knowledge tours = knowledge transfer (understanding puffins and olefins)

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Today under the ‘people I admire (and why) section of the site I posted an anecdote from a meeting I once had with the then Vice President of Mobil. It brought back recollections from a posting I made a year ago on Sparknow’s site about the value of knowledge tools  for encouraging good knowledge retention and transfer. Here’s that updated posting:

Ahead of a trip to the ECCI creativity & innovation event in Portugal I was looking for examples of good knowledge transfer from km practitioners. Let me share one anecdote from an interview with Barney Smith a former CKO and CIO and champion yachtsman in response to a question on measurement.

Barney: 80% staff have attended a knowledge tour. Oh yeah, we did knowledge tours. That was cool.

Sandra: What’s a knowledge tour?

Barney: They were great! Natural England owns and manages about 0.6%% of  England’s surface, its natural resource…we actually got people to leave their day job and come down literally. And rather than them doing job shadowing and things like that, we got them to build a day where staff could turn up and then could actually experience what that person does. And they could take 10-15 out. So if a person is responsible for monitoring environmental impacts around the Lundy islands, he would take people on a boat around Lundy island and looking at birds with a Lundy Warden.

Barney: Lundy (Norse for Puffin Island) is part of a Marine Conservation Zone managed by Natural England. The warden who lives on site managing it is actually an employee. We took our staff out to spend a day on the islands with the warden talking about puffins and things like that.

But the point was for those people sitting in finance or those people sitting advising farmers on agri-environment schemes or those people who are promoting or designating the  South Downs national park or New Forest national park, that’s what they’re doing at Lundy. And of course that was the pilot, great stuff. But we had the chief executives and senior staff who said everyone’s got 15 development days. One of those days must be knowledge tour.

And we even created one that’s virtual. So it was actually a guy walking land with a video camera, looking at things. And then he did a talk-over. It was done like a documentary.

It reminded me of a time long past when I was a lending banker managing a portfolio of energy clients.  I knew little about hydro crackers and cat crackers, even less about olefins, polyamides and bottoms all of which were about to become part of my expanding oil and petrochemical vocabulary.

My boss, a visionary and talented Yale educated and very well travelled American who could and did argue vociferously in Arabic, Cantonese and English reasoned that if I were to be of value I needed to understand the practices and language of the industry I was working alongside.  So courtesy of Mobil I attended a programme designed to educate financial people into the workings and economics of oil refining.

I never thought about that week at a refinery in Paulsboro New Jersey as a knowledge tour but now looking back I can see the connection and the importance of experiencing what others do in order to make better decisions. That this was a one off initiative and never replicated by the bank was regrettable since it gave me an insight into a world that would otherwise have been opaque and because I had a modicom of knowledge, the ability to have more meaningful dialogue with my clients.

Barney’s knowledge tours have become regular events, measurable as KPI’s and part of the knowledge charter used to mobilise and shape Natural England’s approach to knowledge management. That they are built into the calendar with compulsory attendance is key.

And finally and perhaps not unrelated the Lundy Puffin is no longer on the endangered list as a result of a programme to eradicate the island of rats.

 

one of the truly great presentations: implication for knowledge workers

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I was in Turkey on July 6th 2005 when Sebastian (now Lord) Coe stood up to address the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in Singapore at the start of what was to culminate in the games of the 30th Olympiad just ended in London. His speech was never shown on Turkish TV and as the ghastly events of July 7th were about to unfold in London, and I was dodging a bomb in Kusadasi at the same time, I missed it.

Seb Coe’s story, described by many as one of the truly great presentations given to the IOC is worth revisting now that London 2012 is a very vivid, fresh and warm memory.

