the link between national culture and KM?

A few years ago I compared published cultural dimensions for various countries against a proxy measure of KM maturity. This blog post repeats that analysis with more recent, and more complete, data. 

One of the most famous (although controversial) studies of national culture was by Geert Hofstede. Hofstede looked at the culture of IBM employees of different nationalities, dividing that culture into 6 dimensions.

• Power distance -  the extent to which the less powerful members of organizations and institutions accept and expect that power is distributed unequally.
• Individualism - The degree to which individuals are integrated into groups
• Uncertainty avoidance - a society's tolerance for uncertainty and ambiguity
• Masculinity - The distribution of emotional roles between the genders
• Long-term orientation - societies' time horizon.
• Indulgence versus restraint - The extent to which members of a society try to control their desires and impulses.

There are published data for  these dimensions for a wide range of countries, and I used the dataset available here. 

There is no comparative study of the KM maturity of countries, but this blog post has a proxy measure, by looking at the number of knowledge managers listed on linked-in as a proportion of the total linked-in population from that country. So for example we can assume that KM in the Netherlands, with 249 knowledge managers per million people on Linkedin, is more mature than it is in Brazil, with 25 knowledge managers per million Linkedin users. 

We can therefore use the linked-in proportion in the blog post quoted above as a rough ranking of KM maturity, and cross-plot it with the Hofstede dimensions for a number of countries.  The resulting plots are shown below.

Each point on the following plots is a single country. A linear trendline has been calculated, and the correlation coefficient R2 is quoted for each plot.

There is a reasonable negative relationship between Power Distance and KM maturity ranking, with an R2 of 22%. Those countries where there are more knowledge managers (and therefore KM can be deemed to be established) tend to have lower Power Distance. We might expect this. Lower Power Distance means greater empowerment, which is a great enabler of KM.

There is a reasonable positive relationship between individuality and KM maturity, with an R2 of 21% (above). The countries with strong individuality tend to be more at the top of the KM ranking list in terms of KM people on linked-in.

There is no evidence of any significant relationship between uncertainty avoidance and KM maturity, and the trendline has an R2 of 0.02% (above)  

There is even less relationship between masculinity and KM maturity (above), with an R2 of 0.017%

There is potentially a very weak positive relationship between Long Term Orientation and KM maturity (measured in the proportion of poeple on LinkedIn with KM roles). R2 is 2.6% (above).

There is potentially a very weak positive relationship between Indugence/Restraint and KM maturity (measured in the proportion of poeple on LinkedIn with KM roles). R2 is 5% (above).

Conclusion

There must be many caveats to this blog post, but with the crude data we have it seems as if the countries with the highest KM maturity, measured by the percentage of KM post-holders on Linkedin, are potentially those with lower Power Distance and high Individuality.  Any correlation with the other 4 Hofstede dimensions is much weaker. 

The reason for this correlation is not clear, and correlation does not imply causation. However you could argue that KM is both more necessary and more powerful in  country of empowered individual knowledge workers.

If this is true, then we could use the Hofstede dimensions of Power Distance and Individuality as a rough indicator of the relative difficulty of establishing KM. 

Internal competition - the KM-killer

If Knowledge Management is like gardening and the knowledge manager is like a gardener (see here to understand the metaphor), then Internal competition is like a late frost that kills all your green shoots. 

Frosted by Lauryn on Flickr

There is no point in planting the seeds of Knowledge Management and protecting the first shoots of knowledge sharing, if the company incentive scheme has large elements of internal competition, which will just freeze your efforts dead.

Companies often encourage internal competition as an incentive to drive performance in a company. They might set up "salesman of the year" schemes, to encourage personal sales effort with big bonuses, or they might give awards and recognition to the factory that produces the best output.

But why would one sales executive share knowledge to help another, if that just meant that their bonus was more at risk? They wouldn't. They would hoard their knowledge for the competitive advantage it gives them. And the poor salesperson at the bottom of the pile - the one who needs to learn the most - finds nobody who will help them.

Why would one factory share knowledge with another, if they are in competition? They wouldn't. Or if they did, they would be very clever about it.

We worked with a company trying to introduce Best Practice sharing between a number of factories who competed for an annual “factory of the year” award. The company decided to make “best practice sharing” part of the award criteria, with each factory required to submit a quota of best practices. The wily factory staff waited until just before the award deadline, then issued all their best practices in one submission (most of them poor quality); early enough that they counted towards the award, but so late that none of their rival factories could benefit from reusing the knowledge. Internal competition therefore trumped knowledge sharing.

The knowledge manager needs to address this issue, and can do so in two ways, firstly by protecting the first shoots of KM behaviour against the Internal Competition frost, and secondly by making the case for eliminating internal competition.

