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.

Loss Aversion, and the dis-incentives for KM-based change

The risk of loss of the status quo can be a powerful disincentive for change, and can be a powerful factor working against knowledge management implementation.

There is a very apt quote from Machiavelli (The Prince, 1532), which applies to Knowledge Management as it does to any change initiative:

“There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things, because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new.” 

As Machiavelli points out, the status quo is a powerful factor. Introducing something new, such as KM, disturbs the status quo without yet providing anything tangible to replace it. Sometime in the future Knowledge Management will deliver rewards, but people are always more unwilling to lose tangible benefits in the here and now, in return for potentially bigger but intangible benefits in the future.

This is known as "loss aversion".

Wikipedia tells us that in economics and decision theory, loss aversion refers to people's tendency to strongly prefer avoiding losses to acquiring gains. Most studies suggest that losses are twice as powerful, psychologically, as gains.  This is reflected strongly in Machiavelli's quote.

Implementing KM involves change, all change involves loss, and all loss leads to aversion. Therefore you will make enemies of anyone who sees that they will lose something - power, prestige, profile - as knowledge management is introduced.

Elon Musk, as reported on the Farnham Street blog met a similar loss aversion from the regulators when proposing a re-usuable space rocket.

"There is a fundamental problem with regulators. If a regulator agrees to change a rule and something bad happens, they can easily lose their career. Whereas if they change a rule and something good happens, they don’t even get a reward. So, it’s very asymmetric. It’s then very easy to understand why regulators resist changing the rules. It’s because there’s a big punishment on one side and no reward on the other. How would any rational person behave in such a scenario?"

So how do we tackle loss aversion when implementing Knowledge Management?

• Wherever possible, we make a case for change by maintaining that the status quo is undesirable. Maybe not sharing knowledge, or not learning from others, can be shown to put the profitability of the organisation at risk. Maybe failing to retain knowledge means that in 5 years time the organisation cannot compete.
• Secondly we paint a picture of the KM-enabled future. We do this through proof of concept activity and piloting, so people can see for themselves how KM works, and can hear from their colleagues about the benefits it brings.

These two approaches allow people to re-set the loss aversion equation, by reducing the value of the status quo and increasing the tangibility of the KM future. This makes it safer for people to make the change.

Reasons why you should not incentivise knowledge publishing

Just incentivising knowledge publishing risks drowning the organisation in trivia.

Social media overload
by Mark Smiciklas on Flickr

I once had a conversation with a knowledge manager, who explained to me the incentive system they used for KM. My heart sank. 

In this particular organisation, people were incentivised to publish knowledge. For each article they published they were awarded "points". If someone accumulated enough points, then they could trade them in for a reward.

"Is there any quality control on the publishing" I asked? No, was the answer.

"Do you give points for re-using knowledge?"  "No"

"Do you have a way of combining, or removing, duplicate knowledge?"  "No" 

"Do people have to know there is a demand for what they publish?"  "No"

The result was an ever-expanding supply of poor quality material, with no demand. It made the job of the knowledge seeker infinitely difficult.

This reminded me of another client organisation, which required each person to publish ten items every year.  In an organisation of 100,000 people, that was a million items per year, with no quality control, no filtering, no re-use, no guidance on what to publish; no strategy other than to flood the knowledge base with documents.

Both of these organisations were falling into a common trap;

• incentivising Push (supply of knowledge) and paying no attention to Pull (demand for knowledge), and
• incentivising publishing quantity at the expense of quality.

More knowledge is not necessarily better. 

There are many cases where too much knowledge  is counter-productive, especially where this knowledge is poor quality. 

• A highly populated knowledge base with poor structure can seem like a "needle in a haystack" problem to the user, and adding more hay just makes it worse (see my blog post on "a haystack is no place to store your needle").

• A situation where a user is already bombarded by a "Knowledge firehose" will not be made better by turning up the flow.

• Providing far too many items is less valuable than providing a few simple pieces of knowledge which people can retain in "the heat of battle".

• As I found in another client, a lessons data base which is overly full of poor quality lessons is a frustrating experience for the user. "We cant find what we need, and when we do, its not helpful" was common feedback, and users seldom visited the database a second time. 

• Another client, again rewarding publishing, but with no structure and guidance, was proud to see wikis popping up all over the place, not seeming to see the problem in having 5 competing wikis on the subject of Knowledge Management, for example. 

• Here is another example taken to the extreme, where the amount of publishing created a perfect storm of futile effort which cost far more than it ever saves.

Davenport and Prusak, in their seminal "Working Knowledge" point out that over-volumed knowledge bases do not work. 

