10 options for implementing a KM strategy

Last week I had the pleasure of providing my final virtual webinar for the first of the UN's KM Online blended learning programme.  Geoff Parcell and I have taken turns over the past 6 weeks.  Last week the focus was on KM Strategy and Implementation, and we had an excellent interactive discussion about different options for implementation.Here's a shot of our discussion in action...

So with particular thanks to Eric, Harald, Svetlana and Miguel who added some great ideas  - here are ten different options for KM Strategy implementation.

1. Top Down, Big Bang.

This is the traditional "someone at the top has said this needs to happen" approach, usually accompanied by a cascade, a change initiative, communications and engagement plan, brown-bag presentations, training programmes, mugs and mouse mats. We've all seen these initiatives in action - and in some organisations they can be the only way to get people's attention.  The challenge, of course is to find ways to keep people's attention -  particularly when the board or senior sponsors have moved onto their next big bang.  You might consider setting up a programme board with some of the senior players, which will keep them collectively on-the-hook for your programme.  It's much more difficult for the whole group to shift their energy away than it is for a single sponsor to become distracted by the next big idea.

So it's the challenge of sustainability, which leads us neatly to the second approach - Top Down, Bottom Up.

2. Top Down, Bottom Up

This approach is a sophistication of the Big Bang approach, using the same level of visible senior support to send a clear message across the organisation. The critical difference is that there is a deliberate effort to harness the energy and passion of workers at the front line, and to involve them in the programme, perhaps as group of advisors or a community of practice. These people are key in helping to translate the messages from the top and set them in the right context locally.  BP had a two-year programme with a team of 10 with a brief to define and demonstrate the value of KM.  But it was KM Community of practice - around 200 enthusiasts who recognised the value that it brought to their day-to-day roles - this was the group who helped KM to be more sustainable.  They were also an excellent source of anecdotes and credible stories of where KM had made a difference at the sharp-end.

3. Slipstream.

In most organisations, you can guarantee that there will be a number of organisational initiatives in flight at any one time.  Rather than wait for a gap in the traffic which will never come, or to launch a competing campaign to capture the attention of an already saturated workforce, there is a third way!  Slipstreaming is about working in partnership with other initiatives or "transformation projects" (don't you just love that phrase?), looking for ways in which you can feed of each others' momentum. The beauty of KM is that it's such a broad discipline that it is easy to find ways to complement and support other programmes and functions.  I have seen KM effectively slipstream behind business improvement and Six Sigma projects; operational excellence, new project management methodologies, SharePoint deployments, acquisition integration activities, customer management and asset management initiatives, culture change movements and the roll-out of new corporate values. [You might question whether you can change culture with an initiative, or roll-out values - we'll leave that for a future post - but you get the idea...]

One thing to be wary of, which affects competitive cyclists and athletes who slipstream - is the danger of getting "boxed in".  If you're slipstreaming the roll-out of SharePoint with a view to sharing a broader set of knowledge-sharing behaviours and methods, then watch out that the technology doesn't grab all the headlines and rob you of impact.  It's always best to agree these things up-front as part of the partnership, rather than "pop out" unexpectedly and assume that you can push KM to the forefront!

4. Outside In.

This approach is a little higher risk, but does come with its own in-built parachute. Sometimes things just sound better when they are heard from the outside.   People who would treat an internal newsletter or intranet article with a degree of scepticism will pay attention to  the same story when it appears in a journal or arrives via their RSS feed – or when a friend of customer mentions that it just arrived in their RSS feed.  It’s the power of outside-in.  Geoff Parcell and I found that when we published the first edition of Learning to Fly in 2001, it gave reach, awareness and credibility to the KM programme way beyond anything we could have achieved ourselves.  Rio Tinto experienced a similar unexpected impact when they published their video on Communities of Practice on YouTube.  It just works, and it creates momentum inside the company to fill in any gaps between what is said externally and what happens internally.

And if you do over-reach?  Well, all that publicity should help you to find a soft landing somewhere else!

