Considering that being smarter, that is fielding better knowledge resources, than one’s competition is a key survival criterion in business.
After all it is putting knowledge to work, or the actual deployment of Intellectual Capital that is typically what makes one firm survive and another die or get eaten.
So it is curious that many firms fail to leverage their expert’s discretionary effort, subject interest, and awareness.

In this blog I will provide a practical technique for using your experts better to increase your holdings of Intellectual Capital and for improving your firm’s awareness of its business environment, and perhaps even taking another step in the direction of becoming a learning organization.

In a recent webinar for the ic knowledge center I presented some ideas on Knowledge Management & IC and you are welcome to download the presentation slides from the ICKC website, or to join the conversation.

Objectives of Knowledge Management

Firstly, let’s just remind ourselves of the two main forks in Knowledge Management objectives

1. Operational Excellence
2. Niche Mastery

In the first we want to put knowledge to work and by doing so to reduce cost due to wasted effort and duplication, increase output and efficiency by replicating best practices, and by propagating knowledge across the organization.

In the second we want it to be seen that we do this, and make it clear to potential customers, investors, and would-be employees that we are masters of our craft and market niche.

Expertise is the gold, but alone it is insufficient – you can’t just have expertise, you must put it to work in as many ways as possible in order to make it a competitive advantage rather than just an “also-have”.

The Learning Organization

As I have outlined in previous posts, a major cause of corporate mortality is failure to learn – in essence a fatal learning disability.

One of the primary features of such a learning disability is an inward focus and a steady loss of awareness of what is going on outside the firm – such firms stop using external events and information to drive change within their organization.
For a firm to learn I believe there are several components that must be satisfied.

Inter alia, a firm must successfully engage in and master:

• Environmental Awareness
• Processing & Contextualization of external information
• Deriving Synthesis & Meaning from external information
• Adaptive Behavioral Change

A firm needs its experts to be aware of what is going on in the world and specifically in terms of their area of expertise, to have a high index of curiosity, and to do something with what they see.

Specifically, what I have in mind is that they will place a context around things that would otherwise simply pass the rest of us by unnoticed or unmarked, and as a result the firm will adapt to external conditions and innovate.

How an Expert Tags Novelty

What this means in real terms is that I want experts to be aware of things going on in the outside world, for example news items, events, technological changes, and market movements, and then to pull those into the firm, and provide an explanation of what this means, how it is relevant to what the firm does, and finally, to suggest actions that could put this to use for the firm.

In the presentation I give two examples, but your use is likely to be different and should be driven by your experts because they are the only portal through which new ideas can enter your firm without triggering the embedded immune systems that usually crush novelty as a form of error.

DIY

Here then are the steps I suggest you use in getting your experts to pull in Intellectual Capital for your firm

1. Capture Content from external sources
2. Provide a Context from the eyes of an expert
3. Explain why this is Significant to the firm
4. Add an Evaluation to test message integrity
5. Provide a Social Environment for interaction
6. Layer with advised Actions

Although hosting the content in a CRM, LMS, or Wiki will help, don’t prioritize IT systems over the people element – most KM practitioners I have polled believe that people-factors account for 80-90% of the success of this kind of thing, and technology only 10-20%. So spend proportionate amounts of time and effort on organizing, motivating, and helping the people and don’t get distracted by the shiny IT toys.