"Volume may be the friend of data management" they wrote - "but it is the enemy of knowledge management"

Too much knowledge requires the user - and each user in turn - to  filter the volume of material to find the relevant and timely knowledge, and as the volume increases, the task gets harder and harder, and people just give up. It becomes easier to reinvent the wheel, than to find the correct wheel in a junkyard.

Go for "less and better"

The lessons from these observations are relatively simple, though perhaps counter-intuitive in the early stages of KM.

• Do not incentivise knowledge sharing - incentivise knowledge seeking and re-use instead.

• Incentivise quality (usefulness, utility and demand) of published knowledge, not quantity.

• Introduce a synthesis step, so new knowledge does not accumulate like a snowdrift, but is used to refine what is already known.

• Incentivise people who update the existing knowledge; those who build on the work of others, not people who create new duplicate knowledge.

• Provide a structured just-in-time supply of knowledge for the end user - a knowledge faucet and not a firehose - a lean knowledge supply chain .

Don't incentivise knowledge publication alone - incentivise knowledge development and reuse.

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.

What incentives work for Knowledge Management?

There are a number of ways to incentivise KM, but which ones work?

I blogged yesterday about an article which confirms that financial incentives for sharing knowledge can easily backfire, but which incentives actually work?

We can answer this question with data from the Knoco KM surveys in 2014, 2017 and 2020. One of the questions provided respondents with a list if possible incentives, and asked the participants to rank how powerful they have been in influencing behaviour. The graph below shows the answers (approx 700 people answered the question).

The chart shows these incentives in order of value from left to right, as a stacked bar chart, with the weighted value shown as a blue line (this line would be at 100% if all the participants that used this incentive said it was “very powerful" and at 0 they all claimed it was of no use). The top of the dark grey area represents the usage percentage for these incentives, as the light grey area above represents people who do not use this incentive. The top of the green area represents the percentage of people who said this incentive was "very powerful".

The most powerful incentives are clear management directive for KM, KM embedded within normal job descriptions, a centrally organised recognition shceme, and peer recognition schemes. Finanacial incentives are judged the least useful.

The usage of these incentives increases with KM maturity, as shown below.

Each of the incentives shows a greater level of application as KM matures, with the exception of financial incentives, where usage decreases slightly in the most mature organisations.

We can also look at the how the perceived value of these incentives changes with maturity.

Several of the incentives are judged to increase in power as KM matures, especially the clear management directive, embedding KM in job descriptions, adding KM to exected competences, and the use of peer recognition schemes. All of these represent the embedding of KM within the expected work behaviours.

Monetary incentives, gamification and the central recognition scheme, on the other hand - where KM is incentivised separately - are judged to decrease in power as KM matures, even though the previous figure shows they increase in usage.

The message seems to be clear - incentivise KM as part of the job, rather than incentivise it separately.

"It's not about the money" - why financial incentives for KM dont work

On the topic of  incentives for Knowledge Management, there are some interesting observations in this article from HR magazine in 2004

The article is a high level overview of KM, which although warning that KM is not about technology, still talks mostly about technology solutions (and which immediately equates knowledge management with information sharing). However there is this interesting couple of paragraphs on incentives.

Why incentives don't work in education, by opensource.com on Flickr

Incentives must be used prudently. One international high-tech firm used contributions [to a knowledge base] to determine raises. Just before year-end evaluations, the system broke down with an overload of hastily composed submissions, many of them meaningless. 

There are less expensive and more effective ways to encourage information sharing. For example, 25,000 Xerox field service technicians around the world contribute to the company’s Eureka database of maintenance tips. The incentive is “to become known as a thought leader” or expert in the field, says [Carol Kinsey Goman, president of Kinsey Consulting Services, a human capital consulting firm in Berkeley, Calif]

Sandy Mauceli, a spokesman for Xerox, says: “Although financial rewards were tried by various organizations early in the Eureka program, that generally did not drive the intended result. The motivation for employees to submit Eureka tips is really the recognition by their peers of being able to solve the really difficult problems.”

This reinforces the message that linking financial rewards directly to knowledge publication results in an overload of poor quality material.

I was reminded of this a while ago, where someone from a large company told me of the effect of including the target of "contribute 10 items to the knowledge base" in each employees appraisal. In a company of over 100,000 staff this has led to the publication of a million items every year. With no system of knowledge synthesis, this surge of (usually irrelevant) material has totally swamped the system, with the result that nobody can find anything useful.

Financial incentives may have some merit in the very earliest stages of  KM, but very soon, paying people to publish knowledge will flood your system with trivia.

20 incentives to "swing the KM balance"

People will engage with KM if the benefit to them outweighs the cost. Here are 20 ways to tip the scales in favour of Benefit. 