5. Viral

This is a variant of the pilot approach and usually involves technology.  BT experienced it with the  launch of their BTPedia internal wiki back in 2007, Russian financial services giant Sberbank encountered it with the launch of their ideas management system in 2011, and the roll-out of many micro-blogging environments  like Deloitte's Yammer have taken on a life of their own this year. With a viral approach, you need to be prepared for it to be messy - it's a case of let a thousand flowers bloom, pick the best ones and do the weeding and gardening later.   However, it's hard to imagine "lessons learned", "knowledge retention" or the creation of knowledge products spreading like wildfire.  You'll need to make the most of the extra momentum and have a plan up your sleeve to connect the parts of KM which spread virally with the other techniques and methods which require more effort to adopt.

6. Stealth

Sometimes labels get in the way.

Sometimes  you have to find ways to build  up  your organization's capability to manage and share knowledge without them realising what your master plan actually is.  You get smart at making small adjustments to processes, spotting political opportunities and allies, tweaking the configuration of information-sharing platforms and the wording of competency frameworks and values;  encouraging networks and facilitating conversations which improve performance and learning.  After a few years, you'll be able to look back and say to yourself  "you know what, we're pretty good at managing and sharing knowledge. - but you probably won't get a plaudit or bonus - just the satisfaction of having helped to build a knowledge-friendly environment which is probably more sustainable than any managed programme would have achieved.

If you like the sound of that, and can live with the lack of recognition, then perhaps a career as an independent KM consultant awaits you!

7. Copycat

This is more of a tactic than an implementation strategy per se - but it's often successful to point to examples of successful KM from other organisations (competitors and customers are particular impactful) to create some "me too" or "me better" demand.  Find a good example and invite them in to tell their story.  Check whether your board members have non-executive directorships or recent prior experience of other companies.  They might be good ones to pursue! Copycat can work well internally too, encouraging business units to out-do each other in successful knowledge sharing, but make sure that the measures you use to compare and celebrate don't create a new set of competing silos.   ConocoPhillips' '4G' awards (Give, Grab, Gather, Guts) and Syngenta's TREE awards (Transfer, Reuse, Embed, Experience) both focus on giving and receiving - hence they compete to out-share each other - which has to be a good thing!

8. Pilot

A Pilot approach will often take a subset of KM methods and apply them locally - in contrast to the big bang, which usually takes KM as a whole and attempts to apply it globally.  It's all about lighting a number of fires to see what spreads.  A pilot enables you to try the aspects of KM most likely to make a difference quickly, to build credibility locally, and to learn from each implementation.  That could mean launching a community of practice for one part of the organisation whilst closing the learning loop on major projects and working on knowledge retention for retiring experts. Criteria for a successful pilot?

• capable of showing results (measurable value would be good) within 6 months;

• strategic;

• repeatable elsewhere;

• close to the heart of any key sponsor or stakeholder, and

• ideally a recognisable part of the organisation (not too esoteric) which will make their story easy to understand.

9. The Buffet Menu

The success of a buffet approach depends on a high level of demand for knowledge. Rather than investing effort in creating an appetite, or a willingness to experiment - this approach works with the demand already present, and provides an array of tools and techniques which the organisation chooses from at will, once their "palate" is sufficiently educated.

The International Olympic Committee is a great example of this.  They set out a veritable smorgasbord of learning processes, observation visits, secondments, extranet platforms, access to experts, databases, distilled recommendations and lessons learned.  A knowledge feast for a future organising committee, who enter the 7-year process with a tremendous appetite for knowledge. On a smaller scale (and let's face it, everything looks small compared to the Olympics!), management consultancies operate their KM programmes using the demand for knowledge which accompanies each new assignment.

Demand-led programmes are more likely to be sustainable - no need to persuade people to change their behaviour - adrenaline drives them to it!