Conclusion

Experts are often underutilized and pigeon-holed into highly specific roles that reduce their effectiveness as agents of organizational learning that can boost operational performance and increase adaptive capacity. By deliberately encouraging your experts to retrieve found articles of information from the outside world and add value to them by explaining context and implication to the firm, and by specifying recommended actions, the expert can extend their value and that of the firm.

~~~

Matthew Loxton is a Knowledge Management expert, holds a Master’s degree in Knowledge Management from the University of Canberra, and provides pro-bono consulting in Knowledge Management and IT Governance to various medical institutions. Matthew is a peer reviewer for several Knowledge Management and Information Science Journals.

Please view it there

Other than having snappy Three Letter Acronyms (TLA), Centers of Excellence (CoE) and Communities of Practice (CoP) provide a company with ways to consolidate and build on its expertise in areas that bring direct financial and competitive results, and which translate to higher customer satisfaction, increased referenciability, and improvements in both capacity and capability. Both techniques of deploying expert knowledge provide increased job satisfaction and career development for staff at the same time.

One requires special organizational changes and an operational budget, and the other simply needs some infrastructural support to let people do what they are passionate about.

The following operational definition of a CoE is fairly useful

“Whatever you call them, a Center of Excellence (CoE) should, at a most basic level consist of:  A team of people that promote collaboration and using best practices around a specific focus area to drive business results. This team could be staffed with full- or part-time members.” (Strickler 2008)

Strickler goes on to list what he considers to be the responsibilities of a CoE:

• 1. Support: For their area of focus, CoE’s should offer support  to the business lines. This may be through services needed, or providing subject matter experts.
  
• 2. Guidance: Standards, methodologies, tools and knowledge repositories are typical approaches to filling this need.
  
• 3. Shared Learning: Training and certifications, skill assessments, team building and formalized roles are all ways to encourage shared learning.
  
• 4. Measurements: CoEs should be able to demonstrate they are delivering the valued results that justified their creation through the use of output metrics.
  
• 5. Governance: Allocating limited resources (money, people, etc.) across all their possible use is an important function of CoEs. They should ensure organizations invest in the most valuable projects and create economies of scale for their service offering. In addition, coordination across other corporate interests is needed to enable the CoE to deliver value.
  
• (Strickler 2008)
  

In comparison a CoP provides more or less the same in terms of 1-4, but has no official authority over deployment of company resources such as people, places, equipment, or budget.

A CoP provides as follows:

1. Support – provision of a network of experts from both inside the organization and from outside
   
2. Guidance – a CoP can be entrusted to devise and document best practices, standards, methodologies, tools, bodies of knowledge
   
3. Shared Learning – Except for actually creating formalized roles in a company hierarchy, a CoP does all the same things as a CoE under this heading, plus provides mentorship, apprenticeships, and access to external informal and formal trade groups.
   
4. Measurements – besides providing measurements of efficacy, a CoP typically describes what measures are appropriate for the proper execution of the domain of expertise or trade
   
5. Governance – in this one dimension a CoP differs greatly from a CoE and instead of managing resources, a CoP strives to refine and improve the domain of expertise itself. A central function of the CoP is to improve the domain itself rather than simply managing its deployment. A CoE for project management seeks to improve the deployment of project managers and the like in furtherance of operational targets, whereas a CoP would seek to improve the entire field and practice of project management itself.
   

The Carnegie-Mellon Software Engineering Institute (SEI) offers a more detailed account of CoE including how to measure them

(Craig, Fisher et al. 2009)

They also offer a broader definition

(Craig, Fisher et al. 2009)

Their categories are similar to that of Strickler, but the SEI tabulate them as follows:

1. Internal Business Process
   
2. Customer Focus
   
3. Leadership
   
4. Innovation and Learning
   
5. Financial
   

Again we can usefully compare what a CoP does on the same dimensions

1. Internal Business Process – A CoP applies domain principles to service organizational goals
   
2. Customer Focus – While a CoP is focused more on refining the domain than on customer service, it acknowledges that this is a business goal of the host organization and therefore puts domain expertise in service of customers.
   
3. Leadership – a CoP provides leadership on the use and principles of the domain itself
   
4. Innovation and Learning – These are perceived as vital objectives and programs within a CoP, although it must be said that neither a CoP nor a CoE are natural sources of innovation as such since they are both conservationary entities rather than innovative.
   
5. Financial – CoPs have little or no financial responsibilities , in part at least because they depend on members to provide discretionary effort and volunteerism rather than performing work in exchange for payment.
   

So What is a CoP then?

Wenger (2007) defines CoPs as follows : “Communities of practice are formed by people who engage in a process of collective learning in a shared domain of human endeavour“(Wenger, McDermott et al. 2002) and goes on to provide some examples to demonstrate

“… a tribe learning to survive, a band of artists seeking new forms of expression, a group of engineers working on similar problems, a clique of pupils defining their identity in the school, a network of surgeons exploring novel techniques, a gathering of first-time managers helping each other cope. In a nutshell: Communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly.” (Wenger, McDermott et al. 2002)

A CoP is an affiliation of people who share a common practice and who have a desire to further the practice itself … and of course to share knowledge, refine best practices, and introduce standards – but more on that later. CoPs are defined by their domain of interest, but the membership is a social structure comprised of volunteer practitioners.

CoPs differ from a CoE mainly in that they tend to have no geographical boundaries, they hold no hierarchical power within a firm, and they definitely can never have structure determined by the company.
However, one of the most obvious and telling differences lies in the stated motive of members – CoPs exist because they have active practitioner members who are passionate about a specific practice, and the goals of a CoP are to refine and improve their chosen domain of practice – and the members provide discretionary effort that is not paid for by the employer.

CoE members are paid by an employer substantively to perform that role, whereas CoP members may use infrastructure and time provided by their employer, but provide services and participation out of discretionary effort of their own. They are not paid for services rendered in the way a CoE member is.

For example: a CoP for Project Managers would transcend organizational boundaries and consist of members who are passionate about Project Management itself, and who may or may not be employed by the same firm or live on the same continent. They participate and contribute towards the improvement of project management itself because their common interest in refining and improving the practice of Project Management gives them a common interest.

CoPs may remain internal to a single company but there is no reason why they should do so (and plenty of reasons why they shouldn’t), and while they would benefit from support from the company, they don’t have to have it.

What a company can do for CoPs is provide resources like time, places to meet, IT services, stationery, coffee, tea, cookies, and maybe some money for occasional travel and beer.

What a company gets in return are fired-up and expert people who are masters of their game, and a set of practices and methods that get used consistently across different silos of the organization.

Suffice to say that companies that have thriving CoPs tend to be the leaders in their market niche and tend to have better staff retention and higher EBITDA than those that don’t.

Let’s look at the core characteristics of a CoP according to Wenger (2007)

1. A Domain
   ‘…[a CoP] has an identity defined by a shared domain of interest. Membership therefore implies a commitment to the domain, and therefore a shared competence that distinguishes members from other people’
   
2. A Community
   ‘In pursuing their interest in their domain, members engage in joint activities and discussions, help each other, and share information. They build relationships that enable them to learn from each other’
3. Practice
   ‘Members of a community of practice are practitioners. They develop a shared repertoire of resources: experiences, stories, tools, ways of addressing recurring problems—in short a shared practice. This takes time and sustained interaction’

(Wenger 2007) in (Smith 2003, 2009)

Conclusion

A CoE is something that you must be able to afford to put in place, whereas a CoP is something you cannot afford not to put in place. The essence of a CoP is the concept of management being enablers and then simply getting out of the way of passionate people so that they can do their thing. Whether a person’s passion is codification systems for diagnosis & repair, financial measurement, or business analytics, there are bound to be others in the company, amongst business partners, or within the customer-base that are dying to work together on refining and advancing their domain of interest – all you need to do as a manager is enable them, empower them, and get out of the way so they can put passion to work.

