My favourite things...

Next month marks my tenth year as an independent consultant.  How time flies when you're, well, learning to fly...

As I look back over those years, and the privilege of working with 120 different organisations, there are many high spots (as well the odd moment I'd prefer to forget!).  One particular type of activity stands out as my favourite, running a knowledge-sharing and learning consortium.

Let me explain how they work, and why they are so effective.

They typically start with a conversation initiated by a client which goes something like this...

“We keep going to conferences and feel like we're hearing from the usual suspects, and seeing the same glossy presentations, but not learning anything new.   Could you find us a number of peer organisations to learn from and with - and facilitate a number of high-intensity meetings for us?”

And in a nutshell, that’s what a knowledge-sharing consortium is: a limited series of meetings between different organisations at similar levels of maturity with a commitment to openly share and learn. You could say that it’s the perfect blend of a Community of Practice and a Peer Assist, with a brilliant mix of non-competing organisations.

I have co-facilitated my consortium programmes with my good friend and consultant colleague Elizabeth Lank. It takes the energy and abilities of two facilitators to help 25 participants get the maximum benefit from their investment. You need to give it everything you’ve got. I know that both Elizabeth and I end each event with that feeling of “positive-tiredness” that comes after the last member has departed happy and the celebratory G&T has been poured, to help with our After Action Review.

So thank you to Schlumberger, Shell, BT, Unilever, GSK, Freshfields, Oracle, ABN Amro, Syngenta,  Pfizer, PwC, Freshfields, Linklaters, NHS, Audit Commission, the International Olympic Committee and others - thank you for making those events so memorable and enjoyable.

Here are my reflections...

Lessons, recommendations and design principles for a knowledge-sharing consortium.

• Forming a consortium works best when there is a founding organization – a client with a need and a curiosity and desire to learn. Recruiting and inviting other participating companies is so much easier when you can say, for example, “Schlumberger are looking to learn from some other great knowledge companies about maximising the value from Communities of Practice. Would you be interested in joining us?”

• We found that 4-8 member organisations worked best. Any less than 4 and members feel that they are exhausting the possibilities for learning. If you go much higher then 8 and it becomes too difficult to sustain relationships or remember what was discussed – you end up with something more like a conference.

• Ask for 2-4 participants per company. This enables them to provide members from complimentary functions in their own organisations, and gives a critical mass for company break-out moments when they create space and time to consider “what will we do with all the good practice ideas that we’re picking up?. It also enables them to share their own story from multiple perspectives.

• The series of meetings (usually 3 or 4 over a 12 month period) is deliberately time-bound, with a clear end in mind. This gives a focus and a helpful sense of urgency to extract the maximum value from every hour of each event.

• Invest in forming relationships right from the start. Ensure each event has an over-night stay in a pleasant venue, great food and drink, space for informal conversations. Ensure that people have bios or social media profiles available, and include early ice-breaker events which make use of this information and get the group laughing together.

• Ensure that there are sessions where participating organisations tell their story (as creatively as they like – you might chose to ban PowerPoint from some sessions). Balance this time evenly between telling and asking questions. Do everything you can to make it unlike a conference!

• Solve real problems brought by the participants, as early as the first meeting. This sets the tone not just for subsequent face-to-face meetings, but creates the expectation and openness to request and respond.

• Have fun together! We’ve incorporated treasure hunts, photo-safaris, museum trips, role-play, board games, playlists and karaoke into the designs in order to create memories, bind the group together, and, well enjoy having fun!

• Make full use of artifacts. If every picture tells a story, then physical objects can write a book. We’ve curated displays of awards, posters, t-shirts, stress balls, card games, mugs, books, calendars and quizzes and explored their effectiveness at length. It’s been brilliant to see some consensual stealing-with-pride going on between the members.

• Stay flexible. The best-planned agenda needs to be sacrificed if the group collectively choose to go somewhere else. We’ve learned to build in flexibility and use methods like Openspace to keep the power of choice firmly in the hands of the participants.

• Vary the methods, techniques and tools – and debrief their use with the participants. We have found that our participants have really valued the use of new techniques. We’ve introduced reverse brainstorming, appreciative inquiry, project retrospects, social reporting, knowledge asset creation, social network mapping, speed-consulting, peer assists – and some experimental techniques which evolve on the day. Every time we use a technique, we review the outcome and the process and encourage reflection in company teams on how they can be adapted for use.