Balance scale, by winnifredxoxo on Flickr

At a purely individual level, people will decide how to spend their time and energy based on an equation of personal value, namely "what I get out of this must exceed what I put into it, otherwise I won't bother". The same is true for Knowledge Management activities - people will do them if they believe the value outweighs the effort or risk. Our job, as KMers, is to weight the scales on the "benefit" side. This is seldom a conscious decision, and they seldom write the equation on a whiteboard, but it's still there in people's minds.


If we think of the personal value equation as a balance ...

•  On one side of the balance is the personal investment, which will consist of factors such as Time, Effort, Exposure, Change, Peer Disapproval and Management Disapproval.

• On the other side are the personal reward factors which may include More Money, Less Risk, Less Stress, Peer Approval, Sense of Community, Sense of "Doing the Right Thing", Management Approval, Formal Recognition, the Chance to be Heard, and the Chance to Make a Difference

The corporate culture, and the personal and organisational incentives, can help swing this balance.

Incentives that swing the balance

Lets think about some of the incentives for people to seek knowledge before starting a new piece of work. There are internal incentives, things that drive you from within, and there are external incentives, incentives which management can apply to reinforce the correct behaviour.

Some of the internal incentives for knowledge seeking include

1. Payback -- if people seek for knowledge, and find useful knowledge easily which they can apply to help them in their work, then this is a very powerful incentive to seek again next time.  In fact this is the number one incentive.
2. Curiosity -- some people are much more inclined to look for alternative ideas and new approaches than others. Work with these people in the early stages of implementation. 
3. Familiarity -- if people are familiar with the process for seeking knowledge, the technology to use, or the community to ask, then they are much more likely to do it, so this is where training and awareness raising helps. 
4. Trust -- if people trust the knowledge source, and trust the process of asking for help (in other words, they trust that they will not be ridiculed or criticised for seeking knowledge or asking for help) they are more likely to seek for knowledge. 
5. Habit -- eventually, once the culture is firmly embedded, knowledge seeking becomes a habit - something people do without thinking.

Some of the external incentives for knowledge seeking include

6. Management expectation - people are very good at sensing (and doing) what is expected of them, and management can explicitly set the expectation that people will look for knowledge before starting something new (see "the two questions" management can ask to set the expectation
7. Management encouragement -- management can reinforce the expectation by encouraging, recognising and rewarding the behaviours of knowledge seeking. 
8. Example - people follow the example of others. If they see others successfully seeking knowledge, and being recognised for this, they are more likely to follow suit (see blog posts on social proof). 
9. Mandate - later in the process of embedding knowledge management, or earlier in the process if the softer incentives fail, management can make knowledge seeking mandatory (see how NASA make compliance to their KM policy mandatory).

Lets think about some of the incentives for people to share knowledge after completing new piece of work. This is harder to incentivise than knowledge seeking, because it requires an investment of effort on behalf of others.

Some of the internal incentives for knowledge sharing include

10. Reciprocity -- people are more likely to share knowledge with others when they expect to get knowledge back again at some time in the future (or have already benefited from the knowledge of others). 
11. Pride and recognition -- people are more likely to share knowledge when they are proud of what they have accomplished. They are also more likely to share knowledge if the knowledge “travels with their name on it”. Nobody likes to contribute knowledge which somebody else will claim credit for. 
12. Friendship and Loyalty -- people are more likely to share knowledge when they have built relationships within the community of practice, and feel that the knowledge will be used by people they know, respect and like. 
13. Altruism -- let's face it, some people are just naturally more helpful, and more willing to share what they know, than others. Work with these people in the early stages of implementation.  
14. Habit -- eventually, once the culture is firmly embedded, knowledge sharing becomes a habit - something people do without thinking.

Some of the external incentives for knowledge sharing include

15. Management expectation -- management can set the expectation that people will capture and share knowledge after a significant piece of work (see the two questions again). 
16. Example - people follow the example of others. If they see others taking time out to capture and share knowledge, especially from projects that may not have gone well and where there may traditionally have been a reluctance to "wash dirty linen", they are more likely to follow suit (see social proof again)
17. Management encouragement -- management can reinforce the expectation by encouraging, recognising and rewarding the behaviours of knowledge seeking. 
18. Recognition - good behaviours in terms of capturing and sharing knowledge can be recognised through awards, through mentions from senior management, or via articles in internal publications. 
19. Rewards - good behaviours in terms of capturing and sharing knowledge can be rewarded through financial or other material incentives 
20. Mandate - management can make knowledge sharing mandatory. For example many organisations are now building the retrospect process into their mandated project management framework (see the NASA mandate again).

Not all of these incentives will be appropriate at all stages of your KM journey.  Start with encouragement, use early successes as examples to drive social proof, once KM is defined, use management expectation, and to cement the culture, if you are serious enough about KM, use mandate.  the more you apply these external incentives, the more people will begin to develop the internal incentives as well.

