Why Dialogue is at the heart of Knowledge Management

Dialogue is the engine behind Knowledge Management - it is the primary means by which Knowledge is shared and absorbed.

We often assume that connecting people together will lead to better knowledge exchange, but connecting wires doesn't necessarily make a circuit. You need a way of ensuring conductivity as well as connectivity, and dialogue provides that conductivity for knowledge.

Dialogue is different from other forms of conversation. In a Dialogue, the participants are trying to reach mutual understanding. It is a process of exchange of views and of knowledge, of both sides asking questions and of listening to the answers. It is a combination of listening, advocacy, reasoning and consensus-seeking. It is hard to imagine effective knowledge exchange without some form of dialogue.

• Dialogue differs from argument, which is all about presentation and advocacy of views. There are no winners or losers in dialogue; you can't say "I lost the dialogue with Peter”.
• Dialogue differs from debate, which is all about testing the validity of a proposition rather than testing whether it is understood.
• Dialogue differs from interrogation, where all the questions are one-way, and only one person stands to profit from the exchange.
• Dialogue differs from discussion, which is often about analysis of detail rather than searching for common understanding.
• Dialogue differs from reporting, which is the presentation of facts rather than the search for common understanding.

We need dialogue because of the  unknown knowns, the deep knowledge of which people are unaware.  The person who has the knowledge (the "knowledge supplier") may only be partially conscious of how much they do know. The person who needs the knowledge (the "knowledge customer") may only be partially conscious of what they need to learn. The unknown knows and unknown unknowns are only uncovered only through two-way questioning; in other words through dialogue.

Dialogue is needed, in order to

• Help the knowledge supplier understand and express what they know (moving from superficial knowledge to deep knowledge)
• Help the knowledge customer understand what they need to learn
• Transfer the knowledge from supplier to customer
• Check for understanding, and
• Collectively make sense of the knowledge

The knowledge customer can ask the knowledge supplier for details, and this questioning will often lead them to analyse what they know and make it conscious. The knowledge supplier can tell the customer all the things they need to know, so helping them to become conscious of their lack of knowledge. As pieces of knowledge are identified, the customer and supplier question each other until they are sure that transfer has taken place.

Almost all of the effective Knowledge Management processes are based on dialogue. 

AARs, Peer Assists, Knowledge Handovers, retrospects, Harvesting interviews, Learning Histories, Knowledge exchange - all are dialogue based. All of these processes are facilitated, and part of the role of the facilitator is to ensure dialogue rather than argument or monologue.

Some of the elements of dialogue can be done remotely through Web 2.0 tools, though this needs to be done deliberately. We can't assume that dialogue "just happens" over social media, any more than we can assume that a conversation will be a dialogue.

• Blogs are 95% monologue, and although some dialogue can be sparked through blog comments, it's more often debate than dialogue. However examples such as the Polymath project suggest that a structured approach of Blogs and Wikis can lead to problem-solving through dialogue
• Community discussion forums can occasionally engender dialogue, but again, debate and argument are often found in there as well. 
• Social media promote conversation, but not necessarily dialogue. The conversations in LinkedIn, for example, are mostly serial monologues, where people post their own views while seldom seeing to understand the views of others
• Wikis allow co-creation, but not through a dialogue format, which makes them difficult for really contentious or emergent topics. 

So how do we promote dialogue as part of our knowledge management programs?

1. We deliberately promote, even to the extent of educating people in, the behaviours of listening and questioning, as part of a Knowledge Management and Organisational Learning Culture.
2. We introduce the facilitated processes mentioned above
3. We ensure our Online communities of practice are also guided and facilitated, to promote dialogue instead of argument
4. We train the facilitators well.

We move beyond just "connecting people", and look at the nature of that connection, and the nature of the conversations that result. Good facilitation is key to helping this happen.

Dialogue, the engine that drives Knowledge Sharing

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Dialogue is the engine behind Knowledge Management - it is the primary means by which Knowledge is shared and absorbed.

We often assume that connecting people together will lead to better knowledge exchange, but connecting wires doesn't necessarily make a circuit. You need a way of ensuring conductivity as well as connectivity, and dialogue provides that conductivity for knowledge.

Dialogue is different from other forms of conversation. In a Dialogue, the participants are trying to reach mutual understanding. It is a process of exchange of views and of knowledge, of both sides asking questions and of listening to the answers. It is a combination of listening, advocacy, reasoning and consensus-seeking. It is hard to imagine effective knowledge exchange without some form of dialogue.

• Dialogue differs from argument, which is all about presentation and advocacy of views. There are no winners or losers in dialogue; you can't say "I lost the dialogue with Peter”.
• Dialogue differs from debate, which is all about testing the validity of a proposition rather than testing whether it is understood.
• Dialogue differs from interrogation, where all the questions are one-way, and only one person stands to profit from the exchange.
• Dialogue differs from discussion, which is often about analysis of detail rather than searching for common understanding.

We need dialogue because of the  unknown knowns, the deep knowledge of which people are unaware.  The person who has the knowledge (the "knowledge supplier") may only be partially conscious of how much they do know. The person who needs the knowledge (the "knowledge customer") may only be partially conscious of what they need to learn. The unknown knows and unknown unknowns are uncovered only through two-way questioning; in other words through dialogue.

Dialogue is needed, in order to

• Help the knowledge supplier understand and express what they know (moving from superficial knowledge to deep knowledge)
• Help the knowledge customer understand what they need to learn
• Transfer the knowledge from supplier to customer
• Check for understanding, and
• Collectively make sense of the knowledge

The knowledge customer can ask the knowledge supplier for details, and this questioning will often lead them to analyse what they know and make it conscious. The knowledge supplier can tell the customer all the things they need to know, so helping them to become conscious of their lack of knowledge. As pieces of knowledge are identified, the customer and supplier question each other until they are sure that transfer has taken place.

Almost all of the effective KM processes are based on dialogue. AARs, Peer Assists, Knowledge Handovers, retrospects, Harvesting interviews, Learning Histories, Knowledge exchange - all are dialogue based.

Some of the elements of dialogue can be done remotely through Web 2.0 tools, though this needs to be done deliberately. We can't assume that dialogue "just happens" over social media, any more than we can assume that a conversation will be a dialogue.

• Blogs are 95% monologue, and although some dialogue can be sparked through blog comments, it's more often debate than dialogue. However examples such as the Polymath project suggest that a structured approach of Blogs and Wikis can lead to problem-solving through dialogue
• Community discussion forums can occasionally engender dialogue, but again, debate and argument are often found in there as well. 
• Social media promote conversation, but not necessarily dialogue. The conversations in LinkedIn, for example, are mostly serial monologues and arguments, where people post their own views while seldom seeing to understand the views of others
• Wikis allow co-creation, but not through a dialogue format, which makes them difficult for really contentious or emergent topics. 

So how do we promote dialogue in our organisations?

1. We deliberately promote, even to the extent of educating people in, the behaviours of listening and questioning, as part of a Knowledge Management and Organisational Learning Culture.
2. We introduce the facilitated processes mentioned above
3. We ensure our Online communities of practice are also guided and facilitated, to promote dialogue instead of argument
4. We train the facilitators well.