• Focus facilitation on the process rather than the content.  Elizabeth and I are both frequently called upon to speak as experts on knowledge management and collaboration, but in a room with 25 experienced practitioners, our focus is usually on helping them to learn from each other - and just interjecting with the occasional story or 10 minute context-setting session.

• Keep the discussion going between events. We’ve successfully used Google Sites, teleconferences, vlogging, individual telephone calls and even good old email to keep the party going between face-to-face events, and to build anticipation for the next meeting.

Stop press! We've had an approach from a large international company who want to participate in a consortium focusing on effective collaboration, virtual working and network/community building, and we have just started the search for suitable consortium members.

So if this an area that your organisation has experience with, and you're particularly interest in joining with some peer organisations to learn more, then please contact me for details.  I can guarantee it's even better than raindrops on roses...

Just thinking...

Is it true that the best things come in small packages when it comes to knowledge?

I came across this helpful framework for thinking about the way we approach the packaging and sharing of knowledge. (Thanks Elizabeth for spotting it).

Just in Case.   That’s been the unspoken but underlying mantra of many KM programmes. Let’s capture everything - all of those documents, lessons, transcripts and store them in a folder, just in case we need them in the future. It’s like archiving, but without the indexing rigour that a professional would apply.

So when that moment of need does arrive, it’s often too difficult to extract than insightful nugget or reusable example. It can be like rummaging through the rubbish bin to find that set of keys you dropped. You get messy and frustrated trying, then you give up and get a new set cut.

Now of course, there are often procedural and legal reasons why we do need to store everything associated with a particular individual or process – but we should watch out for tendencies to become Organisational Hoarders!

Just in Time.   One of Dave Snowden’s truisms is “you don’t know what you know until you need it”. We need a way to harness current knowledge and recent experience right in our moment of need. We’re not going to do battle with the SharePoint search function, and we’re not going to read through a pile of case studies or lessons learned reports in order to separate the signal from the noise.

And how do we know that yesterday’s lesson will serve today’s problem? We don’t have time for that – we have a real need, a desire to satisfy that need right now and we can’t ask questions of our documents!

How do we best respond to that? Just-in-time points us towards the tapping of formal communities and informal networks, inside and outside organisations. It’s the domain of knowledge jams on Jive and Yammer, questions to our Twitter networks. Face-to-face, it’s a great place to use techniques like Peer Assists and  “Speed Consulting”. Sometimes those interactions will point people back to content and documents, but they cut through the noise and provide access to a willing army of experienced volunteers - when faced with a cry for help – are often only too willing to help.

Just enough.I didn’t have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one. Lack of time, and lack of strategic focus are two reasons why we end up with a Just-in-Case approach to content and documents.

Curation takes time, and it requires expertise. It’s best played as a team sport rather than an individual perspective – but it makes a huge difference when it comes to creating an asset which educates and informs the reader/learner.

Are we planting vast fields of information assets? Or are we harvesting fruitful knowledge assets?  The latter is designed to provide just enough - and also to enable digging on the specifics details

Just for me.   Perhaps that should be the ultimate goal of our work an KM professionals.  To be able to mine the riches of just-in-case knowledge, to deliver it  at the moment I need it, to hone it down so that it's the perfect fit (not too much or too little) for my knowledge gaps and can be easily applied... and to do it in such a way that it's tailored for my personal needs.  Now that's quite a proposition.

Copy, Adapt or Innovate? Educating Yorkshire with the Kings Speech...

A while back I blogged about the value of experience from the film “The Kings Speech” – and the statement from self-styled speech therapist, Lionel Logue who, when cornered by the establishment about his lack of professional credentials, stated: “All I know, I know by experience”. Last year, the BBC TV series “Educating Yorkshire” was broadcast in the UK. It was a fly-on-the-wall documentary about a state school in the North of England, introducing us to the reality of today’s education, and the challenges for teachers and students alike. The most memorable moment came when English Teacher, Mr Burton was helping Musharaf (aka “Mushy”), a student with a severe stammer, to prepare for his oral examination.  This was something of a lost cause, or so we thought, until Mr Burton had the courage to try something that he’d seen on the Kings Speech. He asked Mushy to try speaking whilst listening to music to through headphones – you can watch it here – it’s a heart-warming 5 minutes, and it went viral at the time. I challenge you to watch it and not shed a tear! 