I am indebted to Nick Davies who reminded me (and the audience at KMUK 12 back in June) of Seb’s words. Here’s an extract to give you a flavour:

When I was 12 ..I was marched into a large school hall with my classmates.
We sat in front of an ancient, black and white TV and watched grainy pictures from the Mexico Olympic Games.
Two athletes from our home town were competing. John Sherwood won a bronze medal in the 400m hurdles. His wife Sheila just narrowly missed gold in the long jump.
That day a window to a new world opened for me.
By the time I was back in my classroom, I knew what I wanted to do and what I wanted to be.
The following week I stood in line for hours at my local track just to catch a glimpse of the medals the Sherwoods had brought home.
It didn’t stop there. Two days later I joined their club.
Two years later Sheila gave me my first pair of racing spikes. 35 years on, I stand before you with those memories still fresh.  Still inspired by this great Movement.

The value of using images and stories as a presentational technique in business and especially knowledge management which often struggles with measurement and convincing sponsors of its relevance should not be underestimated.  The ability to inspire future generations by drawing on and bringing to life the experiences of others is at the heart of what is increasingly described as knowledge retention.

Let me know if this strikes a chord with you.

KMUK 12 closing: getting wet in the shallow end!

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At David Gurteen’s Knowledge Cafe Monday run by Arthur Shelley, who coincidentally I interviewed as part of the ‘evolving role of our knowledge manager’ enquiry, I bumped into Adrienne Monteath-van Dok of Plan International who was one of the speakers at June’s KMUK event.  Adrienne said she’d enjoyed the closing session I’d facilitated and that I should share the mechanics with the wider community – so here goes.

If you recall I’d used a ‘swimming pool’ exercise as an ice breaker to promote dialogue and I returned to the same theme to create a sense of animated closure.

I’d left up the six ‘stations’ round the room:’changing room’; ‘poolside’; diving board’; ‘shallow end’; ‘deep end’; and ‘bar’. This is how the 25 minute session was conducted:

I began by describing each of the ‘stations’ :bar = had lots of experiences/war stories and in a position to raise a glass to congratulate or commiserate.

I invited each person to return to the position they’d assumed the previous day. NB ‘newcomers’ had to choose their station at this point as well.

At this point as delegates moved around the room there was a lot of reacquainting and an audible buzz.

The delegates were then asked to consider three questions (and remain standing):

  • What surprised you at KMUK?
  • What are you going to take back to your organization?
  • How do you feel at this point?

I invited them to share the answers with the person next to them.

I concluded the exercise by walking round the room with a roving microphone; each delegate I approached was asked to give a rapid fire answer and to pass the microphone onto a person of their choosing.

This took about 5 minutes culminating in a very positive response (in the shallow end) from a delegate who said what he’d heard over the two days made him believe that far from being dead and in contrast to the feeling he took away from KMUK 2010 KM (in whatever guise it appears) is very much alive. He felt re-energised as indeed did I.

Many events end on an exhausted low note; from the feedback KMUK 2012 wasn’t among them.

the role of narrative grids in knowledge retention & knowledge sharing

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In a recent discussion about how to surface issues that need addressing as part of a km strategy the subject of timelines and objects came up. Here’s a post I wrote for Sparknow at the end of a working session:
At the back end of 2010 Victoria, Carol and I were in Barbados helping to develop a knowledge management strategy.

The strategy needed to be reflective of the institution yet grounded in the reality of the changing nature of the economic marketplace in the Caribbean where the alleviation of poverty remains a core objective of most developmental efforts.

People have become dismissive of the value of km after years of failed attempts to institutionalize it in organizations. Yet the principles of working towards a knowledge sharing/transferring culture remain valid especially in development. And the potential for improvement in operational efficiency cannot be underestimated even if at times is not easily quantifiable.

We began by looking for good examples of knowledge sharing; using a structured framework for the initial assessment has benefited the client (as well as us) and provided an organizing mechanism for reporting.  Adopting a critical decision interviewing approach has also made it much easier to unearth some of the stories that illustrate how knowledge flows. Perhaps our biggest (re) learning is the value of a neutral object in acting as a catalyst for conversations around the working practices of organizations.

