Knowledge Management Fundamentals (Part Two)
The converaation continues. Below is the extended interview with Stephanie Barnes and Dmitry Korzhov from our Grey Swan Guild Craft-Building Series Edition #53 on Knowledge Management (KM).
We hosted an extended discussion after our Grey Swan Guild craft-building session January 17th, 2023 with an all-star KM panel:
- Sean Moffitt, Grey Swan Guild Founder and MD, Futureproofing
- Stephanie Barnes, Entelechy, Chief Chaos Organizer and
- Dmitry Korzhov, Improvado, Knowledge Product Manager
Attached is a link the the first hour we spent together: click here to watch.
Here is part one of our Knowledge Management (KM) Medium recap.
A. Extended Knowledge Management : Interview with Stephanie Barnes and Dmitry Korzhov
As a supplement to our Knowledge Management original post and discussion. Link here.
1) I am a CEO/CxO, please give me the gold, silver and bronze medal reasons why I should care about knowledge management?
Sean Moffitt (SM): I find the scope of what knowledge management is capable of, is both its strength and weakness. It has so many flanges and disciplines that collide together, that many people can get lost in its nuance. To somebody in the the top floor corner office, how do we get it higher on their radar, and not view knowledge management as just another cost centre line item.
Stephanie Barnes (SB): If you’re the CEO, CxO of an organization, regardless of how big or small it is, and regardless of what industry or sector you’re in, your organization is knowledge. Your product is knowledge. And so if you’re not taking that seriously and being strategic about it, not to be too flippant, but I honestly don’t know what you’re doing as a CEO. If you don’t understand knowledge is the core of your business you are lost.
People need to have the right knowledge at the right time to do their jobs. Having good practices around knowledge management greatly impacts the culture of the organization. So having good knowledge management, culture, good knowledge-sharing culture, helps the organization overall and makes the organization have a good culture. It’s a place that people want to work at, because they know they are going to have the required knowledge to do their jobs and the support for that information. They will have the necessary collaboration, tools, and everything that they need to do their jobs effectively. They know that they’re going to be able to work with their colleagues in a highly functioing organization to collaborate and come up with solutions to problems and get their job done.
Good knowledge management practices helps an organization be creative and innovative, efficient and effective. And it doesn’t matter what sector you’re in, what industry you’re in, whether you’re an oil and gas or tech or financial services, or what your your product is, knowledge is enabled by having the right people, processes and technologies in place to support the culture — a knowledge sharing culture, which is collaborative, and sharing that allows people to ask the questions that they want to ask. A participatory culture that allows people to talk to the people that they need to talk to, to get the job done. It isn’t all tied up in hierarchy and rules about who can talk to whom and what questions are okay to ask and what questions aren’t allowed to be asked. KM allows you to get rid of all of that and help knowledge flow freely within the organization. The organization can then meet its goals and objectives and provide top level customer service. Simply, with KM, employee engagement and stakeholder engagement is critical.
KM - It’s what your business is there for! Yeah, I think that’s all I need to say about that.
Dmitry Korzhov (DK): I’d add that because the whole of your business is a collection of knowledge that you have. And how you manage them will show how successful you are. Insights about customers, employees, the market and investors are the knowledge you have. If you don’t take care of them, it directly shows your attitude towards your business, clients and employees.
2) What is a key stakeholder audience that is underserved by knowledge management (we mentioned innovators on our call, perhaps others)?
SM: I find in a some sectors there is a high inherent value placed on knowledge management already. In technology, science, legal and various government and military sectors where documentation is key, there is an instinctive value to knowledge management, maybe not always practiced well but valued nonetheless. What are some knowledge management orphan children that are overlooking its benefits?
SB: I think there certainly is innovation as a candidate. Knowledge management has focused a lot on being efficient and effective and there’s nothing wrong with those things. But as the world changes as our organization changes, as what people want out of their jobs changes,
we need to take that into consideration, and be more innovative. We need to pay more attention to what we need to deliver for the customers and what helps employees generally have what they need so that they can deliver quality customer service and support products.
