Favourable first impressions of Iran despite ‘come back tomorrow with the fingerprint records…’

Posted on August 31, 2013 by Paul Corney

Our first contact with an official at the Iranian Consulate in Dubai in support of our application for a visa.

will we get in?

Nazim (aide de camp from the client’s Dubai office) has handed over our documents at 9am. A prominent Knowledge Management guru/practitioner and I (whose name I am omitting along with that of the client to protect confidentiality), have stopped there enroute to Tehran as there is no Iranian Embassy in the UK. We’ve been assured getting a visa would be straightforward and that the opening hours for visa applications of 8am to Noon would allow us enough time to get on the 18.45 Emirates flight from Dubai to Tehran.

My hand /fingerprint

So at 7.30 am, having arrived barely 5 hours previously, we were collected and taken to Dubai CID for fingerprinting. This is not normal for either of us. It has been necessitated by the US’ imposition of such a policy for inbound Iranian visitors and as often happens in politics provoked a like for like response. It proves to be a slightly amusing affair despite the officer in charge holding my hand a little too long for my liking while I am shown where to place my palms on the machine that is to record every detail of my hands not just fingerprints.

no insurance, no entry!

And so to the Consulate. The official rejection is made in a manner that leaves little room for negotiation. And a new twist, we are instructed to get travel insurance. This is in itself ironic as UK travel insurance is invalid as the UK Foreign Office issues advice warning UK citizens not to travel to Iran. So here we are being told to buy it otherwise we don’t get a visa. Help is at hand, a colleague of Nazim’s appears from nowhere on a motor bike, collects our documents, including fingerprint records, and speeds off in the blazing sun (its by now 10.30am and 35c).

He returns smiling some 35 minutes later clutching a couple of policies issued by the Iran Insurance Company! Amid much backslapping off he goes having handed over our documents. Nazim whose demeanour has changed from misery to euphoria marches up to the counter with the policy.

Come back tomorrow with the fingerprint records!

There is a problem, not all our documents were handed back. Nazim is now crestfallen. Its 11.15am, the noon deadline for visa issuance is approaching, and our records are zooming around Dubai on a motorbike. The likelihood of us getting to Tehran that evening are diminishing rapidly along with his career prospects. We have a packed four day schedule that kicks off tomorrow morning and involves many senior figures, Nazim is on the hook to deliver us to the departure gate with valid visas!

However once more ‘Insurance Man’ delivers. He is back in 15 minutes with our fingerprint documents and with much fanfare 15 minutes before cut off time all documents are submitted. A visa is duly issued by a woman official dressed in an abaya and hijab not our first contact who is haranguing everybody attempting to submit a visa application.

Declining the tempting offer of a tour of Dubai (I put a marker down for a visit to the Burj Khalifa to watch the sunrise) we return to our temporary home the Le Meridien Hotel opposite the Dubai Creek Golf Course – its way too hot and humid to play golf – and final preparations for the packed week ahead.

Nazim tells us that they went to the Consulate to check everything the previous week and were assured all our visas were a formality. Within a week the fingerprinting and insurance requirements were added. And the official who gave the initial advice was now on holiday.

first impressions

As we begin our descent the fuselage mounted camera on the Emirates Airlines Airbus A330 shows little of the terrain but does reveal an airport some distance from the centre of Tehran, a city which we are to learn is home to some 14 million people.

Women put on cloaks and headscarfs and from now on physical contact (including the shaking of hands) in public between the opposite sexes is the exception rather than the norm. We land in the dark at 9.50pm at Imman Khomeini International Airport, Tehran.

The airport is a solid structure; quite Easten Bloc in many respects with substantial columns and signage that pays little attention to aesthetics.The immigration hall has a low ceiling which adds to the sense of foreboding I always feel when entering a new country.

As we line up to put our luggage through a scanning machine I note the lady in front has two suitcases larger than her. My offer to help is politely declined with a knowing look. My earlier fears prove groundless and we are out 30 minutes from touchdown having been met by a driver who instantly makes us feel welcome greeting us with ‘Asr bekheir’ (good evening).