10. Phoenix from the ashes

For a lot of organisations, KM is not a new idea.  For many of them, there have been several historical big bangs, pilots and copycat initiatives. Talk with people about what has happened in the past and learn from it.  Corporate KM started in the mid '90s, so you'll be looking for people with grey hair (working in KM does that to people). Sometimes just having these conversations can rekindle enthusiasm, tinged with nostalgia.  Why didn't we make more of that?  What did we lose momentum then?  Perhaps now the timing is better?  Perhaps now, with a new sponsor, or now that we've addressed that particular barrier? It is quite possible for KM to rise, phoenix-like from the ashes and fly higher than it did before.

So whether you're a viral copycat or a phoenix stealthily approaching a buffet from the outside in, here's ten options to consider, with a little help from the inaugural UN KMOL class of 2013.

Knowledge, Reciprocity and Billy Ray Harris

Have you heard the story of Billy Ray Harris?  It's a heart-warming one.

Billy Ray is a homeless Kansas man who received an unexpected donation when passer-by Sarah Darling accidentally put her engagement ring into his collecting cup.  Despite being offered $4000 for the ring by a jeweller, he kept the ring, and returned it to her when, panic-stricken, she came back the following day.  Sarah gave him all the cash she had in her purse as a reward, and as they told their good-luck story to friends - who then told their friends -  her finance decided to put up a website to collect donations for Billy Ray.  So far, $151,000 have been donated as the story has gone viral around the world.  Billy Ray plans to use the money to move to Houston to be near his family.  You can see the whole story here.

On closer inspection, it turns out that this wasn't the first ring that Billy had returned to its owner.  A few years previously, he found a  Super Bowl ring belonging to a football player and walked to the his hotel to return it.  The football player rewarded him financially, and gave him three nights at that luxury hotel.   So the pattern was already established for Billy Ray, who also attributes it to his upbringing as the grandson of a reverend.

Whether you see this story as an illustration of grace, karma or good-old-fashioned human nature,  it illustrates the principle of reciprocity.  

Reciprocity is an important principle for knowledge management, and one which underpins the idea of Offers and Requests. 

Offers and Requests was a simple approach, introduced to make it easier for Operations Engineers at BP to ask for help, and to share good practice with their peers.  The idea was for each business unit to self-assess their level of operational excellence using a maturity model, and identify their relative strengths and weaknesses.   In order to overcome barriers like "tall poppy syndrome", or a reluctance to ask for help ("real men don't ask directions"), a process was  put in place whereby every business unit would be asked to offer three areas which they felt proud of, and three areas which they wanted help with.  The resulting marketplace for matching offers and requests was successful because:

i) The principle of offering a strength at the same time as requesting help  was non-threatening and reciprocal - it was implicitly fair.

ii) The fact that every business unit was making their offers and requests at the same time meant that it felt like a balanced and safe process.

Like Billy Ray, one positive experience of giving and receiving led to another, and ultimately to a Operations community.  A community website for offers and requests underpinned the process, enabling social connections and discussions.

This is played out in the Kansas story, where the addition of technology and social connections created disproportionate value - currently $151,000 of it. 

In the words of Billy Ray, "What is the world coming to when a person returns something that doesn't belong to him and all this happens?"

How the stiff upper lip is the enemy of knowledge sharing

Here’s a quote from a BBC news article yesterday:

The UK's "stiff upper lip" culture may explain why it lags behind other countries when it comes to beating cancer, say experts.

Researchers, who surveyed nearly 20,000 adults in six high-income countries, said they found embarrassment often stopped Britons visiting the doctor. Respondents in the UK were as aware of cancer symptoms as those in Australia, Canada, Denmark, Norway and Sweden, but more reluctant to seek help, they said.

When you drill down to the underlying reason behind “embarrassment” or “reluctance to ask for help”, you usually end up with “pride”.

This reminds me of one of my “seven deadly syndromes of knowledge-sharing”.   I called it “Real men don’t ask directions”, or “TomTom syndrome”

Imagine the scene: You’re on your way to a dinner party at a friend’s house; you left home a little late, so now you’re in a hurry and the quality of your driving is deteriorating.  Your partner is unsettled and tells you that “she’d prefer to get there in one piece than not at all”.  Now, just to add to the tension, you have a nagging thought that you might have taken a wrong turn. You carry on though, hoping that you’ll happen upon a road-sign or a landmark, but none appear. Finally, your partner breaks the silence and tells you what you already know.  You’re lost!    “No problem”, she says triumphantly pronouncing the solution; “pull over by that man over there and we’ll ask for directions”.