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.

Forget knowledge sharing, let's encourage knowledge seeking instead

People often ask us "how do we incentivise  knowledge sharing?" I often answer "don't bother. Incentivise knowledge seeking and re-use instead".

I give this answer, because knowledge sharing in itself achieves nothing. Knowledge needs to be sought and re-used before any value has been added, and re-use is often a far bigger barrier than knowledge sharing. The Not Invented Here syndrome is far more prevalent than Knowledge Hoarding.

As an analogue, think of a driver in a car in a strange city, looking for a building which is not on the satnav.  They need knowledge, people on the sidewalk have the knowledge, but why doesn't the knowledge reach the driver? It's usually not because people won't share, but because the driver doesn't ask.

Knowledge needs supply and demand - sharing is the supply, seeking and re-use is the demand. Supply without demand devalues a commodity. Demand without supply increases a commodities value. Supply and demand need to be in balance, but the best way to kick off a market is to stimulate demand. 

Without an appetite for knowledge re-use, knowledge sharing can actually be counter-productive, resulting in the feeling of the "knowledge firehose".  Better to incentivise knowledge seeking first then knowledge sharing later, create the appetite for knowledge before you create the access, and create the demand before you create the supply.

There will naturally be SOME supply already, as there are people who naturally like to publish. They like to share, they like to write, they were given two ears, one mouth and ten fingers and use them in that proportion.  If you create the demand and create the channel, the supply will follow. As David Snowden pointed out,

"In the context of real need few people will withhold their knowledge. A genuine request for help is not often refused unless there is literally no time or a previous history of distrust. On the other hand ask people to codify all that they know in advance of a contextual enquiry and it will be refused (in practice its impossible anyway). Linking and connecting people is more important than storing their artifacts".

Create the need, connect the people, and the sharing will follow.

And how do you create the need for knowledge?  There are a number of ways;

• Managers create a high performance culture, where people are eager to "push the envelope"
• Managers ask the two questions that drive KM behaviour, emphasising the first
• Managers set people challenges that they don't know how to solve using just their own knowledge

So don't incentivise knowledge sharing - incentivise knowledge seeking first. The sharing will follow.

What it really means when people say "I don't have time for KM"

Very often people will say to you "we don't have the time for Knowledge Management". But what does this really signify?

Image by on Paul Downey on Flickr

"We are busy" they might say;  "We have lots of real project tasks to do - we can't take time off for an After Action Review, or a Retrospect or a Community of Practice meeting. That's just another thin to do no top of the day job."

But in fact, it's not a question of time, it's a question of priority. They have time to

• do their timesheets
• prepare reports for management
• attend teambuilding events
• listen to senior management briefings
• attend appraisal meetings
• go to risk workshops
• go to safety workshops

and none of these are any more "real project tasks" than Knowledge Management.

The difference is that these activities are prioritised. They are treated as priority activities; things that it is valid to spend time on. They are seen as part of the day job. Risk, safety, accounting for time, supporting management, building the team, are all priority activities that are part of doing a good job.

So when I hear people say "we don't have the time for Knowledge Management", I know that this really means "we don't prioritise Knowledge Management" and "we haven't made it part of the day job".

If you meet this rebuttal, you need to work on making KM a priority. Get clear on the business driver, and the core purpose of KM, figure out what its worth, and use that value figure to make the case to management that KM should be a priority. Ask management to cascade this downwards. Get them to ask the two driving questions. Get KM into the job descriptions and appraisal conversations.

If people say they have no time for KM, then work on making KM an organisational priority.

3 reasons why people don't share knowledge

A recent article from HBR identifies three reasons why people don't share knowledge. 

Image from meco 6925 on Flickr

There are many reasons why people don't seek or share knowledge; the 3 most basic being that they don't think of it, they don't know how, or they don't want to (Unaware, Unable, Unwilling).

From an HBR article earlier this month, named Why Employees Don’t Share Knowledge with Each Other, comes another analysis, and the identification of three factors which inhibit knowledge sharing.  These are as follows:

People are more strongly influenced by internal incentives (the authors call these "autonomous motivation") than external incentives ("controlled motivation"). Examples of both these can be found in my blog post "20 incentives to swing the KM behaviour balance". We can also see the strength of internal vs external incentives in  Shell's analysis of incentives, and NASA's approach to incentives. This particular issue is related to the Willingness to share. As the HBR authors say:

Our results showed that knowledge sharing is more likely when employees are autonomously motivated (for example, they’d agree with the statements “It’s important to share what I know with colleagues” or “It’s fun to talk about things I know”). In contrast, people are more likely to hide their knowledge when their motivation is driven by external pressures (“I don’t want to be criticized” or “I could lose my job”). This means that pressuring people to share knowledge rather than making them see the value of it doesn’t work very well...  Interestingly, in the Chinese sample, controlled motivation was associated with increased frequency of knowledge sharing but not with greater usefulness of what was shared.