I recently read an interview that Mushy gave, where he said something that tingled my KM antennae.

“I thought Mr Burton was a genius until he lent me The King's Speech afterwards, and then I realised he just copied that other man!”

Isn’t that interesting? He just copied that other man.

Applying someone else’s good practice in a new situation isn’t clever or innovative, at least, not in the conventional sense – but it still takes intelligent courage. In the clip, you can see Mr Burton is almost embarrassed to suggest that they try to“just copy the other man”, and suggests it laughingly.

Whether it’s copying ‘best’ practices, or adapting good practices to a different context, we sometimes underestimate what it takes it takes to do this. In some ways, the organisational motivation to innovate a ‘genius’ solution is greater than the recognition gained for copying or adapting. Something a bit like this?

failure matrix_Fotor

How much more effective would we be if we celebrated re-use and re-purposing of knowledge as much as we prized innovation?

Is there a way we can make is safer for the 'Mr Burtons' in our organisation to adopt and adapt what has worked for others?

It's got to be worth a try...

Appreciative Inquiry and Knowledge Management? No problem.

It’s only in the last few years that I’ve come to appreciate(!) the connections between my world of KM and organizational learning, and thephilosophical mindset which underpins Appreciative Inquiry.

Appreciative Inquiry (AI) pre-dates Knowledge Management. It has been around in its current recognised form since the mid 80s, and was first published as a discipline in 1987 when David Cooperriderand Suresh Srivastva wrote their seminal paper for Research in Organisational Change and Development.

The video below sums it up nicely when he describes the conventional approach to improvement as viewing the organisation a “problem to be solved” –and how over time, a problem-resolution mindset can sap energy, goodwill and enthusiasm from the workforce.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzW22wwh1J4

I’ve heard accusations made that AI is somehow ‘dangerous’ because it artificially views the world through rose-tinted spectacles. My response?

Who are we to say that the lesson-learning, problem-discussing, improvement orientation which strongly influences us doesn’t come with its own pair of KM-branded Reactolite-tinted glasses?

Perhaps we just don’t realise that we’re wearing them (and perhaps that’s why some are so quick to look for the danger in other techniques!).  Our default perspective is not necessarily neutral and perfectly balanced, and it's good to take a look our favourite tools and techniques and ask ourselves whether they reinforce a deficit view of the firm.

Having facilitated a number of KM-related workshops using an AI, I can vouch for the positive engagement power of the approach.  It’s still rooted in the reality of what we can learn from our own practice, but the conscious focus on what does it look like when we’re at our best gives a different kind of energy to the group, and expands their vision as to what is possible.

The four steps of an Appreciative Inquiry "4D" Summit are surprisingly simple:

a1

1. Discover. (Inquire into what works.)

This is a filtered process of reflection and storytelling to set the context for what is possible, building a "positive core" from the sharing of stories.

• 2. Dream. (Imagine how good it could be.)

This is a creative vision-building step – constructed by amplifying the reality of the examples from the discovery step. The photo to the left  is from a UN KM and AI workshop in Addis Ababa , showing the positive core, and an engaged group creating their dream, stimulated with some inspirational photos of Africa.

3. Design. (Agree how good it should be.)

This is a prioritisation process, finding ways to connect the colourful hot-air balloon of a long-term vision to the ground with some actionable propositions.

4. Destiny. (Commit to what will be.)

Identify specific actions and start to plan for success.

An approach which combines Reflection, Storytelling, Visioning, Prioritisation and Action and generates positive energy for change? Why would I not want to employ that?

So if you’re a knowledge professional who hasn’t considered or explored Appreciative Inquiry, let me commend it to you as a valuable mindset to integrate into your KM toolkit.

Or to put it another way, provided we understand the perspectives and mindsets which can lie behind the techniques we recommend - then we can help our client organisations to maintain a nutritionally balanced diet of savoury lesson-learning, palate-cleansingly neutral sensemaking and sweet appreciative inquiry.