We move beyond just "connecting people", and look at the nature of that connection, and the nature
of the conversations that result.

Dialogue in KM

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Conversations at State of the Net
Originally uploaded by antony_mayfield

I am a firm believer in the power of Dialogue in Knowledge Management (see previous blog post here). We can assume that connecting people together can lead to better knowledge exchange, but connecting wires doesn't make a circuit. You need a way of ensuring conductivity as well as connectivity, and dialogue provides that conductivity.

What's different about Dialogue? Dialogue is a form of conversation, in which the participants are trying to reach mutual understanding. It is a process of exchange of views and of knowledge, of asking questions and of listening to the answers. It is a combination of listening, advocacy, reasoning and consensus-seeking. Dialogue is a question-and-answer process by which people exchange knowledge. It is hard to imagine effective knowledge exchange without some form of dialogue.

It differs from argument, which is all about presentation and advocacy of views. There are no winners or losers in dialogue; you can't say "I lost the dialogue with Peter”.

It differs from debate, which is all about testing the validity of a proposition rather than testing whether it is understood.

It differs from interrogation, where all the questions are one-way, and only one person stands to profit from the exchange.

It differs from discussion, which is often about analysis of detail rather than searching for common understanding.

I blogged previously about the unknown knowns. This is the unconscious knowledge, the deep knowledge of which people are unaware. Under these circumstances, the transfer of knowledge from one person to another is not an easy thing to achieve! The person who has the knowledge (the "knowledge supplier") may only be partially conscious of how much they do know. The person who needs the knowledge (the "knowledge customer") may only be partially conscious of what they need to learn. The knowledge supplier has both conscious and unconscious competence, and the knowledge customer has both conscious and unconscious incompetence. Also the knowledge supplier doesn't know what the customer needs, and the knowledge customer doesn't know what the supplier has.

Without effective dialogue, a lot of this knowledge will not be transferred at all.

Dialogue is needed, in order to

• Help the knowledge supplier understand and express what they know (moving from superficial knowledge to deep knowledge)
• Help the knowledge customer understand what they need to learn
• Transfer the knowledge from supplier to customer, and
• Check for understanding

The knowledge customer can ask the knowledge supplier for details, and this questioning will often lead them to analyse what they know and make it conscious. The knowledge supplier can tell the customer all the things they need to know, so helping them to become conscious of their lack of knowledge. As pieces of knowledge are identified, the customer and supplier question each other until they are sure that transfer has taken place.

Almost all of the effective KM processes are based on dialogue. AARs, Peer Assists, Knowledge Handovers, retrospects, Harvesting interviews, Learning Histories, Knowledge exchange - all are dialogue based.

Some of the elements of dialogue can be done remotely through Web 2.0 tools, though this is often a poor second. Blogs are 95% monologue, and although some dialogue can be sparked through blog comments, it's more often debate than dialogue. Community discussion forums can occasionally engender dialogue, but again, debate and argument are often found in there as well. Wikis allow co-creation, but not through a dialogue format, which makes them difficult for really contentious or emergent topics. In most cases, if transfer of important knowledge needs to be done well, there is nothing like the power of dialogue in conversation.

In praise of dialogue

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Hand signals at the Dialogue
Originally uploaded by ILRI

• Why do children go to school to learn, rather than staying home and reading books?

• Why, if you have access to the best cookery books in the world, do you still need to take personal tuition if you want to be a cordon blue chef?

• If you have a street map in the car, why would you ever need to stop and ask for directions?


The answer, in every case, is that knowledge transfer is a social process, and if you want to transfer detailed knowledge you have to engage in dialogue with another human being.

Dialogue allows you to ask questions, seek clarification, test understanding, and look for that "aha" moment when the knowledge is really transferred. Dialogue allows access to the deep tacit knowledge - the knowledge that people don't even know that they know - and it allows you to check whether you are really understood the knowledge. Any good teacher knows that discussion and dialogue in the class is far better at developing understanding than teaching by rote. Any cook knows there are tricks you can’t pick up from any book. Any driver knows that there comes a time when the map is not enough, and they need to wind down the window and ask a real human being with local knowledge.

Dialogue is a question-and-answer process by which people exchange knowledge. It is hard to imagine effective knowledge exchange without some form of dialogue

Dialogue is one form of conversation, in which the participants are trying to reach mutual understanding. It is a process of exchange of views and of knowledge, of asking questions and of listening to the answers. It is a combination of listening, advocacy, reasoning and consensus-seeking. It differs from argument, which is all about confrontation of views. There are no winners or losers in dialogue; you can't say "I lost the dialogue with Peter”. It differs from debate, which is all about testing the validity of a proposition rather than testing whether it is understood. It differs from interrogation, where all the questions are one-way, and only one person stands to profit from the exchange. It differs from discussion, which is often about analysis of detail rather than searching for common understanding. Nancy Dixon, in her book “Dialogue at Work” says

“In my view, dialogue is talk -- a special kind of talk -- that affirms the person-to-person relationship between discussants and which technologies their collective right and intellectual capacity to make sense of the world. Therefore, it is not talk that is one-way, such as a sales pitch, a directive or a lecture; rather it involves mutuality and jointness.

This “mutuality and jointness” lies behind the application of dialogue in many work processes; for example Dixon mentions Future Search Conferences, Open Space Technology, Action Learning, and Real-Time Strategic Change. These same attributes lie behind the application of dialogue to knowledge transfer.

The majority of knowledge within any organization is held in people’s heads. Indeed some would claim that ALL the knowledge is in people’s heads, and that anything which is written down becomes information, rather than knowledge. However for the purposes of this article we will call written knowledge “explicit” and “head knowledge” will be referred to as “tacit”.




There are two sorts of tacit knowledge in anyone’s head – the knowledge which they are conscious of, and the unconscious knowledge, the deep knowledge of which they are unaware.  The bulk of the useful knowledge is likely to lie in the box of unconscious competence, where the people who have gained the knowledge have not yet taken the time to analyse what they have learned, and make it conscious so it can be transferred to others.

Under these circumstances, the transfer of knowledge from one person to another is not an easy thing to achieve! The person who has the knowledge (the "knowledge supplier") may only be partially conscious of how much they do know. The person who needs the knowledge (the "knowledge customer") may only be partially conscious of what they need to learn. The knowledge supplier has both conscious and unconscious competence, and the knowledge customer has both conscious and unconscious incompetence. Also the knowledge supplier doesn't know what the customer needs, and the knowledge customer doesn't know what the supplier has.
Dialogue is needed, in order to

• Help the knowledge supplier understand and express what they know (moving from superficial knowledge to deep knowledge)

• Help the knowledge customer understand what they need to learn

• Transfer the knowledge from supplier to customer, and

• Check for understanding

The knowledge customer can ask the knowledge supplier for details, and this questioning will often lead them to analyse what they know and make it conscious. The knowledge supplier can tell the customer all the things they need to know, so helping them to become conscious of their lack of knowledge. As pieces of knowledge are identified, the customer and supplier question each other until they are sure that transfer has taken place.

