Category Archives: Business Culture & Process Issues (Operational)

a knowledge retention technique: importance of business trips and missions

Posted on by
By a stroke of serendipity (a meeting with one of the speakers while he was in London) I went to Khartoum early in the New Year to participate in an event run by University of Khartoum styled “Knowledge Management Capacity in Africa”.

It promised to be an interesting event since unlike a previous mission to Khartoum, Nyala and El Fashar I was to be based in one centre for the week. Also the list of practitioners and speakers is very heavily weighted in favour of the African continent and I was the sole European representative. An honour indeed!

I was asked to focus on a couple of topics: Missions and Creative Commons. More on the latter in a subsequent posting. Here’s a taster from the abstract I wrote with Victoria Ward for the event:

Missions are one of the key ways any development bank or agency can collect, disseminate and synthesize knowledge but the opportunities to do so are often overlooked or wasted.

Most of the processes are focused on producing a report (back to the office report- BTOR), managing risks and making decisions yet every component can be adjusted and fine-tuned or used in more than one way.

This presentation, based in part on a mission to Sudan conducted in 2010 by Sparknow working alongside the World Health Organisation (WHO), will examine a variety of mission collection methods and discuss how the ‘fire of the field’ can be brought back into an organization.

Imagine you are a bank looking to set up a new Islamic finance operation targeted at the private sector in West Africa. There are few peer groups you can look to for advice; it’s by and large unchartered territory. What are your options?

·       talk to the founding fathers of other Islamic institutions

·       undertake a scoping mission to the country

·       identify others in your own institution that have core skills you might draw on.

You actually do all the above but in addition you put in place a programme to ensure that you capture all the learning’s from this new venture; the nuances around operating ‘offshore’ from HQ; the peculiarities of the culture and the way things are done and; you create a missions guide and a mechanism for feeding back what you learn into your organisation. This charts Sparknow’s mission journey illustrated by some of the techniques we’ve found to be of value.

Oh and this time I am going to remember to take nice new shiny dollar bills and not my credit card.

image

handling cultural nuances in Asia

Posted on by
It’s Thursday morning and I am in Hong Kong to run the closing panel session on day two of the inaugural Online Asia Pacific held at the Hong Kong Convention Centre.

On the first day I’d tweeted

‘Difficult to assess whether audience will ask questions; only one allowed thus far per session and all been from visitors to the region’.

Despite a very convivial lunch with my fellow panellists to discuss options it isn’t readily apparent what will meet the objectives to send the delegates away with a smile on their face, with a set of real ‘takeaways’ and bring the conference to a memorable conclusion.

Having been given the remit to do what I think appropriate it is going to be a case of trust my instinct and make sure there is enough interesting content to back me up if I needed it.

After a very promising start on Day One, with 150 people attending the keynote presentation and official opening by Stephen Mak HK Government’s recently appointed Chief Information Officer, the crowd thinned perceptively for the remainder of the event prompting the thought that being seen to sign up is more important than attending.

Those who stayed the course (probably an average of 50 per session) looked like they got their money’s worth and I take the opportunity, having watched Hazel Hall perfect the art at the 2010 Online Conference, of tweeting the bits I feel worth recording.

My ears prick up when Stephen Mak suggests that HK has Communities of Practice at the heart of its drive to build a knowledge based society. This was worth a question; in the interests of timekeeping my request to speak is declined so I corral Stephen before he leaves for a more pressing engagement of putting Information and Communications Technology & Knowledge at the disposal of HK’s population – its Digital 21 Strategy! Yes he says they do use CoP’s but only for internal purposes and then among the IT community. And off he sweeps to perform the opening ceremony which involved dragons, sticks and tambourines.

