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March 10, 2006

How Not To K.O. KM

Knowledge Management (KM) initiatives need not buckle under the weight of uncertain value. The key is to use it to solve the right problem, and to handle it as a characteristic to acquire, instead of as a system to install.

I.

The transportation of knowledge from personal to public, human to machine, and domain to event already occurs continuously throughout the organization. But to optimize how it composes the operational environment, the appropriate aspect of concern to investigate is capacity development, not process development. That is, the availability of the right knowledge in the right circumstance is a different problem from the delivery of at-large knowledge supplies.

Determining the "rightness" of the knowledge and of the circumstance is not about inherently "correct" content. Instead, it involves the use of models that connect expertise to outcomes, not just requestors to information.

That effort needs to be systematic, but in the main conceptually so, not technologically. The biggest practical challenge is to shape a worker's analysis and judgement during a task, by exposing enough of a relevant model to present, guide and validate choices -- while also capturing feedback on the effectiveness of the model's influence on the worker and on the outcome. The problem causing the challenge is that two unlike workers may be different primarily due to their respective individual mental models -- which for starters may also differ from the common model being presented. The payoff comes when dissimilar workers use the same model to derive equally effective individual execution.

A key related factor is that knowledge is carried into production by workers. Knowledge is quite variably embedded into production through a range of techniques utilized by the workers. Managing their techniques becomes a fundamental task of production management. But likewise, the right knowledge must be put into those workers, and the variety of techniques for doing that must also be managed.

Interestingly, there is a very well-known general precedent for just this kind of effective knowledge application: consulting. This shows KM to be generally in pursuit of embedding a consultative capability within the workflow of operations. In that way the capacity for effective knowledge usage is enhanced for all other aspects.

KM's most significant difference is that it establishes an environment in which individual workers can more readily achieve their personal performance objectives. From the perspective of environmental engineering, it is more clear that KM's "customer" is the inhabitant worker, and that the key thing KM must give that customer is an improved experience of managing their resources under pressure of corporate priorities.

Personal management of resources is not exactly obscured by job descriptions, roles, or performance evaluation criteria -- but the fact is that all of those representations derive from a deeper set of assumptions about individual execution.

Here, it is important to distinguish the idea of execution from that of conduct and of behavior. Put simply:
- Behavior generally describes activity and especially activity patterns, in a way that is unconcerned with any imposed or external requirements.
- Conduct describes behavior in the context of situational propriety.
- Execution, finally, describes either behavior or conduct, but only from the concern of whether their impacts have motivated progress towards a certain goal.

How should KM be related to those distinctions?

II.

One of the most important background principles is that the individual should be self-directed yet in alignment with the direction of the business circumstance. Here, the "business direction" means both trajectory and guidance. For this alignment to happen, the individual needs high awareness of the particular important goal, the business significance of the goal, and the implications of various means for meeting it.

A second major principle is that leveraging knowledge requires structured interactions between knowledge providers and users. This is at minimum analogous to the existence of markets instead of merely supplies. For the "leverage" to occur, the user must be in a position to change something with the obtained knowledge. The value of the knowledge is logically associated with the value of the change, so the promotion of the knowledge is organized around that value of change.

Those principles make it apparent that KM, as a business practice, should focus on two high-level outcomes: worker position and worker leverage. That is, if KM does not beneficially contribute to those two things, it is not really adding critical value to the environment or to the business.

Most organizations regard position through worker participation in processes, with participation evaluated by the business at the conduct level. In the case of the leverage, most organizations feature prescribed business functions, such as R&D or production or scorekeeping, that are applied in operations areas like sales, services or manufacturing.

As a result of the operational mindset, "methods" and "assignments" are thought to be the initial targets of KM's top-down influence on individual execution. That is, KM is first sought to make people "do better at what they are supposed to do." That execution is an important business goal, but this goal is "point C" and you can't reach it directly from "point A" where KM needs to start.

Here, we're aimed at improving personal management of resources under corporate priorities-- for which the critical operational success factors are not methods and assignments but instead awareness and alignment -- the drivers of voluntary interaction . These are the direct touchpoints that the worker has, anchoring behavior which we can then project across their conduct and execution.

III.

KM makes the assumption that talent in the organization can generate greater productivity through synergies and/or optimizations offered by dynamic collaboration on key objectives. It therefore intends to practically influence the real-time organization of the community of talent.

But we must remember that a "community" is actually the result of individuals electing themselves to the membership. Let's look at the real structure of the knowledgeworker community targeted by KM. Finding the structure means identifying the major dynamics, "benefit vs. risk" style, that surround and involve the individual member of the community at each opportunity for awareness and interaction. KM's affects on these dynamics stage its ability to shape the individual's execution.

