If you have Netflix, you’ve probably seen Tidying Up pop up on your feed. It’s a new series based on Marie Kondo’s book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, which presents her methodology for clearing your clutter, getting organized, and creating space for only the things that still and will continue to serve you and “spark joy” in your home. The Konmari method for tidying up has transformed the lives of thousands of people around the world and when applied to your content strategy, can dramatically impact the quality and findability of your organization’s knowledge and information.

Here’s what you need to know about the Konmari method and how to apply it to your content strategy efforts:

1. It’s not magic.

In one of the episodes, Marie’s client expressed how excited she was to witness the magic of tidying up. Marie quickly clarified that there is no magic– although she would provide guidance in the right direction, there was a lot of work ahead. In fact, the more stuff her clients had in their home and the deeper their emotional ties to that stuff, the more work it would actually be. To make it even more complicated, the relationship between the people who lived in that home would make it increasingly challenging because they would have to work together to make decisions about the future state of their space.

Similarly, I’ve worked with clients to truly understand the challenges related to their content and we work together to develop strategies for improving their ability to create, manage, and share the resources necessary for their jobs. When it comes to content, it’s important to be intentional and make sure that what you have achieves the objectives and meets the quality standards you’ve set. Each content repository should have a purpose, e.g. the intranet stores information and resources for internal employees or the e-commerce platform contains copy that helps to sell products. Then, each content item that lives in the content repository should align with that objective.

Marie makes her clients hold each and every single item they own and ask themselves whether they want to keep the item, discard the item, or donate the item. When conducting a content clean-up effort, content owners will also have to evaluate each piece of content and determine whether they should keep it, update it, or archive/delete it. The more content you have, the longer this process will take, but the more you do it, the easier and faster it becomes to accomplish the content clean-up effort.

2. The amount of stuff you have will overwhelm you.

One of the very first exercises that Marie asks her clients to do is to pile up all their clothes in one area. All of it. After an initial look of disbelief, they begin to go through all of their closets, drawers, and other hidden places where they’ve stuffed clothing. The mountain of clothes that results from this exercise almost always shocks the owners — some of the items haven’t been worn in decades and others still have their tags. This is an important step in the Konmari method because coming face-to-face with all of the things you have and don’t use or want validates the need to undergo this effort.

Organizations are able to create content at a rapid pace and before they know it, they have terabytes of information that make it impossible to find what they need. In the same way that parents will begin to store their clothes in their children’s closets because they’ve run out of space in their own, people begin storing knowledge and information anywhere and everywhere they can without really thinking through the consequences. By conducting a content inventory, you are then able to see just how much content you have and where it all lives. It will overwhelm you, but when you prioritize your efforts and address each set of content one folder, space, or department at a time, it becomes more manageable and less daunting.

3. You should use little boxes to organize things and put like things together.

After a few days of clean up, Marie will come back to her client’s homes with a gift: a bunch of little boxes of different shapes. These boxes do wonders for the drawers and cabinets in their homes. Imagine the utensil and tool drawer in your kitchen. Is it a jumble of random items that you have to sift through to get to the wine opener? Marie suggests compartmentalizing your drawers with little boxes and putting similar things together by size or function. Through this exercise, you realize just how many batteries and light bulbs you have because your decentralized storage habits made it difficult to find them when you needed them, causing you to just buy more.

This process is similar to the Content Types I’ve designed for my clients. It’s often a hard concept to wrap your head around, but simply put, content types are “little boxes” for content items so that it’s easy to find the information you’re looking for because of the standard templates they now belong in. Imagine reading a procedure but you have to read the entire document to figure out whether this procedure is applicable to your circumstance. If all procedures across your organization followed a similar format (e.g. Purpose of the Procedure, Applicability, Steps, and Related Processes), you would save time because you would know immediately where to look and what to expect when you need information. Content Types also help you to group like-content together so in the future you can find it rather than having to recreate it.