An intranet consultant from Singapore then talks about an assignment in Manila arguing that an Intranet is the blood line of an organisation; the most important part of an IT infrastructure. Again I was interested since the client is Asian Development Bank an organisation we’d come to know and respect greatly a year or so back.  His premise that ‘culture is what happens when a boss leaves the room’ an interesting take on working in Asia further reinforced by an insightful presentation from a Thai energy company who impose through KPIs a requirement on their engineers to contribute to Communities of Practice.  Here’s the conundrum:

  • while workers in Asia are taught to respect their superiors, follow their directives and defer to them in conversations, do ‘hits’ or ‘contributions’ to a lessons learned database enforced via a must contribute policy represent a real change in the way an organisation is working? Or is it merely the way things get done around here and some contribution is better than no contribution?

This conundrum was vividly illustrated later in a Q&A panel which included a session on Open Source technologies:

Q. what are the reasons for OS community here not growing up? A. No evidence that people in Asia will to contribute to online forums

Which brings me back full circle to my closing session dilemma: would a very eclectic public audience of mixed race, faith and gender be willing to embrace Sparknow’s participative work-shopping approach?

Here’s what I did:

  • rearrange the room by stacking previously unused chairs to get a much tighter feeling among the delegates.
  • prepare a brief presentation with plenty of illustrations to provide a backdrop to a conversation about how information and knowledge professionals needed to adapt.
  • ask the other panellists to sit in the audience for most of the session and use them as catalysts for conversations.
  • invite the delegates to consider what their three ‘takeaways’ are from the event (including the exhibition) and then to have a conversation with the person next to them about their choices.
  • at this point my fellow panellists (Robert, Bonnie and Waltraut) and I engage with anyone looking left out and the level of animated conversation bears testimony to a willingness to have a say at least in a small group.
  • I now want to invite the delegates to voice opinions but fear asking them from behind a lectern will be unproductive. Instead I pass the roving microphone to Robert Hillard (the keynote speaker and one of the panellists who is in the audience) to give me his.  Robert bemoans the lack of a open forum for information professionals in the region.
  • rather than give it back to me I invite him to select someone else in the audience and pass the microphone on to them.  That simple act both diffuses and increases tension; everyone watches anxiously to see if they are selected but focuses on what they might say if they are. It has become much more light hearted and I am able to joke about who is next and throw in anecdotes as the mike moves around.
  • this continues for 20 minutes or so; everyone who wants to speak does; Lorna Candy the conference organiser of Incisive Media is taking note of the takeaways – a much better feedback loop than the usual tick box/score forms handed out at conference.
  • the session concludes when I invite the panellists to take their places on the podium (a rather grand description for a table at the front) and give their own summaries which talk to the resonance of information literacy and the need to adopt language that business understands.

What were my takeaways from Online Information Asia Pacific?

  • economic value of reusing public sector information in Asia is not understood though strangely the value of good curation is.
  • conversely the museums sector don’t show digital collections on their website, a real opportunity lost since every other aspect of Hong Kong life including the Ding Ding is presented virtually as streaming video.
  • laughter (not too loud) can overcome basic inhibitions and while its easy to offend an advance apology can go a long way to ensuring there is no lasting damage!
  • when serving chicken remember the breast is what Westerners like; the legs and feet are tastier and considered more appropriate.

using knowledge for competitive advantage: a graphic illustration from history

Posted on by
It being a lovely afternoon and with a guest over from Washington DC my wife and I decided to pay a visit to the Naval Dockyard at Portsmouth where some of Britain’s most famous warships have been restored and are on display.

I didn’t expect to find such a vivid example of how the application of what you know allied to an entrepreneurial spirit can make such a difference.

Here’s the background: By the time of the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805 the rate of fire from a cannon on the British Fleet was every 90 secs whereas for that of the enemy it was 5 minutes; a major factor in the competitive advantage of the British Fleet and the ensuing victory.

Here’s why:

Captain Charles Douglas, commander of the 90 gun ship Duke in 1778, had such great confidence in the efficiency of the flintlock for firing guns that he equipped his ship with them out of his own purse. When Douglas became captain of Lord Rodney’s flagship Formidable (90 guns) in April 1782, he demonstrated his superior rate of fire and hitting power in the victory over the French at the Battle of the Saints in the West Indies. Douglas’s son, Major General Sir Howard Douglas, improved the gun lock system by introducing a double headed hammer to house the flint. This made it unnecessary to change flints frequently during action as this new form of hammer could be turned through 180 degrees to engage the second flint.

