In today’s highly competitive and agile business landscape, organizational knowledge has been recognized as a key component in the organization’s quest to foster innovation and stay relevant and successful.  

Organizations put a lot of effort into managing their data and knowledge, but they often overlook the importance of capturing #tacit knowledge. Tacit knowledge is the kind of knowledge that is not easily written down or documented because it is implicit and subconscious hence difficult to capture through traditional KM strategies. This knowledge is often gained through experience and is crucial for organizations to succeed.

#Creativity can be the best tool in a #KM’s arsenal to capture this gold mine of knowledge. Tacit knowledge is bound to peoples’ experiences, intuition, insights, expertise, and personal conclusions, and cannot be transferred through standard written documentation and knowledge assets.

Here are some of the creative ideas you can apply to your KM framework to capture, externalize, and leverage this powerful innovation tool.

Storytelling: Encourage individuals to share stories or anecdotes about their experiences, challenges, and successes. Through storytelling, tacit knowledge can be conveyed in a narrative form that makes it easier for others to understand and internalize.

Shadowing and Observation: Allow individuals to shadow or observe experts in action. By observing how experts perform tasks, make decisions, and solve problems, others can pick up on the tacit knowledge embedded in their actions and behaviours.

Mentoring and Coaching: Establish mentorship or coaching programs where experienced individuals transfer their tacit knowledge to less experienced individuals through one-on-one interactions. This can include informal conversations, guidance sessions, and feedback exchanges.

Project Debriefs and Post-Mortems: Conduct structured debriefs or post-mortem sessions at the end of projects or initiatives. Encourage team members to share their experiences, identify what worked well and what didn’t, and extract tacit knowledge from their collective insights.
Knowledge Harvesting Workshops: Organize workshops specifically aimed at capturing tacit knowledge from subject matter experts. Use techniques such as brainstorming, mind mapping, and affinity diagramming to extract insights and experiences from participants.

Nurture Community of Practices (CoPs): The foundation of the CoPs is to connect people encouraging conversation to build and share knowledge. The moderators should periodically reach out to its members to harvest and tag knowledge leading to its dissemination across borders and different organization levels.

Set up exhaustive exit interviews: These are no longer the times when an can employee join an organization straight out of college and work till retirement. When a company loses its employees, it also loses the accompanying knowledge and experience. The need is to have an exhaustive exit strategy in place where outgoing people capture their experiences, feedback, contacts, insights, and directories of work that can be passed on to the replacing employee to get a head start.

Succession Planning: Develop robust succession planning strategies to identify and groom potential successors for key roles. This helps ensure a smooth transition of tacit knowledge when experienced employees retire or leave the organization.

Technology Solutions: Explore the use of technology, such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, to capture and analyze tacit knowledge. This can include tools for sentiment analysis, expertise location, and knowledge mapping.

Gamification: Gamify the process of knowledge capture by turning it into a game or competition. For example, create challenges or quizzes that require participants to demonstrate their tacit knowledge in a fun and engaging manner.

The benefits of capturing tacit knowledge extend beyond mere knowledge sharing for time and effort saving. It catalyses fostering collaboration, enhancing decision-making, and driving organizational learning. So organizations must design a strategy for its retention and dissemination. These creative approaches can help organizations effectively capture and leverage tacit knowledge, enabling continuous learning and innovation.

There is no innovation without creative ideas, would you agree? I am sure all of us agree that we have built creative designs in our childhood and learnt from others teaming to create art forms that were unique, just like us. Growing up we found creativity in fun things, and we enjoyed interacting with likeminded beings based on our human-centric abilities, which ensured we were motivated. On the contrary, our behaviors were also conditioned to rule-based practices which society 'norming' instituted. So, we lost creativity to innovate or did we not?

Today, the question more relevant to innovation is 'how does
one develop creativity?' We can improve our creativity through coming together and engaging in stimulating creative abilities. This leads to innovation as we train ourselves to have common beliefs and come together in the creation of new relationships, that seemed unconnected before, and now create knowledge components. So, can knowledge management foster innovation?