~~~

Matthew Loxton is a Knowledge Management expert, holds a Master’s degree in Knowledge Management from the University of Canberra, and provides pro-bono consulting in Knowledge Management and IT Governance to various medical institutions.

References

Craig, W., M. Fisher, et al. (2009). Generalized Criteria and Evaluation Method for Center of Excellence: A Preliminary Report, Citeseer.

Smith, M. K. (2003, 2009). “Communities of practice.” The encyclopedia of informal education Retrieved 31 May, 2011, from www.infed.org/biblio/communities_of_practice.htm.

Strickler, J. (2008). “What is a Center of Excellence.” Retrieved 31/5/2011, 2011, from http://agileelements.wordpress.com/2008/10/29/what-is-a-center-of-excellence/.

Wenger, E. (2007). Communities of practice: Learning, meanings, and identity, Cambridge university press.

Wenger, E., R. A. McDermott, et al. (2002). Cultivating communities of practice: A guide to managing knowledge, Harvard Business Press.

One way to get it hopelessly wrong is to think of social media as just your regular one-to-many vehicle to get a standardized and glossy marketing message out to the public, and allied to that is a mistake of not making sure that you are ready for the bi-directional discourse that social media elicits.
Social media is a many-to-many medium and social networking means listening just as much (or more) than talking, and if you send a message across social media, you should anticipate a response.

Many organizations, especially their HR departments, firewall themselves from external email and have server settings and policies that make it virtually impossible for a member of the public to talk to them.

Here is a nicely branded email I got (unsolicited) from a very reputable company urging me to “connect” – and while the intent is good and the branding is solid, it simply doesn’t align well with their behavior and their (in)ability to react properly.

The Solicitation to Connect

So far so good, but my previous experience with them suggested to me that they are not very self-aware when it comes to talking to the general public and especially job-seekers.
I replied that I didn’t think I would be connecting because some time ago when I did apply for a position there, they didn’t even bother to send me the regular unbranded “get lost” email.

Response

Here is my email response explaining myself.

Sorry, but no.
When I did apply at ……. I got no response, which means you don’t really understand the concept of social networking and following you would be pointless.
I neither want to work for nor socialize with organizations that think social networking is the same as just saying things using social media – social networking is about listening as well as talking, it is not just putting marketing out on a different medium.

… and of course the totally unexpected then happened (/sarcasm), the mail was bounced because they hide behind a “don’t talk to us” firewall.
I received a bounce response as follows

This is an automatically generated Delivery Status Notification.

Delivery to the following recipients failed.

………..Careers@…….com

Reporting-MTA: dns;blu0-omc4-s15.blu0.hotmail.com

Received-From-MTA: dns;BLU0-SMTP106

Arrival-Date: Thu, 26 May 2011 07:43:03 -0700

Final-Recipient: rfc822;…………..Careers@…….com

Action: failed

Status: 5.5.0

Diagnostic-Code: smtp;550 Message refused by SpamProfiler

Conclusion

Social media is going to increasingly become an issue of corporate survival for many people and those that don’t figure out how to use them to engage with their customers, investors, and other stakeholders are going to be under significant natural-selection pressure. However engaging through social networking is not just a bit of IT and regular marketing, and it is far less about being able to produce glossy copy and far more about establishing an engaging online persona and engaging in discourse. Social media are not just a different one-to-many broadcasting medium like TV, radio, and newspapers, it requires that you stand ready to listen and respond. Sending out an email invitation to connect and then bouncing an email reply just won’t do.
This requires not just rethinking IT systems but more importantly, also making cultural shifts.

~~~

Matthew Loxton is a Knowledge Management expert, holds a Master’s degree in Knowledge Management from the University of Canberra, and provides pro-bono consulting in Knowledge Management and IT Governance to various medical institutions.

QR Codes are something you are going to enjoy getting used to – from booking seats for a concert to reading a business card, QR codes are a way to shorten the distance between you and something you want, and all for free via your smartphone.

This particular code takes your smartphone browser to my website, but then what were you expecting? – Tickets to the MOMA?

However, keep your eye open and your phone handy and you will see coupons, special deals, and concert tickets on QR codes splattered across bus-shelters, walls, and magazines.

A savvy person might even consider using them at work to link to instructions for the office printer, claim forms, or meetings.

Nielsen pegged the share of smartphones in the US at 31% as of the end of 2010, and has projected the share to climb over 50% this year.
The proportion is higher amongst technology workers and managers, and therefore provides a fertile space in which QR and bar-codes can be used as part of work environment where most staff will have their own readers.

Since many are already using this functionality to scan products, find coupons, and book tickets, it makes sense to put the same technology to work in providing information at work.

This can be done in two major ways

1. Barcodes and QR codes that link a user to work-instructions, knowledge articles, or contextual information
2. QR codes that link to an online user profile

The standard QR code can fit neatly on a business card, and can transport directly to a meaningful landing zone like a personal profile page that outlines business activity and contact details.

That’s my story and I am sticking to it!

~~~

Matthew Loxton is a Knowledge Management expert, holds a Master’s degree in Knowledge Management from the University of Canberra, and provides pro-bono consulting in Knowledge Management and IT Governance to various medical institutions.

For the purposes of this article I am going to conflate gossip and rumor to a large degree, although at a finer level of granularity the two become very different (McAndrew 2008)– Rumor deals more with externalities and objects, whereas gossip involves interpersonal relationships more.
Gossip is a natural human communicative phenomenon that is part of our evolution (McAndrew and Milenkovic 2002) that does several things, amongst which are articulation of what people are worried about, worries that are insufficiently known, instances of cheating, and changes of positional power or influence.

In case you get bored by the discussion later on, I am going to discuss a quick win first – mining the gossip in your organization as an early-warning system.