What that quote omitted was that the French forces were the inventors of the original flintlock and indeed had trialled (without much success) its introduction to the fleet.

On the British side this became a grass roots incremental change programme spread by word of mouth that ultimately became ‘corporate’ policy. Individual Captains’ who were often quite wealthy paid for the enhancements to the guns on their vessels and were able to see significant improvements in productivity. By the time of the great sea battles of the late 18th and early 19th century most British ‘ships of the line’ were fitted with these devices with devastating impact.

It struck me as I walked around HMS Victory that today many organisations aren’t aware  of what others in different areas of their business do and are often not involved in the redesign of process. Indeed two of the recurring comments we hear are “I didn’t know they did that” or “yet another top down HO initiative we pay lip service to”.

This example spoke to me of the value of knowledge sharing and the need to engage rather than impose change.  I hope you agree?

image

flickr.com/4142/4737534619_aa7c70470e_b.jpg

KMUK 10: power of micro narratives

Posted on by
KMUK 10 was held concurrently with the FIFA World Cup. At that time a lot of debate was going on about the abject performance of the English football team (twas ever thus). Looking back now it was clear old ways of presenting information were becoming stale.
If Emile Heskey is the answer, are we asking the right question?

The depressing performance by the English team at the South African World Cup illustrates the old adage that knowledge out of context is just information. Despite both teams possessing the latest analytical technology, a more astute German team executed their tactical plan perfectly and embarrassed England. And historical contexts are important here; a non-goal scorer remains a non-goal scorer and is therefore unlikely to change the course of a game when coming on as a substitute.

KMUK 2010

A couple of weeks ago I had the pleasure of chairing the annual 2 day UK knowledge management event (kmuk http://kcuk.wordpress.com/) held this year in Canary Wharf London. In addition to 120 or so senior practitioners the speakers were drawn from across the globe; an interesting mix of people who’ve done stuff and are moving onto pastures new, those who are prominent advocates, those at the forefront of new thinking and of course Dave Snowden the recipient of a science in km award who fits at least three of the above and can be relied upon to give a provocative address.

It is a few years (in fact a decade) since Sparknow was a disruptive force at the sister event in Brussels, constructing a garden shed (‘scriptorium’ – a slightly quirky neutral space where delegates could retire to for reflection about the need to cultivate and propagate) among the many software vendors’ exhibits that were the backdrop to the conference. Today such vendors are conspicuous by their absence; perhaps Autonomy’s increasing ownership of the business enterprise search space has forced those that remain in business to explore new horizons?

I was looking for evidence of a new disruptive force and for signs of life among the km community. Did I find it? There were a couple of global km programmes showcased, Heineken, Sanofi Pasteur being two. The majority focused on specific solutions. People such as Bonnie Cheuk have made a virtue out of the necessity of identifying a business problem and then illustrating how km tools and techniques can help solve it. The example presented demonstrated how to use social media to help develop a new strategy. BAE Systems and Burges Salmon (law firm with big Bristol presence) have used an Autonomy based system to help them provide their internal clients with insights and what they described as best practice.

A lot of what was presented was illustrations of good professionalism. The absence of solid metrics was bemoaned (as it always is); people who measure tend to rely on surveys.

lightening bolt: Using stories to present issues

Was there a lightening bolt? If I’m honest the disruptive force / lightening bolt would seem to be increased use of narrative and story. The challenge; how to honour the original voice in an environment where sound bites and 24×7 headlines drive the attention span of audiences?

