Knowledge Management and Organisational Learning

Best Practices in knowledge creation and exchange: What’s

working, What’s not (contd…)
Hierarchy of Knowledge
Fragmented Insights

Wisdom

Tacit/ Intuitive
Knowledge

Explicit Knowledge

Information

Data

Integrated Information
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 Knowledge Management and Organisational Learning
Best Practices in knowledge creation and exchange: What’s
working, What’s not (contd…)
Three Elements of Knowledge Culture
Broad vision Learning by trying
Bussiness community Tolerate mistakes
X-functional teamworking Retain “reject pool”
Knowledge champions Recognise successes
Role models - Gurus Real-time feedback
Coaching mentoring Honest feedback
Encourage Experimentation Gut feel index
Nurturing Personal legacy
Business Action learning
Interdependancy -
Competitor benchmarking
Values we’re all in it together
Groupware/ intranet Reciprocity-
Search engine receive by giving
Balanced scorecard New language
Metrics Good No jargon
True stories
Team-based rewards Practices Metaphors
Contractual obligations
Selection criteria for Identification-
recruiting
Developing Creating this is for me
Competencies the Common Values-
Virtual teams this is worthwhile
Communities of practice
Systems Mindsets Beliefs -
Knowledge coordinators this’ll work for me
Soft rewards
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Knowledge Management and Organisational Learning

Best Practices in knowledge creation and exchange: What’s

working, What’s not (contd…)
Four Kinds of Employee Groups
High Commitment
Inner - Driven Outer - Driven

•Elite guard •Sergeant major

Non-Routine Work Routine Work

•Mercenary •Conscript

Reward - Driven Sustenance - Driven

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 Knowledge Management and Organisational Learning
Best Practices in knowledge creation and exchange: What’s working,
What’s not (contd…)
Cultures and Mindsets in Different Stages of Organisational Evolution
Organisational performance

Bureaucrats
Enthusiasts

Rules, processes, systems driven driven

Aristocrats

Entitlement/ ascription driven

Innovators
Maharajas
Barbarians Achievement driven
Excellence driven

Pioneering Growth Maturity Decline Decay

Organisational life cycles
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Knowledge Management and Organisational Learning

Best Practices in knowledge creation and exchange: What’s

working, What’s not (contd…)
Difference between Managers and Leaders

The Manager The Leader

Administers Innovates
Is a copy Is an original
Maintains Develops
Focuses on systems and structure Focuses on people
Relies on control Inspires trust
Has a short range view Has a long range perspective
Asks how and when Asks what and why
Has his eye always on the bottom line Has his eye on the horizon
Imitates Originates
Accepts status quo Challenges it
Is the classic good soldier Is his/ her own person
Does things right Does the right thing

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Knowledge Management and Organisational Learning

Best Practices in knowledge creation and exchange: What’s

working, What’s not (contd…)
Benefits for the learner

• Ideas: a sounding board

• Expertise: high level, just - in - time consultancy
• Creativity: a risk free environment
• Advancement: skills development
• Sensitivity: understanding paradoxes and diversity
• Confidence: venturing outside the comfort zone

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Knowledge Management and Organisational Learning

Best Practices in knowledge creation and exchange: What’s

working, What’s not (contd…)
Benefits for the mentor

• Enhanced intuition: understand subconscious processes

• Deeper insights: personal mastery
• Laboratory experimentation: testing ideas
• Self learning: by listening and empathy
• Self knowledge: physician heal thyself
• Personal legacy: what do I want to be remembered for?

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Knowledge Management and Organisational Learning

Best Practices in knowledge creation and exchange: What’s

working, What’s not (contd…)
• Sharing knowledge implies increasing knowledge: because ideas
generate more ideas - thereby increasing knowledge
• Way to increase knowledge is going to the right person and asking the
right questions
• Meetings without agenda help to bring out things in people
• Organisations are also born, mature, decline and die like individuals
• Organisations should be more like spider plants wherein the mother
plants give rise to healthy baby plants plants I.e. creating very good
umbilical cords
– Nurturing
– Innovative
– Knowledge sharing

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Knowledge Management and Organisational Learning

Best Practices in knowledge creation and exchange: What’s

working, What’s not (contd…)
• To share knowledge one has to understand people
– Recognising people leads to:
• Creating a responsibility in them to share
• Creating a pressure to role model
– Encourage communication between individuals
– Listening is the most important in communicationas it implies:
• Respect for the other
• Internalise and produce new knowledge

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Knowledge Management and Organisational Learning

Best Practices in knowledge creation and exchange: What’s

working, What’s not (contd…)
• Personal mastery is about converting tacit knowledge to explicit
knowledge (concepts) or tacit to tacit (by working together)
• Knowledge should create more knowledge
– Create a web page for each employee (recognition too!)
• The problems we face cannot be resolved at the same level of thinking
as that which gave rise to them - Albert Einstein
• To share knowledge create:
– Yellow pages for employees - Who knows? - and designate some
authentic knowledgeable stars as ‘Gurus’- so people can refer to
them in times of need
– Databases of specifics of what the organisation knows
– Use search engines to hunt for knowledge
– Create a pool of ideas which did not work and document them too! -
they may be useful at another time!

