I was reading an article in the Economist over the weekend in advance of a book by David Warsh called Knowledge & the Wealth of Nations and it was interesting to me in my Knowledge Management area by coming up with a somewhat worldly response which I think professional service firms might wish to heed.

1. Educate people - to me this goes beyond just doing the minimum amount of CPD - they need to have active learning where they are stretched.

2. Subsidise their research. - I have said in other blogs that companies need to invest in time and it may be that if you charge billing hours that this model needs to change. My good friend Bruce Macewen highlights a legal firm in the US that has eschewed the billable hour and has adopted a fixed price model. One option in my initial thesis was that the billable hour if still retained should be reduced by 10% and that the lawyer should be charged with undertaking some 'renewal learning' and prove how it had benefited him and the firm. firms need to convince their staff how serious they are if they are to invest in knowledge renewal.

3. Import ideas from abroad - I'm constantly doing this via the internet or just browsing in a library - for example today i looked at new scientist and considered how flocking birds could be used to tag items in a knowledge management database. I love strange serendipity and believe strongly that I can pick up ideas anywhere.

4. Protect their intellectual property - I think that when people come up with ideas, they should be rewarded by recognition and that maybe that if their idea is taken up, they get a cut of what it has produced in added value to the firm. Recognition and cash are powerful motivators.


Just a few thoughts for people to think about - by the way i hope to do a new podcast over this weekend - not sure of the subject yet.

This is going to be a podcast - but for people who like to read the transcripts of my talks, then here goes.

I was re-reading some of my notes on this subject following yesterdays discussion and realised that there was more of a link than i had first thought.

Kaizen or continuous improvement requires a commitment to learning - for can a organisation improve without learning something new?

We all need to change our existing views if only marginally and then acting on it. If we don't learn then we are trapped in what is known as the Santayana effect.

Santayana was a philosopher and quoted that oft heard phrase. "Those who can't remember the past are condemned to repeat it." How many of us as managers due to time pressures simply repeat old and trusted practices rather than taking the time to review what we do from time to time and see what may or needs to change. I did this yesterday sitting in the Central library in Birmingham reading some new literature on knowledge management and I discovered some new tools to help me.

One old colleague of mine talked about knowledge management and felt that it was all a bit wooly and wishy washy. What he wanted like Mr Gradgrind in Dickens "Hard Times" was facts facts and more facts as to how it was going to help his bottom line.

There are potentially three areas - which can help regarding the learning organisation.

Meaning
Measurement and
Management

There are various definitions of this - but I've picked on David Garvin's as a good starting point as it has some rigour in it which he and I think most organisations fail at and incorporates Santayana's admonishment

A learning organisation is one skilled at creating acquiring and transferring knowledge & modifying it's behaviour to reflect new knowledge & truths. However, without accompanying changes in the way that work gets done only the potential for improvement exists.

He outlines 5 areas which learning organisations are skilled at namely

• Systematic problem solving
• Experimentation with new approaches
• Learning from their own experience
• Learning from the experiences of others
• Transferring knowledge quickly throughout the organisation.

I'll cover some of these in the podcast so you'll have to listen to find out somemore. However, the initial steps that organisations need to take is breaking down the barriers and breaking down the internal chinese walls that stop people talking - I'm watching with interest some work that Herman Miller is doing in this area in re designing the office to encourage collaboration.

The most important area is that of time - human beings tend to behave like hamsters if we are on the treadmill of work and feel that we have to engage in the cult of presenteeism. If our noses are stuck to the grindstone to mix metaphors for a moment, then we can't look up and see the stars This is in knowledge management terms a bit like the thuggee cult in India slowly strangles the organisational innovation & knowledge pipeline to death especially if we are working in a time measured world.

Once these are in place then we can look at the utilisation of communities of practice to cover a variety of learning and organisational projects.

Hope that you enjoy the pod cast and as always I welcome feedback.

I was at a breakfast meeting this morning and was talking to a lawyer friend of mine regarding knowledge management. She was interested in talking to me as she was aware that I'm also a quality auditor and am particularly interested in the value chain as it relates to administrative systems.

She wondered if there was any correlation between KM and TQM.

I said that I thought that there was if you look at a fairly simple value chain

It goes

Supplier to Inputs to Process to Outputs to Client.

If you are working in a knowledge intensive business and can't get access to the knowledge that you need be it in codified or tacit format then the process of change is likely to be delayed as the input requirements are holding you back.

This then has the knock on effect of delaying your response to the client.

In the medium term the ability to quickly access quality knowledge and transmogrify this to meet your clients needs is important. however if your competitors have a better and speedier access to knowledge, then this will affect your competitiveness with your clients as they will move to the organisation that quickly accesses and recycles information to their needs.

Intriguingly enough in todays Financial Times (16/05) there was an article by a McKinsey's partner that talked about managers needs in knowledge intensive firms to increase the range of tacit interactions where people have to exercise not only information management but the ability to exercise judgement and the ability to deal with complexity to deal with a clients request. As I mentioned in my research, organisations are now looking at technology that supports collaboration rather than trying to shoehorn the organisation around the IT.

