Knowledge Management and Knowledge Transfer

Specialized and functional knowledge is what organizations run on and what gives them both identity and their competitive advantage – but all too frequently it is not easily accessible to the people who need it, and may be locked up in private stashes, file stores, or in the heads of isolated individuals.

Knowledge Management as a discipline has a variety of techniques to address this situation including deployment of Knowledge-Bases, creation of Technical Libraries, and implementation of information architecture approaches including portals, and other technological solutions. However, technology is the smaller part of the pie, and the lion’s share is in how knowledge can be spread from person to person to person in the form of insight and understanding.

Knowledge Transfer (KT) is the process of spreading understanding and insight so that the organization gets more operational value and realizes more advantage from it. With this in mind, KT should be primarily focused on getting business advantage, so the kind of knowledge that should be predominantly transferred is that which has operational value.

Knowledge transfer in an organization can be done in many different, and hopefully, synergistic ways. Those organizations working along ISO9000 or ISO20000/ITIL guidelines should have formal procedure maps and documents stored for all to see and have an advantage over firms that don’t, but the following KT techniques can be applied even if no formal quality and standards system is in place, and would be in addition to rather than in place of formal systems. (although I strongly advise looking into adopting ISO or ITIL).

There are three standard “classroom” style KT environments:

• Formal product or operations training through an internal Educational Services group
• External training of both soft-skills, and tech or industry related courses
• Lunchtime presentation sessions of typically 1 hr covering product or “tricks & tips” subjects.

Classroom-style KT is not the whole picture though, and other components of KT need to be considered.

Informal but scheduled KT sessions can be highly productive and should include regular meetings expressly for KT – such as weekly team information and knowledge transfer sessions with both the local staff as well as their peers in other regions if the organization is geographically dispersed.

Daily “stand-up” transfer sessions for operational updates can be held so that each team lead can hear what others are up to and tell everyone what their team is doing. These need not run longer than 10-15 minutes and should be focused on the most important or significant topics.

Externally facing sessions can be used to reduce customer-support or business-partner costs, and could typically be offered as monthly webinars in which a staff member does an online presentation to customers, partners, and internal staff in short and focused sessions typically as an hour-long tutorial on some aspect of the product-set or ancillary/environmental subjects. These could be recorded for re-use by the Educational Service group and seen as Intellectual Property.

Ad-hoc transfer can be done very effectively by “swarming”. A typical scenario is one in which a person may struggling with a customer problem or has a high-impact internal issue and they call for help. Team members “swarm” around them and provide help and alternative theories or suggestions and then disperse as soon as the person has enough to continue with.

One-on-one teams can also put together on an ad-hoc basis when the situation demands it so that a junior person can have a “guru” help them think through a tricky problem.

Another valuable KT mechanism is to have a mentorship/coaching program where more experienced staff can pair up with a junior member for a longer period.

Sending staff from one geography to another a few times a year can also be valuable in order to exchange specialist information and knowledge in classroom settings, in hands-on small group settings, and also 1-on-1 mentorship sessions.

In a similar way, some staff members can be rotated through other domain areas to gain insight to how other parts of the organization or product-set work and how other teams do things.

Borrowing from academia, it is worth considering a sabbatical system in which a staff member can visit a customer site or another industry, or just work on a particular subject, and then internally publish a formal paper and conduct KT sessions on what they have discovered.

It is also important for subject-matter staff to belong to industry groups and to attend the seminars and workshops offered, and then to bring back knowledge and transfer it to other staff, and to regard that as part of the deal – attend external training or informative sessions and on return you have a duty to deliver at least a tutorial.

Finally, a very high-value KT method is to send staff to customer sites to help the customers with specific problems, but also to simply observe the customer environment and how they use your support services and your product set, and then bring back their observations for you to use to change the product or how you interact with the customer.

These observations may simply trigger lunchtime KT sessions, or customer tutorials, etc. but also have the potential to lead to dramatic innovations in services or product direction – there is nothing quite like seeing something in action to gain insight.

In conclusion I would say that these components should not be seen as isolated solutions, but be mixed and woven into a coherent KT strategy but that can be fluid enough to adapt to internal and external demands in order to deliver the most value.

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Knowledge Management: The Disease Model discussed

 

 

Some readers of my blog on the Disease Model of Knowledge Transfer might have justifiably wondered if I had been typing after a few beers. Admittedly it was a joy to write, but the back-story is actually quite solid and very interesting. (to me at least).

The issue is one of how we can take models built for one purpose, and apply them productively for a completely unintended purpose – in fact a large proportion of technological and scientific breakthroughs occur in exactly this way. Taking a way of seeing things from one domain to an unrelated domain means that you might impose a degree of artificiality, but still derive benefit from the change in perspective and the new questions that might be productively raised.
Philosophy of Science (PoS as it is hilariously abbreviated) calls this an “Instrumental Theory” approach, and people like Ernst Mach (he of speed-of-sound fame) proposed that many if not all scientific facts and theories were actually just instruments of explanation and not real in any strict sense. Electrons, he held for example, were just a useful concept to further investigation, and not real little ball-like things.

In this way one can plot the “infection characteristics” of obesity even though nobody is saying it is “really” infectious, and Richard Dawkins could propose that one could look at ideas themselves as infectious replicators.

What Prof.Dawkins was trying to do was instill a better understanding in his students as to how evolution works at the gene level, and he emphasized that while genes are teleologically blind and not intentional in any way, variation and selection could nevertheless shape populations of people carrying the genes. To understand evolution one needs to look at the world from the perspective of genes under selective pressure in which there are not enough resources for all of them to be replicated. Successful replicants tend to slowly increase in proportion to those that aren’t simply because it is the victors whose code gets replicated.