The first approach - "protection" - involves ensuring that your early KM pilots and proof of concept exercises are not in areas where internal competition is an issue. Find a part of the business where the different business units can benefit from knowledge sharing, but where they are not in competition. If the factories compete on output volume, then perhaps they could collaborate on energy use, or on quality.  If the sales staff compete on sales volume, perhaps they could collaborate on customer retention.

The second approach comes once you have data from the pilots and proof of concept exercises which shows the value that KM can bring. Then you make a business case to senior management that there is more value in collaboration than in internal competition, and that all competitive efforts should be turned towards the competition, not towards other colleagues.

 Instead of incentivising one plant if it increases production, you incentivise all plants if all plants improve. Say you have 10 plants, which together produce 1 billion tonnes. Why not give ALL plant managers the target of reaching a collective total of 1.2 billion tonnes, with a handsome bonus for all of them if they collectively achieve it?  This is the "T-shaped Manager" approach used at BP, which was based on T-shaped incentives.

Why not give all the sales force the collective incentive of increasing sales by 10%? That would be a fantastic way of driving collaboration, because now it is in the interest of the strong performer to improve the results of the poor performer. The strong performers become mentors and coaches and guides.  Once company we worked with gave every salesperson in a team the same sales target, with a bonus for everyone if they all exceeded their targets. The good salespeople delivered their targets early, then spent time coaching and helping the poorer performers to increase the overall performance of the team.

Replace the KM-killing frosts of Internal Competition with the warmth of internal collaboration, and all will be well in your KM garden.

Which comes first - Knowledge Management or culture change?

It's the ultimate chicken and egg situation. KM requires a supportive culture, yet how do you develop the culture without doing KM?

Should you wait for the culture to change, and then start your KM initiative, or should you start your KM initiative knowing you have to battle against the culture?

The Knoco global surveys of KM tell us that Culture is the second biggest barrier to KM implementation, and the second most common reason for abandoning KM.  There is no doubt that the existing culture can strongly infuence your KM efforts, and ISO 30401:2018, the ISO management systems standard for KM, says that

"A culture where connections and knowledge activities are encouraged, and knowledge is valued and actively used, will support the establishment and application of the knowledge management system within the organization".

However Knowledge Management is also a culture change agent. The graph below, also from the Knoco surveys shows how the number of cultural barriers decreases the more Knowledge Management becomes embedded.

So we have a "chicken and egg" situation. Culture is a barrier, culture can derail your KM initiative, but the more embedded KM becomes, the more the barriers come down. 

How then do we introduce KM? Do we start with the chicken, or wait for the egg?

The answer is that we introduce KM as a culture change exercise.

• First we perform a KM culture audit, so we understand the barriers.

• Then we look for small areas of the business where the cultural barriers are weakest and/or the need for knowledge and KM is strongest, so that the balance is tipped in our favour, and we make these our KM pilot areas. 

• We introduce KM in the pilot areas, deliver success, deliver value, than use these success examples in our communication and change program as "social proof". These pilots are our cultural "first followers" or "thin threads"; the equivalent of the first wave of penguins off the ice floe (see video here). 

• Then you repeat the last step as many times as it takes for the new culture to catch hold, recruiting your second followers, third followers and so on.   

• At the same time, you lobby your sponsor and steering team to begin to remove the institutional barriers to the new culture such as the recognition and reward scheme, the internal security barriers, and so on.

The answer to the "chicken and egg" is that you don't wait for the culture to change. You make a start, and change the culture as you go. Buy a pair of chickens, lay some eggs, make more chickens, and before long you have a whole chicken farm.

Use the power of KM to change the culture, and use the culture change to deliver KM.

Contact Knoco if you need help with your KM culture change

How benchmarking and KM make a powerful combination

One of the main barriers to knowledge transfer and re-use is complacency. Benchmarking (internal and external) can help remove this complacency.

Not invented here Bingo, by Ramon Vullings on Flickr

One of the biggest barriers to overcome in Knowledge Management is a lack of desire to learn from others, and therefore a lack of demand for knowledge re-use. You can create the best communities of practice, the best knowledge bases, you can publish all sorts of ideas and knowledge, but if nobody is interested in this knowledge, you have wasted your time.

Some of the phrases you will hear from those complacent people who are not interested in knowledge, are shown in the "Not Invented Here" bingo card to the right.

Behind the reluctance to re-use is the "Not Invented Here" syndrome, and behind "Not Invented Here" are two things

1. People are comfortable and familiar with their own performance, and with the way they currently do things
2. Change involves risk and effort. "If my way works" they think, "why risk changing it? Why change horses in midstream? Why ditch a perfectly good approach, for something unfamiliar?"