Why dialogue is so important for Knowledge Management

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Conversation, by Valerie Kensi, on Flickr

Why do children go to school to learn, rather than staying home and reading books?

Why, if you have access to the best cookery books in the world, do you still need to take personal tuition if you want to be a cordon blue chef?

If you have a street map in the car, why would you ever need to stop and ask for directions?

The answer, in every case, is that knowledge transfer is a social process, and if you want to transfer detailed knowledge you have to engage in conversation (specifically, in dialogue) with other human beings.

Dialogue allows you to ask questions, seek clarification, test understanding, and look for that "aha" moment when the knowledge is really transferred. Dialogue allows access to the deep tacit knowledge - the knowledge that people don't even know that they know - and it allows you to check whether you are really understood the knowledge.

Any good teacher knows that discussion and dialogue in the class is far better at developing understanding than teaching by rote. Any cook knows there are tricks you can’t pick up from any book. Any driver knows that there comes a time when the map is not enough, and they need to wind down the window and ask a real human being with local knowledge.

Why is dialogue so important in Knowledge Management? 

The majority of knowledge within any organization is held in people’s heads. Indeed some would claim that ALL the knowledge is in people’s heads, and that anything which is written down becomes information, rather than knowledge. However for the purposes of this article we will call written knowledge “explicit” and “head knowledge” will be referred to as “tacit” (although this is not the strict definition of the term).

 There are two sorts of tacit knowledge in anyone’s head – the knowledge which they are conscious of, and the unconscious knowledge, the deep knowledge of which they are unaware. The matrix below identifies four states of knowledge, depending on whether the person has the knowledge or not, and whether they are conscious of it or not.

The bulk of the useful knowledge is likely to lie in the box of unconscious competence, where people who have gained the knowledge have not yet taken the time to analyse what they have learned, and make it conscious so it can be transferred to others.

Under these circumstances, the transfer of knowledge from one person to another is not an easy thing to achieve! The person who has the knowledge (the "knowledge supplier") may only be partially conscious of how much they do know. The person who needs the knowledge (the "knowledge customer") may only be partially conscious of what they need to learn.

If we look at the matrix below, the knowledge supplier has both conscious and unconscious competence, and the knowledge customer has both conscious and unconscious incompetence. Also the knowledge supplier doesn't know what the customer needs, and the knowledge customer doesn't know what the supplier has.

Without dialogue we cannot overcome the boundaries of not knowing. (Tweet this)

Dialogue is needed, in order to

• Help the knowledge supplier understand and express what they know (moving from superficial knowledge to deep knowledge)
• Help the knowledge customer understand what they need to learn
• Transfer the knowledge from supplier to customer, and
• Check for understanding

The knowledge customer can ask the knowledge supplier for details, and this questioning will often lead them to analyse what they know and make it conscious.  The knowledge supplier can tell the customer all the things they need to know, so helping them to become conscious of their lack of knowledge.  As pieces of knowledge are identified, the customer and supplier question each other until they are sure that transfer has taken place.

What types of dialogue are there?

Although we have been talking here about knowledge transfer from one supplier to one customer, this will not always be the case. Usually the knowledge is held by more than one person – often by a team. (the team also has another specific role here, it helps define the contextual domain of why the knowledge may be valid to another team. One person has the personal context of “why this works for me”, the team can provide the more smoothed data that would appeal to a larger audience through the process of consensus) There may be many customers for the knowledge, and many different teams may need access to the knowledge at various times in future. Dialogue can take place within teams and between teams, as well as between individuals. However the processes and formats for the dialogue vary, depending on the number of customers, the number of suppliers, and whether the knowledge is being pushed or pulled.

The matrix below shows some of the forms that the dialogue may take, depending on whether the supplier and customer are one individual or team, or many individuals or teams.

	To one customer	To many customers
From one supplier	After Action review Mentoring Coaching Handover interview	Knowledge Handover Training Teaching Knowledge visit
From many suppliers	Peer Assist	Knowledge Exchange Knowledge Cafe

Contact Knoco for guidance on how Dialogue can be part of your Knowledge Management Framework.

FAQs in KM - a form of pseudo-dialogue

I have often posted here about the power of dialogue in knowledge sharing. But how can you have dialogue with written knowledge?

Frequently Asked Questions, credit photosteve101

Dialogue is a form of conversation in which the participants are trying to reach mutual understanding. It is a process of exchange of views and of knowledge, of both sides asking questions and of listening to the answers. It is a combination of listening, advocacy, reasoning and consensus-seeking. Dialogue means "talking it through."

It is hard to imagine effective knowledge exchange without some form of dialogue. What really differentiates dialogue from other forms of communication such as debate, argument or briefing is that both parties are seeking to understand, and asking questions.

And when you ask a question, your mind is open to the answer.

That's not true when you are debating or arguing, or even listening to a briefing, The very act of questioning opens the mind.

So what about written knowledge, where you can't engage in dialogue?

Enter the FAQ - the Frequently Asked Questions list.

You see these everywhere (see for example our Knowledge Management FAQ). They are popular ways of offering knowledge, by producing a list of questions (sometimes "frequently asked", sometimes "most important" questions) and providing the answers. Some people argue that they should be caled "Frequently Given Answers".

FAQs are like pseudo-dialogue. 

Although you cannot question a document or a webpage, the FAQ provides the next best thing. It allows the learner to scan the list of questions to find the ones they would have asked in a conversation. Although reading the answer to a listed question is not as mind-opening as asking the question directly, it is a step in the right direction. They give the reader at least one small way of influencing the way they learn, and finding teh answer they are most interested in.

In fact the FAQ list has an advantage over face to face dialogue, as they provide the learner with questions they might not have thought of asking, and therefore answers to the things they didn't know that they didn't know.

There are some cases where dialogue is not needed and FAQ is not appropriate, for example when the context of the knowledge is very clear, or the nature of the knowledge is limited. See for example this blog post from the government digital service.

If you are in doubt about whether to package your knowledge asset as an FAQ or a set of instructions, then ask yourself this question....

Will people come to your knowledge asset be told, or to find out?

If the former, then give them instructions. If the latter, then use an FAQ.

5 types of conversation - only one works for KM

Knowledge Management is a combination of content management and conversation management, but which sort of conversations do we need?

Let's talk, by Ron mader, on Flickr

Conversation is widely recognised as the best Knowledge Management tool there is. Tacit knowledge and true understanding can be shared through conversation, but not through every type of conversation.

The problem is that conversations do many things, and knowledge sharing is only one of them. Understanding how conversations work, and being able to influence conversations styles through facilitation, are vital tools for the knowledge manager.

Here 5 common types of conversation. This is not an exhaustive list!

• Small talk. Small talk is the social communication where the fact of communicating is more important than the words. "Hi, how are you? What a nice day!" all really mean "I see you, I recognise you, I have, or want to create, a social bond with you".  Banter is one type of small talk. Gossip is another (though gossip is also a form of reporting and debriefing). Much of the interaction we see on Facebook, for example, is small talk (lol). Small talk has a vital social role, but does not share knowledge.

