Social Innovation can be defined as “the systematic disruption of social norms to effect social change.” As knowledge managers, we are quick to learn that much of the work we do involves not simply designing better processes and using technology advantageously, but disrupting the social and behavioral norms of people in our organizations in ways that enable their successful participation in new processes and technology related changes. Try as we might to introduce smarter and better ways to do business, we could not do business without people - more specifically the socially reinforced behaviors of people.  As a career technologist, knowledge strategist, and the owner of masters of science degrees in both Information Systems and Information and Knowledge Strategy, it was this revelation about behavior that led me to pursue what some might consider an unusual next step toward a Doctor of Social Work.  

Why would someone who once built web applications for universities and helped design decision making displays for Navy commanders decide to enter the field of social work at the doctoral level? Three reasons: (1) To understand how and why social innovation solves problems for our nation’s most vulnerable populations, (2) to offer my skill set to the design of new innovations in social work, and (3) to help knowledge managers and strategists discover a different set of research, science, and frameworks that can lead to innovation in the business world where interest in social enterprise and behavioral values like respect, trust, dignity, and integrity - long-standing tenets of the social work code of ethics - have continued to rise.

As my first term in the University of Southern California’s Doctor of Social Work program comes to an end, I thought I would share a helpful framework called Innovation Dynamics with our knowledge management community. This framework was designed by Andrew Benedict-Nelson and Jeff Leitner and is available in an easily digestible format in their book, See Think Solve: A Simple Way to Tackle Tough Problems. The information in quotations for the remainder of this article are taken from this book unless otherwise noted. In this blog post, we’ll walk through Benedict-Nelson and Leitner’s SEE, THINK, SOLVE approach, applying it to what one might consider a typical knowledge management (KM) problem.  First, we will identify the problem, and then rethink the problem in observable, behavioral terms using their framework.

Imagine:

Your senior leadership is fully on board with a new digital transformation initiative. Not only will you be tasked with moving the organization’s information into a new portal, but you’ll also be moving communication processes that are currently managed in another system, and heavily enabled by email, into a Slack-like tool designed to be used on desktop and mobile. Rather than waiting 24-48 hours for responses to trouble tickets, employees will have access to a searchable database and instant live support via their mobile devices. When this new tool set is finally unveiled, it is a hit! People love the design and the senior leaders love that the organization looks and functions in a more modern way. But you notice something interesting after the first two weeks. Usage has slowed and worse, some departments aren’t using your amazing troubleshooting system at all. Because the portal was a significant financial investment, senior leaders request a report out on its usage at their monthly meetings and you are dreading reporting this frustrating trend. What do you do?

Thanks to user analytics, you know the problem here is that user engagement with our new portal has measurably slowed or ceased. Your job as the knowledge manager is to determine why this is happening and design a solution that will make usage go up so your senior leaders feel like they are getting a return on their investment. Since all systems seem to be functioning as designed, this appears to be a behavioral problem in that users are not interacting as you anticipated they would with the new portal system.

If we use Benedict-Nelson and Leitner’s Innovation Dynamics framework, we can begin to understand how to SOLVE the problem, but first we need to SEE the problem through six innovation lenses. The lenses through which we will make our behavioral observations are as follows:

1. Actors: These are the people or groups of people involved in the problem. First order, second order, and missing actors all play a role here and it is your job to identify who they are. First order actors in our KM problem are people in departments that do not seem to be using the system. Second order actors might be the peers of those people in other departments or the supervisors and managers of those users. Missing actors might be trainers or customer support people who have not reviewed the new tools with the first order actors.
2. History: According to Benedict-Nelson and Leitner, “history is a collection of stories about the problem’s past - the official stories, the unofficial stories, the half-truths, and the you’ve-got-to-be-kidding-me stories.” In our KM problem’s past, people used different systems to get support and do their work before we switched to the new portal. Some people loved the old way of getting things done - maybe the 24-48 hour wait bought them time to do more or maybe they enjoyed a different way of interacting with support. You will have to uncover those stories that influence the behaviors leading to use patterns you are seeing in a particular department.
3. Limits: These are the “formal, explicit rules that influence how people behave in relation to a problem”. Could it be that in a department that isn’t using your new portal there is a rule against the use of mobile devices? Are users only able to access the portal at certain times in the day because they work outside of the office? Is there a supervisor who has created a rule that interferes with the use the new portal? These formal, explicit rules, or limits, are worth investigating, if you want to determine how to change the behavior of low or no portal usage.
4. Future: “The collection of people’s expectations about how a problem will turn out”. In our KM problem, some users think that if enough people keep using the old system they won’t be forced to use the new system because they assume the company will sustain the older resources.  Some users may not believe the information in the portal will be valuable to them and that using it will not make a difference in their own job performance. How do expectations about the future keep your problem in place?
5. Configuration: This is how people make sense of things using labels and categories. In the case of our KM problem, do the people who are not using the new portal organize their tasks or work in a certain way? What can we learn about how they organize themselves or their information that can inform why they are not using the portal? Have they categorized the portal itself as an optional tool or a must have? These are questions of configuration that can illuminate how people make sense of the portal’s use or non use in their work life.
6. Parthood: This sixth and final lens tells us that most problems are often related to, or are a part of, other problems. Might a lack of use of the new portal stem from a problem that some users don’t have computers or mobile devices? Could it be because users in a certain part of the organization have not been empowered to do their work in this new way? Discovering the other problems that might exist in relationship to our KM problem can shed light on how and where we need to change behaviors.

Now that we SEE our KM problem through these lenses, we are asked to THINK about the problem in terms of both social norms and deviance.