The way to break this cycle is to help people realise that "my way" is not the best way, and that the improvement they would get outweighs the effort and change. And the best way to help people realise this, is to show that others are already doing better. In other words, to use benchmark data. 

Benchmark data helps people out of their comfort zone

We see this very very clearly in our Bird Island exercise, where people were comfortable building an 80cm tower, and think they might be able to stretch it to 120cm. Then we show them benchmark data where the record is over 3m, the mean is 285cm, and even a bunch of American lawyers achieved 250cm. And we show them a picture of the record tower, so they can see this is not a joke.

What happens, is that the people are shaken out of their comfort zone, They realise their own performance was pretty poor. They become very open to learning. And they DO learn, and in the next round of tower building they also turn in a top quartile performance.

I also have a story from the Peruvian asparagus trade, which tells how publishing data about aircraft loading procedures among Peruvian asparagus producers motivated the poor performers to learn from the good performers, for the benefit of all. The authors of the study I quoted claimed

Objective proof of superior performance helps overcome a principal barrier to
convincing experienced professionals to adopt new practices - that is, the
belief that they are already doing the right thing and that their current
results are the best that anyone can expect

The great thing about good performance data, and good benchmark data, is that people then often come to realise that their approach is not "perfectly good", that their way may "work", but it works pretty badly. They become uncomfortable with their own performance, and become open to learning. "Not Invented here" disappears, because they realise that "Invented Here" is not actually very good!

The driving forces here are two-fold - embarrassment at current poor performance, and competition - to get up there with the leaders. The old motivation, to be safe and secure with a known approach, is replaced by a new motivation. The new motivation is "To do a decent job". (And they often feel that if they are being soundly beaten by a group of US Lawyers, or if they are loading Asparagus in 10 hours when others do it in 4, they aren't doing a decent job!)

When you think about it, most people are professionals. They have pride in their work. They don't like to put in a poor performance.  So the existence of benchmarking data or performance data makes people aware if their performance is bad, they become dissatisfied with their approach, and are open to learning something better, hence creating a market for knowledge, and an incentive for re-use.

Benchmark data

• Shows you your poor performance, and that you need knowledge;
• Shows you which knowledge you lack;
• Shows you who does it better.

KM without benchmarking can backfire.

KM without benchmarking is difficult, as there is no objective way to tell which knowledge is better. Therefore, as we have argued, there can be a big supply of knowledge (everyone thinks their own way of doing things is best) but no demand for knowledge (everyone thinks their own way of doing things is best). Therefore, despite much KM activity, there is no impact to the organisation, as everyone merely reinforces what they are already doing. 

Benchmarking without KM can backfire

The key here is to combine benchmarking with two other things; Knowledge Management and collective target setting.

If you just say to people "other teams are doing this twice as well as you - I want you to be able to match this performance", this could be met by demotivation. People think "we are working our butts off - how can we do this twice as fast? Those other teams must have better managers, or newer equipment, or we working in an easier market".

Instead you need to say "other teams may have some secrets we can apply here which would allow us to catch up with the winners. Let's learn from them, and let's see how well we think we would perform if we used the best of the best ideas"

Benchmarking and KM are mutually supportive. As the classic book "Benchmarking: A tool for continuous improvement" says;

"If you want to maintain the status quo, then don't benchmark. If you want to remain where you are, secure in the knowledge that you are doing the best that you can, don't benchmark. If reality checks are not your cup of tea, don't benchmark. Benchmarking will open an organization to change, and to humility. Benchmarking provides the stones for building a path toward competitive excellence and long run success."(McNair and Leibfried, 1992).

Pair the drive to change (benchmarking) with the ability to learn (KM) and you have the recipe for long term success.

Cultural barriers to KM - updated

Which are the most common cultural barriers to KM? How do these barriers change with KM maturity? Which parts of the world have the most cultural barriers?  

These are some of the questions we addressed in our recent surveys of Knowledge Management. The results from the 2014 survey are presented in a previous blog post, and this post includes results from the 2017 survey as well.

 First we provided the respondents with a list of the top ten elements of an Organisational Learning culture, and asked them to identify which of these elements was currently a barrier to the implementation of Knowledge Management. The graph above shows the results, with the numbers being the number of people who identified this element as a barrier to their KM program. A total of 473 people answered the question.

The greatest cultural barrier to KM is short-term thinking - hurrying on with work rather than taking the time to learn before, during and after.  The second most common barrier is a lack of openness - a lack of willingness for people to be open to knowledge sharing and to analysis of what they have learned.  These two barriers are significantly more common that the others, and the same two were in top and second place in the 2014 survey.

