What’s the likelihood that KM solutions “stick” without a KM leadership team? Pretty slim. When you take the time to develop leaders who understand the value of knowledge management and are empowered to be creative and try new ways to solve tough organizational challenges, you create a culture of knowledge sharing, team collaboration, and personal and professional growth.

The make-up of this KM leadership team looks different in every organization because every organization is different. A KM leadership team that is designed to create positive change within their team, department, or organization’s culture has some common elements. 

Here are the top three ways to shape the KM leadership where you work by thinking about it in terms of tribes:

1. Build your tribes

Seth Godin defines a tribe as “a group of people connected to one another, connected to a leader, and connected to an idea.” Tribes need leaders and members who share a vision that they’re willing to create together. 

In KM, that might be:

• A workplace that’s fun, engaging, innovative, and bustling with smart people sharing their expertise and ideas with one another
• Easy access to all tribal knowledge so that every tribe member can focus on the service they provide to the community, rather than wasting time looking for informational resources
• Leveraging technology that enables the tribe to communicate more effectively about the topics and issues that matter within their community

In essence, individuals make up tribes, tribes make up a community, and a community defines its own culture.

2. Make sure tribe leaders and members know their roles

When you start developing your KM leadership team, you should focus on selecting committed tribe leaders who will serve your tribe members. Look for individuals of varying seniority and tenure who are willing to join the tribe and help support the other tribe leaders. These leaders should attract their tribe members rather than coerce them to join the tribe so it’s important for these leaders to be able to articulate and bring energy to their tribes shared vision.

Once you’ve identified your tribe leaders, provide them with the learning opportunities that they need in order to develop into servant leaders. Then, it’s important that the tribes and community overall recognize who they are and what their role entails. Communication is key because a tribe that doesn’t recognize or understand who is leading the way will go in every which direction.

Here’s what this tribe model might look like within an organization that understands how knowledge management can enable employees to  flourish and thrive:

Tribe Leader (Head Servant Leader): This individual has formal power and influence within the organization. They are the ultimate champion for KM and they’re willing to invest in it and endorse the efforts to build KM into their operations and strategy.

Tribe Supporters (Servant Leaders): These are the individuals who lead departments, teams, and practices within an organization. They may lead one facet of KM, such as content strategy, taxonomy design, or collaboration tool implementation.

Tribe Members: These are the “users” in user-centric design. They are the focus of the KM solutions that the Tribal Leaders are designing because they are the ones who are most impacted by the change.

Tribe Council: This is the group within the tribe that is responsible for the rules that the tribe follows. The council weighs in on the changes to the KM solutions once they’ve been implemented.

Tribe Specialists:  Lastly, these are the individuals within the tribe who are the true experts within a certain KM realm. This would be like the equivalent of a shaman who provides medicine and healing for the tribe members. In KM, this might be someone who is an expert in user experience, change management agile, methodologies, or semantic web tools.

3. Gauge the healthiness and maturity of your tribes

It’s not enough to simply choose and train leaders before you send them off on their own. You also have to set up ways to measure and evaluate their effectiveness in reaching their tribe’s objectives.

Be on the lookout for these signs of a healthy, thriving tribe and community:

• People are happy to be there and feel a part of something larger than themselves
• People are productive and work hard to build and innovate
• People are knowledgeable and share their knowledge with others

Individual growth is tied to the growth of the tribe, which results in the growth of the entire community. Individuals who belong to tribes and have a community-centric mindset will work together to create the culture that they envision. That’s how change happens. 

As I’ve often asserted, one of the major reasons KM efforts fail is the lack of early, frequent, and consistent involvement from end users. We also continue to see organizations struggle with early KM strategy and decision-making, failing to get the buy-in necessary for a true KM transformation. This isn’t just about building users into the design effort. Beyond that, it’s about engaging them in the initial discussions regarding wants and needs and what’s working and what’s not, within the focused context of Knowledge and Information Management.

At EK, we counteract this lack of foundational involvement from end users by leveraging a series of top-down activities including interviews, focus groups, workshops, surveys, job observations/shadowing, and brainstorming games. Throughout all of these efforts, we leverage Design Thinking to progress collaboratively with those who need KM, from new employees to senior executives.

Overall, Design Thinking and Knowledge Management are a natural fit. Effective KM requires user-centered design with a laser focus on the real challenges preventing the organization from successfully harnessing their knowledge as well as innovative thinking regarding the practical solutions to address those challenges. The Design Thinking method directly addresses each of those needs and more.

