I've been on a roll about Learning Circles...get it circle, roll...?

Learning Circles is a peer coaching method which can be incredibly effective when done correctly.

You may have experienced one-on-one coaching, maybe executive coaching, leadership, career, or life coaching. All of these are ways in which a professional coach helps an individual discover new insights, make coherent choices, and integrate new behaviors. It can be a very powerful way to make transformative lasting change in your life.

Peer coaching takes the coaching model of discovery, insight, and action and makes it accessible to a wider range of people. It is a way to promote continuous learning and growth in an organization. That is why I call them Learning Circles.

The method is adopted from Action Learning, an adult development theory which posits that adults learn by gathering what is known (explicit and tacit), asking questions to create deeper insights, and reflecting on actions

Learning circles use the real world issues of the participants as a sort of "active case study" for exploration and action planning. When properly facilitated, Learning Circles create change as well as enable the development of trust, authenticity, and resilience in an organization.

Here's an example of an issue that one of the participants brought to the Learning Circle.

"I'm working on a major tech implementation that will change the process that many people use to order parts. The rank and file seems pretty happy with the change. They see that it will make things easier for them.

The problem I'm having is with the senior leadership, especially the director. This will require changes from everyone and the senior level is not walking the talk. The employees see that and they are losing confidence in the system, starting to talk about it as another 'flavor of the month.' This happened a few years ago with another tech system--successfully implemented but ultimately disregarded because the senior leadership never made it a priority."

This participant wanted to explore ideas for what to do to get the senior leadership on board before the project failed.

After about 12 minutes of clarifying questions and brainstorming possibilities, the person bringing this to the table talked through three ideas she felt might work and committed to action steps to take, reporting back to the circle in two weeks with observations and insights of the impact this plan made.

Then it was the next participants turn to share a challenge they were facing.

How often do you have the opportunity to share a pressing issue with a group of colleagues, have them listen to hear the deeper issues you may be missing, and offer helpful insights that may accelerate the resolution of that issue?

Whether I am designing a creative protection structure as a lawyer or designing a creative business model in my Innovation Management practice, I have found that getting the environment right really matters.  While Knowledge Management (“KM”) traditionally focuses on the framework of people, culture, process, and technology, in this brief article I hope to show that KM programs would benefit by also considering “environment.”
 
Housing KM in the right environment is essential because KM is so often disruptive and radically transformative to the ordinary course of a business.  APQC’s popular book, “The New Edge in Knowledge Management,” recognizes this fact and strongly emphasizes the importance of environment in KM.  Above and beyond communities of practice, the authors assert that successful KM programs house themselves in environments that include “supportive infrastructure, leadership and management roles, sponsors and stakeholders, a governance model, and funding.” Unfortunately, in some KM programs and much of the current KM literature, governance and environment are underemphasized.
 
KM’s neighboring disciplines of Business Process Management (“BPM”) and Project Management (“PM”) place greater emphasis on environment than KM.  These disciplines both suggest a Center of Excellence (“CoE”) as their proper homes.  BPM and PM also emphasize the “importance of positioning” the CoE with sufficient “autonomy” in self-governance as an essential ingredient to success.*
 
While Business Process Management and Project Management are neighboring disciplines to KM, innovation is the “child” of Knowledge Management.  Ikujiro Nonaka, co-creator of KM’s widely used SECI Model of Knowledge Dimensions, emphasized that “the knowledge creating company’s sole business is continual innovation.” However, advancing beyond the basic KM activities of capturing, storing, and reusing knowledge to realize continual innovation is rare.  Continual innovation requires careful design of a KM environment with sufficient autonomy.*
 
Because of KM’s transformative nature and interconnection with innovation, several innovation management frameworks should be considered when housing KM.  Among the Innovation Management literature on structuring innovation environments, Harvard Professor Clayton Christensen’s model stands out as a good starting point for KM practitioners to consider how to structure KM environments.  As Christensen lays out in his book, “The Innovators Solution,” when structuring an environment for a transformative innovation, one must consider how easily the activities involved fit in with an organization’s existing work and workflows.  In companies where KM is more difficult to implement across organizational boundaries, Christensen’s matrix would suggest that a more autonomous environment is required.
 
Further insight into the concept of structuring KM environments can be gained by considering Dartmouth Professors Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble’s framework for designing innovation environments based on size and scope of the KM project as described in the book “Beyond the Idea.”  The authors offer valuable best practices and lessons learned in structuring innovation environments that are directly applicable to housing KM programs in appropriate environments.
 
A full discussion of the specifications for forming (or reforming) KM environments is beyond the scope of this short blog.  However, it is my hope that KM practitioners will draw helpful analogies from the neighboring disciplines of BPM and PM, as well as from KM’s “child” discipline, Innovation Management.  Whether a KM program is housed in a “KM Center of Excellence (KMCoE), or “Office of Knowledge Management,” KM practitioners, will achieve greater success when the governance and environment for KM is carefully designed.
 