‘ Samand_LX_31 Our’ car the Samand is ubiquitous throughout Iran and in its ‘satellite’ countries. Iran Khodro Company (IKCO) is the largest vehicle manufacturing company, having an average share of 65 percent of domestic vehicle production with annual sales in excess of 700,000 vehicles that includes a number of French names produced under licence.

As we are to discover, sanctions has served to increase the manufacturing base placing much emphasis on the need for innovation and creativity. I am to discover that as a result the Stage-Gate Process – New Product Development methodology developed by Professor Robert Cooper is very popular (more of that in a future post) and proves an interesting touch point as I worked with them both a decade ago when helping to introduce the process into many clients.

The journey is eventful and takes 45 minutes. Driving styles mix aggression and faith. Right of way is negotiated though traffic signals are observed. The overwhelming impression is of too many vehicles: entry to the centre on certain days is dependent on your number plate.

Pedestrian right of way does not seem to exist and crossing the road is not for the faint hearted. It requires determination, cunning and luck. Woe betide the pedestrian who deviates or stops mid way as vehicles swerve around you.

On arrival we receive a warm greeting from the receptionist at the Raamtin Hotel a boutique establishment with 70’s decor. The hotel is situated on the main North – South route but is surprisingly quiet. Water runs down each side of the street from the nearby mountains that form a backdrop to the metropolis.

Room 309 which also has a 70’s feel about it overlooks the tree lined road which has many pedestrians despite its steep incline. It feels European in many ways and first impressions are favourable.

capturing & exploiting corporate knowledge in HMRC: bombs, cakes and critical knowledge

Posted on August 14, 2013 by Paul Corney

The impending release of the UK Government’s Knowledge & Information Strategy has shone a spotlight on the need for all areas of government to capture, effectively manage and share the knowledge and information they create and receive…if they are to deliver a world class and publically accountable digital public service.

I wonder how many UK taxpayers associate HMRC with being at the leading edge of government practice? Yet a few months back 14 senior business people gathered for the first modules ran by Victoria Ward and I of a Civil Service Learning pilot programme* entitled capturing and exploiting corporate knowledge.

The venue was Whitehall, London yet the delegates came from around the country and represented a wide variety of disciplines from across HMRC: VAT Directorate; Anti Money Laundering; Large Businesses Service; Corporation Tax, International and Anti-Avoidance (CTIAA); Specialist Investigations; Local Business Comliance: and Excise, Customs, Stamps & Money Services (ECSM).

in advance

We asked the delegates to:

…bring along an object. An image, document or small artifact that illustrates a memorable event with which you were involved during your last couple of years in the business. It might be a decision, a new piece of policy or a transaction. We are going to ask you to talk about the object and use it during the exercises so please think carefully about what you might choose.

Here’s why: Objects stimulate conversations; people feel comfortable talking about them in environments where otherwise they might not open up. They reveal insights other techniques fail to unearth and so are effective as icebreakers and as triggers for more in-depth discussions on events and projects.

One of the core beliefs I’ve developed working with Sparknow is that, to be effective and valued, knowledge management has to be about helping to improve the decision making capacity of individuals, teams and organisations. Indeed it features in the opening sentence of the World Bank’s definition of KM:

…Knowledge provides insight for decision making…

So, much of early stage investigation into critical knowledge has to be around events and decisions and how knowledge has (or has not) informed them. Objects have proved to be a good way of facilitating those early dialogues and feature prominently in the work we do.

By combining timelines and objects to examine an event or decision in an Anecdote Circle we imagined this would act as a real stimulus in helping to place clarity around the concept of critical knowledge.

module one: Positioning

aims

understand the importance of critical knowledge to HMRC

objectives

able to identify critical knowledge
see how and why others identify and capture critical knowledge

Reassuringly people were prepared and had an object, an image or something in mind (this is often not the case). Here’s an extract from Victoria’s fieldnotes taken during the plenary debrief on the memorable objects session:

My object wasn’t that helpful, it was just a document…But it was a conversation starter, very simple very plain, a trigger… It brought a story to life and helped with focus

The Anecdote Circle helped the delegates identify the event or decision they wished to examine in more detail.