4. The order in which you tackle your project matters.

Marie advises her clients to tidy up four categories of stuff: Clothes, Books, Documents (Paper), Komono (miscellaneous items), and Momentos (sentimental items). You wear clothes each day so they tend to be the easiest to sort through first. It gives you an opportunity to practice and strengthen your decision-making skills so that as you progress to other categories, it becomes easier to decide what to keep vs. get rid of. Sentimental items are much tougher to let go of, so those are saved for last because by the time you get to them, you have a stronger sense of what’s truly important to you.

As you implement your content strategy, start with quick wins so that you gain enough momentum to tackle some of the more complex aspects of your project. You can start with content repositories that have the least amount of content or day-to-day content that makes it easy to identify what’s outdated and no longer applicable, like a wiki. Then, you can take on the bulk of your content such as project files, process documentation, and reference materials. Lastly, you can review legal or auditable documentation which would have severe implications if you get rid of them prematurely. The order in which you tackle your project will vary depending on your organization.

After months of applying the Konmari method, with guidance and support along the way, Marie’s clients find themselves surrounded by only the things that are essential to their well-being. It brings them peace of mind and creates a sense of optimism for their future because they now live in a home that doesn’t frustrate them on a daily basis. At EK, our content strategists bring the same sense of order to our clients’ content repositories so that they can focus on the more important things in their businesses. Need help tidying up? Contact us at info@enterprise-knowledge.com.

When charting a new destiny for KM, it is important that we get the basics right. The basics involves understanding what Knowledge is for organizations. Anything and everything within an organization are expressions of knowledge, be that the ability of an employee, approach/process adopted to perform an activity, culture of an organization, how employees come together, the products or services.

Knowledge Management practitioners and researchers should appreciate this aspect. Any intervention and approach to managing knowledge should evolve from this understanding. Difference in competitiveness between two organizations can be explained in the difference in knowledge they have with respect to customer knowledge, product knowledge, production knowledge etc. The ability to visualize organizational functioning in terms of knowledge, will help us evolve interventions that have direct impact on the performance of organizations.

It is very interesting to note how we casually say someone has the right skills and knowledge, but do not realize they both mean the same. The terms like capability, ability, talent, skills, expertise or aptitude means knowledge in one form or the other. Hence when we hear training team conducting learning sessions, they are doing a Knowledge Management job by imparting employees with relevant know how, know what or know why. When someone is undergoing an on the job training, it is nothing but acquiring more of know-how.

Sharing a few definitions from Oxford dictionary

Hence employees are nothing but a mix of different kinds of knowledge. It can be knowledge related to soft skills, products, process, tools, technology, domain, management etc. Similarly the processes of an organization, core competency or thought leadership reflect a mix of knowledge.

When we start realizing and appreciating the fact that everything is knowledge, we will be able to find ways of managing organization by leveraging knowledge. Only this approach will have lasting impact on the performance of the organization. More on this can be found in the blog: Reading 'Organizations' , as a mix of different Knowledge.

Suggested reading materials:

On the distinction between know-how, know-what and know-why by Raghu Garud
Knowledge, Knowledge Work and Organizations: An Overview and Interpretation by Frank Blackler

Next blog: Journey from Art to Science, by leveraging Knowledge: Charting a new destiny for KM

Photo by Glen Noble on Unsplash

I’ve been in the business of Knowledge Management Consulting for the vast majority of my career and, in my experience, one of the most challenging aspects to KM is its intangibility. I’ve helped an array of organizations to define their KM Success Metrics and KM Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) in order to make KM measurable and tie it to business value and hard return on investment. In these cases, though, many of these KM KPIs are only measurable over years and often have a stronger demonstration of value to the organization rather than the individual. 

Since good KM is integrated into the business, enterprise KM programs are often largely invisible when they work, and only visible when they’re causing the end user “pain.” For example, a seamless tacit knowledge capture program feels like natural conversation, whereas a badly designed program will feel forced and overtly time-consuming. A natural content governance plan will be integrated into the enterprise and simply feel like how business is done, whereas a poorly designed governance plan will slow down work and create barriers to sharing and connecting.

As a result, KM runs the risk of not being “felt” by the average end user in a way that inspires engagement and support. Though a KM effort may be meeting long-term organizational goals, it nonetheless runs the risk of a decreased focus or dwindling support over time if the individual business stakeholder doesn’t feel the benefit of it.