Early Warning System

Perhaps I should qualify “early” here – I don’t mean like you have a radar that can detect an oncoming wave of bombers long before they reach your shores, I mean in the sense that you get to sample what is already eating away at your foundations and which may give you an idea of what you are dealing with.
For this reason I strongly recommend that gossip be sampled regularly in order to get on the radar screen threats and weaknesses that might otherwise have been missed until they made themselves known more overtly and systemically.

The technique is to gather gossip without people being afraid that the intent is to track the source and to mete out punishment.
If people fear retribution, the gossip doesn’t go away and neither do the causes, it just goes silent – silencing gossip is the equivalent of switching off power to the radar screen.
The idea is not to encourage gossip as much as simply sample and monitor it.

Depending on the level of trust in your organization, there are two main ways to sample gossip:

• Get them from the people in the organization who are the Connectors, those who lie at the nexus points in your Social Network
• Provide staff with an anonymous postbox

OK, so I lied a bit, there is another and far more accurate way, but you aren’t going to like it.

Predictions

Gossip is often the stuff that people believe to be true or likely but that they feel uncomfortable to tell management. This might mean they just have a hunch, but it may also mean that they know something but won’t say it for fear of being embarrassed or the retribution that may visit them if they come clean.

This is where Prediction Markets come in, and boy are you going to hate this!

If you ask how a project is going or what the sales forecast is, you are likely to get the sanitized and upbeat evaluation, but if people bid on a market – even with fake money, something different happens, and you are likely to get a far more accurate picture. Asking “how is the project going” gets you a CYA response, but if there was a pseudo-stockmarket in which people bid on a specific question such as “Project X will achieve Y milestone by Z date”, the results are likely to be far more accurate.
Share-value in the market rises or falls according to the insider knowledge and conviction of buyers, and if the identities of bidders are unknown, it represents the most accurate sampling of the organizational knowledge that one can get.

The downside is that questions must be highly specific and need to be somewhat Boolean in nature (Manski 2006), and people must not be able to game the system for personal gain which is perhaps an insurmountable obstacle since you could get the equivalent of “insider trading” in which a person might deliberately sabotage a project to gain benefit from the market.
However, some academics show evidence that “bear raids” and other attempts to game the market tend to be short-lived and self-correcting (Hanson, Oprea et al. 2006)
On the other hand, economists were the same geniuses that said this about the real stock market prior to the Global Financial Crises that appeared from the shadows and ate about $8 trillion.

I told you that you wouldn’t like it! – but let’s talk very quickly about what gossip is really, after all.

Cultural Learning

In a very real sense gossip is a manifestation of “cultural learning” (Baumeister, Zhang et al. 2004), it emerges under several distinct conditions that have to do with (amongst others) detection of social cheating, message incongruity, fragmented information scent, and power vacuums. It also manifests when there are threats and insufficient information available. Rumors often start because of simple information underload.
In the case of social cheating, gossip functions as the channel to communicate cheating and as the foundation for what has been termed “Costly Punishment” (Henrich, McElreath et al. 2006)

Gossip not only communicates efficiently and fast, but also delivers peer pressure to correct non-conformance with norms of behavior – and this is where there is both a problem and an opportunity.
If organizational goals and policies are out of step with the organization’s social norms, then gossip will “correct” behavior to satisfy the social norms rather than the organizational goal, and people will tend to obey the “ground rules” (Davenport and Prusak 1998; Stacey, Griffin et al. 2000) rather than the institutional rules, and this bears repeating – if the social rules are at odds with your institutional rules, the social rules will win almost every time.
Peer pressure is faster and stronger than institutional power, so it is wise to sample the gossip stream to see if there is significant divergence between the two and measure the results of any remedial interventions for signs of success. – bringing the two closer together puts peer dynamics into play to achieve organizational objectives, rather than undermining or corroding them.

At a different level, sampling the gossip-stream also gives a very good picture of what the organizational culture really is like and to what degree the organizational mission as communicated is infectious, sticky, and resilient – A poorly crafted mission statement simply won’t stand up to the test.

“Ba” and the Water-Cooler Dilemma

One of the foundational objectives of Knowledge Management as a practice is to create both built-environment and mental space that fosters and encourages innovation and knowledge diffusion. In his conceptualization of “Ba”, the mental and physical knowledge terrain (Nonaka and Konno 1999), Nonaka proposes the “water-cooler” phenomenon – that more often than not breakthroughs and acquisition of critical knowledge happens in the spaces between formal meetings and workareas rather than in them, that sometimes the water-cooler and other social spaces see more real work than the formal work areas.
While this is certainly a strong argument, what is also clear is that when left to their own devices, people tend to talk about sports, celebrities, and gossip more than they do about work, and that even when they talk about work it tends to be more about their idiot boss, the lazy workmates, or which members of staff are in a romance or likely to leave, than about work itself.

This leads to somewhat of a dilemma – creating “Ba”, areas and time in which staff can mingle, chat, and relax certainly does increase the likelihood of real innovation and productive spread of knowledge, but it also increases at a larger rate the amount of gossip and non-work related talk.