Of course, it’s not exclusively a male problem, but it does seem to be the case that men suffer from this syndrome more than women.  It’s hard to ask for help.

We have all had times when we have that nagging sense that “there might be a better way to do this”, or “perhaps someone else has already figured this one out”.  What stops us from asking around for solutions and ideas for improvement?  Sometimes it’s a sense that we’re supposed to know the answers.

Why would I want to show everyone else that I’m incompetent? That doesn't seem like a route to promotion.  However, once I've solved my problem, I’ll be happy to share my solution.

The truth is, the biggest challenge to organisations who want to get more from what they know, isn't that they have a knowledge sharing problem.  It’s that they have an asking problem.

It’s also true to say that we often turn to technology for help when a conversation would be more timely, more accurate and more helpful – whether that’s with a doctor, a local resident or a knowledgeable colleague who would be only too willing to help.

What stops us from putting knowledge into action?

Our BMW is nearly 8 years old now.  It’s been brilliant, and it’s had to put up with a lot from a growing family, and now a dog with an affinity for mud and water.

It’s about this age when cars generally - regardless of the manufacturer -  begin to reveal some of the longer-term glitches to owners and manufacturers send letters to notify people like me that “there is an extremely small chance that you may experience a problem with the battery wiring in the luggage compartment, and please would I contact my local dealer at my earlier convenience where they will be glad to examine and fix any potential problems without charge…”

If I wanted to sell my car (probably to someone who doesn't read this blog!), then I have a choice:

• Sell them the car, and give the new owner the keys and a small pile of vehicle recall notices.  These represent all of the lessons about the 535D Touring that BMW and their customers have learned over the past 8 years, so they are, of course, invaluable to the new owner…
• Take the car to the dealer, get the problems fixed for free and the vehicle record updated on their systems.  Throw away the recall letters which now have no purpose. Give the new owner the keys.

It’s clear which is the better option.  Now let's park the BMW analogy and think about knowledge management (which, coincidentally, BMW are also very good at).

In my experience, many organisations sometimes treat lessons learned like they are an end in themselves – as though the value has to remain in the document - rather than where possible leading to actions which embody the learning.  These actions might include updating a process, policy, standard or system has been updated to incorporate the learning, which  removes the need to promote the lessons or recommendations to future teams.

So why do some organisations settle for a pile of lessons rather than a set of improvements?

Some possibilities:

• It’s much easier to write a document than see a change through to completion.
• It’s too difficult to find the owner of the process which needs changing.
• I’m measured on how many lessons our project captures.
• We have invested in customizing SharePoint to capture lessons learned documents, and need to show that we’re using it.
• Although I wrote the recommendation, I’m not 100% confident that we should change the process for everyone.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm not decrying any kind of activity to capture lessons learned. Sometimes the learning is such that there is no obvious process or standard which can be changed, and there is no immediate customer for the knowledge.  In those cases we need to preserve it in such a way that our learning is expressed as a recommendation for the next team, and is supported with the reason, the narrative, any relevant artifacts and the contact details of the person behind the recommendation.  These things all add context to what would otherwise be a recommendation in isolation.  The next team then have more background to assess whether this particular recommendation is relevant in their world.  I wrote about this on my February posting on dead butterfly collections.

However, I do think it's worth looking at the barriers which prevent people from from translating their personal or team learning into an improvement for everyone.   Perhaps we're not selling the idea of lesson-learning in the best way?  Hearts and minds, or just minds?   Commitment or compliance?  Value or box-ticking?

Let's not let the tail wag the dog!

The ultimate Knowledge Management recipe?

I grew up in Devon, (south west England), surrounded by fields and sheep. A beautiful area, but sadly too remote to be a practical base for a much-traveled management consultant! One of the things about sheep is that you can see where they've been on the hillsides.  Their propensity for following each other leads to paths being worn away over the generations of sheep - becoming, quite literally, the path of least resistance.