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Knowledge Management and Organisational Learning

Best Practices in knowledge creation and exchange: What’s

working, What’s not (contd…)
• Chrysler created a “Book of engineering knowledge” - one of the finest
pieces of documentation of engineering knowledge
– Good ideas were captured everyday
– It is a dynamic book
– It provides recognition for individuals
• Have X-functional teams working on areas, projects, subjects about
which one knows nothing to have a common mental model/s

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Knowledge Management and Organisational Learning

Best Practices in knowledge creation and exchange: What’s

working, What’s not (contd…)
• There are three layers of knowledge culture:
• Behaviour
• Values
• Systems
Allignment between the three is a must
• “The great decisions of human life have as a rule far more to do with the
instincts and other mysterious unconscious factors than with conscious
will and well meaning reasonableness”
• Progressive organisations are already talking about “Talent”
management
• Best initiatives are the ones which come upwards from the bottom

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Knowledge Management and Organisational Learning

Best Practices in knowledge creation and exchange: What’s

working, What’s not (contd…)
• Remember, in a war situation
– Take your enemy by surprise
– Different soldiers need different triggers I.e. understand the drivers
of different types of people
– Will the line managers buy the “Knowledge Management” initiatives
• Major reasons for failed projects:
– Too much reliance on technology/ technologists
– They were not looked at from the individuals’l angle
• Sustaining something is very difficult!
• Relying on IT beyond a point does’nt work
• Top down initiatives don’t work

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Knowledge Management and Organisational Learning

Best Practices in knowledge creation and exchange: What’s

working, What’s not (contd…)
• Leadership issues must be addressed - Fish starts rotting from the
head!
• Culture of the organisation must be addressed
• Knowledge management is a subset of change management

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Knowledge Management and Organisational Learning

Against Knowledge management

• We can only improve the efficiency/ effectiveness of the knowledge

worker
• We can’t put together knowledge which exists in several people
• Knowledge and market change too fast
• Knowledge management systems do a lousy job of containing tacit
knowledge
• Knowledge cannot be managed
• Knowledge cannot be limited by IT
• Inturnship, Mentoring and Job rotation are the only ones which really
work
• Know what’s important!

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Knowledge Management and Organisational Learning

Improving Organisational competence

• Learning is an investment not a cost

• Communicate, Collaborate, Coordinate

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Knowledge Management and Organisational Learning

Improving Organisational competence (contd…)

• Learning points
– Assault as many senses as possible
– Combine face to face and virtual/ remote collaboration
– Top down commitment is a must
– Make learning a part of the job
– Reward right behaviour
– Enrol the understudy’s manager
– Make 2 hrs a week available to the subordinates
– Build world class solutions
– Best if people learn on the job
– Deploy strategy rapidly
– Publish retention and not attrition status
– Grow your assets
– Become a hiring magnet
– Have a competitive advantage/ edge

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Knowledge Management and Organisational Learning

Turning Knowledge Management strategy into practice and results

BP AMOCO
• Created web pages of experiences and new procedures/ innovations for
drilling work and managed to save several millions of dollars!

BUT,
• Focus on meeting the real business needs
• Focus on minimising barriers to sharing

Do not develop things for their own sake

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Knowledge Management and Organisational Learning

Creating “Living Systems of Learning and Knowledge”

• Knowledge is born out of Living people/ systems

• Take “Ownership” - Don’t “Belong”
• Knowledge resides in the “pathways” networking one another

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Knowledge Management and Organisational Learning

Creating “Living Systems of Learning and Knowledge” (contd…)

• What we commonly refer to as knowledge in organisations is at best

documented information, partially useful but dead
• Knowledge is the very process of life: of survival, development and
growth; for organisations it represents their “inner journey”
• Knowledge emerges out of a patterned network of cognitive
relationships

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Knowledge Management and Organisational Learning

Creating “Living Systems of Learning and Knowledge” (contd…)

Knowledge pathways
• Knowledge in an organisation does not exist objectively as a given but
emerges out of a patterned network of relationships
• Knowledge originates in the totality of the system; the knowledge a tree
needs to grow is contained in the pathways that connect the tree to the
soil, earth and sun
• Knowledge as a resource lies dormant in an organisation’s story; its
culture; and in its ability to self-organise itself into new patterns of
thought and action

