5 Helpful Tips: To Avoid Searching For Knowledge In The Same Old Places

How can you ensure that the knowledge you are getting is enabling you to successfully respond to the challenges of today and tomorrow?

A dilemma that I imagine many of us deal with is how to avoid coming up with yesterday's solutions to deal with today's challenges. There is certainly a tendency to build our solution to today's challenges on knowledge and approaches developed to deal with past situations. How can we position ourselves to take a forward-looking view of challenges and seek out contemporary knowledge?

In organizations, there are many new challenges that cannot be met with yesterday's solutions. New knowledge is required to be obtained and used. For example, work in the interactive world of Enterprise 2.0 will be different from work in the past. It will be important to develop internal organizational knowledge about Enterprise 2.0 and create ways of applying this knowledge congruent with our contemporary business models.

In the world of intelligence, national defense, foreign policy and homeland security, solutions that worked for challenges in the pre-9/11 "cold war" world need to be significantly updated for the post 9/11 "post-cold war" world. This can be gleaned by reading the "9/11 Report." Yesterday's solutions based on old types of knowledge may be more harmful than helpful.

Equipping ourselves to succeed in gathering knowledge to respond to the challenges of today is a complex and time-consuming endeavor. Here are five things you can do in your organization to respond to challenges in new ways.

1. Listen with discipline and listen serendipitously.

Usually when we listen with discipline we are pursuing answers to questions that we have asked many times in the past. Our discipline enables us to focus. We can be successful in obtaining helpful answers. However, the knowledge we gain may still be within the confines of our previous perspectives. In addition to this approach, we also need to listen serendipitously so as to enlarge our perspective outside of our well-trodden paths of people, channels and boundaries. By this I mean, we can listen and see more broadly by situating ourselves in a real or virtual environment and following our curiosity to attend to a larger sphere of data and knowledge. We can be open to diverse knowledge from various sources. This enables our brains to perform the natural task of making sense from a larger, systemic perspective. At some point, new connections will appear and new lines of inquiry will open up. We can then pursue these new lines of inquiry using our disciplined way of listening to gather knowledge.

2. Build competencies into your organization now to create a foundation for responding to future trends.

Though none of us has a crystal ball, we can still identify many new trends in our own and related spheres that are likely to impact our work and our success in the future. In this regard, building a foundation of new knowledge is critical for enabling us to be able to absorb future new knowledge and use it effectively. The bottom line is to create a foundation of knowledge in the organization that broadly encompasses the identified trend in terms of diversity of perspectives relating to that trend.

For example, we identified Al-Qaeda as the perpetrator of the first World Trade Center bombing during the Clinton Administration. At that time, a trend could have been identified of terrorists whose native language was Arabic. Building a foundation of knowledge in the form of Arabic language and culture competencies within various intelligence gathering organizations would have been timely and helpful in enabling us to hear and make sense of new signals in the future such as those leading up to 9/11.

What was the case then is likely the case now. More Arabic language and culture skills and knowledge within these various organizations enables more accurate knowledge to be gathered, absorbed and understood in the future. The more such internal knowledge and competencies exist, the better these organizations can be at identifying other trends and additional competencies needed in the future. Once the decision is made to develop internal knowledge, the question becomes how best to give the organization access to such knowledge.

As another example, in a variety of businesses now, we can surmise that having competencies to effectively utilize interactive web technologies will be a critical part of the future. Having such competencies within the organization will make the organization better able to further identify technological trends and uses and develop value-adding applications of this technology in the organization.

In my previous work with British Petroleum in deploying digital technologies, BP had internal competencies which enabled them to develop in-house some very sophisticated technologies to use in monitoring production on off-shore oil platforms. This is a significant approach for improving productivity while reducing cost and BP as a result was in a good position to compete in this regard using their advanced technology. An organization lacking this internal capacity might easily miss the requisite knowledge in the environment and let such opportunities to use these new technologies go right by.

3. Build diverse knowledge into formal and informal processes.

There are a variety of ways to ensure that needed knowledge is available to an organization and is analyzed to produce high quality results. I break these out into three modes of operating.

Hiring and Training

The traditional mode is to build needed knowledge into the formal organization by hiring or training people to have the critical knowledge. This knowledge and the knowledge sources are built directly into the work processes. In the homeland security example, employees with Arabic language and cultural knowledge could work directly in relevant processes to contribute to on-the-spot intelligence gathering and analysis. In the BP example, people with software development experience in developing virtuality in applications would be hired into the organization, would become familiar with production and cost challenges and would then participate in developing and implementing products that respond to these challenges. My belief is that this is the most sure way of creating a strong organizational capacity to absorb future related knowledge.

Partnering and Contracting

Another mode developed over the last ten to fifteen years is to partner and contract with external knowledge resources and integrate these with the work processes. This is also a more formal approach and if designed well results in an expanded, integrated value chain. The challenge here is to ensure that there are close working relationships and bridges across cultures enabling internal organizational elements to "hear" and use the new knowledge. The value is decreased to the extent that new knowledge is just thrown over the wall or segregated to the contractor silo.