To explain this Dawkins proposed a thought experiment in which ideas themselves are seen as a replicator.

Picture a world filled with ideas that aren’t entirely stable and can mutate or join together, and which can replicate from one host mind to the next – sometimes suffering copying errors on the way. There are more potential ideas than minds to run them, and those that don’t get run by a mind die out.
Like the DeLorian or Cuban Heels.

The idea of “memes” (as he named them) itself went viral, and soon it became evident that it was a highly productive way of looking at ideas. Whether or not memes or even temes* are “real” is not terribly important – but what is, is the ability it gives us to do useful things and ask productive questions. *See Prof. Susan Blackmore’s Meme/Teme TED talk online

It allows us to ask why some ideas transfer more readily between people, why some are more stable, why some last longer. It allows us to look at Intellectual Property, Job Aids, and Knowledgebase articles in a new way, and to try new ways of getting ideas to behave in ways that we would prefer.

For example, it asks why gossip and the “corporate grapevine” are so compelling and so fast, and begs us to consider how we could put this to use or gather information from it. In Nonaka’s “Ba” a coffee area or watercooler is a place where people will gather to exchange information – the question is how to increase the work content of that without tunring it sour and putting people off.

A second area that I find an interesting parallel, is in the work of a psychologist of human behavior by the name of Eric Berne. In his Transactional Analysis approach, he proposed that there were somewhat stable “games” that seem to be enacted by people – especially in interpersonal settings. By “games” he didn’t mean fun and party-novelty kind of behavior – he meant that the on inspection one could make out somewhat persistent “rules”, “players”, and “roles”. Important to note however that the dehumanizing form of Game Theory described by the earlier Nash is not what I have in mind at all – that path leads to a dreadfully dehumanizing approach to people and drives highly destructive behavior.

Putting the two together (part of my own research activities) one comes to a perspective in which games and ideas “fight” for space in people’s minds and to get expressed as behavior. Just like genes, some memes work well together and some are mutually exclusive. We even know why (to an extent) some ideas push others out.
For example, if you are thinking of money and especially personal reward, some very specific parts of your brain fire up and they suppress activity in some other parts – you can’t easily run the two sets of circuits at the same time. This is why economic norms suppress social norms and why somebody who was perfectly happy to donate time and effort to do something for a “good cause” might be put off if you pay them to do it. It is also why rewarding people with money is a risky approach and tends to lead to conflict and gaming of the system of rewards.

If you doubt this, try the suggestion of researcher Dan Ariely, and at your next Christmas meal offer your Mother In Law $50 for her trouble. Let me know how that works out for you.

Putting another layer on this, some ideas, like pathogens or genes, have evolved specialized penetration or adhesion mechanisms that are usually very specific to the host they will use – and this is where we can start asking how to make some information easier to use, or stick better, or be easier to locate.

For example, although digital watches and instruments were very hip, they were actually less usable – it takes more processing power to turn a digital readout into what your brain uses than analogue.

You can literally measure the time difference between how long it takes to say if a specific time is still a long way off or near when viewing either an analogue clock-face or a digital readout. For this reason many time-critical instruments in a cockpit are analogue.

This is also why it is important to decide if information is something we want somebody to remember, or if we will just present it to them at the appropriate time. Getting people to memorize product codes or server paths is not as effective as simply presenting them with the information when the time is ripe.
It is also important in GUI design and in how IT needs to be appropriate.

At a higher level, when everybody knows that the “real rules of working here” mean that you aren’t actually allowed to use the eLearning materials or the open-door policy, then they behave according to the game rules of the “real ground rules” not the ones in the employee handbook.

In a future blog I hope to go into some of the practical implications and uses, but for now, this is my story, and I am sticking to it.

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Matthew Loxton is the director of Knowledge Management & Change Management at Mincom, and blogs on Knowledge Management. Matthew’s LinkedIn profile is on the web, and has an aggregation website at www.matthewloxton.com
Opinions are the author’s and not necessarily shared by Mincom, but they should be.

What can we learn from a tired doctor?

 This post is more aimed at the multitude of Knowledge Management professionals out there, but I hope it also has some value to those who just wish we would help them with their problems.

In the last few weeks the doctor behind the very informative Brain Science Podcast has been using Twitter to say when she is doing her shift in the ER, (an example of how Twitter is finding a role in professional circles) but what stood out most to me was that Ginger is pulling a 24hr shift and that I had some definite Knowledge Management opinions on that fact. 

The evolutionary science and psychology end of KM suggests to me that humans don’t really function well knowledge-wise without sleep and we are deeply pulled by a circadian rhythm that probably goes back millions of years back in our development – so not something we can simply wish away or unlearn.
The point here is that KM must take into account who and what we are, and not build business processes that ignore our limitations and natural biases or preferences.

On the other hand, we could just assume that there are good practical reasons why Dr.Campbell is pulling 24hr shifts and pose a different KM question – how should knowledge be managed if we assume the agent is sleep-deprived, physically tired, and dealing with life-or-death situations?

Once we start down that road, a whole terrain of thoughts and follow-up questions present themselves.

- What kinds of things do we forget or remember wrong when we are tired?
- Should job aids be changed or presented differently?
- How will organisational memory be best served if the agent is unable to take time to make rich notes?

… but most of all
– How will we use situations like this to learn methods that can be deployed to other realms where the problems might not be quite so starkly illuminated.

This is where I see a double benefit of a Community of Practice of KM professionals – to jump in and help people like Dr. Ginger Campbell by using KM methods and principles, learn from situations where the risks and constraints are high, and then draw that learning back into the domains where we practice our craft for our wages.
A good way to drive beneficial innovation across the field?

So hat’s off to Dr. Campbell for yet another 24hr shift in ER – but now let’s put our heads together and see what we can do to help her.