For that we invited them to use a tool, (worksheet) for conducting a more in depth (Deep Dive) type of discussion, Sparknow has christened the Narrative Grid.

Narrative Grid Worksheet

Comments were broadly favourable and the Narrative Grid was to feature later in the programme by which time they were more attuned to its benefit and skilled in its application.

From looking at critical knowledge from an internal perspective we shifted to the external environment drawing on examples from the nuclear industry, the health industry and the regulatory industry to illustrate how they had set about identifying what critical knowledge was in their business and why they set about capturing it. A common theme running through each example, with which the HMRC delegates were able to empathise, was the need to mitigate risk especially around the departure of staff with considerable expertise and experience.

There was broad agreement that critical knowledge:

‘It’s the knowledge HMRC would struggle without if it lost’

And in working through examples the delegates were able to identify two compelling metaphors: bomb defusing and cake making

In defusing bombs the precise critical knowledge is knowing what wire to cut.

For recipes, it’s not just the recipe, ingredients, marinading, but how hot is my oven?
Flower Bomb Cake by Madeline Ellis

Module One ended with us providing the delegates with a set of references and reading. We also provided a link to an interview I’d conducted with Gordon Vala-Webb a promiment KM’er in Canada who was in charge of a project to capture and retain knowledge for a regulator at a time when many of its most experienced staff were about to retire and would impact them operationally. Gordon gives an eloquent explanation of how a large govenrment organisation tackled this and determined the knowledge they could least afford to lose. Here are a few snippets:

…we took a risk management approach and got each of the branches to fill in a risk assessment form as part of the annual business planning process… a high score would have resulted in the branch developing a risk mitigation plan… we provided guidance on different approaches which included videoing, interviewing, expanding procedure manuals…in some cases they kept the retiring staff on call…

…I believe if we had not had this program people would have been scrambling to keep operating…

More to follow on Modules 2 through 6 over the next few weeks.

*Sparknow and Knowledge et al worked in partnership to deliver this programme.

why the UK Government is seeking to capture and retain critical knowledge

Posted on July 31, 2013 by Paul Corney

As I write this an updated Government knowledge & information Strategy is being crafted.

Following the recognition of knowledge & information management (KIM) as one of the professions of government and building on Information Matters published in 2008 it represents another important milestone in the journey towards a more flexible workforce able to recognise, capture and retain that knowledge & information critical for its current and future business.

More on that in due course once the Strategy has been released.

turning the km & i vison into reality

Recently HMRC (through Civil Service Learning) commissioned Sparknow and I to run a set of pilot programmes on capturing and exploiting corporate knowledge. HMRC like all areas of governement face the threefold challenge of:

equipping new joiners with sufficient knowledge and information that they are able to hit the ground running (while making the most of the knowledge they are bringing to the organisation)
ensuring that when staff are reassigned they have sufficient time and access to the knowledge they need to transition into the new role
capturing the huge experience and knowledge (often tacit) from staff who are coming up for retirement, whose job may be dissapearing or who are leaving to pursue a career elsewhere.

In welcoming the participants our sponsor said:

This proposed programme…aims to make knowledge retention part of the engrained behavior and the way ‘we’ work. It should be a continuous process fuelled by the belief that everyone has something to contribute and much to learn from sharing knowledge.

Our challenge then: to develop an informative, participative and enjoyable set of interlinked modules that gives exposure to a dozen or so tools and techniques that will help to identify, capture and reuse what are often termed ‘critical knowledge assets. And find a measurement (we used Dr Donald Kirkpatrick’s Learning Evaluation Model) to assess the success of this capacity building initiative.