Today, there are many experts who relate Creative KM to Technology, and this has resulted in practices such as Gamification, that is related to incentivizing users to contribute their critical knowledge in return for reward and recognition. This in-turn has ensures a culture setting where teams come forward to contribute their critical knowledge. Then where is the problem?  We need to ensure there is a sustainable advantage in the long-term merits and combining it with people practices. Let us explore what some of them are...

In the above graphic are few proven methods

• KM Cricket is a teaming concept where project-based teams working for a client come together and practice bi-weekly a fun-based activity that encourages sharing knowledge that is common to both but practiced differently. It is a simple Q&A session where there are two teams, and each gets to ask the other frequent questions around a technology, product, or customer that associates both teams to learn from each other. This culture building technique establishes trust and makes it a 'win-win' to move from internal awareness to building a learning capacity.
• A KM Cafe is a wonderful way to move towards building relationships and ensure we build people's motivation to come together to learn from each other, share their experiences, and finally relate to each other. The outcome of the exercise is to synthesize informal learnings helping the individual advance from their own trust-based corner to coming together in creative workspaces to co-innovate.
• KM Folklore stories are leaders speaking about their own journeys and sharing their motivations, fears, behaviors, and a lot more that helped them advance. It helps the audience to be encouraged and most of the times through these 'folklore stories' makes leaders more approachable to ensure better teaming.
• Mind Maps are a wonderful way to get teams together and help them ideate around key organization themes such as achieving business excellence, building customer loyalty, improving revenue and many other organizational tenets. It can also be linked with tools that teams are using like 'idea portals', 'sprint boards' and other agile practices to ensure an innovation journey as individual teams.
• Chat Bots are AI based engines that users find more personalized. If one can link this to Communities of Practice and ensure there are experts who are also documenting the questions that the user's rate as Satisfactory or below, then this knowledge base becomes a rich source of innovation.

If we focus on the teaming aspect at a project and organizational level we can encourage culture building. There is a still the individual need of motivating users to align to the Innovation Strategy and ensure their intrinsic need is met, and this is where we need to create 'the reading library of km' - a space for users to have access to exploring project briefs, lessons learnt, best practices and most important, access to work alongside experts to hone their skills.

In-Summary: Innovation starts with Creative KM as it helps innovators come together and develop organization culture. However, it is important we recognize that it begins with not just the right 'Toolsets' but has to be combined with the right 'Mindsets' for individuals to come together as teams in sense-making to learn and co-innovate. Finally, we need to elevate the right 'Skillsets' and ensure users feel motivates, have fun and practice Creative KM that help in achieving the organization Innovation Strategy. 

The Knowledge Management Systems—Requirements, ISO 30401 (shortened to, ISO KM Standard) was published in 2018 and provides guidelines for organizations to develop a management system to promote and enable value-creation through knowledge. As such, it offers definitions and a high-level framework and process for this purpose. It is meant to be used in any organization, and in any industry or sector, which makes it a good place to start when explaining how Radical KM fits within and enhances traditional KM.

There are four areas I will focus on: the definition of KM, the spectrum of knowledge, the knowledge development lifecycle, and knowledge management culture.

Starting with the ISO KM definition, which defines KM as a discipline focused on the ways organizations create and use knowledge that and says KM is a holistic approach to improving learning and effectiveness. The ISO Standard notes that knowledge is created by people and is intangible and complex. Radical KM supports and agrees with this definition in that what is added in Radical KM is creativity, which is about helping organizations and people create knowledge and to thrive in our VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous) world. Radical KM supports breaking down silos and looking at things differently, questioning the status quo. Radical KM is definitely a holistic approach to doing that in that because it includes creativity, not just analytics and processes. It supports people because creativity is a human characteristic, helping people be who they are and facilitating people bringing their whole selves to work to be both creative and analytical.