Most people feel uncomfortable talking about something intangible, they need a hook to hang their conversations on.  In much of our work we’ve asked people we are interviewing to draw a time line to help ground them in chronological events; that tended to be a good launching point for dialogue and stories. It was especially effective in our mission to Darfur back in March where the enormity of the problem tended to obscure people’s specific recollections unless they had just occurred.

In Barbados though we were looking for evidence of how knowledge and information flows across an organization and how it is used to inform decisions.  Drawing on the excellent tome Working Minds by Gary Klein et al we combined a critical decision interviewing approach with a timeline approach to create a Narrative Grid.

Perhaps most importantly we built on previous work with Royal Mail and others to ask our interviewees to describe what was going on in the formal and informal channels (“above and below the line”) while a decision was being made.

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Did it work?

  • As a conversation piece and in a 1:1 situation it was extremely effective and moreover became the neutral object that the interviewee was happy to channel their thoughts into. We learned a lot about the use of the right pen and of the value of the subtle prompt. It was also very effective as a way of assessing different cultural types; there were those who instantly took the pen and began writing; those who would take the pen after we had begun writing; and those who were happy to have us do the writing while they “dictated”.
  • In a group session the Narrative Grid shone. Teams would gather round correcting each other and while the outputs were often anything but neat the results of a genuinely collaborative effort were not purely visual. Getting each group to summarize was especially useful since it often revealed similar patterns of behaviors, good examples/stories of knowledge sharing and areas ripe for process improvement.

Over the last decade Sparknow has experimented with many techniques to capture organizational stories. For helping to identify organizational knowledge and information flows around events and decisions the Narrative Grid has proved among the most effective.

insiders view on knowledge in the Middle East

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In 2011 I spoke at the inaugural KM Middle East event about a knowledge survey we created for the event and drawing on recent diagnostic work and the knowledge management strategy and implementation framework it spawned.

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photo | Tom Spender

One of the tools Sparknow has used before as a way of raising awareness of, testing the receptivity for and measuring the impact of, a knowledge initiative is an online questionnaire. We usually keep it to about five sets of questions and ensure it takes no more than five minutes to complete – about the length of time it takes to drink a cup of coffee!

It often kicks off a diagnostic process and provides useful pointers/insights into what an organization understands knowledge management to be as well as highlighting ‘the way we do things around here’ through snippets and anecdotes.

KM Mid East seemed like a good opportunity to stimulate a debate through an online questionnaire: knowledge management roles are beginning to appear in quasi government organizations and some recognize that the way ‘stuff’ is stored today will impact on its potential reuse. And this is being conducted against the following backdrop:

  • Libya has descended into a civil war.
  • The outcomes of the Bahrain protests are by no means clear.
  • The Saudi authorities have just handed out over $37bn in pay rises and improved conditions to its inhabitants having reportedly adopted rough tactics with protesters.

The response from within the region’s commercial organizations has been to take a good look at disaster recovery, contingency planning and risk evaluation; assess their value of portfolios. Few would instantly associate this ‘burning platform’ moment with knowledge management but it’s totally relevant. In fact it’s what got me into this business two decades ago when a bomb blast took out the paper records my organization had and I led an ambitious programme in a Middle East focused investment bank to capture what we knew and make it available for reuse electronically. It was our attempt to create a one-screen view of a client and the forerunner of what today people call intranets.

So what has emerged from the Sparknow Knowledge Survey?

  • The majority of respondents were from government organizations.
  • Most people felt lessons learned were best examples of knowledge sharing at work.
  • The spectre of poor records management looms large.
  • Learning and by implication knowledge transfer are the areas many people believe KM should be addressing.
  • While cash incentives are attractive carrots for some to share knowledge the majority wanted recognition and a sense of ownership in the outcomes.
  • Unsurprisingly given the astonishing technological revolutions this region has been witness to, most answers to the question ‘the thing I always carry with me to help with knowledge…’ focused on technological solutions.