The view from the venue for modules one and two.
Picture by Victoria Ward

Over the next month I am going to be taking a more in depth look at the modules we ran and the areas that stimulated most interest among the dozen or so senior HMRC staff from different areas of the business around the UK. So as ‘they’ say: ‘watch this space’!

when knowledge & information flow

As part of the discussions leading up to the programme we developed a vision (a future story) of what an knowledge & information friendly environment might look like:

I’ve just returned from ‘an audience with…’ session with John who is about to retire. It was different from the usual breakfast briefing – we got to learn about topics and events we’d identified as being of interest. Hearing those described by someone who’d been through it all was really insightful for a relative newcomer.

I relocated this year: thanks to Agnieska who’d built a bridge between my predecessor and me there were few surprises and I still see Jane for a regular catch up. I am much more aware of things that are going on, who I can go to and ask a question. Most importantly I now have a set of useful questions and the confidence to ask them in any situation.

I am keeping my Decision Journal: who’d have thought it but it’s been immensely valuable as a prompt when having conversations. And I am now a timeline convert and shocked my Director when I used postcards on a timeline to share my regular update.

I do feel that should I leave it would be easier to pass on what I’ve learned in a more illuminating way. If only I’d begun it earlier – using objects as prompts has made sharing experiences intuitive.

The business has benefited: an idea brought in by a new staff member resulted in process improvements that improved collection rates; when Roger transferred to East Kilbride the transition time was much shorter as he was able to tap into the networks of his predecessor and the insights that emerged from the sessions with Priyanga prior to her departure helped shape the new set up in Southend. Whereas before we may have lost touch, now she still feels a sense of attachment and was at one of the recent breakfast events that are now open to alumni.

“… a brilliant and eye opening experience”: using ‘The Apprentice’ format for a good cause

Posted on July 29, 2013 by Paul Corney

This quote, from one of the Accenture team who took part in a Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) volunteer day in blistering conditions at Islington, London a few weeks back, was in response to a question I posed at the conclusion of the event:

Q) As you leave: if someone in the office asked you about the day what would you say?

A) ‘Was a great day with a chance to do some real good.’ was another participant’s reply.

Those who follow my musings will know how honoured I am to be invited to become a founder trustee of the charity PlanZheroes (PZ) who aim to help make use of surplus food. The CSR day, one of a number of imaginative ‘offerings’ PZ developed, gives organisations and their employees a chance to put something back into their community while concurrently testing their innovation, teamwork, sales, negotiation and project management skills in a real life setting.

‘…your task…’

To make the day really energetic PZ introduced an Apprentice-style competitive element. Fifteen people, three teams, three separate areas of London: Who will raise most awareness and get most businesses and charities added to the map?

I was there with CEO Designate Maria Ana Neves and a team from PZ whose role was to shadow the teams as they made their way around Islington and to provide input for the debrief session that was to end the day.

The 16 participants began by introducing themselves and noting something that others might not know about them. This was to prove a great kick off session, part of the briefing to equip them for the time they were about to spend out and about in Islington. We asked later what they’d expected:

Q) On arrival what were you expectations?

A) I did not expect the day to be as organised as it was or to have such supportive helpers

fired up and ready to go

Briefing over and armed with PZ badges and little books each team spent a while perfecting their strategy, the messages they were going to give to the organisations they met and who would be doing what. A large part of the challenge of approaching food outlets is to recognise that surplus food is a natural by product of the suply chain, hence we advised them to avoid using the word ‘waste’.

We were not to see them now for 5 hours so Maria Ana and I monitoroed their progress via Twitter and the PZ Map updated as contacts were made and organisations signed up.

The teams assembled back at base just before 4pm for the debrief. I asked them to use a timeline as a prompt to describe what happened, when and who was involved with a further commentary as to how they overcame difficult moments.