Interactive Media and Web Technologies

The third option is to engage with external knowledge sources via media and interactive web technologies to access and analyze new knowledge. Media can include video conferences. Interactive web technologies, now called Enterprise 2.0 can include blogging, micro blogging, social networking and wikis. The challenge here is to ensure that adequate trust exists among external sources and internal organizational elements. It is also important that internal elements be able to "hear" and use the new knowledge.

These Enterprise 2.0 technologies can be used in a formal manner to support partnerships and contractual relationships with external parties.  They also have an important use in facilitating more informal, serendipitous collaboration with knowledge sources internal and external to the organization. In this vein, they can be used as a basis for large-scale collaboration.

4. Create the smooth flow of knowledge across internal networks in place of the rigid silos of the past

One of the key reasons why we may get the same old knowledge from the same old places is that our access to new knowledge may be constrained. This reaches tragic proportions when that knowledge actually exists within our organization. This tragic, frozen state of status quo can result from the existence of rigid structures developed to solve a problem some time in the long distant past and never changed. It can result because of jealousy over turf, rigid views of hierarchy, ego issues, differing or conflicting missions, differences in basic organization culture and assumptions and lack of trust born of all of these things. The result of these factors is that knowledge does not get shared and if shared is discounted.

The classic and most tragic example is the knowledge that someone in the FBI-intelligence gathering community had with regard to foreigners taking flying lessons on large planes prior to 9/11. That information though reported never made it to the necessary people who could act on the information.

It should be clear by now, both in the business and government community that such silos that lock in knowledge and foster the continual re-use of old knowledge at the expense of hearing new knowledge are detrimental to the welfare of the business and government organizations and their customers and citizen constituents.

The challenge is to embark upon change efforts that replace the frozen structures of the past with structures and approaches that are conducive to achieving current business and government goals. One can create formal value-chains that ensure that necessary knowledge does flow as part of the work embodied in that value chain. Different reporting relationships, configurations of employees and different incentives will be needed to reinforce the newer ways of doing business. The right to share as a governing assumption will have to replace the right to know or right to secrecy within the organization. Incentives will have to be provided to support the sharing of knowledge. The organization as a whole will need to value diversity of thought as a balance to uniformity of thought. New modes of collaboration are needed in which diverse perspectives are sought, valued and become part of the analysis in solving problems.

5. Take an expansive view of knowledge gathering using Enterprise 2.0.

Interactive, Enterprise 2.0 tools and approaches can play a major role in supporting the search for new, diverse knowledge and for the further development of this knowledge. Enterprise 2.0 can support the gathering of knowledge over a small or wide group of participants. It enables diversity of perspectives to be brought into the mix - some specifically sought out, others not even imagined.

Enterprise 2.0 supports the flow of knowledge by synchronous and asynchronous opportunities for collaboration via blogs, wikis, social networking, and IM. It supports the building of trust via personal profiles and micro-blogging (Twitter). '

Enterprise 2.0 can be used by formally building it into the work process and mandating its use or by incentivizing its use. It can be used informally in the organization or by the organization and its environment. It can be used to allow for wide-spread, grass-roots knowledge and ideas to bubble up and attain critical mass.

Enterprise 2.0 allows for mass collaboration among a vast number of people as in the Linux development efforts or as in Wikipedia or allow for the generation of ideas in a given business as in the recently reported use at Best Buy in Don Tapscott's new book, "Grown Up Digital" where younger employees used a wiki to generate helpful ideas for the organization. Enterprise 2.0 allows for the serendipity which enables new ideas to be surfaced and built on which can then progress to reaching critical mass.

Final Comment

I am indebted to the question raised about serendipity by Gil Yehudaon his blog: "Do we need to turn serendipity into a workflow process or do we need to include serendipity into our existing processes?"  I am also indebted to discussions of serendipity by Bertrand Duperrin in his blog.

I hope all of you who are reading this blog will add your ideas. I am particularly interested in examples of how you have built Enterprise 2.0 into your work processes as a means of enhancing the gathering, analysis and use of knowledge.

 

 

 

Comments

[Barry Camson]

Stacy you raise a number of good points in your comment. You talk about capturing tacit knowledge when people leave an organization. There is an ongoing conversation about this though there are far too many situations where this is not done. You add what I see as a less discussed point which is capturing knowledge and sharing knowledge during the onboarding process. Certainly the organization shares knowledge, but your comment raises the issue of whether there should be knowledge capture from the person joining the organization as part of the onboarding process? I am curious as to your thoughts on this?

[Stacy Goodman]

I really like the elements of your post that relate to imbedding knowledge capture and knowledge sharing into talent processes like - onboarding and training. One of the things I find fascinating about KM is that to truly make it work within an organization it must be inextricably linked to the talent management model (for incoming employees, in existing processes and when dealing with outgoing employees who are taking all the tacit knowledge with them) to become a part of the culture.