Thoughts on “Absolute” KM Objectives - or Guiding Principles
At our company we are currently putting some intensive thoughts into a new corporate Knowledge Management strategy. I hope you understand, that I can not go into details of our strategy itself but one specific part I would like to share and discuss with you.
In order to lay the foundation of the new KM strategy, we were sketching the “absolute” or “ultimate” KM objectives, which could be generic for any company (edit: user Joachim suggested the term Guiding Principles, which describes the ideas below very well). We started this process with a reverse brainstorming based on the question ‘which behaviour is totally destroying knowledge sharing?’ - to some of you this might be familiar. Based on the outcome, we then started to formulate the antidotes. As a result, we established seven desired behaviours for Knowledge Sharing, which I would like to share here:
- One Family/ Networking: any colleague within the company is regarded as an equal member of a Big Family and we are open to network with all of them
- Leverage Expertise: it’s a natural habit to build on existing solutions, and therefore avoid to re-invent the wheel
- Transparency: all information has potential to be shared and by default is public within the company; this behaviour should be reflected in storage, permission, and language
- Conversation: participation is more important than perfection; we as a company acknowledge that a ‘zero failure tolerance’ culture is hindering knowledge sharing
- Value of Knowledge: we are all aware of the fact that capabilities lead to sustainable performance (long-term) as well as immediate improvements (short-term)
- Language: we acknowledge that within a larger corporation we have no common language; this is also related to social lingo and acronyms
- Recognition: we all have the perception that there is a natural balance between sharing and consuming knowledge
I admit that these objectives are not easy to accomplish and in some companies are far from reach. We are not using them to formulate our strategy but in a way these objectives are setting the direction in which we should head to.
What do you think? Are these objectives applicable for any corporation? Are important high-level objectives missing? Let’s discuss…
7 Comments so far
Hi Tim, I’d call those Guiding Principles rather than objectives - this way there’s less pressure to come up with (or work towards) a perfect solution.
- Tim
@Dave: I really appreciate your comment because to some people the language issue was too dominant; we actually identified that certain teams talked in their acronyms and specific terms is a distinct barrier of knowledge sharing
@Joachim: thank you very much; I prefer ‘Guiding Principles’ as well!
- John Tropea
Peter-Anthony Glick has a page full of syndromes/barriers http://leveragingknowledge.blogspot.com/2009/12/corporate-cultures-not-conducive-to.html
A lot of these are structural in nature...orgs are a natural design to deal with technology and people that has caused a disconnection due to living in multiple social networks within society (compared to the pre-agricultural one network)...side effect is a culture of competition and hoarding, rather than sharing and collaboration.
http://culturalengineer.blogspot.com/2009/11/how-would-hunter-gatherers-run-world.htmlAltruism drives weaken with distance and proximity...which is why the big wigs cannot possibly feel for all the people, and vice versa (the workers corporate plot)
http://libraryclips.blogsome.com/2010/03/31/sharing-and-change-in-the-corporate-plot/Bottom-up shifts are good, but top-down design will change behaviours...just look at Cisco, which seems to be a kind of change from authortarianism to democracy (to some degree)
http://johntropea.tumblr.com/post/925741637/next-generation-collaborative-enterprise-ngceA big thing is re-design what people are paid to do
http://libraryclips.blogsome.com/2009/12/17/the-roi-of-time-spent-helping-others-and-performance-reviewsI really like how social computing is creating conditions for engagement...once people can have input, feel heard, have impact, interact with an audience...sharing simply becomes a byproduct. That’s why I think engagement is key.
At the end of this post I compare KM to safety, quality, environment...and why KM may not seem as important as these due to risks not being tangible or felt enough, or dangerous to well being and reputation
http://libraryclips.blogsome.com/2009/11/02/sensemaking-km-and-cops-just-in-time-vs-just-in-case-engaging-and-embedded-km-and-a-competitive-vs-collaborative-culture/I’m thinking alot these days about organisational design...it’s the roots to many behaviours that we think it’s just the way it is. This is what I think is behind the social business design movement
http://www.dachisgroup.com/Sometimes I feel KM is getting nowhere as there are design issues at the roots that are causing undesirable behaviours
- Tim Wieringa
@John, I totally agree with you. Thanks a lot for sharing! We also see that we have a structural and behavioural problem and that is where part of our new strategy is focussing on.
I think a lot to do is that in a tradtional organisation, power is the leading force and not collaboration. And this attitude is discouraging knowledge sharing.
I would suggest to ways out of this structure:
a) social computing helps to enable the people to share and collaborate outside of the existing ‘power structures’
b) show management the value for hte company and themselves when everybody engages in conversations across the entire organisationComparing that with the guidelines above, all of them point in one of this direction, I think.
- Simon Bostock
Like @Dave, I was struck by the language point.
I think there’s a common misconception that technical language and jargon is motivated by something akin to precision. When actually it’s chunking and reduced cognitive load.
We all think we’re being helpful when we use the technical terms of our profession - See! I’ve taken the trouble to use the exact phrase which describes the situation! - but in fact we’re just kittens rolling around bundles of chunked-up thoughts and learning. (For example, “chunking” and “cognitive load”. . . I guess that a #KM blog is familiar with both and that, therefore, so will all the readers. I’m almost certainly wrong - my own use case for ‘chunking’, for example, is almost certainly not the same as everybody’s.)
Did you see the Humantics piece? They identified a LADR concept for effective collaboration, ‘language anxiety’ being their number one ‘barrier to collaboration’. I summarised it here:
http://www.bfchirpy.com/2010/06/humantics-hypergogues-collaboration.html(It’s a very personal summary rather than useful for everybody, but the language anxiety concept is in the first two paragraphs and in the final paragraph which has this fantastic quote from Mary Shaw:
“solving a problem simply means representing it so as to make the solution transparent.”)
Interestingly, the Humantics authors (both designers) suggest a remedy of more visualisation. Perhaps the very term ‘language’ in your Guiding Principles imposes a problem by assuming communication takes place in this mode?
- John Tropea
Reducing cognitive load hopes to settle into a cognitive fit...oops there we go again talking jive.
From my tumblr by Michael Lissack on Cognitive fit
http://johntropea.tumblr.com/post/847151557/cognitive-fit-shared-perceptions-and-linguistic“The new vocabulary becomes a shared linguistic domain, not just because of the language, but because the set of shared perceptions created about how the world works.”
Wittgenstein to wit, “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”
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I’m especially struck by the good sense in the Language point. I’m assuming you mean among other things more than one human language, and that alone is good to keep in mind. When one language is the lingua franca, even widely-used others tend to get neglected (especially by mono-lingua-francists).
Beyond those obvious barriers, though, is the recognition that how we communicate within our groups (my department, my specialty, my interests, my profession) can place unintended obstacles to participation by others.
Not that engineers shouldn’t talk about engineering in engineer-y ways—but that it’s good to recall that non-engineers might pick up, or contribute, things of value.
Posted on August 06, 2010 at 03:00 AM | Comment permalink