One of the team’s timelines

Though lighthearted it gave the teams (and a senior manager who joined at this point) a chance to compare and contrast: what had worked and what hadn’t; where did they get pushback, from whom (and why)?

amazing results

Before revealing the results Maria Ana asked the teams to develop a one sentence ‘why we should win’ statement. The ‘results’ were amazing:

Announcing the scores

14 new businesses on the map & 1 new charity sign-up
35 businesses to follow up & 2 new charities to follow-up
one team even walked to Holborn to talk with Sainsbury’s head office
two teams got their lunches for free (or part of it!)
130 mix of facebook likes and tweets/followers and we were told one celebrity chef is supporting us (details to find)

Perhaps the most value though comes from the way the teams come together and the roles they play throughout the day. Here’s a couple of responses to my question about role models:

Q) Role model: who did you admire during the day and why – tell us about what they did?

A) One memeber of the team really came out of their shell and were particularly confident when approaching businesses …

A) …The person was awesome and I think I have learnt some people skills that day.

To learn more about Plan Zheroes’ special days for volunteers and organisations please contract us via the PZ website

My chairman’s presentation looking at a decade of KMUK: the importance of managing for serendipity

Posted on June 26, 2013 by Paul Corney

It took me a while to think about what I was going to say to the first full house KMUK has enjoyed for many years as I detect a palpable sense of excitement among the organisers.

Over the last couple of months I’ve been at Social Business events in Lisbon and London and came away feeling that the phenomenal adoption of collaborative social technologies and the clever use of Big Data has the propensity to fuel the resurgence of Knowledge Management.

We live in a world now where: Philips have the ability to log when any light bulb is being switched on and where; testimonials and consumer recommendations (on sites such as Trip Advisor) are the most trusted form of advertising & marketing; the art of sales is about a long tail engagement (consumers publicly telling family and friends what they’ve done and bought); and in effect, performance improvements come from making the invisible visible. All of these characteristics are likely to be found in a knowledge driven organisation.

Its reaffirmed in my mind: the importance of personal contact and facilitation; a need to be clear about why this critical knowledge ‘stuff’ is being captured and harvested; the importance of the right environment (and culture); and the idea of focusing on Ambassadors / Champions especially in global organisations.

the address

Good morning and welcome to the 10^th anniversary event of KMUK. I said in the event flyer that I thought there was a stellar speaker line up with MAKE winners and some of the most influential thought leaders in the Knowledge Management space.

Over the next two days you are also going to have the opportunity of spending time with your peers as well as engaging directly with the speakers in the breaks and at the speaker clinics. And for the first time at KMUK the opening Keynote will have two carefully selected respondents.

It promises to be an interesting and stimulating two days: a number of the speakers will be using KMUK as the launch event for ideas, techniques and groundbreaking partnerships.

There is a twitter hash tag KMUK and Ark will be consolidating all of the tweets into a Storify record of the event.

Back to 2003

It being the 10th anniversary, I want to take you back a decade to the last KM Europe held in the UK at Alexandra Palace in 2003. Many people wrote blog posts about the keynote speech. I’ve selected a few quotes:

…much of our current knowledge management practice is being locked into content management,
…we are all engaged in a constant process of sense-making, where we try to find the best available explanation for something based on previous experience rather than the perfect logical solution. This is why he favours “narrative management” and story-telling as more appropriate vehicles for knowledge sharing than replicating best practice
Conventional Knowledge Management has been too concerned with codifying explicit knowledge to aid replication, and with using categorisation (where we construct data around a framework), rather than exploration (where we construct frameworks around the data).
innovation springs from emergence in complex systems, which means that we should be “managing for serendipity” by creating the conditions for creative innovation to emerge.

Again it’s worth returning to what was said back in 2003

Too many people focus on managing knowledge rather than managing the channels through which knowledge flows. Just connecting or linking people can be a major knowledge management activity.
… new tools now allow us to telescope five to six years of social networking down to five or six weeks, albeit with less density. Such programmes aim to create linkages where no linkage currently exists and are particularly useful during re-organisations and activities such as merger and acquisition.
Attempts to engineer a network through design and allocation of staff to groups generally fail as they create artificial relationships that are not sustainable. Self selecting social network stimulation replicates, but in a shorted timescale, a natural process.