People share more readily if they are involved in Knowledge work (what the HBR authors call "cognitively demanding work"). This is probably more related to Awareness of the need to seek and share, rather than Willingness or Ability. As the HBR authors say;

"Because cognitively demanding work can be more interesting and stimulating, and also more difficult and challenging, we expected that people would both enjoy sharing information more and see a greater need to share. Similarly, because having more autonomy in one’s work leads to finding it more meaningful, we’d expect to see the same propensity for sharing". 

Knowledge work requires knowledge, knowledge becomes a precious commodity, people become aware of its value, and knowledge sharing and seeking emerge as behaviours which drive a knowledge marketplace within the organisation.


Finally, people are less willing to share if others are relying on them. This is counterintuitive. The HBR authors say that;

We expected that if respondents perceived their colleagues to be dependent on them, they would be more willing to share knowledge and less likely to hide it. Much to our surprise, we found the opposite. When people perceived that others depended on them, they felt pressured into sharing knowledge (the controlled type of motivation), and this in turn promoted knowledge hiding. This could be because frequent requests from colleagues created more demands on their time — quite a rare commodity these days. People often chose to prioritize their own tasks over sharing knowledge and even pretended not to have the information being requested.

Notice the assumption in the last paragraph - that "their own tasks" do not include "knowledge sharing". This is a typical factor where KM is not yet treated as "part of the job" and instead is seen as something separate and different. KM is then seen as competing for your time against the "real job" rather than being part of the real job.  This was the sort of thing that Elon Musk was trying to counter in his email of last year.

So the conclusions from this are, for knowledge work, ensure that knowledge seeking and sharing are seen as part of the job, and incentivise them wherever possible using internal incentives - the desire to be recognised, the desire to help, and the desire to do a Good Job.

Two simple management questions that drive a KM culture

KM behaviours can be influenced quite easily by two simple questions from line management

Image from wikipedia

I posted on Monday about "What's in it for me" in KM, and how implementing Knowledge Management relies on identifying the local value. Part of the local value can be driven by the local manager, as "fulfilling managers expectations" is generally a valuable thing for people to do!

It is surprisingly easy for managers to set KM expectations. All they/you have to do is ask two questions.

Who have you learned from?
Who have you shared this with?

Who have you learned from?
 

If you are a leader, then every time someone comes to you with a proposed solution to a problem, or a proposed course of action, you ask “Who have you learned from”?  Through this question, you are implying that they should have learned from others before proposing a solution – that they should have “learned before doing”.

Who have you shared with?

Also, every time someone comes to you to report a problem solved or a process improved, or a new pitfall or challenged addressed, you ask “Who have you shared this with”? Through this question, you are implying that they should share any new learnings with others.

The great thing about leaders’ questions, is they drive behaviour. People start to anticipate them, and to do the learning before, and the sharing afterwards. People hate to be asked these two questions, and having to answer “umm, well, nobody actually”. They would much rather say “we have learned from X and Y, and have a Peer Assist planned with Z”, “We have shared with the A community, and are holding a Knowledge Handover next week with B project”. And once you drive the behaviours, the transfer of knowledge will happen, the value will be delivered, and the system will reinforce itself.

But the moment you stop asking the questions, people realise that you, as a leader, are no longer interested in KM, so they will stop bothering.

There’s an old saying – “What interests my manager fascinates me”, so managers should make sure they are interested, and ask the questions.

KM carrots and KM sticks

Both carrots and sticks are required when incentivising KM behaviour, but each has its time and place.

Image from wikimedia commons

I spent this week at the Asian Development Bank's Knowledge Forum, and (as is so often the case in these events) the topic of Incentives for KM was a frequent point of discussion. Most people agreed that these incentives could be both Carrots and Sticks (rewards for doing KM, and sanctions for not doing it), but there was a lot of discussion on when these should be applied, and what nature they should take.

Here is my view on the topic, including links to the next level of detail and to examples and illustrations.

KM Carrots

A KM carrot is an externally-imposed incentive specifically for doing Knowledge Management. Typical such incentives include:

• Recognition from the organisation, which can take the form of awards, certificates and publicity
• Recognition from peers, which can take the form of "thank-yous", peer-nominated recognition, or status as a "thought leader"
• Knowing that knowledge you have shared or used has "made a difference".  To use this incentive, you need to be able to allow the user to track knowledge from source to re-use, and this was one of the most powerful incentives according to a Shell survey
• Ratings on articles (not a mechanism I personally support for KM)
• Payment for articles. This is very tricky incentive to get right, rewards overproduction, is easy to "game" - see this commentary from NASA. It tends to work only in the short term, and removal of the payment later will result in bad press. It was the least effective incentive according to the Knoco survey.
• Setting people challenges they cannot solve with their own knowledge as a way to drive learning and innovation (tough, but very effective)
• Collective target setting and rewards, rather than individual target setting and rewards.