Talent versus Internal Competition: the person's predisposition must be compatible with the organization's need for their skills. In effect, "hold-outs" dramatically increase the opportunity costs of operations by forcing a shift of other resources away from more optimal pursuits of advantage and towards what are essentially operational defenses like contingency coverage or repairs. Here, "talent" is a practical idea representing "appropriate skills". Since talent is valued in association with the efficiency of its use, any challenges to that efficiency will virtually devalue the talent; therefore, managers should target removing those challenges -- but meanwhile the talented individual will naturally seek low-resistance opportunities to being prominently employed.
For that, the individual's own tactics to preempt, avoid or reduce challenge need to be simultaneously channeled away from unproductive self-protection and towards opportunity.

Collaboration versus Co-Opting: the person's presence must be highly valued specifically for the purpose of the collaboration. This means that the person's identity needs to be noted much more for their role as a giver or enabler than as a taker.
- Being explicitly associated with successful collaborations must be equally important as, if not more important than, individual credit.

Opportunity versus Confusion: the person's preference must focus on the objectives for which their support is well rewarded. Otherwise, their personal priorities can too easily challenge the priorities behind the deployment of the KM channels. Behaviors themselves must be an objective, not just certain projects or subject matters.
- The individual needs to be able to see, continuously, which personal behaviors are currently being perceived as business benefits.

Those points advocate systematic coordination of:
- the security of the individual's ongoing opportunity
- the public visibility of the individual's expertise
- the pre-approved recruitment of the individual into high-priority areas of business need

But where coordination is concerned, companies typically look at processes and functions to generate the value they ultimately seek from their resources. Less well understood, and less accounted-for, is the ecological effect that the quality of resources has on the environment hosting the processing.

Usually, the connection of resource-quality to operational progress gets most of its attention during a phase of resource-selection and process design. But except when problems break out, the attention to the subsequent execution-quality often overlooks many of the ways that resources constrain, improve, or modify production in tasks and processes. In correcting this visibility, the essential issue to grasp is how (and why) workers apply knowledge in real time to production.

In the table below, examples are shown for how the dynamics in the community can be influenced through cultivating individual persons' adoption of more knowledge-based objectives. Such examples stage opportunities to track influences in terms of an ecology. In short, this suggests how to execute KM, and shows it as being more of a practice than a process.

IV.

In a very important sense, the difference between KM and process management parallels the difference between coaching and supervising.
- Supervision focuses on reliable compliance of activity to requirements.
- In comparison, coaching increases resource readiness and confidence by concentrating on the alignment of capabilities and opportunities.

Looked at that way, it makes sense to ask how an individual's "profile" of predisposition, presence and preference makes them more or less "coachable" through a consultative facility. The more coachable they are, the more chance exists that their personal performance objectives can be coordinated with business priorities.

A view of this might be developed by auditing the profile in terms of awareness and alignment. In turn we can anticipate how KM mechanisms can support improvement in the profile, and thereby set better expectations about how KM will enable the individual.

Along with coaching, support completes the enablement scenario. In particular, various tools can provide KM-support for each row in the main chart above. For example:
- In the Expectations row, tools that generate topologies and ontologies for aggregated information stores are applicable, helping to coordinate vocabularies and ideas around shared standards.
- In the Experience row, Wikis, blogs and knowledgebases effectively promote the link between specified authors and content.
- And in the Expertise row, search engines and dashboards help expose and promote the relative importance of behaviors and ideas to each other and to production.

V.

Finally, a practical expectation of synergies and optimization needs to be established, and supported in an uncomplicated way:
- For synergies, the point is to show that new or unexpected collaborations yield important results on demand.
- For optimizations, the point is to show that knowledge re-use increases the number of instances of benefit obtained from one developed item or source of knowledge.

Having those working definitions, rewarding initiatives related to them, and tracking their example success stories, is the most straightforward way to focus attention on when and how value comes from them -- making them practical instead of just theoretical.

Furthermore, the extent of opportunities to pursue them should be taught. When a collaboration yields an unconventional or unexpected benefit from a given source, that source is contributing to optimization by announcing that its potential as a resource is greater than previously acknowledged -- offering agility and the possibility of eliminating some redundancy. Thus, synergy and optimization can be flip sides of the same coin, and an increase in one might also spur some degree of increase in the other. This should be looked for both in the design of operations and in the evaluation of outcomes.

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at March 10, 2006 8:12 AM

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» Ryder on a KM knock-out from Knowledge Jolt with Jack
Malcolm Ryder has another great essay on KM, this time "How Not To K.O. KM." I can't help but appreciate the way Malcolm synthesizes what has to happen in the world around the worker for "knowledge management" to be successful. [Read More]

Tracked on March 19, 2006 9:41 PM

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