• Social cohesion. Social cohesion conversation is like small talk, but the purpose is to gain social cohesion through agreement. Reminiscence is a social cohesion tool - "Hey, do you remember when .... Did you see that moment in the second half of the game where he ....". The "Like" button is a social cohesion tool - "I am on your side". The problem with social cohesion conversation is that it can completely mask the truth. The Solomon Asch experiment showed how social pressure means that individuals will often agree to something they know to be incorrect, in order not to disagree with the rest of the group - not to be "off-side". Facilitators in knowledge management sessions such as Knowledge Exchange and Peer Assist need to be very much aware of the social cohesion aspect, and actively search for the dissenting voices. The only "side" to be on, in knowledge sharing, is the side of the truth.

• Reporting and debriefing. These are conversations (or more often, serial monologues) where people state facts and occasional opinions. Most project meetings are like this. These meetings are vital to have, but are only very superficially "knowledge sharing" meetings. Facts are shared, deep understanding generally is not shared. People go away "better informed, but none the wiser". If reporting and debriefing is the only type of conversation which happens in your projects, you need to introduce some  different processes, such as After Action Review, and Retrospect.

• Argument and debate. These are the "win/lose" conversations. Someone has an opinion, and defends it against alternative opinions. Very often this is tied into the issue of status - "I am the expert - my opinion must be defended as it gives me my status; if I lose the argument my status will be weakened". Debate is a milder form of argument, but both debate and argument carry the concept of winning. In debate and argument, people listen to and question their opponents statements in order to find weaknesses and loopholes. Many of the discussions on Linked-In are arguments, debates, or serial monologues. Argument and debate are hopeless for knowledge-sharing. As Thomas Jefferson said - ""I never saw an instance of one of two disputants convincing the other by argument." The body language in the picture above suggests that this is a debate or argument.

• Dialogue. As described in this HBR article, dialogue is the primary tool for knowledge sharing in organisations. The goal of dialogue is not winning, nor convincing, nor agreeing, but reaching a deeper level of collective understanding. In dialogue, people listen to and question the statements of others in order to understand why they hold these views. Dialogue requires listening skills as well as debating skills. In dialogue, people allow their opinions to be challenged (and indeed, welcome that challenge). In dialogue, everyone leans in to the conversation. Dialogue requires trust and openness. Dialogue is a very difficult conversational style to achieve, and until it becomes second nature in an organisation, the role of the facilitator may be vital. The facilitator watches the conversation, defuses argument, challenges group-think, ensures assumptions are questioned, seeks out the dissenting voices and the unshared opinions, and keeps the process of the conversation on track to it's stated goal - that of building shared understanding. 

Without good facilitation, dialogue can easily degenerate into debate and argument, or even further into opinion-stating, social cohesion and small-talk, and the opportunity for effective knowledge sharing is lost.

Ensure you focus on Dialogue as part of your Conversation Management

Contact us for KM process facilitation, or for facilitator training.

Conversations about knowledge

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Actually, the operative word is probably not "conversations" but "Dialogue". Dialogue is probably the single most important component of effective knowledge management.

It's the conversations that drive the identification, the exchange, and the implementation of tacit knowledge. This isn't just true of knowledge management either; risk management is driven by conversations about risk, safety management is driven by conversations about safety. And knowledge management is driven by conversations, or by dialogue, about knowledge.

All my favourite, most powerful knowledge management processes are dialogue-driven. It's the dialogue that allows people to reach a shared understanding of "what have we learned". Knowledge management planning is a dialogue about knowledge needs. Peer Assist is a dialogue to exchange and acquire knowledge at the start of a project. After Action Review is a ongoing, regular learning-based dialogue within a working team. Retrospect is a detailed dialogue at the end of the project to idenfity and clarify the team learnings. Knowledge exchange is a multi-person dialgue within a community or between two teams.

The time and attention given to this dialogue is crucial to effective learning, and to effective knowledge management. I remember Steve Denning saying at the Ottowa KM summit that the learning capacity of an organisation is directly related to it's ability to hold conversations, and I truly believe he was right.

Photo - Little Conversations Originally uploaded to Flickr by iwona_kellie

Choosing conversations that work for knowledge sharing

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Conversation is widely recognised as the best Knowledge Management tool there is, but the wrong conversation can build barriers to effective knowledge sharing.

Knowledge and true understanding can be shared through conversation, but not through every type of conversation.

The problem is that conversations do many things, and knowledge sharing is only one of them. Understanding how conversations work, and being able to influence conversations styles through facilitation, are vital tools for the knowledge manager.

Here are some types of conversation. This is not an exhaustive list!

• Small talk. Small talk is the social communication where the fact of communicating is more important than the words. "Hi, how are you? What a nice day!" all really mean "I see you, I recognise you, I have, or want to create, a social bond with you".  Banter is one type of small talk. Gossip is another (though gossip is also a form of reporting and debriefing). Much of the interaction we see on Facebook, for example, is small talk (lol). Small talk has a vital social role, but does not share knowledge.

• Social cohesion. Social cohesion conversation is like small talk, but the purpose is to gain social cohesion through agreement. Reminiscence is a social cohesion tool - "Hey, do you remember when .... Did you see that moment in the second half of the game where he ....". The "Like" button is a social cohesion tool - "I am on your side". The problem with social cohesion conversation is that it can completely mask the truth. The Solomon Asch experiment showed how social pressure means that individuals will often agree to something they know to be incorrect, in order not to disagree with the rest of the group - not to be "off-side". Facilitators in knowledge management sessions such as Knowledge Exchange and Peer Assist need to be very much aware of the social cohesion aspect, and actively search for the dissenting voices. The only "side" to be on, in knowledge sharing, is the side of the truth.

• Reporting and debriefing. These are conversations (or more often, serial monologues) where people state facts and occasional opinions. Most project meetings are like this. These meetings are vital to have, but are only very superficially "knowledge sharing" meetings. Facts are shared, deep understanding generally is not shared. People go away "better informed, but none the wiser". If reporting and debriefing is the only type of conversation which happens in your projects, you need to introduce some  different processes, such as After Action Review, and Retrospect.

• Argument and debate. These are the "win/lose" conversations. Someone has an opinion, and defends it against alternative opinions. Very often this is tied into the issue of status - "I am the expert - my opinion must be defended as it gives me my status; if I lose the argument my status will be weakened". Debate is a milder form of argument, but both debate and argument carry the concept of winning. In debate and argument, people listen to and question their opponents statements in order to find weaknesses and loopholes. Many of the discussions on Linked-In are arguments, debates, or serial monologues. Argument and debate are hopeless for knowledge-sharing. As Thomas Jefferson said - ""I never saw an instance of one of two disputants convincing the other by argument." The body language in the picture above suggests that this is a debate or argument.