Beyond the core benefit of putting the user at the forefront of the process, approaching KM from a Design Thinking perspective has a broad array of benefits, including:

• Helping organizations to cast off assumptions about their KM needs, which often focus too much on a technology solution;
• Letting real business needs and individual wants drive the KM strategy, ensuring a focus on business value and practical KM;
• Allowing for small mistakes, and learning from those mistakes, in order to achieve a KM strategy that will really stick; and
• Keeping a focus on showing value quickly and iteratively, assuaging questions and concerns regarding the efficacy of KM.

Approaching KM from a Design Thinking perspective, above all else, is about empowering your end users (those who will be asked to lead, sustain, evolve, and benefit from the KM program over time) to own KM within their organization from the start. At each step in the process, our Design Thinking for KM approach (DTKM) is equal parts education, coaching, brainstorming, action planning, and prototyping, aimed at helping an organization to get “unstuck” with KM by putting the end users at the center of the journey:

We’ve developed our DTKM approach into a specific KM Strategy workshop, but it’s critical to recognize that Design Thinking isn’t just about workshops. At EK, we align complete KM Strategy and Design efforts cleanly and clearly with the Design Thinking approach. What we have found is that the most effective initiatives don’t simply follow the Design Thinking stages in a linear fashion. Rather, they evolve and progress from stage to stage in increasing levels of user engagement and practical KM focus — we will often revisit a stage with a client to ensure we have framed the right opportunity and are focusing on what matters to their end users.

Moving forward, my colleagues and I will detail each of the above Design Thinking stages in greater detail, to ensure KM is user-focused, practical, and consistently focused on business value.

Looking for help getting unstuck with KM by engaging your end users and showing practical results? KMI offers the Certified Knowledge Specialist - Agile and Design Thinking for KM, facilitated by EK consultant, Claire Brawdy.  Next class: Feb 6-7, 2019, Arlington, VA (just outside Washington, DC).

As a small and growing knowledge management team, we are always looking for ways to engage our people. The FIFA World Cup 2018 presented a perfect opportunity for our us to create an internal campaign at our company, Moorhouse Consulting, modelled on the World Cup. It’s not hard to get swept up in the competitive spirit of the World Cup - even if you’re not a die-hard football fan. This enthusiasm was the wave we wanted to surf.

Our aim was to get people to share knowledge and understand the processes and benefits of knowledge management.

So what did we learn? Here are five things:

Keep it snappy, make it sassy

Aligning our campaign with the football World Cup was a good move. It generated excitement and competition. There was already a high level of enthusiasm about the football: all we had to do was harness it.

It could work with any other major event or cultural phenomenon. This could be another sporting event (the Olympics, Rugby World Cup, Wimbledon), a TV series (Game of Thrones, Love Island), or a contemporary craze (Tinder, anyone?). Linking it to something that people are already enthusiastic about will get you half way there.

Get your top dogs barking

It turned out that those teams who did the best overall had leaders who motivated their team to participate. The method of motivation varied: some offered carrots, others beat their sticks. What mattered was that the leaders were enthusiastic, competitive and wanted their team to win.

Buddy up

Our campaign team included two employees who were already working together on the same client project. This turned out to be an advantage: they could meet face to face, had similar working hours, and the same types of client pressures. If your campaign team members are already working closely together, it makes it much more efficient to get organised and move forward.

No single players

We found that in most teams, there was a star performer (an ‘MVP’, if you like), who scored the most points for the team. If you can get people to share the enthusiasm and improve the volume of participation, that will make your campaign more successful. One way of doing this could be to award bonus points for team work.

Turn the spark into a flame

If nothing else, we learned that our people are a competitive bunch. It only takes a little stoking to get the competitive flame burning. Make the most of it by gamifying your campaign, and offering incentives. There is a little child in all of us, and the prospect of a reward for doing a Good Thing is, of course, too tempting to resist.

In summary, we learned that there are a few fundamental things that can help you drive a successful internal engagement campaign.  Linking your campaign to a non-work phenomenon that gets people excited is a good idea. You can never go wrong with rewards and incentives. And participation from leadership is a major propeller. Keep it simple. Make it fun.   

In my career as a KM Consultant, I’ve often worked with organizations who have previously experienced failed KM initiatives and want to avoid repeating past mistakes. I’ve worked with an array of organizations spanning industries, size, and geography, yet the tales of Knowledge Management woe I encounter tend to be quite similar.