*Additional Resources:
 
For further reading on Business Process Management and Project Managment best practices for structuring environments, refer to “Building Project Management Centers of Excellence” by Dennis Bolles and “The Ultimate Guide to Business Process Management” by Theodore Panagacos.
 
For further reading on KM’s connection to innovation, read “The Knowledge Creating Company” by Ikujiro Nonaka.
 
For further reading on the difficult transition from KM to innovation, see Ch. 10 in “The Complete Guide to Knowledge Management” by Pasher and Ronan.Rustin Diehl is an attorney and innovation advisor, focused on organizational modeling and training with businesses, private clients, non-profits, and trusts. Rustin Diehl is an attorney and innovation advisor, focused on organizational modeling and training with businesses, private clients, non-profits, and trusts.

by Anne Marie McEwan, CEO of The Smart Work Company, Ltd.

'Change management' and 'knowledge management' are both phrases that make me very uncomfortable. To me, knowledge is personal. Certainly what we think we know is influenced by many things. This might include our own psychological dispositions that limit or enable our beliefs about our capabilities, work environments and contexts that help or hinder us as we seek to understand, and the strength of our commitment to acquire new knowledge. What I think can be influenced are the conditions where new personal and collective knowledge can emerge, and existing knowledge can be put into practice.

What about change management? We know from the last big shift in organising and working practices, when traditional manufacturing adapted to lean, quality and agile approaches that, in the words of one commentator at the time, most businesses failed their way to success. Change, as we all know, is messy. To say it can be managed is, I think, to conceal the complexity of human behaviour.

Human beings are individually complex; we are not static entities. We may well have patterns of characteristics that stay with us through our lives but what we know and believe in adapt continually as we experience life and people. Work process are the outcomes of what people do together. So if we are already complex, relationship dynamics only expands complexity, and that's before we start to take into account increasing levels of social, organisational and technical complexity arising from converging global workplace trends.

Yet despite human relationships being complex and dynamic, organisational rigidity prevails. The pull of the status quo is strong. Can change be managed? And if so, how?

Changing our approach to change

I really like Peter Fry's metaphor of trojan mice:

"Trojan mice are small, well focused changes, which are introduced on an ongoing basis in an inconspicuous way. They are small enough to be understood and owned by all concerned but their effects can be far-reaching. Collectively a few trojan mice will change more than one Trojan horse ever could."

He's in good company. John Hagel and colleagues in their book, The Power of Pull, talk about "small moves, smartly made" as the basis for institutional change. They say:

"These changes will be driven by passionate individuals distributed throughout and even outside the institution, supported by institutional leaders who understand the need for change but who also realize that this wave cannot be imposed from the top down."

And then there's Dave Snowden's "safe-to-fail probes":

"... when dealing with complex systems there is the need for experimentation. Safe-fail Probes are small-scale experiments that approach issues from different angles, in small and safe-to-fail ways, the intent of which is to approach issues in small, contained ways to allow emergent possibilities to become more visible."
Hagel at al. say that "going forward, individuals will increasingly shape institutions rather than vice-versa." I agree with them, which is why the book I wrote is called Smart Working: Creating the Next Wave. What I am suggesting is that people are not prisoners of their work environments, rather they shape them to suit their own purposes - as far as they are able to.

That has always been the case, though. If organisations are slow to change because of the rigidities built into structures and systems, what now makes an increased pace of change more possible? What is now key is that people are connected through the internet to a sort of giant global brain. They can find out who knows what to help them in doing whatever it is they want to do, and they can get emotional support in communities of peers who are trying to do the same thing.

Creating conditions

Let's return to knowledge management. What people need are performance environments and cultures where continuous innovation is integral to everything everyone does. People have a "yearning of learning", desire for social connectivity, and a need for self-determination.

Process innovation philosophies, which I was researching decades ago, matured from a focus on continuous improvement and eliminating waste to a broader focus on continuous innovation - questioning the status quo (Do we still need to do this? If so, how might it be done better or differently?), and building enterprise capability from a philosophy of try-it-and-see experimentation.

So rather than trying to manage knowledge, our changing world demands a rethink. Change does not only have to be of the top down variety. People who are able to lead change and build enterprise capability through an accumulation of small-scale experiments are distributed throughout organisations.

The focus now shifts to managing our own knowledge and putting it into practice. What people now need to develop are digital, networking, political, collaboration and learning skills that will let them access what they need both within and across enterprise boundaries.