The problem with KM carrots is that they reward KM separately from the "day job", and so reinforce the idea that KM is something separate from the day job. This is absolutely necessary in the early stages of KM implementation, when KM is something new and not yet part of the day job, but is problematic and counterproductive later.

KM sticks

A KM stick is a sanction against not doing KM, or at least not doing what you were supposed or expected to do in KM terms. Typical sanctions include:

• Appearing at the bottom of a KM league table, especially if this league table is widely published
• A personal communication from management
• Peer disapproval
• Missing out on bonuses
• Not getting approval to progress your project if the KM work is not done (this was how BP incentivised Peer Assists)
• Missing out on promotion.

The problem with KM sticks is that they cannot be applied until people fully understand the minimum expectations for KM, there is a measurement system in place to measure whether they are meeting these expectations, and until they have all the training and resources in place to allow them to meet the expectations; in other words, until they have no excuse. You cannot publish people for not doing something if they are unable to do it or unaware they needed to do it. Therefore the KM sticks come very late in the process of KM implementation. However ultimately this is the best way to keep KM embedded, and is the way that disciplines such as financial management, quality management and safety management are incentivised - you are supposed to do them, and are punished if you don't.

The blended Carrot Stick approach

Once KM is fully embedded in activity, and once people realise that KM is fully integrated with other work, then you should use the normal reward mechanisms such as personal objectives, promotion, raises and bonuses to incentivise all elements of work including KM. This was shown by our global KM surveys to be the most powerful KM incentive of all, but can only really be applied once you have a KM framework fully rolled out across the organisation, including a combination of;

• Clear corporate expectations for KM
• A way of measuring against those expectations as part of measuring performance
• The resources needed to perform against these expectations, including KM training, KM reference resources, and a full set of KM tools, processes and roles
• A performance-related reward and recognition scheme.

If you do KM well, then this is part of doing your job well, and so you gain promotion, raises and bonuses. 

If you do KM poorly, then this is part of doing your job poorly, and so you miss out on promotion, raises and bonuses. 

That's the way to blend the carrot and the stick

What would it take, to get you to share more of your knowledge?

"What would it take, to get you to share more of your knowledge

Image from wikimedia commons

This was a question Shell asked in an internal survey, several years ago, in order to understand the incentives and barriers for knowledge sharing. The top 6 answers were as follows

1. More time 
2. More feedback on use of the knowledge 
3. Recognition from peers 
4. Knowing that it made an impact 
5. An easier way to do it 
6. Thank you from colleagues

What was missing from the list of answers were

• Money 
• Prizes
• Badges
• Hard incentives, and 
• Directives from management. 

If you want people to share, then make it easy, free up some time from them, and give them feedback on the difference it made (including some "thank-you"s)

That "making a difference" piece is important, and sits behind factors 2,3,4 and 6. Make sure this is built into your Knowledge Management system, so people don't feel that they are just dropping their knowledge into a black hole, with no idea of where it's going, or who is benefiting.

If you want people to share more knowledge, show them that it makes a difference when they do.

Expectation, metrics, rewards, support - the KM Governance quartet

Four elements make up Knowledge Management Governance. Expectations, metrics, rewards and support.

Governance in the cloud, by Blue Coat Photos, on Flickr

Governance is often the missing element in Knowledge Management, and although it is one of the four legs on the KM table, it is the one that gets least attention.  This is partly because governance is not easy, and partly because there is no clear published model for KM governance.

Governance represents the things that the organisation does, and the management of the organisation does, that drive the KM behaviours and adoption of the KM Framework. We see four elements to governance - expectations, metrics, rewards and support.

Knowledge Management Expectations.

The first thing management needs to do in terms of governance is to set the expectations for KM. This requires a set of clear corporate expectations for how knowledge will be managed in the organization, including accountabilities for the ownership of key knowledge areas, and the definition of corporate KM standards, KM principles and KM policies. These documents should tell everyone what is expected of them in Knowledge Management terms.

Different departments can then add to these expectations, and individuals with KM roles will have KM expectations written into their job description (see examples here).  Within a project, the expectations are set by the Knowledge Management Plan.  Expectations may also be set using the competency framework.

If there are no clear expectations, nobody will know what they should be doing in KM terms.

Knowledge Management Metrics.