There is a secondary benefit to KM that the organization is a place that employees want to come to every day and and help make the world a better place regardless of what you’re what the product is. So I think those broader views gets ignored. I know we talked about innovators in our earlier discussion, but I think just taking the human side of that of Knowledge Valuation Management (KVM) and recognizing that knowledge is human. It is key and gets overlooked. We get so caught up in the the technology and “oh look at this cool AI tool” or “oh look at this, you know cool collaboration tool” and the tools are great you know. I started out being very technology focused in a lot of ways, but the technology is just that it’s a tool.
And so remembering that our audience is human and what with what all of that means. It is critical and gets overlooked in our rush to try and overly simplify things that are complex and complicated. And people are definitely complex. Possibly even chaotic. And so we need to keep that in mind.
3) How do we effectively promote adoption of knowledge management to our stakeholders ?
SM: We had a really interesting audience question during part of our live discussion that I’m not sure we were fully able to answer given our time constraints. They were taking a very practitioner and company influence focus to knowledge management, less theory, and more how do we get people to care and rally behind what might seem like another priority on their job list.
SB: Finding out what’s in it for them. What keeps them up at night? What can help them understand the power and the benefits of KM? And then having good KM practices around people process and technology that helps them understand what they’re looking for. and helps them understand the connection to KM.
As I said in answer to your last question, knowledge is human. And so we need to look at the human factors in that the technology and the processes are all good and necessary and useful. But if you haven’t got the people on board by understanding what would make their jobs easier, then you’re not doing your your job as a KM person. So that’s one-on-one conversations. That’s understanding and asking them the question and what they’re looking for what would make their jobs easier. What don’t they understand about knowledge management? What do they think knowledge management is and having that conversation, rather than making the assumption.
I’ve talked with too many people over the years that think they know what their people want and I always say well, did you ask the users, did you ask the people who are involved in this process, or this activity, or this project whatever it is. Oh well, no, we just know.
Think again. What could you go and ask? Go and have a cup of coffee go and have a meeting, have a workshop, understand what their challenges are? Because you don’t know if you’re not doing their job, and then you don’t know what their challenges are. Have those conversations and then you can figure out what you need to do, whether it’s a communication campaign, whether it’s an education campaign, whether it’s a series of workshops, or classes, you can figure that out once you know what the challenges are, what the barriers to adoption are. Is it not having enough time, or thinking that they need more time? You know, you need to understand that, and then you can can get people on board.
DK: Show concrete examples of when it is worse for business. For example, when I worked in research, I showed management statistics on requests from other departments. 30% of the requests were about something that already existed in our company. They could not find it and sent us a request to do it all over again. After that, we started thinking about a new system for disseminating knowledge in the company.
4) What is a key debate or myth that you would like to take a side on or debunk about KM?
SM: I always love teasing out tensions within the industry itself. Knowledge management is still a fairly nascent discipline. What is the KM world still grappling with?
DK: Knowledge management should be handled by one person / one department. This is a myth because knowledge management is a culture that needs to be nurtured. So that every employee understands the importance of every piece of knowledge they create.
SB: I think the biggest myth (and I had it again in my inbox this morning) was that KM is about technology. It’s not about technology. We have been doing KM for years and years and years (pre-technology).
Hundreds and thousands of years of cave paintings were a form of knowledge management. You know, then the medieval guilds were a form of knowledge management. They were training, and apprenticing. That’s about knowledge management. That’s about sharing, and it was not called Knowledge Management then, but that’s what it was, and no computers were involved.
I guess you could call paint on a on a cave wall “technology” but not technology the way that we think about it now in the 21st century. So technology is an important tool. It’s an important enabler, but that’s all it is. And there’s so much knowledge that can’t be captured and put down in some kind of a database, document or video, it just has to be experienced. It’s tacit, it has to be learned through experience, like riding a bike, or learning to swim you have to actually go and do those things.