Too many of these organizations and their people say the same things: They’ve tried KM before and it didn’t work. They made large investments, only to have people revert to the “old way” of doing things. They got everyone excited about the prospects, only to disappoint with underdelivery. These issues tend to be consistent regardless of the scope of KM efforts as well, and on projects focused mainly on process and people changes, as well as those that have a more technical focus.

1. Lack of Leadership Support

One of the most common reasons KM efforts fail is that they don’t possess the appropriate level of support from leadership. This doesn’t just mean a lack of funding or prioritization, though those are certainly dire issues. In order for KM efforts to succeed, they need active support from leadership, with executives modeling and reinforcing the behavior changes that must occur for the KM effort to truly stick. Leadership support is also critical to remove project blockers and resistors throughout the organization. The most effective means of engaging leadership is to tie KM effort to business value and, wherever possible, hard return on investment. KM plans must be put in terms of benefits to the business in order to generate and maintain leadership support.

2. Lack of End User Engagement

Many KM efforts have fail because they don’t engage the very people who are supposed to get value out of them. Too frequently, KM efforts are designed without sufficient engagement from end users and business stakeholders. This commonly results from KM practitioners and project owners making too many assumptions about what the end users really want, what troubles they’re having, and how they’d like to see things change. Even if the practitioners “guess” correctly, end users typically revolt against change when they haven’t had a seat, ensuring their voices have been heard. At EK, we focus on a workshop-heavy strategy and design approach to ensure appropriate user-centricity. If we can’t say what’s in it for the end users associated with each recommendation we’re making, we know we have more work to do. From strategy, to design, to implementation, and long-term iteration, a key success factor for KM is to ensure users are engaged and empowered to guide the effort.

3. Missing Vision

Another primary reason for KM efforts failing is a lack of definition and consensus regarding where an organization wants to go. For many organizations, the KM transformation journey will be a multi-year effort. These efforts fail when not everyone is aligned around their destination. Without a clear vision, organizations end up with internal competing priorities and misset expectations as to what the end state looks like. It is notable that most organizations believe they possess a shared vision, but once we start asking individual sponsors and stakeholders what their definition of success is, the answers can be dramatically different. At EK, we counteract this misalignment by putting a great deal of energy into defining, socializing, and periodically revisiting the target state. We’ll use personas, journey maps, and user stories to make the target state for KM feel real, and allow stakeholders to truly visualize the impact. Coming back to the target state over time to check-in and ensure no major priorities have changed is also a key component to maintaining alignment.

4. Too Much Theory, Not Enough Business

At EK, we focus on practical KM that will solve real business needs. Too much work in the KM field is based in academic theory and involves an exceedingly painful amount of discussion about KM best practices and academics, instead of focusing on real business value to address actual end user pains. Too many KM projects fail simply because they’re placing too much stock in KM theories and have not focused enough in what their users want, what the business needs, and what will drive stakeholders to embrace real-world KM.

5. Excessive Complexity

Yet another major reason for KM project failures is that they are designed in an overly complex manner. This is not only a reason why many KM efforts fail, it’s also the reason many never move past the planning phase. KM, as a field, has always suffered from struggles regarding complexity and clarity. When you consider the many definitions for KM itself, and the vast array of topics, processes, and technologies that can fit within the KM bucket, it isn’t surprising that many organizations end up with a confused and overly intricate KM strategy. To counteract this, EK focuses on agile design for KM strategy, identifying pilots and other foundational efforts that can show real value, measured in weeks and months instead of years.

6. Insufficient Marketing and Communications

Another major reason for failed KM initiatives is the incorrect assumption that “if you build it, they will come.” In short, “they” won’t. Good KM efforts require a significant, early, and consistent investment in change management, communications, and marketing to ensure all potential parties (everyone you’re asking to change and everyone you’re hoping will get value out of KM) will understand not just what KM is, but why they should care. In other words, KM communications need to be about the personal and direct value to the end users and stakeholders. These communications should be in clean and direct business terms, avoiding KM jargon wherever possible, and instead speak in terms of what the end users care about and what they’ll get as a result of embracing the change. As an important note, good KM communications aren’t just something that happens at the outset or endpoint of a project release. Instead, they should be consistent and ongoing in order to continue driving the change and engaging end users.