What's not to like?

Mapping the KM Landscape

Knowledge Management has become an ever-increasing suite of interconnected tools and techniques - it's easy to feel overwhelmed without a map. Having bounced some early ideas around with Geoff, and spent far too many idle moments at airports fiddling with PowerPoint,  I think it's time to stop tweaking and start sharing.  So here it is: my rendition of the KM Landscape  (click to enlarge).

KM Landscape

I wanted to try and show the breadth of techniques and processes, the connections between them, and also some of our neighbouring disciplines and opportunities for boundary collaboration.

It’s far from perfect  (I need more than two dimensions to really do the juxtaposition justice) – but hopefully it’ll illustrate some new places to explore.

Let me know if you find any new destinations, landmarks or pub walks to include.

The 12 knowledge-enabled days of Christmas!

(I know that technically it's a bit early for this but here goes anyway...)

On the twelfth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me:

Twelve knowledge assets

Eleven open questions

Ten strategies

Nine knowledge cafes

Eight AARs

Seven deadly syndromes

Six social networks

Five lessons learned

Four knowledge jams

Three anecdotes

Two peer assists

And a tweet from the APQC

Click here to sing along from the start! [audio http://www.chriscollison.com/documents/12days.mp3 ]

Getting Lessons Learned Right: Part 2 - Questions

This is of my favourite exhibits at the Tate Modern Gallery in London, sculpted (if that’s the right word) by Giuseppe Penone. Here's a summary from the description:

Out of processed planks of timber the ancient technique of carving draws out the shape of a tree, wood removed ring by ring until twelve metres of tree - bottom to top and top to bottom - is exposed within two sawn pieces of wood, initially intended for construction. Sculpture is engaged in a reconstruction through deconstruction, a turning back of the clock, pulling back to reveal the raw within the contained.

I love this work because it speaks to me of the stories which lie within. It says that with careful skill, the layers of what looks on the surface to be an unremarkable object can be peeled away to reveal years of history, detail and in this case beauty.  In the case of the tree on the left– it revealed truth that the world was actually the other way up!

If you’re anything like me, there will have been times when you have looked through the write-up of a post-project review, or lessons learned summary, and wanted to ask questions of the document in your hand, or on your screen.   And when we try to ask a document a question, it will always be a one-sided conversation!

Asking the right questions is the core activity for anyone facilitating a learning review.

Naturally it's better to learn whilst doing, rather than try to get a team to remember at the end of a significant project (and not post-rationalise events!) - but all too often you are confronted with a "learning after doing" scenario.  So how do you make the best of that situation? So what types of questions should we consider?  Here are 20+ questions and some techniques which I find helpful.

Questions to establish the facts and re-set the context.

• Can anyone talk me through the original plan and objectives of the project?
• Did these change over time?  (When, How, Why?)
• Who was responsible for this task, and did this responsibility change? (Why, How, Who?)
• How well did the project achieve its aims?
• What were the areas of deviation from the plan, and what were the reasons?

Questions to surface the notable high and low spots.

• Think back over each phase of the project: What did the team do well during this time?
• What was the most professionally satisfying part of the project for you?
• What should have gone better?
• What were the most frustrating parts of the project?
• Were there any early warning signs which we should have spotted? What should we look out for in future?
• If you could wave a magic wand and change anything about the project, what would you change?
• If you had to give a mark out of 10 for the project outcome/output - what would that be? What would make that a 10?
• If you had to give a mark out of 10 for the project process - what would that be? What would make that a 10?
• How many marks of 10 would your customers/contractors give it?
• Consider the Emotional Rollercoaster as a technique.
• Michael Greer's PM Resources article has a number of more specific questions for design and implementation phases.

Questions to dig deeper

• Why?  The 5-why's technique is a very powerful way of peeling away the layers and getting closer to the root, but try not to be too mechanical about it! There's more than one way to ask "why" to make it sound less like an inquisition -  for example:
  • "What makes you say that?",
  • "What led you to that decision?",
  • "Why do you think that might be?",
  • "Was there a reason for that?"...
  • Can you give me an example of that?
  • Can you share a story which illustrates this? (Capture these on video/audio if possible.)