• Dialogue. As described in this HBR article, dialogue is the primary tool for knowledge sharing in organisations. The goal of dialogue is not winning, nor convincing, nor agreeing, but reaching a deeper level of collective understanding. In dialogue, people listen to and question the statements of others in order to understand why they hold these views. Dialogue requires listening skills as well as debating skills. In dialogue, people allow their opinions to be challenged (and indeed, welcome that challenge). In dialogue, everyone leans in to the conversation. Dialogue requires trust and openness. Dialogue is a very difficult conversational style to achieve, and until it becomes second nature in an organisation, the role of the facilitator may be vital. The facilitator watches the conversation, defuses argument, challenges group-think, ensures assumptions are questioned, seeks out the dissenting voices and the unshared opinions, and keeps the process of the conversation on track to it's stated goal - that of building shared understanding. 

Without good facilitation, dialogue can easily degenerate into debate and argument, or even further into opinion-stating, social cohesion and small-talk, and the opportunity for effective knowledge sharing is lost. Contact us for KM process facilitation, or for facilitator training.

Why conversations are so important in KM.

All forms of Management involve conversation, and Knowledge Management is no different.

The management of intangibles is driven by conversations. Those conversations are focused on the particular intangible in question, and serve to set direction, raise awareness, and lead to action.

• Risk management is driven by conversations about risk; conversations to identify risks, conversations to map and characterise risk, and then actions to ensure the risks are well managed;
• Safety management is driven by conversations about safety; Hazops to identify safety issues, conversations about safety mitigation, and then actions to ensure personal and process safety;
• Talent management is driven by conversations; from conversations to identify talent requirements and strategy, through conversations to identify job requirements, to conversations with talented individuals.

Knowledge management is also driven by conversations, or by dialogue, about knowledge.   Steve Denning said at the Ottowa KM summit in 2006 that the learning capacity of an organisation is directly related to it's ability to hold conversations, but we need to go beyond this, and say that these conversations need to be conversations about knowledge. Not normal conversations such as project meetings or status updates, but deliberate conversations with knowledge as the focus.

Conversations about knowledge. 

We can probably divide these into two types of conversations;

1. strategic conversations about knowledge strategies, knowledge needs, knowledge frameworks and knowledge flow, and 
2. conversations designed to identify, build, synthesise and transfer knowledge. As I said on this blog, KM is as much about conversation management as it is about content management.

Actually, when it comes to the second type of conversation, the operative word is probably not "conversations" but "Dialogue". Dialogue is probably the single most important component of effective knowledge management.

All my favourite, most powerful knowledge management processes are dialogue-driven. It's the dialogue that allows people to reach a shared understanding of "what have we learned".

• Peer Assist is a dialogue to exchange and acquire knowledge at the start of a project. 
• After Action Review is a ongoing, regular learning-based dialogue within a working team. 
• Retrospect is a detailed dialogue at the end of the project to identity and clarify the team learnings. 
• Knowledge exchange is a multi-person dialogue within a community or between two teams.

Make sure that your KM program involves all the right conversations about knowledge, as this is the way that intangibles get managed.

KM and conversations about knowledge

All forms of Management involve conversation, and Knowledge Management is no different.

"Side conversation" by Loren Kerns on Flickr

The management of intangibles is driven by conversations. Those conversations are focused on the particular intangible in question, and serve to set direction, raise awareness, and lead to action.

• Risk management is driven by conversations about risk; conversations to identify risks, conversations to map and characterise risk, and then actions to ensure the risks are well managed;
• Safety management is driven by conversations about safety; Hazops to identify safety issues, conversations about safety mitigation, and then actions to ensure personal and process safety;
• Talent management is driven by conversations; from conversations to identify talent requirements and strategy, through conversations to identify job requirements, to conversations with talented individuals.

Knowledge management is also driven by conversations, or by dialogue, about knowledge.   Steve Denning said at the Ottowa KM summit in 2006 that the learning capacity of an organisation is directly related to it's ability to hold conversations, but we need to go beyond this, and say that these conversations need to be conversations about knowledge. Not normal conversations such as project meetings or status updates, but deliberate conversations with knowledge as the focus.

Conversations about knowledge. 

We can probably divide these into two types of conversations;

• strategic conversations about knowledge strategies, knowledge needs, knowledge frameworks and knowledge flow, and 
• conversations designed to identify, build, synthesise and transfer knowledge. As I said on this blog, KM is as much about conversation management as it is about content management.

Actually, when it comes to the second type of conversation, the operative word is probably not "conversations" but "Dialogue". Dialogue is probably the single most important component of effective knowledge management.

All my favourite, most powerful knowledge management processes are dialogue-driven. It's the dialogue that allows people to reach a shared understanding of "what have we learned".

• Peer Assist is a dialogue to exchange and acquire knowledge at the start of a project. 
• After Action Review is a ongoing, regular learning-based dialogue within a working team. 
• Retrospect is a detailed dialogue at the end of the project to identity and clarify the team learnings. 
• Knowledge exchange is a multi-person dialogue within a community or between two teams.

Make sure that your KM program involves all the right conversations about knowledge, as this is the way that intangibles get managed.

3 cases where KM doesn't need dialogue

This blog has often argued that dialogue is at the heart of effective knowledge transfer, and that without dialogue it is difficult both to access the deep unconscious learning, and also to check whether the knowledge customer properly understands the knowledge that has been offered. 

Conversation with a wise man by Celestine Chua on Flickr

However many companies operate knowledge transfer systems, such as lessons databases or knowledge bases, which involve no dialogue at all.

Do these work? Under what circumstances can they work? Here are 3 cases

 1. Dialogue-free knowledge transfer is perfectly acceptable when the context of the knowledge is very clear.

Take the example of cookery books; these are a very effective means of transferring the knowledge of how to cook certain dishes. The context of cooking a meal is a clear context, shared between the author and the reader. However if you move outside that context, for example moving to another country where the ingredients and measures are different, or opening your house as a pop-up restaurant, the results may be disappointing. If you want to move to a more creative context, you will probably take cooking classes and discuss what you are learning with a professional chef. 

2. Dialogue-free knowledge transfer is perfectly acceptable when the nature of the knowledge is limited. 

 Take the example of road maps; these are a very effective way of transferring the knowledge of how to navigate from one place to another. Most motorists have a road map in their car, or a sat-nav. But for more complex knowledge, like the details of finding a specific house down country roads, you need the advice of people with local knowledge (see my blog post on Charts and Pilots; charts are fine on the open sea, but every large vessel entering port uses a pilot to travel the last mile or so).

2. Dialogue-free knowledge transfer is perfectly acceptable when the knowledge is very mature at user-level. 

When a topic is mature, everything is known. We know all the questions that can be asked about the topic, and all the answers.  All of this can be fully documented, for example in an online FAQ or knowledge asset.  Even then, there will be advanced-level nuances which experts may still need to discuss, but for the average user, this knowledge can safely be codified.  However if a topic is not fully mature and is still evolving, then the answers in the FAQ may change, and new questions may arise. There will be knowledge that is needed that is not yet "in the manual" and will need to be exchanged through dialogue.

As I pointed out here, any Knowledge Management framework needs to focus on Conversation (through dialogue-based processes) as well as on Content, other than in the three cases described above.

Management by Talking About

Part of the way you manage issues such as risk, safety and knowledge, is by creating times and processes for talking about them.