At that event horizontal km software vendors were much in evidence as they had been at all of the previous ones.

Intranets were into their 2^nd wave, people were struggling with enterprise search, decentralized publishing and SharePoint, some 2 years on from its launch, was competing with other document management systems and had yet to achieve the ubiquitous enterprise status it has today wherein in many in senior management say ‘we do km, we have SharePoint!’

Android Inc was being founded and would become the largest mobile operating system inside a decade mirroring the dramatic growth of mobile smart phones.

WordPress too was launched bringing self-publishing to the masses. It has recently been the beneficiary of an exodus from Tumblr following its acquisition by Yahoo – more of them and Marissa Meyer later.

IBM were undertaking a 72 hours ValuesJam, for all employees in a debate about the very nature of the company and what it stood for.
The 2^nd Gurteeen Knowledge Management conference was taking place – its themes: ‘knowledge, networking and communities’. And it was all about conversation. One delegate’s key soundbite: “Knowledge is not something you keep in your head, it’s a behaviour”’
In 2003 the book Knowledge Asset Management was published. It recognized critical knowledge as an asset to be nurtured.
Also that year my colleagues and I at Sparknow were using the traditional techniques of a postcard as a prompt to ask delegates at KM Europe about their work spaces and what the new virtual world would do to the traditional office and ways of working. We collected but never published a number of very insightful comments.

when space matters – looking at workspace

So since in my view workspace (physical and virtual) plays a critical role in all things Knowledge Management we decided to repeat the exercise a decade on and asked the speakers if they’d take first stab at answering the same half a dozen questions.

I’ve collated their responses and contrasted them with some of those we had in 2002/3. The report is available on line along with the conference proceedings. It would be great if you could add to the body of work by filling in your own and putting them up on the wall.

KMUK 2013

Social vs. Knowledge Management

You are going to hear a lot about community, collaboration, culture and change. Also context, champions, conversation and communication. Your challenge over the next two days is to work out when and how to harness the array of social tools and use them in context/ tandem with other initiatives. Here’s a really interesting and recent extract from a Gartner blog post:

Knowledge management is what the company tells me I need to know based on what they think is important.
Social media is how my peers show me what they think is important based on their experience in a way that I can judge for myself

Knowledge should be like water — free flowing and permeating down and across your organization filling the cracks, floating good ideas to the top, lifting everyone in the organization.

Knowledge management, in practice, reflects a hierarchical view of knowledge to match the hierarchical view of the organization. Knowledge may originate anywhere in the organization, but under knowledge management it is channeled and gathered together in a knowledge base (cistern) where it is distributed based on a predefined set of channels, processes and protocols.

Social media looks chaotic in comparison. There is no predefined index, no prequalified knowledge creators, no knowledge managers, ostensibly little to no structure.

Where an organization has a roof, gutters and cistern to capture knowledge, a social media organization has no roof allowing the rain to fall directly into the house collecting in puddles wherever they happen to form. That can be quite messy and organizations abhor a mess.

Last week I was an invited guest at the Dachis Group’s Social Business Summit. A month previously I’d been helping to run a similar event in Lisbon at which social vendors presented their wares to a fictitious company.

Both events threw up so many crossover points with Knowledge Management and I shared a number of the tweets on the #KMUK twitter site. Here are a few sound bites to reflect on as you are thinking about it

Social interaction accounts for 50% of the performance of the team We are now consuming more content generated by each other than generated by media companies

Brands are a natural community of people identifying with each other, with a shared set of belief /Advocates are the ‘tribe’ who need motivation/incentives. – Employees are the most important and need empowering to do so

social helps to drive savings where knowledge management comes in’

The two that stood out for me and reappear as a theme this afternoon

A dead sale is one that’s not shared. People must be incentivized to share.
Who can add value to the data? Data will tend to migrate to where it will be most effective.

Paul J Corney

For KMUK June 2013

knowledge et al

when the journey is as important as the destination