Questions to construct advice, recommendations or principles for the next team.

• What would you say to a colleague about to start the same kind of project, to help them repeat your success?
• Imagine you were having a drink with a close friend, and they mentioned that they were about to take a similar approach to the one you took - what advice would you give them to help them avoid the pitfalls you encountered?  Specifically, what should they do or not do?
• If you could go back in time to the start of this project and shout something in your ear, what three pieces of advice would you give yourself

Questions for de-risking discussions about failure. (Works best with multiple projects represented.)

• Imagine for a minute you were writing a guide on how to screw up projects of this type - what would your top tips be?

The truth is in there, if we can ask the right questions...

Young Tree Carved Inside Old Tree

What did Confucius know about Knowledge Management?

Confucius is the next in my series of famous leaders on knowledge management, although he spoke much more about learning and wisdom than knowledge itself.

Confucius introduced three key virtues:  Rén, Li and Yi.

Rén relates to humanity, and the relationships between two people. It causes people to remember that they is never alone, and that everyone has these relationships to fall back on, being a member of a family, the state, and the world.

(Or a network, I’m sure we could add today)

Li consists of the norms of proper social behaviour as taught to others by fathers, village elders and government officials. The teachings of li promoted ideals such as brotherliness, righteousness, good faith and loyalty. The influence of li guided public expectations, such as the loyalty to superiors and respect for elders.  Li is sometimes describes as “the way things society expects things to be”.

Finally. Yi is an internal controller which gives the person the ability to make right judgments about the people and situations and to react accordingly. Confucius stated that truth can be hidden sometimes and most common reaction to the situation is not always the best one and the possession of Yi principle helps to define the true nature of things.

You could say that Li will get you to a proper answer, Yi will get you to a correct answer.

renliyi-pinyin

This distinction between the Li and Yi  in relation to the relational virtue of Rén reminds me of the impact of Organisational Network Analysis  when understanding how people make judgements (Yi) about where to find knowledge which might run counter to the official (Li) organisational hierarchy. 

I often describe it to clients as "taking an x-ray of the organisation to see what really happens, rather than what the organisation chart suggests".

The map below contains such a wealth of insight compared with the organisation chart.  The colours of the nodes represent functional expertise, the size of each node is the length of service, the colour "heat" of the lines represents the frequency of communication and the arrow heads show the direction of technical requests.  No wonder the team spent nearly an hour drawing out conclusions and actions!

Screen Shot 2013-11-03 at 15.32.18

So getting back to Confucius - what did he say which we would relate to knowledge management?  Here are my top ten - a journey from ignorance to reflection, learning, adopting good practice, double-loop learning and transferring knowledge to others...

“Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance.”

“To know what you know and what you do not know, that is true knowledge.”

“Study the past if you would define the future.”

“By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest.”

“I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.”

“Learning without thought is labour lost; thought without learning is perilous.”

“You cannot open a book without learning something.”

“If I am walking with two other men, each of them will serve as my teacher. I will pick out the good points of the one and imitate them, and the bad points of the other and correct them in myself.”

“Reviewing what you have learned and learning anew, you are fit to be a teacher.”

...and one for you Cynefin zealots out there:

“Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.”

Getting Lessons Learned Right! Part 1: Customers.

Having spent the last few weeks exploring what’s wrong with lessons learned, it’s time to turn our attention towards the elements that contribute to successful organisational learning.

As we piece this puzzle together, one of the most important principles to bear in mind is that of knowing your customer.

It sounds obvious, but in my experience it’s often overlooked.  Just who is customer for the learning?

1. The current team.

One clear customer is the team who are conducting the review.  A well-facilitated review will not only surface technical, commercial and process-related learning, but also personal, behavioural and team-related insights. Even if the activity was a one-off, never-to-be-repeated project, there will always be learning relevant to each individual – provided the team explores the right questions.

Imagine a research team is working on a vaccine for an incurable disease.  After years of experimentation, analysis and a little luck, they stumble upon the antidote.  The team is ecstatic – they have a formula in their hands that could improve the lives of thousands of people.  So they secretly inoculate themselves, disband the team and each individual starts on their next challenge.