If standards and expectations have been set, then the organisation needs to measure against these expectations. For example, if the corporate expectation is that every project will conduct a lesson learned session, and every knowledge topic has an owner, then you should measure whether this is happening.

There are other types of KM metric as well - see these blog posts for more discussion.

If there are no metrics, then nobody will know what people are actually doing in KM.

KM rewards and recognition.

If you are measuring people's performance against the expectations, then this needs to be linked to rewards and recognition. If people do what they are expected to, this should be reflected in their rewards. If they don't do what is expected, then there should be a sanction. See these blog posts for a wider discussion of incentives.

If there are no links between metrics and reward/recognition, then nobody will care about the metrics. Particularly important are the sanctions for not doing KM. If people can dodge their expectations and get away with it, then this sends a strong message that the expectations are actually options, and not expectations at all.

Knowledge Management support

It is unfair to set expectations, measure people against them, and then reward people based on these measures, unless you make the expectations achievable in the first place. Therefore you need to set up the systems, the training, the coaching, reference materials and so on, that make it possible for people to meet their expectations.

If there is no support, then you have set up an unfair system which people will resent.

Together, the quartet of Expectations, Metrics, Reward/recognition and Support form the basis of an effective Knowledge Management governance system.

Pride as a KM disincentive/incentive

Pride is an interesting motivator in Knowledge Management. In some cases it acts as a real dis-incentive, but if harnessed well it can be a powerful driver for KM behaviours.

Proud Lion from Public Domain Pictures

I was reflecting on this recently while running one of our powerful Bird Island exercises.

People start this exercise by building a structure from bricks and sticks and rubber bands. They work in isolated teams, and have no knowledge of the task before they start. They create relatively small structures, but are inordinately proud of them.

After a while, we get the teams to share knowledge with one another. They send one member out of the door to go and interact with another team, and very often they have a little discussion about how open the team member should be with the others. Last week, one team actually suggested to their envoy that if the other team's structure was smaller, they should give misinformation, rather than share knowledge with them. They were proud of their success, and did not want to share it.

This is the negative side of pride. If people are proud of their work they may be unlikely to want to change it, to learn from others, or even to share with others that they see as competitors. Pride is part of what drives "not invented here" and knowledge hoarding.

Wounded pride.

What happened to many of the teams was that they found that the other teams' structure was much taller, and that theirs looked like a midget in comparison. Now their pride was dented, they realised that their performance was mediocre, and that they had a lot to learn.

When we got the team together in a group and showed them current best practice, their pride was dented even more. Even the best of their structures was less than half the height of the current world record. And sure enough, when we built the structures again, everyone was liberally copying from the "best practice". There as no evidence of the "Not Invented Here" syndrome.

That's because wounded pride kills "not invented here". You cannot proudly continue to reject knowledge from other people who are performing far better than you are.

People want to do a good job, they want to be among the leaders, and if they find that their current approach gives results that are bottom quartile they will not defend their approach, they will not display NiH, but will look for knowledge from any source they can, to restore Great Performance. I remember one drilling crew on the Gulf of Mexico, whose motivation to learn was to be "the best darned drill crew in the Gulf" and who approached KM with great enthusiasm.

You need to remove the false pride in local (substandard) performance and harness the motivation of "proud to be the best" in driving people towards learning and sharing.

Incentivising KM by setting "impossible" targets

Nobody will look for knowledge from others, if they think they already know what to do.

Day 14: I Don't Know ANY of This!
Originally uploaded by Lourdes Nightingale

This is the way humans work. If you give people challenges thay know how to solve, they have no incentive to look for new knowledge. Instead they will just rely on their own knowledge (after all – they know its provenance, and they trust it more than they trust anyone else’s knowledge).

This means that the best way to promote learning and re-application of knowledge across an organisation, is to give people challenges they don't know how to meet, but which others have already solved.

These "impossible" challenges push people out of the comfort zone of “I know how to do this”, into a zone of “this is tough – I’d better see what knowledge is out there that can help me”. Then they will look for knowledge from others, to help them solve the problem.

Ford did this in the days of the Ford Best Practice Replication System. Through applying continuously decreasing operating budgets, they forced their plants into a situation where they had to learn in order to deliver.

John Browne (the BP CEO in the 90s and early 00s) did this in BP. He expected every project to deliver better than the previous project, and his budget allocations and performance targets reflected this. He forced continuous improvement in delivery and cost, and the only way to continuously improve was to continuously learn. For the project manager, these "stretch goals" were seriously uncomfortable ("How the h*** does he expect me to cut the budget by another 20%?”) and it pushed them to seek advice, look for the best of the best, and build upon the entire knowledge base of the organisation. As a result, these stretch targets were drivers of innovation, knowledge management and continuous improvement.