Moving on from the definition of KM, the ISO KM Standard also references a spectrum of knowledge that starts from knowledge that is a tacit to the point that the individual isn't aware of knowing it, ranging all the way to the other end where it's documented, codified, and/or structured. Radical KM plays a role in the tacit knowledge end of the spectrum because it helps access it and make it explicit or at least move it along the continuum towards being more tacit allowing people to make new connections and putting the pieces they have together in a new or different way. Radical KM plays less of a role in codified and structured knowledge, although it can have a role there too, depending on what the purpose is.

Looking at the knowledge development lifecycle that ISO sets out, starting from knowledge development where knowledge is created, moving through consolidation, retaining, sharing, adopting, applying, and ultimately retiring. Radical KM plays a role most clearly in the development through the use of creative methods to inspire and create new knowledge, however, it can also play a role in sharing, adopting, and applying knowledge as it asks people to be curious and open-minded and to adopt through learning and decision making. Radical KM through the utilization of creativity thus makes the knowledge development lifecycle more holistic and complete.

Finally, the area where Radical KM potentially has the most significant role is KM Culture. There are many components of KM Culture, elaborated in the ISO KM standard including helping people be more open, more curious, feeling more empowered, helping them develop autonomy, and curiosity and being open to collaboration as well as helping them learn continuously and recognize the value of knowledge. The art-based interventions envisioned in Radical KM play a role in all these behaviours and helps build trust and respect which is also key to having a KM Culture.

In conclusion, through the addition of creativity, specifically arts-based interventions, Radical KM makes traditional knowledge management a balanced, integrated, sustainable whole, ready to meet the challenges of the 21st century.

Note: a more expansive version of this discussion will be published in the June 2022 edition of Business Information Review.

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Leadership is never easy. It often requires you to strike the delicate and difficult balance between coaching, mentoring, teaching, and commanding. But while it is impossible to be all things to all people, there are strategies that effective leaders can use to build a cohesive, harmonious, and high-functioning team.

Among the most promising of these approaches to leadership is the conversational leadership style. Conversational leadership has been shown
to facilitate a more open, successful, and supportive working environment.

But conversational leadership isn’t just for managers and executives. Teaching conversational leadership skills to employees at all levels can maximize the benefits of this approach, making for a happier and higher-performing team!

What is Conversational Leadership?

As the name suggests, a conversational leadership approach prioritizes rich and ongoing communication at all levels and across all job functions.

The conversational leader is approachable and receptive. They not only accept feedback, but they embrace and, indeed, require it, even when that feedback may not necessarily be what the leader wants or expects to hear.

There is, moreover, a significant element of relationship management in conversational leadership. An effective conversational leader remains ever curious, ever invested, not just in the work, but in the workers. The conversational leader pursues bottom-up communications, devoting time and effort to engaging with and learning about employees at all levels.

The stronger the relationship between the leader and their team, after all, the more likely workers at even the most junior levels will be to share hard truths or promising insights when they arise.

For example, in a workplace that emphasizes conversational leadership, an employee who notices that there has been an unusual uptick in the number of customer complaints regarding a specific product and issue, then the subordinate, who may be a lower-level customer service representative, for instance, should feel comfortable in alerting her superiors to a potential product issue. This kind of frequent and timely knowledge-sharing can help to ensure that problems can be recognized and resolved before they can escalate into a full-blown crisis.

Teaching Conversational Leadership

As beneficial as this approach to leadership may be when practiced at the management level, it may be even more effective when such an approach is diffused throughout the organization, with employees at all levels engaging with colleagues in the conversational style.

Conversational leadership, after all, is principally concerned with the production and sharing of knowledge. But when that knowledge is traveling in two directions only, between the leader and their employees, you miss out on invaluable opportunities both for developing productive relationships between team members and for driving communication and knowledge-sharing across the organization, both vertically and horizontally.