7. Missing “Celebratable Moments”

Too often, KM projects talk in terms of features and functions, instead of business outcomes. In addition, overly “big-bang,” sprawling KM projects wait too long to demonstrate value to their end users by showing them something real that they can use. Projects that take too long to show value often struggle to get or maintain the necessary traction and buzz to keep going. To that end, at EK, as we’re developing KM Roadmaps for organizations, we often talk about the Celebratable Moments. These are seeded throughout an initiative to deliver periodic communications to stakeholders to ensure they see progress and have real elements to which they may react. Moreover, these moments become a key component of the aforementioned marketing and communications, as it allows the KM team to show progress and demonstrate the practicality of the project approach and KM in general.

8. Mistaken Faith in Technology

We are at an incredibly exciting time in KM technologies, where many of the promises from a decade ago are finally reality. Auto-tagging tools are much more accurate than they used to be, ontologies and the semantic web are creating functional webs of structured and unstructured content, and enterprise search tools are making it easier to intuitively find and discover what you care about. However, KM initiatives frequently fail when technology is regarded as the KM solution. While technology plays an important role, at EK we talk about KM in terms of People, Process, Content, Culture, and Technology. We always list technology as the last factor as a reminder that technology alone doesn’t make KM work.

9. Forgetting About the Content

As a corollary to the last point, KM initiatives also fail when organizations avoid what, for many, is their number one issue: old, incorrect, and outdated content. In fact, in many organizations, 4 out of 5 documents/pieces of content would fall into this category of disrepair. Ensuring the quality of your content is the most critical foundational element for KM success. At EK, we often prioritize an assessment of the current state of content and the development of an ongoing roadmap to prioritize the NERDy content for cleanup.

10. Lack of Sustainment

Even projects that experience initial buy-in and success still run the risk of failure if not properly sustained. A client recently asked me how long they’d need a head of KM and my answer, quite seriously, was forever. Organizations and their priorities are constantly in flux. Technologies, customer drivers, brand strategies, and user demographics are all dynamic. An organization must assume their KM strategy and approach will be as dynamic as the rest of their organization. To that end, organizations that don’t make a long-term investment in the communications, iterative adjustments, updates to processes and technologies, and continued engagement efforts for their KM strategies will quickly see the interest and support for such initiatives wither.

11. Lack of Governance

Though governance is much more tactical than most of the items above, I’ve seen many KM efforts fail as a result of poor or nonexistent governance that it must be included in this list. Efforts that have not put a long-term plan in place for KM Strategy, System, and Content Governance may see initial successes, but will turn into failures over time. Indeed, early KM successes that don’t have the benefit of effective and comprehensive governance will quickly turn into failures, as systems and content trend toward chaos. Governance may not be the most exciting element of KM, but in order to achieve sustainable evolution of your KM programs, it is absolutely critical. At EK, we define KM Governance to include Vision, Roles and Responsibilities, Policies, Procedures, Communications, Education, and Analytics. Together, these elements will define a KM ecosystem that will yield continuous improvement instead of system entropy.

In a recent post on Lucidea.com, well-known KM expert, Stan Garfield shared his tips for "Seeking Outside Help" in selling KM to others within your organization.  We at KMI have found that this is a common issue faced by knowledge managers, and hope you find Stan's advice useful. . .   

You don’t have to go it alone to sell KM to others in your organization. Take advantage of outside help by scheduling visits with others who are doing KM well, joining and participating in KM communities, using industry analyst reports, or using an outside consultant.

If you decide to seek outside help (and I believe you should), and you plan to schedule visits with other knowledge managers who are “doing KM well”, it’s important to prepare. First, identify people to visit by attending conferences, listening to webinars, participating in communities, and reading publications, blogs, and books. Good advisor candidates are people who make a major impression, are engaged in similar efforts, or are in the same industry. Of course, as you are seeking out these advisor candidates, you are continually learning!

Once you’ve identified and approached a group of potential advisors, prepare as you would for any informational interview. Below is a list of questions that should lead to a rich conversation about promoting knowledge management to leaders and end users. Be prepared to share your own experiences in these areas; peer mentoring is bidirectional.

• To whom have you had to sell KM within your organization?
• How did you go about it?
• What obstacles did you encounter, and how did you overcome them?
• How do you educate stakeholders and users?
• How do you communicate with stakeholders and users?
• How do you motivate people to demonstrate the desired behaviors?
• How do you work with IT?
• What other functions do you work with, and how do you work with them?
• What are your top three tips for selling KM?

If you’d like to read more on this topic, please consider my latest book, published by Lucidea Press, Proven Practices for Promoting a Knowledge Management Program, which offers a broad range of advice and insights drawn from my career as a KM practitioner.