My early part of my career was in accounting, you learn there are some tips and tricks on how to balance a spreadsheet and it’s different now that it’s all automated, but there’s still stuff that you just have to learn by doing, the mistakes that get made. And that yeah, the you just have to learn it by doing
it’s not about the technology.
5) What are your top inspirations for knowledge management? Companies, experts, books, podcasts, blogs?
SM: When i was researching our craft-building session, I must admit there was an embarrassment of riches when it comes to content covering Knowledge Management. It did make me think which are the most accredited sources, as some appeared to have an agenda to be hocking their own type of technology or school of thinking. Popular thoughts?
DK: Personally, I start with primary sources. To create a great system, you need to understand in general how systems work. I start by studying how our bodies work. There are an incredible number of invitations and tools that I have adopted and use after reading this information.
Also, I recommend studying ontologies and the principles of taxonomy creation. Here are the most common frameworks: Basic Formal Ontology (BFO), Simple Knowdleg Organiization System (SKOS) and Resource Description Framework (RDFC).
SB: Books, podcasts blogs — there are so many good ones. I would hate to pick just one. Google never lies. You had provided some good sources during our original session. I would humbly hope my own website and blog Entelechy (meaning realization of potential) provides some value for those starting out, and those steeped in the KM world.
I don’t really have one place that I go. I sort of constantly scanning I follow a bunch of people. You know I keep an eye on I’ve been doing KM for a long time. There are people like Stan Garfield that’s curated a lot of resources that I go to. But yeah, I don’t have a have a single source.
I come up with weird questions for Google sometimes. See what or who’s doing what, because there’s so much going on. Things are changing quick and we need good critical thinking and curiosity — this is one of the things I advocate strongly with Radical KM. I take that to heart in my own knowledge management personal practice.
So Google is my best friend and I compel myself to find things because inevitably there’s somebody doing something that I didn’t know about. Case in point, last year I was working on a project, and we’re looking at metrics and even though I have a bunch of stuff on metrics, I was still looking to see what the latest thinking was. I came across a study that had actually been done in 2004 2006 that I had come across before but it was showing the relationship of stock market performance to knowledge management, and the better an organization was at knowledge management, the better their stock performance. And this is a big deal in KVM. And yet, nobody seems to have picked up on it.
I blogged about it, commented on it a couple of times on LinkedIn. I’ve talked to people about it. I’ve included it in some of my presentations. This is one of the things that the CEOs can get their shirts in a bunch about, the ROI and things of the sort. There is this amazing study that was done that that shows better KM equals better stock market performance,. Y\ou would think that would have been shouted from the rooftops and it wasn’t. Everybody that I’ve mentioned it to or showed it to, it’s like, Oh, can you give me that paper? So this is why I try not to get locked into any particular company or or experts or books or anything. I just keep an open mind, a curious mind, and a critical thinking mind, and see what’s new.
What we are is what Google shows up for me today. I hope that’s an answer to that question. And I hope that this has been useful for you. I appreciated the opportunity adding to our knowledge bank with our LnkedIn Live and being connected with the the Grey Swan Guild now. Thanks so much for your time and the opportunity and I look forward to other opportunities.
6) Where should the learning or knowledge function side in a company? CTO, CHRO, CSO, Customer Function or its own function?
SM: I find many parallels in my more familiar innovation and digital worlds where there is a temptation that if you want to make a dent in something, some tangible progress, you have to anoint a chief XYZ officer to be in charge of it (iIchecked there are are only 36 CKMOs on LinkedIn hmm).
The challenge however when you give special designation to an executive in an area, then the rest of the executive team shrugs their shoulders and says I guess it isn’t my concern anymore. Great decks, great prototypes, great new hires, but nothing really gets done. What should be the approach to KM organizationally?
DK: As I said earlier, you need a culture where everyone understands responsibility and follows the rules. And of course, you need an ideologist to create a culture. Usually it is someone from top management who cares about these things and talks about them all the time. I don’t think it’s the KM of culture that needs a separate role. It’s redundant.