This diffusion of knowledge and, in particular, the prioritization of bottom-up communication is critical to breaking down potentially destructive “barriers to knowledge sharing.” Such barriers, for instance, can easily emerge when subordinate employees feel that they cannot or should not share their feedback with senior colleagues. When the lines of communication are open, transparent, and safe, as in the conversational style, then knowledge production and sharing will be optimized and that, in the end, will make for a far more effective workforce.

For instance, in a conversational workplace, employees are less likely to fear recrimination or retribution for sharing information that, for instance, falls short of projections or flouts stated expectations. This is also important to avoid group-think insofar as a conversational approach allows for, accommodates, and, indeed, even requires dissent and heterodoxy. This could involve, for example, the presentation of data and information that decision-makers and stakeholders might consider “negative” or of ideas that defy, resist, or interrogate the consensus.

Effects on Individual Performance

In addition to the positive impacts of conversational leadership on internal communication and knowledge-building, the approach also has been shown to galvanize individual performance. For instance, conversational leadership, above all, is about cultivating conscious awareness, awareness of oneself, one’s environment, and, especially, of one’s colleagues. This involves both active listening and alert mindfulness.

And when you and your team members are always listening, always engaged, then it’s very difficult to miss nascent problems or to let important opportunities slip by.

Conversational Leadership and Employee Development

The perks of teaching your employees to use conversational leadership aren’t just institutional, however. Teaching the approach can be an excellent strategy for employee development. This is particularly true for team members who may have difficulties with social interactions or who may even be experiencing social anxiety. As reticent employees learn and develop new social skills, they may also discover aptitudes for leadership that they never knew they possessed.

Similarly, employees who already possess a faculty for the conversational style may be encouraged to build their skillsets even further. For example, if you identify a natural-born conversational leader, you may encourage them to pursue additional training, advanced certification, or even an executive Master of Business Administration (MBA) degree.

That means that, through both teaching and role-modeling, you will be building teams of leaders, mentors, facilitators, and collaborators. And there are few better ways to cultivate a happy, harmonious, and united team than that!

The Takeaway

The conversational leadership style is highly effective in driving productive communication between leaders and their employees. This is particularly true when the bottom-up approach to communication is prioritized, enabling employees at all levels to offer their insights and share their concerns. However, even more important than the conversational approach between leaders and team members is the value of teaching the style to employees at all organizational levels. Through the teaching of the conversational leadership approach, you can not only support and enhance individual employee performance, but you can also facilitate stellar relationships between employees. At the same time, you will cultivate a workplace environment that optimizes the production and sharing of knowledge. And all this, in the end, makes for more effective, more cohesive, and more satisfied teams.

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Note: Next Creative KM Certification class is coming up: Oct 16, 18, 23 and 25, 2023 (half days, 9-1 EST).  Based on the "Radical KM" methodology and taught by the author of the program, Stephanie Barnes. Details here...

Radical KM seeks to make knowledge management take a strategic view of knowledge work from the perspective of the knowledge worker. Sustainability comes from making space for creativity in our organisations, so that they are not just analytical, rational, and process-oriented factories, but creative, and innovative ecosystems. 

The value of knowledge management in the 21st century comes from learning, not from the databases and the documents of the 20th century, but from the experience of learning. It is necessary for knowledge management to take a more active role and to ask: what are the desired sustainable behaviours and is there a group of people who consistently exhibit many of them that we can learn from? How do we focus less on databases and documents and more on continuous learning?

Radical KM seeks answer these questions by putting creativity into our organisations, to make them whole, to help the people within them thrive in the times we live in: volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous times.

Our organisations have focused on the division of labour, the compartmentalisation of knowledge, and treating knowledge work like it is part of a production line. Anchoring our organisations in these industrial-age paradigms has left out space for creativity and does not suit desired knowledge-age requirements. People are not machines, knowledge work requires different behaviours to support it and be successful, it requires the behaviours that have been ignored in favour of efficiency and effectiveness. Making space for creativity is critical to our success in the 21st century and beyond.

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