We can identify similar patterns in our organisations.  We can discover who the go-to people are, and we can reveal how they interact with their colleagues, how technical advice flows, how requests for help are requited and where ideas are incubated.  That’s basis of organisational network analysis, which can be an excellent tool for determining the focus of a KM strategy or Community of Practice plan.

Of course, if you’re a sheep, and your landscape is unchanging, then a well-worn path is a good thing.

In most cases though, parts of our business landscape are changing.  Yesterday’s hill is tomorrow’s valley. However, it’s easy for sheep-like behaviour to persist, because the tracks are entrenched.

Contrast the behaviour of sheep with the waggle dance of the honey bee.   There’s an excellent 7-minute documentary about this on YouTube, but here’s a quick summary:

When a bee identifies a source of pollen, it returns to the hive and performs a ‘dance’ in the presence of the other bees.  The dance follows a figure-of-eight pattern and includes a pronounced waggle.  The direction of the waggle relates to the location of the pollen source – a precise angle in relation to the sun (even when cloudy) in relation to the hive; the duration of the waggle indicates the distance to the source.  It’s an amazing piece of design, and the documentary explains it very well.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bFDGPgXtK-U]

In contrast to the sheep, the sources of pollen are short-lived - perhaps just a few days, for a few hours of the day. This action of discovery-broadcast-sign posting reminds me of the way in which organisations are using micro-broadcast tools like Yammer.  I was privileged to get some insights into the way Deloitte (UK) are using it recently, and was impressed by the buzz(!) of discovery and sharing which it had generated.

So reflecting on the sheep and the bees,  I'm left with a belief that:

i) we need to understand the sheep paths on our organisations.  They may be positive and worthy of reinforcement, or they may be historical patterns of a "ghost" organisation, rather than a current picture of where the optimum knowledge flows should be.

ii) we also need to encourage the bee-haviour (sorry!) and enjoy the discovery of resources  - and subsequently the discovery of shared interests, expertise, passions and ultimately informal networks.

So perhaps the ultimate knowledge-sharing dish is roast lamb glazed in honey?

Giving Opinion and Sharing Experience

Last week I spent a day in The Hague, delivering a KM training programme to a group there.As part of the day, after an experiential exercise adapted from the Marshmallow Challenge (which was great fun!), we had a more detailed discussion about the Peer Assist technique.

A Peer Assist, as Geoff Parcell and I said in “Learning to Fly”  is

...a meeting or workshop where people are invited from other organisations and groups to share their experience, insights and knowledge with a team who have requested some help early on in a piece of work.

Whenever I teach how this works in practice, I always emphasize that the invitees to a Peer Assist are there to share their experience, rather than give their opinions.  Experience, you see, is a precious commodity, an earned reward because someone was present, involved and personally learned from an event – and hence can share their story first hand.

Opinion is cheaper and easier to come by.  I can google for opinions; I can give/receive opinion in a LinkedIn group;  I can email you my opinion. I can receive opinions on a blog posting or a tweet.  Sometimes the opinion given is rooted in experience, but not necessarily. It’s often “retweeted” opinion, amplified from someone else.  This video where members of the public give their opinion on the new iPhone (or so they think!), is a classic example of retweeted opinion - the unwitting stars of the show have absorbed so much of the iPhone 5 hype that their received opinions distort their personal experience!

The language we use around Opinion and Experience is interesting.

"Do you want my opinion on that? Let me tell you what I think…. "

Opinion is something which is given.  It’s transactional.

It’s like me buying a coke from a vending machine.

In contrast, we would never say “Let me give you my experience”!

We usually ask “Can I share my experience with you?”

As you share your experience with me, I begin to enter your world. I can feel how you felt, see what you saw, think what you thought, and then ask about what I don’t understand.

Sharing experience isn’t transactional – it's a conversation. It’s relational.  It’s like we are sharing a meal together.