• Social norms are “unspoken, informal rules that tell everybody how to behave in social situations.” Here, our social situation is the workplace and we use the six lenses to look at the behaviors in our KM problem to find the norms. For example, if we see the problem (user engagement with our new portal has measurably slowed or ceased) through the lenses of actors and limits, we can identify specific people who are not using our new portal system, and, after speaking confidentially but candidly with those people, learn that that their supervisors have explicitly discouraged users from engaging in the new portal because they themselves are not using it. The social norm here would therefore be that users in department x do not engage in the use of the new portal and the six lenses help us see this is because a supervisor does not use it. This problem might seem “obvious”, but what the innovation framework does is empower us as knowledge managers to explore the problem more deeply, allowing us to engage and observe people in our organization using a more structured set of questions that can help us identify opportunities for innovation.
• Deviance “is a behavior with the potential to subvert a social norm.” Benedict-Nelson and Leitner insist that deviance not only break the rules and disrupt a social norm, but that it change the rules altogether. Understand the social norm, understand the behaviors that could unseat the rules that keep it in place. Once you identify areas and opportunities for behavioral change, you can begin to ideate on solutions and create a deviant.

This leads us to the SOLVE portion of Benedict-Nelson and Leitner’s framework. How we solve our KM problem requires us to create a deviant, not BE deviants in the traditional sense, but design mechanisms that encourage a deviant behavior in an innovation sense. If we take the problem, (user engagement with our new portal has measurably slowed or ceased), use the lenses to SEE a social norm (users in department x do not engage in the use of the new portal because a supervisor does not use it), we can posit that a deviance would be the supervisor changing his or her behavior to increase portal use within their department. But as Benedict-Nelson and Leitner emphasize, we not only want to disrupt the social norm, we want to change the rules holding that norm in place altogether. We want to understand what makes the supervisor NOT want to use the new portal and how can we change the rules around THIS behavior so that ALL supervisors will be incentivized to use the portal. One deviant innovation might be designing a recognition system that rewards supervisors directly for high departmental use and collaboration, maybe at those monthly meetings where you have to report out to the senior leadership. Perhaps another deviant innovation would be designing a questionnaire or conducting an interview that helps you tailor the new portal to each supervisor’s specific needs, addressing the WIIFM (what’s in it for me) more directly.  

Whatever your proposed innovation, or deviance, it is likely to get the support you need to execute it if you can show that you have investigated your problem using an innovation framework that has been applied, proven, well-researched, and costs nothing to your organization. I hope you will consider Benedict-Nelson and Leitner’s Innovation Dynamics and SEE THINK SOLVE when diagnosing your next major KM problem.

Check out highlights from the KM Showcase 2019.

Save the date - March 4-5, 2020 - for the next Showcase!  The 2-day event will be held at the Westin Arlington Gateway. 

You won't want to miss it!

Creativity and Innovation for KM Programs

The second in a series of videos about knowledge management, creativity, and innovation. In this episode, Stephanie Barnes (www.realisation-of-potential.com) and John Girard (www.johngirard.net) discuss knowledge management and why collective intelligence is worthy of note.

Recently scientists discovered a new organ in human body “Interstitium”, probably one of the biggest. It was always in the plain sight, but it was never recognized as an organ. Knowledge is also probably suffering from this overlooking. While it is underlying any activity done by organizations and the ability to manage knowledge directly impacts performance and competitiveness of an organization, this is completely missed.

To ensure that we manage organizations by leveraging ‘knowledge’ is not going to be an easy journey. While there is no easy solution, the first question is who will work towards setting things straight. Well the only folks who will be and should be working on this are the KM practitioners, researchers and academicians. One cannot expect leadership team, or any consulting firm to suddenly get this realization one fine day and make the structural changes. It is up to us to bring in the change.

Knowledge will always be important for organizations and managing knowledge will never become a fad. However we need to have innovative practices, which will help us impact organizational performance in a tangible way. As a practitioner and researcher what you can do.

Align KM practices with organizational goals: Be clear that the KM practices should always be aligned to the organizational goals and help organizations achieve its goals. There are two types of KM practices. One can be classified as hygiene practices and other as value add. The hygiene practices are required across any type of organization irrespective of its focus. However to have a direct impact on business, we should focus on value add practices.

1. Focus on metrics that are tangible and talk in business terms: Always talk on business terms and measure your contributions on business terms. Nobody cares about how many documents have been downloaded, or how many knowledge sharing sessions were held. They are more interested in cost savings, revenue generation, adherence to time etc.
2. Question the assumptions: Question the assumptions based on which you are practicing KM. Somehow we never do this. We have to apply lessons learned on what we do. Keep questioning ourselves, unearth the assumptions. If there is lack of knowledge, then become more knowledgeable
3. Embrace technology but after understanding it properly: Do not get overwhelmed by technology. Understand it and then use it. Technology is an enabler for KM and not KM. With the fast changing technology, you will see more and more new tools coming.
4. Develop new tools that will help in KM practices. Our current set of tools are mostly focused on knowledge storing, sharing and collaboration. We need to have tools for lessons learned, continuous improvement etc.
5. Knowledge managers roles will change drastically: In a world where organizations are managed by leveraging knowledge, the roles of Knowledge managers will have very little shades of what they are doing currently. It will go through a drastic change.
6. Participate in knowledge communities: Participate in knowledge communities across the world. Start discussions and make it vibrant. It will have a cascading effect. LinkedIn itself has got more than 25 KM groups and across the world there are probably more than 100 communities focused on KM. In your country or county or state, if there is no KM community, then form one.

As a practitioner and researcher, I have been working towards taking KM to a key position. This I am currently doing it through my blogs, by highlighting how KM should be re-positioned and to bring tangible benefits to the organizations. I continue to build connections across KM practitioners across the world, with the message of this re-positioning. Let us all come together to help the world understand the importance of knowledge and managing it.

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.