One key area where the individual, as well as the business, can experience meaningful value from KM on a daily basis is through enterprise search. Though I’m not suggesting a technology is necessary for all aspects of KM, the reality is that for large organizations, a great deal of KM will be enabled through supporting technologies. A well-designed, implemented, and governed enterprise search is one of the key systems where KM becomes real for the average end user.

Several exciting things are happening within the enterprise search world at this point:

• Enterprise search tools are increasingly able to index both structured and unstructured information, creating greater linkages between different types of knowledge and information.
• It is becoming easier to design more creative user interfaces within search that better reflect the needs of the end user and the actions they want to take.
• Once advanced features, like type-aheads and faceting, are now readily available.

In order to really make enterprise search work, foundational KM activities are still critical. For instance:

• Content Audits and Cleanup – Content has to be cleaned up and enhanced with tags to ensure the right content appears in search and is weighted appropriately. Content cleanup alone is time-consuming and dry, but linking it to a search effort shines a critical light on why it is important. Without a content cleanup, search will end up being “garbage in, garbage out” no matter how slick it is.
• Taxonomy Design and Tagging – Taxonomies have to be designed and applied to key content repositories as well as integrated into the search design to ensure faceting works and different types of content from different sources can be seamlessly integrated. Taxonomy by itself can be esoteric and easily set aside, but when its value surfaces as faceted navigation, it becomes a critical tool for findability and discoverability.
• Content Types – Content Types continue to be one of the more misunderstood elements of a KM architecture, despite our efforts to make them more approachable. Content Types can serve as templates, guide workflows and security, and inform tagging. When designed correctly, they can also translate into search hit types. That said, they tend to be relatively confusing until seen in action.
• Tacit Knowledge Capture – Almost every organization with whom we’ve worked agrees Tacit Knowledge Capture is critical to ensuring expertise isn’t lost as employees leave and new employees are up-scaled faster and more effectively. Good Tacit Knowledge Capture can take a broad array of forms, from traditional mentor/mentee pairings, to email capture tools, to communities of practice (both live and virtual). Though there can be substantial visibility for a great deal of these mechanisms, their full value isn’t felt just in their existence. Tacit Knowledge Capture really only pays off when individuals can find and engage with the captured knowledge. Search can play a key role here, and can also allow for the integration of a range of result types in a manner that allows the end user to find the “official” published answer as well as related “social” answers from experts (as well as, potentially, the experts themselves).
• Knowledge Sharing Culture – Developing a strong culture of knowledge sharing is one of the foundational activities we seek to implement in the early stages of any KM engagement. Specific activities for this venture vary greatly amongst organizations and depend on from where they’re starting. Approaches may range from a simple commitment from leadership, to the establishment of a KM Leadership group, and to more advanced gamification and analytics efforts. At the end of the day, however, nothing shines a light on good knowledge sharing behavior like something that will surface that newly shared knowledge in a form that is easy to find and discover.
• Governance – Governance, specifically content governance, is another building block and truly foundational activity for enterprise knowledge management efforts. Like a culture of knowledge sharing, nothing helps to show the importance of governance as much as a search initiative that shows what happens in very real terms when people DON’T follow it. Content governance will get a huge boost in importance as soon as it’s easier to find and expose content.

Each of these pieces alone is an important part of a comprehensive KM strategy. Together, they make up many of the core KM foundations I seek to put on KM Roadmaps for my clients. Integrating a search pilot into that roadmap ensures the hard work that will go into the aforementioned efforts, as well as the overall KM transformation, will be seen, and made clickable, for your end users.

For this first in a series of videos about knowledge management, creativity, and innovation Stephanie Barnes (www.realisation-of-potential.com) is interviewed by John Girard (www.johngirard.net) and shares her thoughts knowledge management’s challenges and the possible role creative leadership plays in creating a culture that supports organisational learning.

Click anywhere on Video image to launch.  A new window will open on YouTube.