Conclusion

Gossip isn’t going to go away anytime soon and while it can be reduced both by disciplinary action and removing some of the information-gap causes, it can also be monitored as a good error-signal and mined for content to flag things that are miss-matches between organizational objectives and social rules. Gossip is also a reliable indicator of organizational culture, and can be a valuable source of information that can lead to beneficial intervention programs.
Gossip is something that is likely to increase if knowledge management is done well, but the upside is that it becomes a mechanism for good just as much as it does for serving the craving people have to know about the personal foibles of the powerful and who is sleeping with whom in the office.

~~~

Matthew Loxton is a Knowledge Management expert, holds a Master’s degree in Knowledge Management from the University of Canberra, and provides pro-bono consulting in Knowledge Management and IT Governance to various medical institutions.

Bibliography

Baumeister, R. F., L. Zhang, et al. (2004). “Gossip as cultural learning.” Review of General Psychology
8: 111-121.

Davenport, T., H. and L. Prusak (1998). Working knowledge: how organizations manage what they know. Boston MA, Harvard Business School Press.

Hanson, R., R. Oprea, et al. (2006). “Information aggregation and manipulation in an experimental market.” Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization
60(4): 449-459.

Henrich, J., R. McElreath, et al. (2006). “Costly punishment across human societies.” Science
312(5781): 1767.

Manski, C. F. (2006). “Interpreting the predictions of prediction markets.” Economics Letters
91(3): 425-429.

McAndrew, F. (2008). “Can Gossip Be Good?” Scientific American Mind
19(5): 26-33.

McAndrew, F. T. and M. A. Milenkovic (2002). “Of Tabloids and Family Secrets: The Evolutionary Psychology of Gossip1.” Journal of Applied Social Psychology
32(5): 1064-1082.

Nonaka, I. and N. Konno (1999). The concept of Ba : building a foundation for knowledge creation. Boston MA, Butterworth-Heinemann.

Stacey, R. D., D. Griffin, et al. (2000). Limits of systems thinking Complexity and management; fad or radical challenge to systems thinking. London, Routledge.

Besides, I love yapping on about statistics and also came to realize that this was a subject that is a foreign area to many HR people – apparently and according to three HR Professionals, statistics and questionnaire design are not typically in the training for HR staff and recruiters.

Status Quo

Here’s the situation:

Many recruiters have lists of their favorite questions to ask candidates, and there are more blogs and articles online than you can shake a stick at with lists of “best questions”, “favorite questions”, and “most common questions”. Some recruiters have their own lists, some draw from those blogs and articles, and others make up new questions as they go, or even do it on the fly during an interview.
What gets my giddy-goat is that while they all wax lyrical about how wonderful their questions are and how happy they are with the results, almost none volunteer how they determine that their questions do anything whatsoever other than make them happy and take time.

The articles tend to be empty when it comes to explaining the reasoning behind the “top ten/twenty/forty-two” list, and can’t point to results other than (at best) a few hand-picked and probably fictitious anecdotes. Many recruiters also espouse questions to “throw” the candidate, catch them off-guard, or startle them, which is supposedly going to reveal a “true character” or do something else that is simply marvelous but undisclosed.
… and of course there are many examples of those “why is a manhole cover round” sort of question which are spoken of in hushed and reverent terms.

My question is why is one asking these questions at all.
I mean, it takes time, effort, and presumably one needs to take notes and then compare answers, and time is money.
The answer is that the questions are going to give insight into the applicant’s personality and abilities.

Fair enough, I say.

… but this is hiring and we are presumably trying to get a better performer than those of our competition, and whose performance translates into achievement of corporate objectives – EBITDA, for example.
In which case, I am not so sure that we are trying to discover “true character” as much as simply trying to match applicants to a role in such a way that we are more likely to achieve operational goals – in other words, performance.

What to Do

Firstly, don’t ask illegal questions, it can get your employer into a whole heap of pain.
I say this because over the years I have been asked about my religion, my age, my national origin, and even my political affiliations, and each time I made a mental note to eradicate that if I joined the firm.
There is silly, and then there is just plain ridiculously silly – Don’t ask questions that expose your employer to legal action for improper discrimination. It costs money, it harms the reputation, and it just isn’t necessary.
Simple rule, if you aren’t sure of the legality of a question, leave it out!

Secondly, get a book on questionnaire design and interviewing (Scheaffer, Mendenhall Iii et al. ; Oppenheim 1998; Van Bennekom 2002; Swanson 2005), and maybe one on qualitative analysis (Ezzy 2002)

Here are some basic points before we get to my recommendations on designing a process for interview questions:

1. Getting experts for technical or specialized tasks is a good idea, and you shouldn’t stop when you reach staffing – IO Psychology was founded precisely to address staffing issues.
2. Don’t fret unnecessarily about sample size – a sample is used to predict a feature of a population to which it belongs and you aren’t trying to tell what is going on in the general population by using your sample of applicants, so sample size is not as relevant.
3. There are robust statistical methods to deal with non-parametric situations in which sample sizes are small, such as Kolmogorov-Smirnov, Willcoxon, Kendall, and other tests
4. Statistical tests are pretty much always going to be better than gut-feel and guessing since that is precisely what they have been designed to do. They exist because of the many and various biases and errors that come factory-installed in our Neolithic brains.

I often encounter this chestnut – “Past performance is a better predictor of success than chance.”

Yes it is a better predictor than chance, but that doesn’t mean that the question or the specific past behavior selected are better than chance.
While it is true that amongst the myriad past behaviors there are those that would predict specific future behavior, there is no reason to believe that we have selected the right predictors or that what we believe to have been a predictive behavior is going to be so.
In addition, don’t forget that people learn, and learning is exactly the opposite of past predicting future.

Dr.Shepell the EAP expert has suggested a regimen of measuring the predictive power of your questions over time. He suggested 2yr tenure as a performance measure, and that the scores from recruitment questions be correlated to whether the person is still employed at the 2yr anniversary to see if the questions had higher predictive power than chance. This is a simple task that can be done with standard features in Excel.

My suggestion is more complex and involves (a) post-diction to see if a question would have predicted known performers and (b) for prediction I choose the regular performance review scores. Predictive questions should correlate strongly with performance evaluation scores (unless the appraisals are rubbish).

An additional suggestion is to code the probationary outcome and either produce a dummy Boolean variable to correlate against the questions, or to expand the probationary result into a Likert scale with negative values if the person was released and positive values if they were retained. That allows a “no thanks” or “ok,sure” to be distinguished from a “Hell, No!” and a “Hell, YES” evaluation.

Here’s what I am recommending:

1. Derive interview questions from four sources:
   1. previous critical events in the company’s history
   2. desired operational outcomes or goals
   3. the characteristics of known performers
   4. Industry-specific authorities (but make sure you understand the heritage of the questions)
   5. Like unpackaged drugs, do not get them from anyone without solid credentials
2. Test them before use
   1. Examine them for Content Validity and Construct Validity i.e. do they test the things they are meant to and do they do so exhaustively and exclusively – the whole truth and nothing but the truth
   2. Check with simple correlation that currently known high performers answer the questions as you would have expected. If you have a top-gun Software engineer and want to get another, make sure the questions would be answered by them in the way you expected – if they don’t then modify your question or drop it.
   3. Check that the answers by existing staff correlate to their performance reviews – unless you are making a pig’s ear of the regular performance reviews, you should have simple numerical ratings that can be correlated to the answers to your questions. If there isn’t a strong positive relationship between the appraisal scores and your questions, then one or both are a mess.
   4. Take your questions to the company lawyer who knows employment law in your locality. This is not a DIY step, get legal advice before you put the company’s neck on the block.
   5. Take them to the Marketing department and get them to give you a feel for whether you are damaging the brand in any way. You shouldn’t have many questions so they should be able to give you a feel in a few breaths.
3. Use them in a consistent manner
   1. Don’t ad lib and don’t change the wording or delivery
   2. Explain how long the questioning will take, who will use the answers and for what purpose, and how long they will be kept on record
   3. Keep records – this is company property, not yours to discard or lose
4. Test them over time
   1. Use Dr.Shepell’s criterion – if the results don’t predict tenure, then something is wrong, probably the question itself.
   2. At each performance review, run correlations again and see how the questions are doing at predicting performance – if the correlation isn’t higher than 0.5 then you might as well be flipping a coin! You should be refining the question battery to give you an overall predictive power of 0.85 or above.
   3. Once you have a few years of data, get a good statistician in to do some fancier tests like Discriminant and Factor analysis.
5. Be Sneaky Observant
   1. See if you can get people at other companies and particularly your competitors to answer the questions – the objective is to get a competitive edge over other firms in your market space by hiring better people than they are.
   2. Put some of the questions online in forums where SMEs that you typically hire would congregate, and see if they correlate to how senior the respondents appear to be in their area of expertise
   3. Approach known experts in the field to answer some of your questions and check those correlations

… but Why?

So why all this bother, after all stats is hard, and isn’t this going to take a lot of effort and time?

If you are keeping records of the answers people gave and how you scored those answers (and please tell me you are keeping scrupulous records), and if you have six-monthly or annual performance reviews that include numerical scores for various categories of performance (and please tell me you are doing this and keeping records), then all you need is to spare a few paltry minutes on extracting the values and running a correlation between the scores from the questions and the performance scores.

The IT folks can write a script to do all that automatically if your appraisal system doesn’t already have that functionality.

The effort is therefore not all that great since you should be doing most of it anyway.

The benefit is that you …

1. Don’t waste time and effort asking, coding, and using questions that don’t do anything – if the question is as effective as flipping a coin, leave it off the list
2. Get a solid basis for a defense if your hiring practices wind up being challenged in court – it is a whole lot easier to defend if you can show statistical tracking over time for questions used than standing there looking earnest and saying how you really really believe they are good questions.
3. You get to demonstrate in real and tangible terms the value of your profession – you can show in hard numbers how the hiring processes lead to competitive advantage and shareholder value. Not a bad thing to be able to show these days!

Conclusion

Building interview and selection questions in a methodical way and tracking their predictive power eliminates many of the inbuilt biases that come with the standard-issue human brain, and creates intellectual capital that moves the questioning process from a smoke & mirror charade to a solid foundation and translates into real operational advantage.
The costs of doing it are lower than simply carrying on a status quo based on belief and opinion, and the additional effort involved in running basic statistical correlations is negligible.

There is simply no reason not to do so.