Respondents could choose multiple cultural barriers, and to an extent, the number of barriers chosen is a measure of how supportive or unsupportive the culture is.

The number of cultural barriers identified by the respondents is on average fewest (and the culture therefore most supportive) for those companies where Knowledge Management is fully embedded.

This graph may be interpreted in three ways; either KM is easy to embed where the culture is most supportive, that embedding KM requires culture change, or that embedded KM acts to change the culture.

This issue is further explored in the third graph, which shows the average number of cultural barriers identified from respondents from different regions (note that the numbers of respondents are small in some cases).

The most supportive cultures for Knowledge Management seem to be in Australasia and the Indian sub-continent, with the least supportive cultures in Africa and China. The USA and Western Europe sit somewhere in the middle.

KM and Hansei, where "no problem" becomes a problem

Effective learning within an organisation requires consistent and rigorous self-analysis, in order to pick up learning points and points of improvement. In Japan, this process is known as Hansei.

Hansei, by Jim O'Neil, on Flickr

Although alien to many in the west, Hansei is an important part of the Japanese culture. Han means “change” and Sei means “to review”, so the whole thing means “introspection” or “reflection for the purposes of change”.  This translates into a behaviour , instilled from childhood, of looking for mistakes, admitting responsibility, and implementing change.(When Japanese children do something wrong, for example, they are scolded and are told: hansei shinasai - Do hansei!).

Hansei can become very public, as the footage of the crying Toyota CEO shows. As a response to poor safety performance, the CEO admitted responsibility, apologised, promised change, and wept - behaviour lauded in Japan but deemed strange in the West. In the West we would probably avoid responsibility, deny the mistake as "fake news", and insult our detractors.

Hansei is at the heart of Kaizen - the "learning from experience" approach seen in Japanese industry. It may part of the reason why Japanese companies succeed so well at Kaizen as a core component of Knowledge Management, while other cultures struggle. Where a European company might see lesson-learning as a witch-hunt, for example, a Japanese company would see it as a way to put right the embarrassment of self-acknowledged failure. Where a US company might fear a blame culture, Hansei means that individuals already accept any blame and if they fear anything, they fear the lack of ability to make restitution.

How do we develop Hansei?

In non-Japanese cultures we have not been brought up with Hansei. Seeing our leaders accepting full responsibility for mistakes and sincerely, with emotion, promising change is something exceedingly rare (name me one example!).  However this is a behaviour we would dearly love to promote at work, so that mistakes are not hidden, but lead to learning and change.

So here are six things we can do to begin to develop Hansei behaviours.

1. We can understand the current culture, and recognise the barriers. One of the 10 cultural barriers is defensiveness - an unwillingness to take responsibility and examine your mistakes. Our cultural assessment service allows you to see whether this is a major barrier in your own organisation.

2. We can build reflection into the work process. After Action Review, for example, is a Kaizen activity that can be embedded into the working pattern, to trigger reflection and change on a regular basis.

3. We can adopt no-blame learning processes. The Retrospect is widely recognised as a no-blame lesson-learning process for use at the end of projects or project stages. The open questioning within the Retrospect gives people the opportunity to examine what went wrong, and to suggest how this might be improved.

4. We can ask the team leader to set the tone. If we are concerned about lack of openness in a Retrospect, we can work with the team leader before hand to identify an area where they can openly admit to making a mistake, and explore how to avoid this happening again. When the leader sets the tone, the rest of the team may follow.

5. We can ensure all learnings lead to action. We must make sure that everyone present in a Retrospect or After Action review can see that their admissions, introspections and lessons will lead to action. Lessons will not just rot away in overstuffed databases, but become embedded in changes to process. Knowing that your mistakes can be turned into successes for others can make Retrospects into something like group therapy. This is the positive outcome of Hansei.

6. We can become intolerant of complacency. Another of the 10 cultural elements, complacency is the feeling that "we did alright, there was no problem, we don't need to change anything".  Here is what the Toyota website says about "no problem":

"Even if a task is completed successfully, Toyota recognises the need for a hansei-kai, or reflection meeting; a process that helps to identify failures experienced along the way and create clear plans for future efforts. An inability to identify issues is usually seen as an indication that you did not stretch to meet or exceed expectations, that you were not sufficiently critical or objective in your analysis, or that you lack modesty and humility. Within the Hansei process, no problem is itself a problem".

This type of thinking - where "no problem" is seen as symptom of a lack of introspection and a lack of analysis, and something to challenge rather than to feel smug about - may be what separates the  true learning cultures from the also-rans.