Why is this important? We have seen a dramatic rise in the number of social channels which surface opinion - within and beyond the boundaries of our organizations.  For people like us, who work with knowledge, this is a good thing. We need to put that opinion to work and make sense of the patterns and sentiment available to us.

But all that experience is also still available for sharing....

This post is a plea for us to remain ambidextrous – let’s continue to be smart at working with opinion, and let’s also strategic about learning from experience.

As we immerse ourselves in transactional tide of opinion, let’s make sure that we can still see the richer, personal knowledge available through the sharing of experience. We need to spot the relational opportunities as well as the transactional ones.

Take a closer look at the bottom of that coke machine, and you’ll see what I mean. It's the real thing.

The trouble with demolishing silos...

Is that sometimes, you just end up creating new ones! [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YaHn86dcaJ0&w=640&h=480]

Wanted: Knowledge Assets - Dead or Alive?

There have been a few threads on LinkedIn KM groups on the topic of “knowledge assets” recently. It’s one of those words which gets thrown around by KM people without any agreed definition.  For many people, they are interchangeable with the term “information assets”, but sound sexier.  (Much like databases became “knowledgebases” a few years ago.)

Now I’m not going to assert definitions here – rather to give my view on the different perspectives, and share the way I distinguish between knowledge assets and information assets, building on the descriptions that Geoff and I wrote in “Learning to Fly”.

Speaking of flight, there’s something about butterfly collections which always leaves me feeling slightly saddened.   The colours and fragility are still there, but of course the life has gone.

I think we do well to remind ourselves that when we capture knowledge and write it down as information, we kill it. That’s not to say that the information is not immensely valuable, and may even have a long shelf life.

But it is dead.

Knowledge is information with the life still in it!

For me, the role of a knowledge asset is to consolidate the learning from a number of activities, and produce a distilled set of guidelines or recommendations, with (importantly) a clear and well-linked signpost to contact the source, to drill down into more detail and examples, and to contribute further stories to build the asset further.  Oh, and there’s some kind of mechanism for validating the input – ideally via a community of practice.  They keep it alive.

I've seen a lot of examples which start out as "knowledge assets", but quickly become "knowledge graveyards" because there is no community to own and refresh the content, and the links between the information and the authors/sources are not clear or maintained. Once you lose the connection between knowledge and the person who provided it, it's a bit like switching off its life support machine...

• There is an "extractionist" school of thought out there which focuses on separating knowledge from an individual, then combining, distilling and packaging in into a convenient and accessible products.

• And there's a "connectivist" school of thought which seeks to turn information into an advertisement for a conversation with the source.

I think the best knowledge assets combine these perspectives.   Too much extractionism (is that a real word?), and you can end up a logical but inflexible, self-reinforcing summary of the views of the editor-in-chief.  Too much connectivism, and you can get endless repeating, diverging threads and snippets which can be frustrating to draw insight from, and require too many phone calls to answer the all questions they elicit.

There are some topics which lend themselves to something approaching a “single version of the truth” (we call that known area “best practice” don’t we?), and for them, the logic of an extractionist-oriented knowledge asset will work.

Then there are topics which are more complicated, and benefit from the constant iteration and interaction of a connection-rich asset. (That’s knowable “good practice” in the Cynefin framework).

Cynefin framework, from MBAworld.com

I suspect it’s in these two quadrants where knowledge assets add value. Shifting further to the left takes us on a journey into emergence and chaos where pre-packaged knowledge is unlikely to fit the bill, although the fragments and stories they contain may well be informative.

One of the LinkedIn discussions asked: "Is a cookbook was an example of a knowledge asset?"

My answer was:

... a cookbook isn't really a very good example of a knowledge asset because it represents a snapshot in time of a particular recipe, and doesn't usually provide me with an easy way to ask questions of the chef, or other cooks who are learning/experimenting/adapting... I would say it's really an Information Asset.  That's not a bad thing - I have a kitchen full of them!

However, a recipe *blog*, which has all the benefit of the book, but which is socially constructed, grows and develops, commented-on added to by other cooks and enthusiasts who ask and answer questions...  Now that feels more like a *knowledge* asset to me.