~~~

Matthew Loxton is a Knowledge Management expert and holds a Master’s degree in Knowledge Management from the University of Canberra. Mr. Loxton has extensive international experience and is currently available as a Knowledge Management consultant or as a permanent employee at an organization that wishes to put knowledge assets to work.

Bibliography

Ezzy, D. (2002). Qualitative Analysis: Practice and Innovation (New South Wales, Allen & Unwin.

Oppenheim, A. N. (1998). Questionnaire design, interviewing and attitude measurement, Pinter Pub Ltd.

Scheaffer, R. L., W. Mendenhall Iii, et al. “Elementary survey sampling. USA: IPT, 1996.” Links: 126-195.

Swanson, R. A. (2005). Research in organizations: Foundations and methods of inquiry, Berrett-Koehler Publishers.

Van Bennekom, F. C. (2002). Customer surveying: A guidebook for service managers, Customer Service Press.

So I tend to focus on the other 70% more or less stable side of the equation, which includes human behavior, organizational structure, and all those other bits that make up the socio-behavioral complex.

However, something is going on in techieland that is worth talking about – According to Global360, the adoption of Microsoft’s Sharepoint will hit 97% this year and has already reached a user-count of 130,000,000.
Of course they are very bullish on the topic because they sell Sharepoint stuff for a living, but still, even in the 90′s when Knowledge Management was something many software vendors and gurus were proclaiming as the next big thing, nobody ever thought that all the products put together would get near 97%, and 130 million licenses is a big number in any language.

