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Knowledge Management Trends in 2020

April 8, 2020

The field of knowledge management continues to evolve quickly, embracing new disciplines including semantic technologies and artificial intelligence as core parts of the growing field. Based on our experience as the largest Knowledge Management Consulting company globally, I’ve once again defined the trends that I believe we can expect to see increasing over the next year and beyond. 

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Enterprise Knowledge is a leading KM Consulting firm and long-time partner of KMI, based in the Washington DC area.  If you would like a free consultation call, please contact us today.

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Reflections on KM Showcase 2020

March 12, 2020

Last week, Senture, LLC staff sponsored, exhibited, and attended KM Showcase 2020 co-presented by KM Institute and Enterprise Knowledge. The Showcase provided an excellent opportunity to meet and engage with KM experts and fully embrace the Learn, Collaborate, and Apply concepts that were evident in conversations in the Exhibit Hall, in speaker presentations from the KM Experts and KM in Practice tracks, and in the plenary sessions.

Fueled by coffee, tea, soda, generous lunches, and afternoon snacks, we shared our own KM work with others, including a successful project with USDA, and absorbed what others shared with us. Many speakers validated our KM thoughts, theories, models, and methodologies. Exhibitors demonstrated new-to-us tools that we can apply to future KM projects. Attendees kindly shared their KM stories—successes and failures—and we grew our KM network considerably in those two days through LinkedIn connections and the exchange of contact information. There was even talk about collaborating on future presentations.

Having spent the last week reflecting on what we learned, we realized that there was a takeaway from every conversation, every presentation, every plenary, and that those takeaways were immediately applicable our ongoing KM work. We’re sharing a few of these takeaways here:

People. Personalization was a hot topic at the Showcase and Jeffrey MacIntyre and Colin Eagan talked about a personalization gap and how to think about the detractors that we might face within our organizations labeled as critic, skeptic, pundit, pragmatist, and box checker. Being able to identify an internal audience in this way is meaningful because it allows us to personalize our message (see how that works?) to move our KM work forward. If we understand that someone is a box checker, we know that there might be some additional work necessary to help that person understand that KM is rarely a one-and-done project. Or that the work is simply over once the technology is up and running.

Process. We heard a collective message about making KM processes easy and even transparent and invisible so that those processes just become the agency way of doing things. Agreed!

Culture. Jen Jensen shared a powerful story about USAA culture and what it means to her. She also gave us an idea for our meetings at Senture, LLC. She said each USAA meeting starts with the Mission and then a story is shared—called a Mission Moment—where a meeting attendee shares an example of an action that embodies the Mission. What a wonderful way to actively promote organizational culture through continued reference to the Mission and shared stories.

Laura Greenlee and Julie Man from Bridgeable shared a KM case study that exemplified how to align KM implementation with an organization’s culture using service design principles. In Bridgeable’s case study, quirky engagement matched the culture. We loved Julie’s beginning rendition of Knowledge Paradise. Who says KM can’t be fun?  

Content. Nestled in the shared content by presenters were some really great phrases that we enjoyed:

  • Perfect is the enemy of good.
  • Invest in search.
  • When you’re building search from scratch, it’s a tough beast.
  • Seek professional help (regarding change management).
  • Address the burning platform (go vanilla, no custom builds).
  • Organizations are managing the wrong stuff (4/5 documents outdated).        

Technology. Thank you to the presenters who used audience polling tools to maintain a high level of engagement. Doug Kalish used Poll Everywhere and we also saw Slido.com in use (was that you, Joe Hilger?). These are effective ways to engage audience, and we appreciated them. We also appreciated the simple, yet effective approach taken by Mary Little and Kristin McNally with the paper handouts at each table that were meant to spark discussion for their in-session activity. It’s unfortunate that the activity was disrupted by the hotel fire alarm. (If you’re reading this, we’re all safe and were able to re-enter the hotel after a few minutes.) It is always refreshing to hear others share our philosophy that talk about technology should come last in KM and this message resonated with us during Zach Wahl's keynote.

Thank you to those who stopped by to talk about Senture, LLC’s KM work. Thank you to the presenters for sharing amazing content, lessons learned, and ideas to move us forward. Thank you to KM Institute and Enterprise Knowledge for an insightful two days of learning and collaborating. We’re already applying all the good stuff we heard.