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 Knowledge Management and Organisational Learning

Creating “Living Systems of Learning and Knowledge” (contd…)

Knowledge Creating Community
Knowledge Adult, conserving
Architect N -the world of the “herder”
-consolidating knowledge

Youthful, competitive
- the world of the” hunter”
- exploiting knowledge

Knowledge Knowledge
W Exploiter KNOWLEDGE Catalyst E

Mid-life, catalytic
-the world of the gardener
-transformation through
knowledge

Mature, co-creative
Knowledge
-the world of the steward
Animator
S
-knowledge for sustainable
development
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Knowledge Management and Organisational Learning

Creating “Living Systems of Learning and Knowledge” (contd…)

• The West: Competing for Knowledge
– The Western world: First order change - The world of Competitive Strategy
• Arising out of simple habit formation, without any formulation or re-
conceptualisation, involving experiential learning and the development
of practical, change skills
– Solve problems by defining their identity
– Assume the existence of a singular truth
– Skills of effective experimentation
• The North: Consolidating Knowledge
– The Northern World: Second order change - The world of strategic Intent
• Assimilating and consolidating new concepts and knowledge, using
mental constructs based on a sense of reality
– Models and formulae to create order and coherence
– Documentation and replication
– Focussing on core competencies

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Knowledge Management and Organisational Learning

Creating “Living Systems of Learning and Knowledge” (contd…)

• The East: Knowledge renewal

– The East: Third order change - The world of Strategic Dynamics
• Driven by contradiction and paradox, and by anomalies between
practice and theory in the first and second orders, and involving
learning to work in spaces beyond habitual bondage
• Inviting divergence
• Working through complex learning and questioning mental models
• The South: Knowledge as Value
– The South: Fourth order change - The World of Co-creative Strategy
• Involving active and reflective transformations in the evolutionary
process of human, organisational and societal processes
– Creating and adding value through knowledge
– Creating a community and managing a high-value enterprise

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Knowledge Management and Organisational Learning

Developing Intellectual Capital at Skandia

• Stretch your brains to “see”

• Money economy is at its “end”
• What knowledge has impact on future learning?
• Measures
– Efficiency
– Risk
– Rejuvenation

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Knowledge Management and Organisational Learning

Developing Intellectual Capital at Skandia (contd…)

• The main components of the new Economy are going to be Human and
Structural Capital
• We destroy more intellectual capital than we create
• How much Intellectual Capital or Knowledge do you have?
• Intellectual Capital is a potential - where are you on a scale of 1 - 100?
• Move from “Head” Office to “Heart” office
• Measure Market potential rather than Market share
• Share holder value = Money + Brains (Intellectual Capital)

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Knowledge Management and Organisational Learning

Developing Intellectual Capital at Skandia (contd…)

• Human Capital is the currency of the future

• Indulge in “Knowledge Care” - nurture it
• Imagination is more important than Knowledge - can you nourish it?
• Intellectual Capital is the language of Leadership
• Use all senses
• Patterns of relationship is very important
• Look for shapes of relationships
• Imagination is maximum at a “Spa”
• Knowledge exchange takes place at “futurizing.com”

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Knowledge Management and Organisational Learning

Where’s the “Knowledge” in “Knowledge management” ?

• How is knowledge generated and diffused?

• Knowledge is the capacity for effective action
• Knowledge is expressed only in action
• Learning is a process that enhances knowledge
• Teams are battling with “How to Learn”
• Fear cramps imagination
• Teams is the fundamental unit of learning

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Knowledge Management and Organisational Learning

Where’s the “Knowledge” in “Knowledge management” ? (contd…)

• All formal or informal knowledge is generated in teams

• A team is any group of people who need each other to get something
done
• Work is a process by which people produce value
• Learning occurs while working
• Knowledge can’t be managed like a thing
• Knowledge generation is a deeply human process
• Technology enables things it does not create them

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Knowledge Management and Organisational Learning

Where’s the “Knowledge” in “Knowledge management” ? (contd…)

• Knowledge spreads only through interacting in informal settings

• Networks is about exchange of information
• Communities of practice is about exchange of knowledge
• All learners assess/ judge their own learning
• Aspiration is a continuum
• Rhythms between teams and communities
• Infrastructure, values and communities are missing in the “Fifth
Discipline”

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Knowledge Management and Organisational Learning

Where’s the “Knowledge” in “Knowledge management” ? (contd…)

• Communities share practices

• Community logic
– Give value
– Get value
Ask for help properly and
– Have an identity
you will get it
– Have meaning
– Be aware of who you are
– Be aware of what you are
– Binding force

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