One presenter (Helen) chose to be bold. She read out three stories and invited the audience to discuss each one. They focused on how a centrally driven change management effort was being received. There was an audible buzz; the delegates had listened and had differing emotions. The language and way of presentation had struck a chord and the delegate’s feedback reflected this:

  • A very illuminating session on the power of micro-narratives; how much you can learn from a short story. Good to have opportunity to discuss, rather than just being another ‘lecture’.
  • Very participative, and found it useful to engage in discussion around the stories.
  • Great to take this approach as contrast to presentations. Supports reflection and some slower learning.

illustrating the value (and effort) of story work

Helen is now grappling with the outputs of this exercise and since this is a common issue I thought I’d play back something one of our clients said about an assignment Sparknow worked on with them on a couple of years back:

  • One of our strongest impressions… was the absolutely meticulous attention to detail. I think this is both a good and bad thing – it leads to a fantastic product every time but at a very high resource cost from those working on the project. One thing I particularly noticed being so closely involved in the narrative research project was how important that attention to detail was in ensuring the right questions were asked of customers to bring out the stories – I had absolute confidence in the project right through the process.
  • The method generates extremely deep insight and the stories have proved extremely powerful both in and out of the Boardroom. It has been interesting watching people react to the stories – they can make people very uncomfortable or react quite strongly. The interesting thing is that they don’t allow people to ‘hide’ from the truth and therefore the impact of just the .stories collected is long lasting, as well as the insights generated.
  • Story work seems to be resource intensive (probably associated with the meticulousness of what was done) so it is something you have to pick and choose carefully where you use it – not only in terms of spending the money but also in terms of the impact that can be created with particular sets of stories. * The audio material is still being used to this day so there is quite a legacy!

an alternative summary: ‘Good wrap-up and collation of key points from sessions.’

As a departure from the usual Chairman’s Summary session Christopher Heimann and I invited each participant to share with his or her partner whatever they wanted to as takeaways. We stressed this was not a conversation more an exercise in listening and being heard. We asked the pair to repeat this process with the other partner acting as teller and vice versa.

Based on a technique we’d used in Darfur it illustrated how valuable (and in a pressure situation, cathartic) it can be to tell and hear your story played back at the end of a tiring day. It surfaced many previously unspoken issues and being unexpected shifted thinking, two of the many virtues of a narrative approach.

using the past to inform the future: Asian Development Bank

Posted on by
In 2010 in Manila, staff and Alumni at Asian Development Bank were handed a book and cd as part of a new Human Resources strategy, the culmination of an assignment to create a Living Archive for the bank that had begun back in November 2008.

image

Here is the story of the assignment.

“…the story he told me about his work… made things come alive, and showed where my project fitted into a much larger and more complex picture than I had foreseen or understood.”
Rajat M Nag | Managing Director General

In November 2008 ADB officials and alumni embarked on a journey to find new ways to share reflections, insights and experience. Recognizing the power of narrative to stimulate dialog and unearth the hidden stories that best illustrate an organization at work, ADB appointed Sparknow LLP, a knowledge and communications consultancy, to help to create a Living Archive and to nurture the individual and collective practices that will allow ADB build a new narrative capacity to marry to the substantial analytical skills it already has.

An exhibit, plenary sessions, a combination of short, structured sessions and more extended oral history interviews, interactive workshops and on location sound recording were techniques employed to capture the content that forms the backbone of an embryonic Living Archive upon which ADB can build.

Today, the Living Archive comprises:

  • a slim book, ADB: Reflections and Beyond, capturing significant events in ADB’s history told through the eyes of some of those who were involved
  • a set of audio clips for use in induction and training
  • a CD featuring the sounds of ADB and Asia as a backdrop to many illuminating reminiscences about working for and in ADB
  • a narrative practitioner manual to support ADB in evolving the processes and practices across the organization.

A small group of determined, enthusiastic and skilled Narrative Practitioners has worked with Sparknow throughout and these people are now equipped to listen for, capture and share stories about ADB, its work and impact on those it seeks to help. These processes and their products can be seeded through all parts of the organization, whether it’s the formation of a community of practice, better handling of a mission debrief, or new ways of evaluating and carrying out after action reviews. ADB’s narrative practitioner team will help to build on the work with Sparknow in 2010 and make the most of the possibilities it has opened up.

Fast forward a couple of years to 2012 and this case study is now part of a publication from the Ark Group entitled “Making Knowledge Management Work For Your Organisation”