Future measures of success will be around levels of organisational change, learning and collaboration in the organisation rather than the rather clumsy manufacturing age metrics.

Watch this space.

Today, I completed my very 1st podcast covering one of the areas that I blogged last month - just to get an insight into the process.

It did take a few minutes to write up a script and it was a bit strange but i hope that if you do listen then you will enjoy and provide me with some feedback.

Thanks for listening

As this is the first blog of a new month - new readers can read previous months blogs by clicking on the Months on the side bar.

As readers of this blog will be aware, I've talked about knowledge sharing and how people will hoard knowledge.

Well some new research from Catherine Connelly at McMaster University in Canada highlights that co-workers hoard their best ideas and will even take steps to hide it from their co-workers.

She leads off by saying:-

Have you ever asked a colleague for information, only to have them ignore your request? Did you feel they were purposely avoiding you or only pretending to be ignorant? You may have been right.

This backs up the work in my thesis on the subject of knowledge sharing in a law firm in the UK and it is a little gratifying that her comments do correlate with some of my findings and I put her comments below for review:-

Why people engage in knowledge hiding:

• they feel that an injustice has been done to them
• they are distrustful of co-workers or management
• they are retaliating against someone else's behaviour toward them
• the organisational climate encourages secrecy, not sharing
• they can get away with it.

How to encourage knowledge sharing:

• emphasise positive relationships and trust among employees
• explain the mutual benefits of having colleagues share their knowledge
• treat all workers fairly and respectfully
• make knowledge sharing part of the culture

In a recent McKinsey study, chief executives have highlighted that knowledge sharing is important, the opposite is happening. Yet more proof that something isn't right in the world of business, particularly in the way(s) that we work.

I was at a business breakfast this morning and as is usual at these gatherings was asked by a gentleman what I did for a living. I mentioned that I acted as a knowledge management consultant working with professional service firms. He mentioned that he wondered whether any firm would require my services as surely all the knowledge was captured by either a document database or via the search mechanism on Windows.

I went on to explain that he was confusing information with knowledge and to prove the point I highlighted to him that I could via a Google search download the information to enable me to undertake a heart by pass operation and asked him if he would then be willing for me to anaesthetise him and perform the operation. Not unsurprisingly he declined my kind offer as he did doubt that my skills didn't lay in that direction.

This was the difference between information and knowledge as if I had been a doctor, then I would no doubt have spent time working with a consultant or in his case as a solicitor picking up the tacit knowledge that a mentor can pass on to an apprentice/trainee to enable me to have a higher success rate on his heart by-pass operation. This is a time consuming and a costly process - but as of yet no one has made it a quicker process because we are dealing with human beings in this area.

Interestingly enough Lawrence Prusak has recently commented on this in HBR's April issue and he concludes with the following which law firms amongst others need to grab hold off

"Until our governments schools and ...institutions embrace the idea that knowledge not information is the key to prosperity most of the worlds people will remain a world apart."

It has been because of this lack of understanding , that law firms have spent a great deal of money with IT providers to capture 'knowledge". This has been the major thrust of my thesis and it is nice to see that one of the greats of knowledge management is also quoted as highlighting this strategic error.

In the two previous blogs we've been examining the question of how research has been showing that the best leaders tend to be humble and disdain the limelight if they can. the final section looks at how leaders who are quiet tend to have four rules in handling the ethical challenges as well as making decisions. In this i've been taken by the work of Joseph Badaracco in an article in Harvard Business Review in 2001 which looks at this area.

The four rules are as follows:

Put things off until tomorrow

When an ethical dilemma escalates, buy time. How many times have we as managers regretted precipitate action or been glad we reflected on a decision overnight when the heat of battle is not so hot. Sometimes the issues need to be mulled over for a bit This buffer zone allows the quiet voice to come through and this can be done through 'strategic stalling" by dotting all the i's and crossing all the t's to gain that time.

Pick your battles

in organisations - this capital is the £'s and pence of organisational life that we like squirrels accumulate by getting a reputation for say getting things achieved or by having a good network or just a good sharer of knowledge. As one who has worked in organisations for 25 years - it is hard to gain and quick to lose.
Like any investor a quiet leader invests it astutely and uses it with caution. Before taking a stand on an issue or dealing with a tough problem - a quiet leader undertakes a risk/reward analysis of making a stand. I've had to do this a couple of times in my career and i imagine you as readers can recognise the scenario.

Bend the rules - don't break them

If we follow the rules in a bovine manner, this can be used as a cop-out to avoid making a decision. I think everyone of us has told a 'white lie' to help somebody save face. A quiet leader finds ways to manoeuvre within the boundaries.

Find a compromise

I've been fortunate to work in a variety of organisations and one wise banker taught me a lesson. If you stand your ground too rigidly even though you may be right in every way - you will snap like a tree in a high wind one day.

Life is full of compromises and although it smacks of smoke filled rooms and that you are trimming to match the winds. As that famous politician of the 17th century the Marquis of Halifax was fond of saying that if people are leaning too far over in a boat and it is about to capsize into the water then he thought it well that a trimmer was needed to protect the boat