Steven Denning, at the Ottowa Knowledge Management summit a few years ago, said that the learning capacity of an organisation is directly related to it's ability to hold conversations, and I truly believe he was right.

When dealing with the management of intangibles such as knowledge, much of the process of management will be through conversation (conversation leading to action).

For example, Safety Management is driven by conversations about safety, in order to drive awareness of safety issues and identify mitigating actions. Similarly Risk Management is driven by conversations about risk, in order to drive awareness of risks to projects and to identify mitigating actions.

Similarly knowledge management is driven by conversations about knowledge.

All of the most powerful knowledge management processes are driven by conversation - especially dialogue.

• Knowledge management planning is a dialogue about "what knowledge do we need", in order to identify learning actions. 
• Peer Assist is a dialogue to exchange and acquire knowledge at the start of a project, in order to identify improvement actions for the project. 
• After Action Review is a ongoing, regular learning-based dialogue within a working team, to identify improvement actions for the team. 
• Retrospect is a detailed dialogue at the end of the project to identify and clarify the team learnings, and the improvement actions for the organisation. 
• Knowledge exchange is a multi-person dialogue within a community or between two teams, in order to collectively make sense of experience, identify the learnings, and determine the process improvement actions.
• Communities of practice are systems for dialogue amongst practitioners of a topic or domain.

As Steve Denning might have said, the learning capacity of an organisation is directly related to it's ability to hold conversations about learning.

Connecting and Collecting - two halves of a KM strategy

There are two main mechanisms for supporting the flow of knowledge in an organisation - Connecting the people, or Collecting the content. These are sometimes seen as separate strategies of codification or personalisation, but both are needed as part of any Knowledge Management strategy. 

Oct 14 - NodeXL - Twitter Network MWA09 Followers, by Marc Smith on Flickr

Here is an overview of Connection and Collection.

Knowledge suppliers and users

Knowledge is created through experience, and through the reflection on experience in order to derive guidelines, rules, theories, heuristics and doctrines. Knowledge may be created by individuals, through reflecting on their own experience, or it may be created by teams reflecting on team experience. It may also be created by experts or communities of practice reflecting on the experience of many individuals and teams across an organisation. The individuals, teams and communities who do this reflecting can be considered as ‘knowledge suppliers’.

In business activity, knowledge is applied by individuals and teams. They can apply their own personal knowledge and experience, or they can look elsewhere for knowledge – to learn before they start, by seeking the knowledge of others. The more knowledgeable they are at the start of the activity or project, the more likely they are to avoid mistakes, repeat good practice, and avoid risk. These people are ‘knowledge users’.

Communication, Conversation, Connection

The most direct way to transfer knowledge from suppliers to users is through direct communication and dialogue. Face to face dialogue, or dialogue via an online communication system, is an extremely effective means of knowledge transfer. This method allows vast amounts of detailed knowledge to be transferred, and the context for that knowledge to be explored. It allows direct coaching, observation and demonstration. It often allows new knowledge to be created through the interaction.

However, it is very localised. The transfer takes place in one place at one time, involving only the people in the conversation. For all its effectiveness as a transfer method, it is not efficient. For direct communication and dialogue to be the only knowledge transfer mechanism within an organisation, would require a high level of travel and discussion, and may only be practical in a small team working out of a single office where travel is not an issue (for example a regional sales team that meets on a regular basis). This may be the only practical approach to the transfer of uncodifable knowledge; that knowledge that cannot be written down (that Polyani would call “tacit”). However, it should not be the only mechanism of knowledge transfer, nor should knowledge be stored only as tacit knowledge in people’s heads.

Using people’s memories as the primary place for storing knowledge is also a very risky strategy. Memories are unreliable, people forget, misremember, or post-rationalise. People leave the company, retire, or join the competition. For example, what is the staff turnover in your team? Your division? Your company? How much knowledge is leaving your organisation in the heads of the departing people? There needs to be a more secure storage mechanism for crucial knowledge, and a more efficient means of transfer than just dialogue.

Codification, capture, content

The less direct flow of knowledge  is through codification and capture of the knowledge, storage in some sort of ‘knowledge bank’, and retrieval of the knowledge when needed. The transfer is lower bandwidth than direct communication (perhaps 14 times lower), as it is difficult to write down more than a fragment of what you know, and the written knowledge needs to be translated back into human understanding by the knowledge user (some would argue that the written knowledge has become information, and needs to be translated back into knowledge). No dialogue is possible, and demonstrations are restricted to recorded demonstrations, eg using video files.

Transfer of knowledge by this means is not very effective. However, the knowledge need only be captured once to be accessed and reused hundreds of times, so it is an efficient method of transferring knowledge widely. The knowledge is secure against memory loss, or loss of personnel. This approach is ideal for codifiable knowledge with a wide user base. For example, the widespread transfer of basic cooking knowledge is best done through publishing cookery books.

It is also ideal for knowledge that is used intermittently, such as knowledge of office moves, or knowledge of major acquisitions. These events may not happen again for a few years, by which time the individuals involved will have forgotten the details of what happened, if it is not captured and stored.


These two approaches to knowledge transfer are the Connect and Collect approaches.  Effective Knowledge Management strategies need to address both these methods of knowledge transfer. Each has its place, each complements the other, as summarised below.

Connection

Advantages  - • Very effective • Allows transfer of non-codifiable knowledge • Allows socialization • Allows the knowledge user to gauge how much they trust the supplier • Easy and cheap
Disadvantages - • Risky. Human memory is an unreliable knowledge store • Inefficient. People can only be in one place at one time • People often don’t realize what they know until its captured
Type of knowledge for which this approach is suitable -  • Ephemeral rapidly changing knowledge, which would be out of date as soon as its written • Knowledge of continual operations, where there is a large constant community • Knowledge needed only by a few
Comments - One traditional approach to Knowledge Management is to leave knowledge in the heads of experts. This is a risky and inefficient strategy other than in very small organisations

Collection

Advantages - • Allows systematic capture • Creates a secure store for knowledge • Very efficient. . Know-ledge can be captured once and accessed many times
Disadvantages -  • Some knowledge cannot be effectively captured and codified. • Capturing requires skill and resource • Captured knowledge can become impersonal
Type of knowledge for which this approach is suitable -  • Stable mature knowledge • Knowledge of intermittent or rare events • High-value knowledge • Knowledge with a large user-base
Comments -  A strategy based only on capture will miss out on the socialization that is needed for culture change, and may fail to address some of the less codifiable knowledge.

How Connect and Collect work within knowledge management

A reprive from the archives - an overview of Connection and Collection as dual components of KM.

Image by Marc Smith on Flickr

There are two main mechanisms for supporting the flow of knowledge in an organisation - Connecting the people, or Collecting the content.

 These are sometimes seen as separate strategies of codification or personalisation, but both are needed as dual components of any Knowledge Management strategy. 

Here is an overview of Connection and Collection, starting with the concept of knowledge suppliers and users.

Knowledge suppliers and users

Knowledge is created through experience, and through the reflection on experience in order to derive guidelines, rules, theories, heuristics and doctrines. Knowledge may be created by individuals, through reflecting on their own experience, or it may be created by teams reflecting on team experience. It may also be created by experts or communities of practice reflecting on the experience of many individuals and teams across an organisation. The individuals, teams and communities who do this reflecting can be considered as ‘knowledge suppliers’.