I find that quite often when we say Knowledge Management, we actually mean Content Management or other aspects of explicit knowledge. That is a logical starting point for most of us, for historical reasons but also because it is the easier of the two knowledge dimensions to quantify and measure both progress and business impact.

But what about our tacit Knowledge Assets? This is the collective knowledge comprised by different personalities, experiences (past and present, personal and professional) and passions, that is the main intellectual capital for any knowledge worker organization. Are we leveraging tacit knowledge in a way that drives our business forward? And are we able to effectively combine and balance the needs and desires for tacit vs. explicit – including return on investment (ROI), cost of creation, harvesting and curation? Is tacit knowledge the secret sauce that can help us maximise investments made on the explicit side?

I believe that we can and should. But before designing a solution or planning the next tacit KM initiative, it may be worth spending some time thinking through your tacit knowledge needs, how existing tacit knowledge is shared, collaboration forums etc., because most likely there are several initiatives already existing (likely in pockets) that you can build on:

1. What constitutes tacit knowledge in your company and what is its value to your business?

2. How and where does tacit knowledge sharing happen today: Is it informal or formal knowledge sharing and are there ways we can standardise to drive synergies?

3. How can you capitalise on tacit knowledge and demonstrate clear business value?

What do we mean by Tacit Knowledge?

For the sake of simplicity, I am using a broad definition of Tacit Knowledge: “any skills, experiences and expertise that exists in our people’s heads”.

For a professional services organisation like my own or any knowledge worker organisation, this is core intellectual capital. It is important to create environments where people can share experiences and have conversations about common interests, central to innovation. The key is to support the tacit knowledge exchange in a way that makes the knowledge accessible for others at a later point in time, to capitalise on it at scale, without stifling creativity.

How and where does Tacit Knowledge sharing happen in your organisation?

Most of us subscribe to the thinking that diverse teams are more creative, innovative and productive, and we strive to foster collaborative environments that can enable those teams to achieve more, by leveraging both explicit and tacit knowledge. Tacit knowledge sharing can take many forms–from experiences and expertise shared in meetings and projects, collaboration platforms (formal as well as informal ones), Communities of Practice, Expertise Location Services, to new hire buddy-systems and peer mentoring.

It’s a good idea to start by identifying any such formal and informal occurrences before making plans to extend or attempt to merge to a common platform. It is likely to find informal forums with more engagement than formal ones.

Once these tacit knowledge sharing pockets have been identified, it is worth looking at the success and user adoption of them, to understand why some are more popular or more effective than others. This is especially valuable when looking at KM solutions. It’s very easy to jump on the social collaboration bandwagon and think that a new collaboration platform will magically solve all problems and be immediately adopted. This is highly unlikely as the “Build it and they will come” approach rarely works, in KM, or elsewhere!

The main challenge then becomes how to standardise and align where collaboration, or other forms of tacit knowledge sharing happens, so that it can be harvested for re-use and/or become available for broader consumption. We need to be careful here, that the organisation’s need for reporting and measuring impact or value, does not take priority over usability and impacts adoption.

How can you measure the value of Tacit Knowledge?

We tend to assume that if we can’t measure it, it doesn’t exist, or has little value to the company. So how can we measure the monetary value of peer-to-peer interactions and capturing knowledge currently not documented? It may be valuable to consider at least these two aspects of “value” dimensions:

Activity metrics–designed to show and drive behavioural change and encourage or incentivise knowledge sharing and collaboration. Metrics can be very effective in driving behaviour, but we need to be careful to drive the right behaviour for the right reason, so that it doesn’t become a tick-box exercise.

Value metrics– with intent to monetary impact, which is always hard when trying to show $ value of intangible assets, like productivity or efficiency. It’s important to acknowledge this and consider indirect metrics (correlations) between knowledge sharing and business results.

In summary, tacit knowledge is as important, and sometimes more so, than explicit knowledge and you need to look at both when planning a KM initiative. Sharing and usage of tacit knowledge can be a differentiator for your business, as a foundation for innovation and collaboration, driving revenue, efficiencies and employee satisfaction. All of which can’t necessarily be directly translated into monetary value but are nonetheless contributing to business objectives.