We’re happy to talk KM anytime!

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Introduction to Conversational Leadership for KM Practitioners

February 5, 2020

Why consider Conversational Leadership?
Our world has notable peace and turmoil. We can see peace between countries that were at war just a few decades ago. And we can see peace in communities and families that have worked through their challenges. Alongside this peace, we can also see turmoil in countries, communities, and families.

Peace and turmoil exist within each of us as individuals also. I can experience moments of happiness, joy, calm, and contentment within myself, and I can also feel moments of anger, disappointment, confusion, and strife within myself.

There are many ways to look at peace and turmoil. We can look at them through a technological lens. For example, we’ve seen technology expand from audio to video, to automation, to prediction and beyond. We can also look at peace and turmoil through a leadership lens. For example, we’ve seen leadership expand from styles of directive, to supportive, to coaching, to delegation, and to collaborative.

How does this relate to KM?
Knowledge Management has progressed collaboration and the flow of knowledge for several decades now. We’ve seen KM expand from within a single organization or community or nation to more and more examples of “external-facing” KM.

Given your specific purpose and objective of KM, we’ve collectively seen quite a bit of KM technology. For example, the “Conversation Prism” offers hundreds of techniques to serve specific collaboration needs. We’ve also seen many KM processes. For example, Knowledge Transfer processes, Expertise Location processes, Knowledge Café processes, etc.

Conversational Leadership has the potential to be another expansion of KM culture, processes, and tools. Especially from a cultural perspective, it is quite often that we hear about the challenges of “buy-in for KM” and “barriers to knowledge sharing.” Most organizations are hierarchical in their design, and so we often hear about “top-down” or “bottom-up” or even “peer-to-peer” patterns of influence and decision making. What if the concept of leadership was based on both your position and your leadership skills? What if we reminded ourselves of the difference between leaders and leadership, and more purposefully balanced the individual and collective aspects of leadership?

As KM continues to grow and expand from information management to experience management, to idea management, to collective leadership and beyond, we have an opportunity to develop from collaboration, innovation, and decision making to complexity, sensemaking, and Conversational Leadership.

Patricia Shaw, a former professor at the Business School at the University of Hertfordshire and founder of the Complexity and Management Centre, says,

“One of the ways of thinking about leadership, is thinking about convening conversations that might not happen otherwise.”

We often provide KM tools and techniques as broad solutions to challenges, similar to how engineers apply engineering tools and techniques to problems. Most of us think that we’re defining the challenge as best we can, and thinking as broadly as we can about the solutions. What if it were less about defining the problem, even less about the answers, and more about skillfully creating and contributing to an environment where conversations can flourish? Maybe that’s similar to one of the KM definitions of “creating an environment in which unique and critical knowledge can flow?" Notice the focus on conversation and leadership in this case.

What is Conversational Leadership?
Conversational Leadership is about appreciating the extraordinary but underutilized power of conversation, recognizing that we can all lead, and adopting a conversational approach to the way in which we live and work together in an increasingly complex world.

It is a relationship-building and community-building vehicle. It helps us to understand each other better and, in doing so, better understand ourselves. Furthermore, it is a collective sensemaking tool that helps us make better sense of the world and thus improve our decision making by bringing different perspectives to bear on an issue.

How to learn more
David Gurteen and I are running a Conversational Leadership workshop in the UK from 3-7 August 2020.

You will spend much of your time in conversation during the workshop:

  • First, to make sense of the Conversational Leadership concept and its principles
  • Second, to practice and improve your conversational skills
  • Third, to build strong relationships with the other participants and create a sense of community

You will learn about and experience two powerful conversational methods, the Knowledge Café and the C-group.

The Knowledge Café is a conversational process that brings a group of people together to make a better sense of a complex issue, share experiences, learn from each other, and build stronger relationships. Many of the sessions will take the format of a talk followed by a Knowledge Café to allow you to fully engage with each other and make better sense of the material.

The C-group is an experiential and transformative learning methodology that enables a small group of people to practice and develop their interpersonal and conversational skills. You will take part in several C-group sessions throughout the workshop.