In business activity, knowledge is applied by individuals and teams. They can apply their own personal knowledge and experience, or they can look elsewhere for knowledge – to learn before they start, by seeking the knowledge of others. The more knowledgeable they are at the start of the activity or project, the more likely they are to avoid mistakes, repeat good practice, and avoid risk. These people are ‘knowledge users’.

Communication, Conversation, Connection

The most direct way to transfer knowledge from suppliers to users is through direct communication and dialogue. Face to face dialogue, or dialogue via an online communication system, is an extremely effective means of knowledge transfer. This method allows vast amounts of detailed knowledge to be transferred, and the context for that knowledge to be explored. It allows direct coaching, observation and demonstration. It often allows new knowledge to be created through the interaction.

However, it is very localised. The transfer takes place in one place at one time, involving only the people in the conversation. For all its effectiveness as a transfer method, it is not efficient. For direct communication and dialogue to be the only knowledge transfer mechanism within an organisation, would require a high level of travel and discussion, and may only be practical in a small team working out of a single office where travel is not an issue (for example a regional sales team that meets on a regular basis). This may be the only practical approach to the transfer of uncodifable knowledge; that knowledge that cannot be written down (that Polyani would call “tacit”). However, it should not be the only mechanism of knowledge transfer, nor should knowledge be stored only as tacit knowledge in people’s heads.

Using people’s memories as the primary place for storing knowledge is also a very risky strategy. Memories are unreliable, people forget, misremember, or post-rationalise. People leave the company, retire, or join the competition. For example, what is the staff turnover in your team? Your division? Your company? How much knowledge is leaving your organisation in the heads of the departing people? There needs to be a more secure storage mechanism for crucial knowledge, and a more efficient means of transfer than just dialogue.

Codification, capture, content, Collection.

The less direct flow of knowledge  is through codification and capture of the knowledge, storage in some sort of ‘knowledge bank’, and retrieval of the knowledge when needed. The transfer is lower bandwidth than direct communication (perhaps 14 times lower), as it is difficult to write down more than a fragment of what you know, and the written knowledge needs to be translated back into human understanding by the knowledge user (some would argue that the written knowledge has become information, and needs to be translated back into knowledge). No dialogue is possible, and demonstrations are restricted to recorded demonstrations, eg using video files.

Transfer of knowledge by this means is not very effective. However, the knowledge need only be captured once to be accessed and reused hundreds of times, so it is an efficient method of transferring knowledge widely. The knowledge is secure against memory loss, or loss of personnel. This approach is ideal for codifiable knowledge with a wide user base. For example, the widespread transfer of basic cooking knowledge is best done through publishing cookery books, rather than creating communities of chefs.

It is also ideal for knowledge that is used intermittently, such as knowledge of office moves, or knowledge of major acquisitions. These events may not happen again for a few years, by which time the individuals involved will have forgotten the details of what happened, if it has not been captured and stored.


These two approaches to knowledge transfer are the Connect and Collect approaches.  Effective Knowledge Management strategies need to address both these methods of knowledge transfer. Each has its place, each complements the other, as summarised below.

Connection

• Advantages  - 
• Very effective 
• Allows transfer of non-codifiable knowledge 
• Allows socialization 
• Allows the knowledge user to gauge how much they trust the supplier 
• Easy and cheap
• Disadvantages - 
• Risky. Human memory is an unreliable knowledge store 
• Inefficient. People can only be in one place at one time 
• People often don’t realize what they know until its captured
• Type of knowledge for which this approach is suitable -  
• Ephemeral rapidly changing knowledge, which would be out of date as soon as its written
• Highly contextual knowledge 
• Knowledge of continual operations, where human knowledge is contatntly being refreshed and rehearsed
• Knowledge needed only by a few
• Comments - One traditional approach to Knowledge Management is to leave knowledge in the heads of experts. This is a risky and inefficient strategy other than in very small organisations

Collection

• Advantages - 
• Allows systematic capture and development of knowledge
• Allows synthesis of knowledge from many sources
• Allows knowledge to be embedded in common process, in product design, or in algorithms
• Creates a secure store for knowledge, which will therefore not be list when people leave the organisation
• Very efficient. Knowledge can be captured once and accessed many times
• Disadvantages -  
• Some knowledge cannot be effectively captured and codified.  
• Capturing requires skill and resource 
• Captured knowledge may become impersonaland decontextualised
• Type of knowledge for which this approach is suitable -  
• Stable mature knowledge 
• Knowledge of intermittent or rare events 
• Knowledge which requires input form many sources or people
• Knowledge with a large user-base
• Comments -  A strategy based only on capture may miss out on the socialization that is needed for culture change, and may fail to address some of the less codifiable knowledge.

Management by conversation

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Photo - Little Conversations Originally uploaded to Flickr by iwona_kellie

Steven Denning, at the Ottowa Knowledge Management summit a few years ago, said that the learning capacity of an organisation is directly related to it's ability to hold conversations, and I truly believe he was right.

When dealing with the management of intangibles such as knowledge, much of the process of management will be through conversation (conversation leading to action).

For example, Safety Management is driven by conversations about safety, in order to drive awareness of safety issues and identify mitigating actions. Similarly Risk Management is driven by conversations about safety, in order to drive awareness of risks to projects and to identify mitigating actions.


Similarly knowledge management is driven by conversations about knowledge.

All of the most powerful knowledge management processes are driven by conversation - especially dialogue.

• Knowledge management planning is a dialogue about "what knowledge do we need", in order to identify learning actions. 
• Peer Assist is a dialogue to exchange and acquire knowledge at the start of a project, in order to identify improvement actions for the project. 
• After Action Review is a ongoing, regular learning-based dialogue within a working team, to identify improvement actions for the team. 
• Retrospect is a detailed dialogue at the end of the project to identify and clarify the team learnings, and the improvement actions for the organisation. 
• Knowledge exchange is a multi-person dialogue within a community or between two teams, in order to collectively make sense of experience, identify the learnings, and determine the process improvement actions.

As Steve Denning might have said, the learning capacity of an organisation is directly related to it's ability to hold conversations about learning.

AAR the standard way

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Remember this post about the 251 method for After Action reviews?

I have had a few people say "that's a great idea - I will try it on my AARs"

I say "Hold on a moment!"

This 251 method was developed for a specific situation, where people are culturally unwilling to join in a free and open conversation. It is therefore a way of stimulating interaction, and specifically asking for their individual input.

The advantage - you hear from people who might otherwise not contribute.
The disadvantage - no dialogue - just a set of individual views.

For me, the dialogue is one of the key elements in the success of the AAR. Through dialogue with each other, the team reaches a deeper understanding than any of them could have reached individually. You dialogue, to find the root causes, and then design the corrective (or sustaining) actions.

That's why, in most western cultures, I would not recommend the 251 method. 251 is for specific cultural circumstances. Where these do not apply, I would recommend you stick with the standard 5 questions, and use your facilitation skills to ensure everyone contributes to the dialogue.

what was the objective?
what was actually delivered?
why was there a
difference ? (root causes)
what did we learn?
what are we going to do
about it?