Towards the end of 2010 I briefly flirted with a company that pretty much only does Sharepoint add-on’s and seemed to be doing just fine, although I thought they were way too focused on plumbing and pipes i.e. the software and technology, and far too little on the human side – which is where the action really is and why this time Knowledge Management may be rising as never before.

During 2010 I actually tried to stamp out SharePoint at a previous employer, but failed, and now I am a strong advocate of Sharepoint adoption (yes Christy, I am).
So what led to this Damascus Road change of heart?

Epiphany

At the start of 2009/2010 SharePoint was just another (yet another) file-sharing toy that users had discovered and had started to put things into – just like the wikis, Lotus Notes groups and folders, fileshares, portals, and all the other bits and pieces that proliferated over the years and slowly gathered dust under layers of corporate accretion. We already had an order of magnitude too many file-sharing/storage methods, most of which were hidden and not spidered by the corporate search engine, and some of which were backed up onto expensive RAID while other repositories should have been but weren’t.
There was also already a huge investment of time and money in Alfresco, and I didn’t want to simply attenuate focus on another contender.

However, as the year drew on, and just before I left, I had changed my mind and was actively pushing for adoption.
Why did I change my mind? – It was simply that there was a strong user desire that was capable of pushing through the resistance.
My view is that when users put that much effort into something, then that enthusiasm should be supported and guided where possible and not left to rust out in the cold.
A KM solution is less than 20% technology, and over 70% culturally determined in my view, so where you find a high degree of engagement and desire from users, especially where it will help to form Communities of Practice, then this is worth supporting.

… and it seemed that SharePoint wasn’t going to go away anytime soon.

What can SharePoint do for YOU?

Well, it’s a bunch of code that costs money, so it can eat some of your budget and keep the IT guys out of mischief for a while.
It can also be a reasonably good document repository with passable workflow for approval and control and reasonable version-control, which means with a modicum of effort you can shift files that were lying in a nice orderly canonical structure on a server into another nice pile in SharePoint. Naturally you can start corralling all those stray files and index them, but of course that was possible with canonical file-shares too.
SharePoint also allows searchable Knowledge Bases to be built, but before you get too excited about that remember that retrieving hundreds of hits that are infojunk is no better than not getting any at all.

What it adds that canonical file taxonomies can’t however, is folksonomies via tagging that give multiple taxonomical hooks to a single file, and it can provide a far more social environment for people to access than regular traditional fileshares could – and this is where SharePoint can bring you real value.
By bringing information closer to people in a more natural ecology than before, SharePoint can make a real contribution to your operation.
It also allows add-on products that build out the social side, and can bring learning, socializing, chatting, and people’s biographical pages to cohabit in an informational ecosystem that plays far more naturally to our inbuilt preferences.

One thing that you can use it for that probably dwarfs everything else if you have an organization with more than 150 staff, is to make people searchable in terms of their skills, training, and experience by adding them as knowledge artifacts. Why this isn’t done more completely baffles me, because a “facebase” was something we were experimenting with long before Bill Gates brought out Windows.
Using technology like integrated search and content management to help find people should be a no-brainer.
The point is to give people a page that can be modified to suit their tastes but that contains scrapable information that says what they are good at, trained in, and willing to help with, along with their availability and rules of engagement – how to contact them, when, for what, etc. If you tie this in to the more modern B&N/Amazon idea of “what I am reading”, and also to what articles they have authored you can do some magic that goes far beyond a semantic web will ever get.

Allowing the thought leaders to emerge, and to allow people to see what informational sources they are producing is probably worth the investment, but add to that the ability to see what informational sources they use and how they rate them, and you will have as close to a miracle as ICT can deliver.

Life After SharePoint

Not that I go in for predictions much, but until exobiology produces something better, humans are always going to be way faster at finding semantic information than machines. Long after Microsoft is just an historical footnote, people will still be the fastest way to get meaning out of information, and that’s what knowledge is all about.