School. On reflection.

We spent some time with extended family over new year, and I overheard one of the younger boys, Ted, recounting his tales of mischief at school – and the subsequent punishments he had received.

I was perturbed to hear him say that the school no longer uses the word “detention” because it has negative connotations (Guantanamo has a lot to answer for...),

No, instead labelling staying late after school or missing break as “detention”, the children in this particular school  are threatened with.....                  wait for it...

Reflection!

Yes, the biggest threat that you can hold out to an eleven-year old is that of Reflection!

So Ted gets caught copying someone work, and is sentenced to a period of reflection until he’s learned his lesson.

In ten years time, Ted may well enter the corporate world where (if he chooses his employer wisely) he’ll be expected to copy the work of others, encouraged to take time to reflect, and to actively seek out lessons learned!

We don’t make it easy for them, do we?

Measuring Knowledge Effectiveness

A couple of weeks ago I spent a day with a Chemical manufacturing company, working with their business improvement (BI) community, 50 miles south of Milan.  The welcome was very warm, but the fog was dense and cold as we donned hard hats and safety shoes for a tour of the site.

One of the key measures which the BI specialists monitor is that of Overall Equipment Effectiveness – which is defined as:

OEE = Availability x Performance x Quality.

Availability relates to production losses due to downtime; Performance relates to the production time relative to the planned cycle time, and Quality relates to the number of defects in the final product.

It set me thinking about what a measure of Overall Knowledge Effectiveness for a specific topic might look like?

How do we measure the availability of knowledge?  Is that about access to information, or people’s availability for a conversation?

What about knowledge performance?  Hmmm. This is where a linear industrial model for operational performance and cycle times begins to jar against the non-linear world of sharing, learning, adapting, testing, innovating...

And knowledge quality?  How do we measure that?  It is about the relevance? The degree to which supply satisfies demand?  The way the knowledge is presented to maximise re-use?  The opportunity to loop-back and refine the question with someone in real-time to get deeper into the issue?

Modelling how people develop and use knowledge is so much more complicated than manufacturing processes.  Knowledge isn't as readily managed as equipment!

If we limit ourselves to the “known” and “knowable” side of the Cynefin framework – the domains of “best practice” and “good practice” - are there some sensible variables which influence overall knowledge effectiveness for a specific topic or theme?

So how about:

Overall Knowledge Effectiveness = Currency x Depth x Availability x Usability x Personality

Currency:  How regularly the knowledge  and any associated content is refreshed and verified as accurate and relevant.

Depth:  Does it leave me with unanswered questions and frustration, or can I find my way quickly to detail and examples, templates, case studies, videos etc.?

Availability:  How many barriers stand between me and immediate access to the knowledge I need.  If it’s written down, than these could be security/access barriers; if it’s still embodied in a person, then it’s about how easily I can interact with them.

Usability:  How well has this been packaged and structured to ensure that it’s easy to navigate, discover and make sense of the key messages.  We’ve all read lessons learned reports which are almost impossible to draw anything meaningful from because it’s impossible to separate the signal from the noise.

Personality:  I started with “Humanness”, but that feels like a clumsy term.  I like the idea that knowledge is most effective when it has vitality and personality. So this is a measure of how quickly can I get to the person, or people with expertise and experience in this area in order to have a conversation.  To what extent are they signposted from the content and involved in its renewal and currency (above)

Pauses for thought.

Hmmm. It still feels a bit like an "if you build it they will come" supply model.  Of course people still need to provide the demand - to be willing and motivated to overcome not-invented-here and various other behavioural syndromes and barriers, apply the knowledge and implement any changes.

Perhaps what I've been exploring is really "knowledge supply effectiveness"  there's a "knowledge demand effectiveness" equation which needs to be balanced with this one?

Hence:  Overall Knowledge Effectiveness is maximised when

(Knowledge Supply Effectiveness) / (Knowlege Demand Effectiveness) = 1

Not sure whether the fog is lifting or not.  More thinking to be done...