I recently read an excellent paper by Mark Schenk, Shawn Callahan and Andrew Rixon. You can access it here.
What is good about this paper is that it is just sweet and punchy. It goes straight at the heart of what is knowledge, and knowledge management. It does this by, paradoxically, not explaining knowledge and knowledge management, and not trying to. It simply draws the picture many organisations face with regards to what referrents (such as data, databases, and the like, as well as culture, whatever people understand by this) they can use in order to enable the sharing of knowledge and catalyse its management by the organisation.
The paper pinpoints the fact that knowledge, and knowledge management, are hard to pin down and, in such a way, can not really be managed. It also pinpoints the fact that data and tools are a lot less important to knowledge and learning in organisations, in sharp contrast to organisational culture.
The thing is that, unless the organisational culture is right for knowledge, sharing and learning, nothing else will be right in order for an organisation to be a knowledge-based, and a learning, organisation. And, because of the characteristics of knowledge, it is not possible to enable a culture of sharing, and learning, and hence knowledge management, unless you recognise that knowledge is fluid, that the major part of knowledge processes is about tacit knowledge, and that you can not really capture, and codify it …
This brings me to the thought I read somewhere, by somebody (I am very sorry to not remember where and who) concerning the need to refer to knowledge leadership instead of knowledge management. I would agree with this completely, simply because, in order to be a good knowledge manager, one does need to posses a lot of the ’’soft skills” usually attribited to good leaders and not necessarily good managers. As we know, management and leadership are far from one and the same (Kotter) from the point of view of skill, knowledge and intuition, despite that, in good organisations, these complement each other in a reinforcing interplay.
Here is how the authors of the paper explain this:
Increased understanding of organisational culture, using approaches such as narrative techniques (see our website at www.anecdote.com.au for details), social network analysis, open space technology and other participative approaches which help the organisation to become self-aware, is important in creating an environment that enables more value to be extracted from knowledge and information resources.
Some favourite quotes:
”Knowledge is that relatively intangible resource within every individual. The very intangibility of knowledge works against its effective use in many organisations because it does not lend itself to the process-focused and reductionist approaches of industrialage companies.”
“You can’t do knowledge management until you accept that you can’t manage knowledge”.
”Efficiency encourages codification; effectiveness encourages lower levels of codification and greater flexibility. The more you attempt to codify and capture knowledge as information, the more you reduce flexibility, the more you fossilise it.”
“trust is the bandwidth of knowledge sharing”
4 comments
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August 27, 2008 at 9:36 pm
Alanna
What do you think of a positive deviance approach to knowledge management? Find those employees who are sharing well, and disseminate their methods. One of those things which sounds very simple and turns out to be very complex, I bet…
August 28, 2008 at 3:29 pm
loumbeva
Hi Alanna. Thanks for your comment. For sure, the approach you suggest is good. I think it is so for two reasons:
1. it implies looking into the organisation itself to identify ways in which knowledge sharing and learning are, already, taking place. this is a great SHORTCUT to improve the extent to which an organisation leverages what it knows.
it does happen that organisations embark on some very high-level knowledge-related initiatives, mostly so that they design and implement knowledge management strategies. personally, I think this can be quite superfluous, considering that knowledge is not there for its own sake, but rather for the sake of the business of the organisation. and so, there is no need for a knowledge management strategy per se, but rather there is the need to start just DOING the sharing and learning, so that the organisation can improve on all of its mission, purposes and activities.
2. the method that you suggest would not only build on the ways in which people already share knowledge; it would also do so in the context of the already existing organisational culture … if done well, the method you are suggesting would also present opportunities for changing this, beneficially, for the sake of knowledge sharing and organisational learning. and so, all in all, a great way to achieve some concrete results, and quickly so, whilst intelligently and compellingly communicating about what is being done.
Here is a link to some more knowledge sharing methods and tools:
http://www.kstoolkit.org/
On whether following such an approach might turn out very complex:
Yes, it might, or it might not. One can never know until they do it.
In any case, it would be important to start small, i.e., identify good practices for sharing and learning in just one department and/or division, then, once these have been identified, raise awareness about these within the division, encourage everybody to do more in order to learn better together in that division. Then, it would be good to do the same in other divisions. All throughout, it would be important to have leadership support, as well as consistent and compelling communications about what is being done, and why.
Hope this helps. Please let me know if you want to talk more.
February 24, 2009 at 2:37 pm
Nick Milton
You mention ” the need to refer to knowledge leadership instead of knowledge management”.
I would say “as well as” rather than “instead of”
Leadership is a component of a management system, but not the only one. The management system, as well as leadership, needs the tools, the processes, and the accountabilities in order to deliver.
A good leader leads, but also provides his or her organisation with the means to delivery. Leadership plus Means equals Management
February 25, 2009 at 2:52 pm
loumbeva
Thanks Nick. I completely agree with you. Knowledge management and knowledge leadership are both important.
Yes, we could also say that knowledge leadership is a component of knowledge management. In fact, I think, by the nature of it, knowledge leadership implies distributed or transcending, or bottom-up leadership, as they also call it. In other words, those who know take the lead depending on circumstance etc. If we were to have some or more of that, then we would get into distributed cognition, intuition and sense-making and then that is already a step towards a learning organisation.
I hope more organisations will go and go that way!