Now imagine the outcry!  That would be outrageous – a waste of extensive research. Commercially disastrous and selfish to the point of immorality!

There is a research team hidden in every operational project we do – it’s just that we fail to help them realise and multiply the value in what they have discovered - which takes us to customer type number 2:

2. The next team. One year ago, a large number of representatives from the London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games conducted an extensive debrief. That debrief wasn’t carried out in London.  Instead, it was conducted in Rio de Janeiro, in the presence of the Rio 2016 team, facilitated by the IOC.  Not only that, but the time was deliberately managed such that 50% of each day was available for connecting, networking and asking further questions., as well as exchanging documentation. The customer was clear – it was the next team.

Sometimes we know who exactly the next team (or teams) will be, and we can set up relationships, staff transfers, conversations, forums to ask questions, site visits, peer assists, peer reviews.  The IOC do all of this very well. When we know who our customers are, then we can connect the supply with demand. Dialogue-based approaches are the most effective mechanisms for this.

However, there are times when we don’t know who the next team will be – but we’re sure that there will be one at some time.  We can’t afford to wait until the demand surfaces, because the supply (the current team) will have already been disbanded, and may well have left the organization.  In these cases we do need to capture some record of the context and the learning, and where it is relevant, to express this as principles, propositions, recommendations or specific advice for the next team, whoever they might be.

We need to ask the right questions (more on this the next post); questions which make the current team think about the needs of an imaginary future team:

• “What would you say to a team about to start on a similar project?"

• "If you had just 5 minutes with them, what key pieces of advice would you give them, based on your experiences?"

• "How could they repeat your successes; how could they ensure that they avoid the low points you faced?”

In practice, it can be difficult to convince a busy team that they need to invest time together for the benefit of some future imaginary team. They know it makes sense, but they usually have other priorities, even if there is a requirement in the project process that they need to comply with.  Compliance rarely generates thoughtful dialogue.

You will want to start with them as the customer, and bring the questions around to the future once they have warmed up, and seen some personal benefit.  You may need to appeal to people’s professionalism and pride to get them to engage in the idea of being recognized for leaving a legacy.  Indeed, some organisations have recognition schemes in place for exactly this. (ConocoPhillips’ “Gather” award, and Syngenta’s “Embed” award are both examples of this.)

Of course, when we take on a customer mindset, we need to consider more than just what they need to know.  We have to think equally as hard about how they would like to receive this knowledge.  You can bet that they don’t want a copy of a flipchart sporting a set of bullet points from a meeting that they were not present at!  They would probably like to have context, contacts, reasons for decisions, artifacts, quotations, narrative, references, top tips, things to avoid… – all nicely structured and easy to navigate.

When we understand that we have knowledge customers, then we need to consider our knowledge products.

More on this at a later date.

3. The Organisation itself.

So the current and future teams are clear enough, but how does the organisation become a customer?

It’s the best way I could think of to describe the idea of improving the structural capital – the processes, guidelines, protocols, standards, policies, training, development and formal ways of working.  I have had the privilege of spending time with the IOC over the past two years, and their approach to closing the loop and translating learning into technical guidance through their technical manuals is a great example of this.

An effective “lessons learned programme” does to simply pass the baton to the next team, neither does if make it’s goal in life the develop a library of lessons learned.  The focus should always be on improvement.  The question should be “how do we ensure that actions follow which remove the risk, or bake-in the benefits that our learning has uncovered?”.  I covered this in my BMW shaggy-dog story earlier last year.

The question “what have we learned?” should be followed by  “what should we do about this?”.  A learning log needs to have an actions log.

When we apply KM in Safety context we do this without another thought.  If someone is killed, injured or in the event of a near miss, a sequence of safety-related review processes are initiated, root causes are understood, risks mitigated, procedures updated, communication planned and training delivered.

We are good at closing the loop between a moment of learning and a permanent change in the structural capital.  Hopefully this is because we don’t want to kill or injure anyone, and hence care enough to make someone accountable for looking for risks and actions in every fragment of learning.

In my experience, other topics don’t receive this level of attention, even though the commercial value at stake might be significant.  Something we could learn from there.

False customers.