SB: This is hard. As I was saying in our live discussion, I’m kind of curious about the Chief of Staff role because the descriptions are, in some cases at least it seems to fit in there. I know in the US Army it does sit in that office.
I do think it needs to be noticeable. So that could be a CTO role. I’m uncomfortable with it as a CIO CTO role because it often then takes on that technology focus, not the HR focus, or the customer function. It takes on too strong a tech flavor and instead, it really has to go across the whole organization.
Once in a while I see it in a strategy group. That makes a bit more sense to me, and it really illustrates the the strategic importance of knowledge. So I like that when it gets a more holistic view and strategic priority within the organization rather than getting the being put into one of those the other
silos.
Admittedly, I’ve seen it all over the place in 20 years. So what’s important is that it’s visible, and that it’s balanced, and that it’s cross functional, and that it’s cross organizational. And so whatever that looks like, in any particular organization, I know that it’s likely in a good place. I think anything that calls, and focuses on knowledge as a strategic enabler to the companies, organizations and all of its functions is a good thing.
7) The future of Knowledge Management — how do shifts in worker attitudes, the rise of augmented AI intelligence, the speed of company life, WFA/hybrid work and the need to share but secure information from cybersecurity affect the future of knowledge management?
SM: Last question I promise. Our Guild always likes to postulate this question on all of our subjects — what next? what scenarios? what unexpected shifts? what fusion of factors leads to a different future? We never are quite happy with the answer that the future is a straight extrapolation of the past. So no different here, what’s the future Knowledge management? Tell us KM oracles. Care to weigh in?
SB: I think all those considerations you laid out are important. Given what I’ve said earlier about knowledge being human I think this cybersecurity and the AI stuff, needs to be figured out and understood better and really fixate about how it really enables people knowledge. People knowledge is human knowledge at the base of it. That’s also been the challenge with a work- from-home hybrid work environment.
Hybrid work is bringing to light issues about creating trusted relationships and in maintaining the trust relationship among people who aren’t co-located. So doing virtual team building and making space for that is important in maintaining the culture.
A lot of organizations I’ve been talking to in the last year, 18 months, two years, have really struggled with their their organizational culture. And because people are working from home, there are quasi hybrid -not everybody’s in the office at the same time. And so doing things that improve, enable, and maintain the culture, that knowledge sharing culture, and that trust is critical.
There are absolutely ways to do that work such as my Radical KM, creativity and art space interventions. It’s a great way of doing some virtual online team building because we do a little guided visualization, we do some scribble drawings. If it’s a bigger session we can do some painting and some bigger interventions.
Even if we’re all in our own homes, we’re having that experience together and we’re having some space for open dialogue and chatting and questions and take some of the pressure off and, open up some new ways of looking at things.
So I think that’s one of the big benefits for adding creativity and arts based interventions into organizations. It’s to help enable the culture and maintain, develop and evolve the organizational culture around sharing and that trust, are some of the bigger interventions that I advocate for. With Radical KM, we are creating a studio so that when people are in the office together, they can book some studio space and do some collaboration and some work together in this studio around problem solving, around planning.
When they’re finally in the office, they’re doing things that that maybe are a bit more challenging to do from home or hybrid. Being co-located is such a rarity, or it’s becoming a rarity. I think hybrid work can be good because there are benefits to people being able to work from home. It cuts out on pollution, travel time and the stress of commuting. I think those are all good things that give people back time for other purposes. There is certainly an advantage and a positive side to work from home and hybrid, but attention still needs to be paid to team building. Building the trust, the respect and the collaboration is paramount, so when they are together in the office it can really make it worth their while for new kind of collaboration, problem solving and planning and doing things in a more creative, more innovative looking at the world in a different kind of way.
DK: This makes KM much more interesting than it was and is now. New technology will allow us to manage knowledge much more easily than it is now. It is difficult now because it requires extra staff effort (e.g. remembering to update a document, finding an existing document and supplementing it rather than creating a new one, and so on). With the proliferation of AI technology, we will not need to make the effort, it will help us.
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