Discussion and dialogue

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Dialog Retreat
Originally uploaded by veni markovski

A quote from organised chaos

“A key difference between a dialogue and an ordinary discussion is that, within
the latter people usually hold relatively fixed positions and argue in favor of
their views as they try to convince others to change. At best this may produce
agreement or compromise, but it does not give rise to anything creative.”

David Bohm & David Peat, Science Order, and Creativity, p. 241

There are many forms of discussion, the three main types being argument, debate, and dialogue.

• In argument, you try to convince your opponent that they are wrong and you are
  right
• in debate, you argue your case, to convince an audience that you
  are right
• in dialogue, you explore the topic together, to try and find
  what is right

That's why dialogue is the primary process that lies behind so much Knowledge Management activity

The challenge of Unknown Knowns

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The unknown knowns are, in many ways, as tricky to deal with in Knowledge Management than the Unknown Unknowns. 

05.24.08 by Daniella on Flickr

We hear a lot (famously from Donald Rumsfeld) about the unknown unknowns, and how difficult they are to deal with, and in knowledge management terms, they can be a real challenge. However an equally challenging issue is the unknown knowns. These are the things that people know without realising – the unconscious competencies. These are very often the deep-lying technical knowledge that is of real value to other.

But how can someone share knowledge if they don’t know that they know it?

An example comes from when I was teaching my daughter to drive. To start with, she did not know what she did not know. The whole topic of driving was a closed book to her. However, once she was behind the wheel, she began to be aware of the things she needed to learn. Now I have been driving so long (36 years), that I drive automatically, without thinking. I know how to do it, but I am not conscious of what I am doing much of the time. I don't know what I know any more. So when she asked me complex questions such as “when changing gear going down a steep hill, do I put my foot on the clutch before I put it on the brake, or do I brake first?” I had to think for some time, and often I had to get into the driving seat, go through the manoeuvre, and analyse what I was doing in order to become conscious of it, before I could explain it to her.

The people who have the knowledge, are often unaware that they have it, like me and driving. The people who need the knowledge may often be unaware that they need it. Without an effective process to address the unknown knowns, the crucial knowledge may never get transferred. We need a process of helping people know what they know.

Questions are the route to the unknown knowns.

We have already seen the process from my driving example – the process is questioning.

There is a saying in the Middle East – “Knowledge is a treasure chest, and questions are the key”.  The person who needs the knowledge asks the difficult question, and starts the process of discovering the unknown knowledge.

The most effective means of knowledge transfer is through dialogue – via questions and answers. Through a question and answer process, the knowledge supplier becomes conscious of what he or she knows, and once they are conscious, they can explain or demonstrate to the learner. The explanation or demonstration can be recorded and codified and made explicit.

This works for teams as well. Teams have an unconscious competence in the way they work effectively together. Not only do the individual team members not know what they know as individuals, they doubly don’t know what the other team members know. So before you can start to capture or harvest any knowledge from a team, you need a team Q&A dialogue, carefully facilitated, such as After Action review or retrospect. Once you start the dialogue, and start discussing the reasons behind why things happened, the team will often piece together the learning as a group activity.

The "self-submission" trap.

Now imagine that you did not use dialogue or questions, and instead that you asked the team members to write down what they know. You would never get the unknown knowns, and you would never get at the double unknown secrets of team delivery.

And yet many organizations expect just that – individual submissions – as a feed into their knowledge base. And then they wonder why they don’t get the value.

Instead, you should aim to make use of the dialogue-based processes,

Interview
After Action review
Peer Assist
Retrospect

Use these as your primary means to help competence to become conscious, to help the knowns to become known, and to start to generate some content of real value.

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Dealing with the unknown knowns

Another post from the archives on dealing with the "unknown knowns" in Knowledge Management.

We hear a lot (famously from Donald Rumsfeld) about the unknown unknowns, and how difficult they are to deal with, and in knowledge management terms, they can be a real challenge.

However an equally challenging issue in Knowledge Management is the unknown knowns. These are the things that people know without realising – the unconscious competencies. These are very often the deep-lying technical knowledge that is of real value to other people - the tacit knowledge (in the original sense of tacit - distinguished from explicit knowledge being the known knows, whether they are documented or not).

How can someone share knowledge if they don’t know that they know it?

An example comes from when I was teaching my daughter to drive. To start with, she did not know what she did not know. The whole topic of driving was a closed book to her. However, once she was behind the wheel, she began to be aware of the things she needed to learn. Now I have been driving so long (45 years), that I drive automatically without thinking. I know how to do it, but I am not conscious of what I am doing much of the time. I don't know what I know any more. So when she asked me complex questions such as “when changing gear going down a steep hill, do I put my foot on the clutch before I put it on the brake, or do I brake first?” I had to think for some time, and often I had to get into the driving seat, go through the manoeuvre, and analyse what I was doing in order to become conscious of it, before I could explain it to her.

For me, that manoeuvre was an unknown know. I knew how to do it, but did not know how I did it, if you see what I mean.

The people who have the knowledge, are often unaware that they have it, like me and driving. The people who need the knowledge may often be unaware that they need it. Without an effective process to address the unknown knowns, the crucial knowledge may never get transferred. We need a process of helping people know what they know.

Questions are the route to the unknown knowns.

We have already seen the process from my driving example – the process is questioning.

There is a saying in the Middle East – “Knowledge is a treasure chest, and questions are the key”.  The person who needs the knowledge asks the difficult question, and starts the process of discovering the unknown knowledge.

The most effective means of knowledge transfer is through dialogue – via questions and answers. Through a question and answer process, the knowledge supplier becomes conscious of what he or she knows, and once they are conscious, they can explain or demonstrate to the learner. The explanation or demonstration can be recorded and codified and made explicit.

This works for teams as well. Teams have an unconscious competence in the way they work effectively together. Not only do the individual team members not know what they know as individuals, they doubly don’t know what the other team members know. So before you can start to capture or harvest any knowledge from a team, you need a team Q&A dialogue, carefully facilitated, such as After Action review or retrospect. Once you start the dialogue, and start discussing the reasons behind why things happened, the team will often piece together the learning as a group activity.

 The answer to the question might be a statement; sometimes it is a demonstration (as in my driving example). This depends on the knowledge, and the depth to which it has become unconscious.

The "self-submission" trap.

Now imagine that you did not use dialogue or questions, and instead that you asked the team members to write down what they know. You would never get the unknown knowns, and you would never get at the double unknown secrets of team delivery.

And yet many organizations expect just that – individual submissions as a feed into their knowledge base. They don't pay attention to the step of making knowledge conscious, so all that becomes recorded is the known knowns - the shallow knowledge, which does not contain the necessary depth or detail. And then they wonder why they don’t get the value.

Instead, you should aim to make use of the dialogue-based processes,

Interview
After Action review
Peer Assist
Retrospect

Use these as your primary means to help competence to become conscious, to help the knowns to become known, and to start to generate some content of real value.

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