Conclusion
Conversational Leadership may be an extension of KM, or it may become an entirely new discipline, or it may blur into a new discipline. What an exciting opportunity to learn and contribute to the emergence of a potentially new discipline. Let’s practice a way to continuously respond to these questions together:

  • Are we having the conversation(s) we need to be having right now?
  • Are we having those conversations in the way we need to be having them?
  • In what ways are we building or breaking down our community through these conversations?

The essence of Conversational Leadership is to make sense of the complexity we face every day through conversations that have awareness and discussion similar to the questions above. The potential application of Conversational Leadership might be one aspect of the way to provide inner and outer peace for us all.

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Why Knowledge Management's Time is Now

January 8, 2020

Officially started back in 1995, Knowledge Management (KM) has had a bumpy ride to put it kindly.  There are a number of reasons for this, the most significant one being that it was at its inception owned and delivered by IT (not KM specialists) and was largely dependent on databases with impenetrable folder structures. This meant that adoption of KM was poor and it nearly always failed to live up to its hype – the right information to the right people at the right time.  The problem was further exacerbated  by the fact that an IT driven approach essentially focused on explicit knowledge which has always represented at best merely 20% of the company knowledge; the remaining 80% being in the heads of employees.

And so KM soldiered on for the next quarter of a century getting as much bad press as good press (see: the famous Nancy Dixon timeline graphic below). The problem being that the promise of KM was just too good to ditch but the practice of KM was proving too difficult to deliver.

 

 

Now fast forward to today where the perfect storm in terms of technology advancement and societal change has made the need for KM more important than ever. Indeed, there is now an unquestionable Knowledge imperative for business, that is impossible for any sane thinking CEO to ignore. The need for better KM really is a very easy sell today.

Consider this slide from People Analytics curator David Green:

 

Simply put, the future of your company lies in the heads of a vast ecosystem made up of your employees, your partners and your customers. Without a well-designed and executed KM program with dedicated resources in place, you are playing Russian roulette with the future of your company and sooner or later it will almost certainly become collateral damage.

Call this time in history what you like – the Digital Age, the Age of exponential Change, Age of Disruption, Age of Anxiety, Generation Z  - one thing is clear companies are disappearing at speed -- Kodak, Nokia (for mobile phones), Woolworths, Blockbuster, Borders. Society is changing at speed – drones, self-driving cars, 3D printing, and robotics. Business is changing at speed – Uber, Air B&B, Google cars. The workplace and the worker is changing – automation, the gig economy, virtual reality.

So developing a KM practice as a means of helping your company to stay in the game is now a priority.

When asked what their top 3 Digital Workplace Priorities were, KM was number 2 (source: The State of Digital Workplace report, CMS Wire 2020)

 

However the ability to execute KM well and to make it both agile and sustainable remains a challenge. Interestingly that challenge is no longer really to do with technology (we have the tools and the appetite to collaborate at speed: social media continues to prove that beyond any doubt).

The problem remains one of culture and change. And this is why a well-designed KM program that is funded and resourced as a business priority is the hallmark of companies that truly understand the knowledge imperative and are actively seeking to use KM to improve the odds that their business and their employees have a future. 

They know that Knowledge Management’s time is now!

 

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Creativity for Knowledge Management Programs

December 10, 2019

We're sharing with you here a series of short discussions captured on video between Stephanie Barnes and John Girard about the use of creativity in knowledge management. It came about because of the chapter that Stephanie wrote for the book John and JoAnn Girard created and edited called, Knowledge Management Matters: Words of Wisdom from Leading Practitioners. 

We seem to have spent so much time in the last 100+ years trying to drive efficiency and effectiveness into our processes. How to do things faster, with more quality, with better outcomes, reduce waste, reduce re-work. These are not bad things, but in our push to be effective and efficient many of our organisations have removed time for reflection, for questioning, for considering alternatives out of the process. These chats look at a different motivator for knowledge management: creativity and how it can be used to facilitate innovation. 

There are nine videos in the series and the topics range from how creativity, innovation, and knowledge management fit together to how to enable innovation through diversity and what organisational mindsets are helpful in when innovation is the goal.

We hope you enjoy the series as much as John and Stephanie enjoyed making it. You can see the full set of videos in this YouTube Playlist.  

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