This is SharePoint’s year, and with it an opportunity to use technology to support and sustain very ancient and effective human abilities to share and create meaning – we should not let it slip by.

~~~

Matthew Loxton is a Knowledge Management expert and holds a Master’s degree in Knowledge Management from the University of Canberra. Mr. Loxton has extensive international experience and is currently available as a Knowledge Management consultant or as a permanent employee at an organization that wishes to put knowledge assets to work.

I changed continents (again), and took on multiple roles in addition to being a global director of Knowledge Management, and wound up job hunting – but not in that order.

My roles this year included my main job, that of a director of Knowledge Management, as well as unofficial Chief Learning Officer which saw me in many meetings with universities and vendors of learning materials, head of Localization & Translation in which I inherited a recently emptied department and a strangled budget, and made friends with several translation vendors across the world.
Another role was that of program manager of the offshoring and outsourcing activities that took me to India, and involved building a team of over a hundred software engineers while I also managed the contract and relationship of a similar-sized group in Bali, tried vainly to move some outsourcing to South-Africa, and celebrated the building of a 15-person team in Chile.
During this time I received a few “what are you doing” phone-calls from the Australian embassy in India, and many people avoided me in case I was looking to offshore their job.

In July I my relationship with Mincom ended, and having waved goodbye to Brisbane, found myself back in Denver and job hunting.
Since then I have interviewed with dozens of firms – been hugely interested in some, horrified by a few, and left others feeling vaguely relieved not to be working there and having to breathe in their toxic culture on a daily basis.
Some interviews ran into several months and included large panels only to end with me as the runner-up, while others ended in a fizzle when the budget vanished, the position was cancelled, or the VP herself resigned after missing several chances for an interview.
Some had really sharp and focused job descriptions (HP, Invensys, and Philips for example), some had a copy/paste smorgasbord, and some had job descriptions that were a complete mystery.
Some organizations were clear and transparent about their process, others seemed to be playing it by ear and making it up as they went along.

Generally, the people were nice but clearly unsure about what they are trying to achieve – one guy spent 30 minutes posing an elaborate scenario that he fed me piece by piece until we arrived at the answer he apparently had in mind. According to him this was the first time anybody had given the correct answer but he was seemingly unhappy with that so I didn’t get the job.
Maybe just as well, all things considered.

I often wonder how much a firm’s recruitment practices are a reflection of what it is like to work there, and what effect recruitment practices have on their clients.
According to a few research papers I read, it is and it does.

Keeping Busy

Besides looking for a permanent employer, flying around for interviews, and making copious resume modifications to satisfy recruiters, I blogged on KM-related topics, networked, and read several IO Psychology and KM textbooks from cover to cover. Some people have hobbies, some play golf, and I read textbooks – go figure.

Some people take a break from work when they are between jobs, I mostly designed questionnaires and wondered about Communities of Practice.
I also thought about Sharepoint a lot – can you believe it, 130 million licenses and likely to hit 97% adoption rate this year?
Again, go figure!

As part of a Master’s in Knowledge Management I covered various maturity models and although I really liked the KMMM by Lange & Ehms, the K3M by Liebowitz & Beckman, and the various KMMI attempts, they all seemed to be heavy on the Conservation side and light at the Innovation end. I also felt that they neglected the point made by Argyris that processes will inevitably obscure and hide those systematic problems that are essentially never spoken about – things that we become systematically blinded to by the way we measure and think. As a result I built my own KM Maturity model based on the Carnegie-Melon CMMI, with two added layers bookending the CMMI, and blogged incessantly about the implications of Argyris and his Single and Double Loop Learning concepts. The blog about externalization and avoidance I was sure might get me lynched by recruiters.
Seems I must like Argyris, because he comes up in my blogs more than any other author.
Owing to my longtime interest in IO Psychology and research methods, the offspring of the KMM was a questionnaire instrument (currently in Beta), which of course lives on a KM wiki (CoP-M).

To get a better way to benchmark and examine the current state of KM in an organization, I developed a KM & OL Climate questionnaire called the KMOL-C which is now in its RC2.1 version with an RC-3.0 in planning.

During this time I also started thinking about starting my own LLC, firstly because even providing pro bono consulting in the US means one is vulnerable to being sued personally.
Secondly it would allow me to do paid consulting and contracting.
I am still stuck for a company name however, so feel free to suggest one.

Having Fun

Mostly I read textbooks for fun, but I also had many enjoyable discussions, debates, and arguments with HR people on LinkedIn – Since I was dealing with them a lot it seemed logical.
I also played with some new applications – bibus an opensource equivalent to EndNote, Qiqqa a nice CAQDAS tool for qualitative interviewing, R a free statistical package that means I can’t afford SPSS or SAS, and ggobi a graphical add-on for R. No spinplots like VisualStats had, but VisualStats seems to have stopped.
I added all my books to GuruLib – mostly by using a webcam to scan in the ISBN barcodes.
Using R, I pulled correlation numbers for a survey I did for a LinkedIn discussion and discovered that self-identified HR people are more than twice as risk averse as operational managers.

Reading academic papers was very enjoyable, and in case you think they are all boring and filled with indigestible facts and arcane theory, here is one I particularly enjoyed:

My most favorite piece of research findings was this one about penguins (Meyer-Rochow & Gall 2003)

Now besides the fact that next to ducks, penguins are the next funniest animal, there is something inherently funny about research that clocks the speeds and distances of penguin evacuation.
Also, knowing that penguin poop is more dense than blood but less dense than honey, and is ejected at pressures that approach that of a car tire, is just fascinating.
The paper also won an IgNoble award in 2005

What’s in Store for 2011

I hope to register my own LLC soon, start a PhD, and get a job with a really interesting and innovative company, and I hope to use my survey instruments with several organizations, volunteer time to worthy organizations, and stay healthy.

More to the point, I hope to carry on enjoying knowledge management, IO Psychology, and discovering interesting ideas and people.

… and blogging, of course.

~~~

Matthew Loxton is a Knowledge Management expert and holds a Master’s degree in Knowledge Management from the University of Canberra. Mr. Loxton has extensive international experience and is currently available as a Knowledge Management consultant or as a permanent employee at an organization that wishes to put knowledge assets to work.

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads This blog is on fire!.

Crunchy numbers

A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 2,900 times in 2010. That’s about 7 full 747s.

In 2010, there were 60 new posts, not bad for the first year! There were 58 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 989kb. That’s about 1 pictures per week.

The busiest day of the year was October 7th with 87 views. The most popular post that day was eLearning Adoption Case Study: Results of Research Into Professional Development Activities.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were linkedin.com, lmodules.com, matthewloxton.com, en.wordpress.com, and mail.yahoo.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for referenceability, how to talk to executives, itil quality management, how to speak to executives, and how to talk to management.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

eLearning Adoption Case Study: Results of Research Into Professional Development Activities October 2010
4 comments

Knowledge Management Issues: KM Policy and High Staff Turnover May 2010
5 comments

Externalization and Avoidance – How we ignore and avoid facing our own faults September 2010
3 comments

Knowledge Management, Training, and Ongoing Professional Development October 2010
2 comments

Building a CoP Maturity Model and Questionnaire Instrument – WIP November 2010