It's a question of receptivity. You can't transfer knowledge unless the recipient is receptive.
To be receptive, they need to have feel a need to learn, and they have to think that their own personal knowledge is not enough to solve the challenge.

Tough targets alone are not the answer.

Do not think that I am just advocating setting arbitrary stretch goals which cannot be reached, That would be crazy; demoralising to staff and suicide for the organisation.

Instead I am advocating challenging people to do at least as well, if not better, than their colleagues, and combining this with a KM system that makes it possible to learn from these collagues. 

In both the Ford and BP cases, the strong delivery push from management was coupled with an effective knowledge management framework. Just increasing the pressure without providing systems for learning would not have worked – it would have added stress to the organisation. Increasing the pressure while also providing good KM, on the other hand, provided the incentives for knowledge to flow around the system to where it was needed (driven by “demand Pull”), and fuelled continuous performance increase over a number of years.

So remember, if you want to promote a knowledge seeking culture in your company (and a knowledge seeking culture is a far better driver of KM than a knowledge sharing culture), then your senior managers may need to push people out of the comfort zone where they can rely on what they already know.

The 4 incentives for Knowledge Management

I blogged last month about "4 reasons to try KM"; logic, emotion, expectation and peer pressure. Here is a little more detail on these four incentives.

Logic

The first incentive, the incentive of logic, is the one that you have to address first, when you start off knowledge management in your organisation.  You need a business case and a logical business driver for knowledge management, and you need to be able to explain these in a very simple way.  In many ways, you need this logical argument in order to convince management to let you even start, and when you to start communicating about knowledge management, again you have to start with the logical business case.  This is not enough to convince people, but it needs to be in place before or any of the other incentives can work.  It can be really helpful if you get your CEO or another senior person to give you a sound bite in which they “make the logical case”. 

Emotion

In order to bring the second incentive, the emotional incentive, into play, you need to have some success stories from within the organisation.  A good success story, told on video by the people involved, can begin to convey the value of knowledge management emotionally and act as social proof.  People tell how much it helped them, how knowledge management solved a problem, or reduced a risk, or added value.  Through these stories, you can begin to project a human face onto knowledge management that goes beyond the logical business case.  You can make it personal.  But you can’t make it personal until you have piloted KM and have some success stories, and the stories really need to come from within your own company in order for people to identify with them.

Expectation

The third incentive, management expectations, comes later after the piloting phase.  Once you have defined how knowledge management will work within your organization, when you have piloted the knowledge management framework of roles, processes, technologies and governance, then your managers can set clear expectations and targets for knowledge management, and by doing so they give the message that knowledge management is now part of the job.  Most people go to work to do a good job, at some stage managers need to set the expectation that in order to do a good job, you need to include a component of knowledge management.

Peer Pressure

The fourth incentive, peer pressure, comes later again.  Once you’ve made the business case, piloted knowledge management, delivered the success stories, defined the framework and set management expectations, then as you begin to roll out knowledge management across your organisation a larger and larger number of people will begin to be involved.  This is where peer pressure comes in; when people see others involved in communities of practice, re-using lessons, sharing knowledge online and so on, then knowledge management becomes “business as usual”, and not doing knowledge management becomes seen as unusual.

How NASA incentivises KM

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

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 because they believe it is the "right thing to do".


The latest NASA CKO newsletter contains an interesting article on motivation which shows that NASA takes a similar approach; namely avoiding extrinsic rewards and focusing on that "sense of doing the right thing". The author (Michael Bell, the Chief Knowledge Officer at NASA Kennedy Space Center) tells us:

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 (KSC) 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 prozes may be gamed, and how badges may trivialise something which is far more important, namely a shared sense of community and purpose. Also recognise, as NASA is beginning to, that incentivising sharing is not enough, and that you need to incentivise knowledge seeking and re-use as well.

The NASA article ends with this note of recognition that things could be improved still further!

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.”

4 reasons to try KM

What "sells" KM in an organisation? Primarily, one of four things.

There are 4 main things that drive people to adopt KM, and they are as follows, from the weakest to the strongest.

1. The first is logic. People understand that KM makes economic sense to the organisation, and can deliver personal value to the individual. This is a weak incentive, but needs to be in place before moving up the scale to the other three.

2. The second is emotion. KM sounds like it's a good thing to do, it sounds easy, it sounds attractive. You woulld rather like to try it if you have the time.

3. The third is company expectation. Management make it clear that KM is part of the job. Everybody want to do a good job, and KM is considered part of doing a good job. Neglecting KM is neglecting your responsibility and doing a poor job. Personal pride becomes part of the driver.

4. The fourth and most powerful incentive is peer pressure. If everyone else is doing KM, then you stand out as the "oddball". Once a critical KM mass kicks in - supported by logic, emotion and expectation - then peer pressure cements the deal.