Just a few words about other stakeholders who are sometimes unhelpfully referred to as the customer for learning.

The customer is the project management process.

Never heard anyone say that?  Well, perhaps you’ve heard them express the same sentiment when them say: “the process says we need to have a review before proceeding to the next stage gate”. That’s more or less the same mindset.  We need to raise the sights of our project teams to see the real customer – themselves, the next team, or the betterment of the organization, which ultimately will improve relationships with a real external customer.

The customer is the regulator.

In some regulated businesses, there is an expectation that effective learning and improvement cycles are in place. This is a good thing!   Sadly, the regulators often look for evidence of inputs (because that’s what how they can measure compliance and consistency) rather than outputs (where the customer creates the value).  This can launch an industry of lessons logs and registers, unproductive reviews and ineffective debriefs, again the real customer has been lost and regulatory compliance has become a distraction.

This can be difficult, as nobody wants to do the work twice.  I recommend a dialogue with the regulating body to find out what they are actually looking for, rather than making assumptions that they have a preferred format. In my experience, regulators are specialists in their subject matter, but not specialists in organisational learning.  Engage them in a discussion about your preferred approach and propose different or additional sources of evidence of learning and transfer (for example: meetings in schedules, testimonies from individuals, candidates for recognition schemes).

Let's keep our focus on the true customers, and magnify the benefits.

What did Da Vinci know about Knowledge Management?

My post on “What did Einstein know about KM” last week seemed to go down well, so I have continued my search for KM musings from great figures. This week, we’ll hear from the Leonardo Da Vinci.  It wasn’t until I read Gelb’s ambitiously titled book “How to think like Leonardo do Vinci” that I appreciated just how multi-talented he was.  Painter, sculptor, architect, musician, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, geologist, cartographer, botanist, writer and no mean athlete  - you name it, he could do it.  Curious then that one of his quotations (one of the few which I disagree with) states “As every divided kingdom falls, so every mind divided between many studies confounds and saps itself.“.  I guess you can make yourself an exception  when you’re the archetypal Renaissance Man Polymath. I wonder what he would have made of the ubiquitous availability of information and possibilities which we enjoy today?

So my curated top-ten quotes from Da Vinci will take us on a journey through different facets of KM: from knowledge acquisition, the way our perceptions filter knowledge, the superiority of expertise over opinions, the power of learning, seeing and making connections, the challenge and value of expressing knowledge simply and the criticality of seeing knowledge applied.

Yes, I would have had him on my KM Team.

“The knowledge of all things is possible.”“The acquisition of knowledge is always of use to the intellect, because it may thus drive out useless things and retain the good.”“All our knowledge has its origins in our perceptions.”“The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions.”“Experience is the mother of all Knowledge. Wisdom is the daughter of experience.”“Although nature commences with reason and ends in experience it is necessary for us to do the opposite, that is to commence with experience and from this to proceed to investigate the reason.”“Learning is the only thing the mind never exhausts, never fears, and never regrets.”“Principles for the Development of a Complete Mind: Study the science of art. Study the art of science. Develop your senses - especially learn how to see. Realize that everything connects to everything else.”“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”“Knowing is not enough; we must apply.”

I couldn’t find a suitable infographic to illustrate these (I'm sure Leonardo would have produced a very good one if he'd not been so busy), but the book I mentioned earlier insightfully looks at the seven different deliberate practices he drew upon.  They’re an excellent set of frames through which to consider our approaches to life and work.

How does your Knowledge Management practice measure up against these?

1. Curiosita:
  Approaching life with insatiable curiosity and an unrelenting quest for continuous learning.

2. Dimostrazione:
  Committing to test knowledge through experience, persistence and a willingness to learn from mistakes.

3. Sensazione:
  Continually refining the senses, especially sight, as the means to enliven experience.

4. Sfumato:  Embracing ambiguity, paradox and uncertainty.

5. Arte/Scienza
:  Balancing science and art, logic and imagination - ‘whole-brain thinking’.

6. Corporalita:
  Cultivating grace, ambidexterity, fitness, and poise.

7. Connessione:  Recognizing and appreciating the interconnectedness of all things – ‘systems thinking’.

Leo, you're not just on the team; you can write the KM Strategy!

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