To do this, they will need others to act as facilitators, information brokers and curators, coaches, provocateurs and sounding boards. They will also need work cultures that encourage autonomy and experimentation, of course with risk factors and boundaries clearly communicated. How then will the role of Knowledge Manager have to evolve? Over to you!

In our previous post, we discussed the challenge facing the KM team as the nature of knowledge becomes more fluid.  Organizations must use the tools available to their advantage.  Have you considered these tactics?

• Have team members utilize smartphones to promote knowledge transfer.  
• Design applications that allow employees to easily access information, or connect to experts through a simple search
• Create a feed that works in a similar manner as Twitter, with updates on what is occurring in "real time" within the organization, that can be acted upon quickly
• Employ a catalog or subject index accessible by smartphone
• As context becomes more fluid, and as knowledge is more tacit, consider creating a learning environment where those involved can build a massive network of databases comprised of websites, wikis, and thousands of message forums.  This will create a large scale knowledge economy.  Consider ways in which this can create an environment where members are constantly measuring and evaluating their own performance, even if they must build new tools to do so.  By doing this, these communities will be constantly improving.
• Implement a guild structure, which allows for smaller groups which self-organize.  These groups are then responsible for seeking out, testing, filtering, and distributing information within the organization.  Using available tools, such as "Google Hangouts" can allow members from around the world to converse and learn from one another in a social way, especially as there is an increase in tacit knonwledge.  In this way, they can still learn from one another through storytelling, while constantly refining their knowledge.
• Create a type of social-bookmarking system, one where users determine the content, and can add descriptions or comments to the content of others.  This type of system would include information retrievable by tag search, with content that is centrally stored, accessible from any browser, and shareable with others.

These are just a few ideas which can be implemented to more successfully manage knowledge in today's fluid environment.  Contact KM Institute for more information or to register for our training programs.

Katrina (Kate) Pugh is the president of AlignConsulting, the author of Sharing Hidden Know-How, and is on the faculty of Columbia University’s Information and Knowledge Strategy Masters' program.  Kate will present at our KM Solutions Showcase event in September.

In this featured article, Kate describes what is know as the “Knowledge Jam” process. The knowledge jam is centered around an event focused on discovering and capturing knowledge. Knowledge jams are based around an agenda, with one team asking questions of another team which has experience or knowledge. Careful notes are kept during the event, which all participants can see. Following the event, those asking the questions are able to utilize the knowledge which they gained. This is an effective way to transfer knowledge and to capture knowledge which may be more tacit in nature.

Summary: A Knowledge Jam is a 5 step process.  Its centerpiece is the 90-minute "discover/capture" event with a planned agenda, geared to facilitating, asking questions and exploring ideas associated with thorny business problems. The discussions of the Jam are documented live as much as possible, and the participants develop new respect and new connections that are expected to become new business relationships as the Jam ideas are acted upon during the broker and reuse steps.  Click here to see the process.

Before the Knowledge Jam event, the facilitator and sponsor scope out the subject -- something relevant to the business' productivity, revenue, or job satisfaction (such as "how do you run an IT transformation project?"). Next we identify the "originators" (those with experience -- either team or individual), and the "brokers" (who will be asking questions in order apply the knowledge in their unit). These folks may have never met and could be oceans apart, literally and figuratively. In a pre-planning meeting with some of each, we establish a set of sub-topics, or "agenda." The facilitator also does some pre-interviews with both groups to set the stage and set the tone of safety and common curiosity, and to dissipate defensive routines like knowledge-hoarding or "not invented here."

During the 90-minute Knowledge Jam event, the brokers are invited to ask questions of the originators. (In effect, we encourage everyone to ask of each other, and to collectively channel the organization's far-flung insight into new processes, products or services.) The facilitator or appointed scribe types comments in a template (projected on the wall or in WebEx or GotoMeeting), with the original agenda to the left of the comments, and with implications or "best practices to continue" on the right. 

For example, a comment might be, "We established the scope through a series of stakeholder meetings," and another, "But we found out we'd missed a few and had to revise the scope." And then, in the summary column we might say, "Keep the scope statement flexible to incorporate missed viewpoints."  Notes are visible to all participants throughout the session, and the facilitator carefully cultivates an atmosphere of common curiosity -- through openness, diversity of perspectives, and dialogue.  Ultimately the rich conversation back and forth makes the ideas more practical and (re)contextualized and helps to reduce the time to market.

After the Knowledge Jam event, brokers translate the (cleaned up) notes into their process, product or service design. This is a critical differentiator relative to other knowledge-capture processes. Knowledge Jam drives toward action, and leverages the connection between the brokers and originators. Brokers tend to feel it's safe go back to originators to deepen the discussion and to invite the originators into the design process.

Join us at the KM Solutions Showcase - September 11-12 - to learn more about the Knowledge Jam and other KM topics!