For years, it has been proven that Storytelling helps audiences connect with a Brand. Storytelling has helped products connect with diverse audiences by enabling them to emotionally connect and become loyalists. Leaders have used Business Storytelling to Humanize a Business and increase profits, which in turn helps establish the values and messaging, creating a sustainable business model. Now, how can Knowledge Management learn from Business Storytelling and if we are already using it effectively, do we identify with some of its elements?  Let’s find out.

There are 5 elements of an Effective Business Storytelling framework; let's correlate these to our 5-C KM Roadmap.

Circumstances (Communication Strategy)

Each conversation in KM can be a different story, and as Knowledge Managers we engage with Leaders, Delivery Teams, and New Hires with have different knowledge needs but fail to recognize these as different plots. Each user has a very different circumstance on how KM can impact their need. Many times as Knowledge Managers we fail to go deep and want to go wide, and rely on our proven KM framework to deliver results for our teams and report ways KM is benefiting our communities. However, the result is our users fail to acknowledge how KM is enabling them, as they have not been engaged by us as KM Professionals. Is having a strong Communication Strategy the key?  Let’s find out more from KMI Blogger Amanda Winstead, who calls out 5 ways of Building effective Knowledge Management through Communication, to ensure we can deliver improved outcomes.  The key takeaway is to contextualize knowledge and encourage more open dialogue, which encourages networks to make people help each other and who are passionate to share their Critical Knowledge.

Curiosity (Critical Knowledge)

Curiosity is the most important element of Storytelling. Today, users want instant gratification and often it's the realm of the unknown as the need and the outcome are different. So, as Knowledge Managers how are we to develop these users into believers? We can definitely start with defining what is Critical Knowledge and speak to Leaders and Experts, and engage our teams to ensure we are defining it correctly. The larger question is how do users get access to this knowledge and acknowledge that it’s truly benefiting them and their KM Needs? This is where Communities of Practice, Lessons Learned Practices and other proven techniques help engage users and influence behaviours so users accept these proven methods each time they are looking for something.

While there are a host of KM Tools, Mind-Mapping is a great tool to understand the diverse user personas and reasons impacting KM Adoption. It’s important that we don’t exclude KM Teams, Leaders and IT/HR teams enabling in sharing Critical Knowledge.  Below is a simple graphic of Play-in-Action that is a great starting point to develop a Content Strategy.

Characters (Content Strategy)

Every Story has to have relatable Characters. Often, if a user looking for something they know in their subconscious mind then they form a Connection that helps them want to participate in the experience. 
Often Knowledge Management is narrowed down to just Collecting Content and building a heavy Knowledge Management systemic processes to keep it up to date. We fail to go beyond and KM is embedded in the organizational practices and slowly begins to demonstrate tangible value and align to what matters to the business. We need to draw a fine balance and be seen as People Leaders, and then make systemic approaches work to Collect Knowledge that can be aligned to our Content Strategy. It’s also important to not reinvent KM Best Practices and acknowledge teams who are practising KM in different ways that the methods or tools we are suggesting.

Conversations (Culture)

A story should be capable to evoke emotions and your audience will Share-It.  Imagine if our user community shares the impact that KM has enabled through expanding organizational networks. As Knowledge Managers, we should practice Conversational Leadership and ensure KM is aligned to the Culture Setting of the organization. We should shift our own behaviours from providing answers to developing systemic thinking to enable our leaders to explore critical issues and encourage our teams to participate and ask more questions. KM Tools/Systems have to be seen as Collaborative Social Technologies that facilitate this process and cannot be done away with. The ultimate goal is to guide collective intelligence towards effective action, ensuring capacity development of leaders to believe in KM as a platform to drive change.

Conflicts (Change Management Strategy)

A Story is incomplete without a Conflict that encourages the audience to think of possible options to solve the plot. Many times leaders fail to acknowledge KM and it’s seen as an overhead many strategic KM initiatives fail. It’s important as leaders / KM practitioners that we continue to align and capture KM Success Stories and align them to Organizational Metrics and make these visible. These Knowledge Nuggets will help our community of users see value and invest in showcasing how KM is a value-enabler within their teams. The goal is to go enterprise-wide but most initiatives fail as they fail to create unique business cases that KM can resolve. 

In –Summary to Put it all Together

People seek our great stories as much as food and water. Leaders for years have used Business Storytelling to improve their narrative on how they augment business value to organizational performance. As Knowledge Managers we enable them through our Conversations and support embeds a Cultural shift mind-set. It’s often that no two Circumstances are the same, and this is where the disconnect happens as the leaders see Conflict with KM and hence don’t develop the believers' mindset to support the KM team. It is during these times that an effective Change Management Strategy has to be enabled where we capture Knowledge Nuggets and share with our user community, resulting in Success Stories being showcased linked to organization performance.

Finally, as we align to KM Maturity and there is acceptance, we as Knowledge Managers need to ensure we continue to define user personas and don’t limit it to discounting our known experiences for developing Critical Knowledge. It’s important we are seen as important Characters and create avenues to recognize KM practices that are enabling teams to share passionately and practice continuous learning. It’s important we bring our own Curiosity to each Conversation and indulge our community to develop organizational ethos of being Conversational Leaders and enable teams to ask critical questions and aid in improving the collective intelligence. The final goal is to help our leaders in Capacity Development helping our leaders to believe in KM as an enabler for Change,

If you are embarking on a Knowledge Management journey then it is important to set it up for success from the beginning. Here are my 7 key components for a successful Knowledge Management strategy. 

Vision / Scope / Strategic principles

Defining the organisation's vision for Knowledge Management is an essential first step. Make sure it is linked to the organisation's strategy and helps tell the story of where it wants to head with Knowledge Management. A clear scope and boundaries regarding what is in/out of the KM Strategy are also vital. It's also essential to agree on KM Strategic principles or guidelines that the KM program team and stakeholders will adhere to from the outset. 

• Where - Vision helps set the KM destination,
• What - Scope determines what will be achieved. 
• How - Principles are the rules to follow to get there successfully.

For a successful strategy, you will need to define the current state, the ideal future state (based on the vision) and the tasks involved to get to that future state for the six components below.

Content

Content will likely be the most time-consuming component and critical to the success of any KM strategy. You'll often hear "Content is King" in many Knowledge Management industry forums, and from what i have seen on all my KM deployments, I agree - Content is indeed King. 

Content will need to be Identified, Analysed, and Prioritised. Editorial standards will need to be defined and agreed. Taxonomy approach defined. Then comes the task of creating and curating content in a way that works for the frontline users and customers and managing it successfully on an ongoing basis.

People 

It's crucial to identify all the critical stakeholders in a successful KM strategy and be clear about the roles and responsibilities of each and how they influence the overall strategy. Here are some examples: -

• Customers and Customer-Facing users
• Senior Stakeholders and Decision Makers
• Knowledge Champions
• KM Manager and Team
• Knowledge Architect
• Approvers (Legal, Compliance, Regulators, Product owners, Process owners etc.)
• Key content collaborators and SMEs
• External Vendors
• Technology teams (IT, Digital, Developers, UX designers)
• Relevant business stakeholders (HR, Training, Back office, Finance etc.)

It's also essential to map the current organisational structure for these stakeholders and highlight opportunities to improve in line with the broader KM strategy

Technology

Knowledge Management initiatives are often seen as IT or Technology implementations, which they are not. Technology is an enabler for the other components of KM to be successful. Technology can be a headache, so it is essential to take a step back and define requirements as to what it is you want from technology to help you achieve your vision. Assess your organisation's existing technology against your needs to highlight any opportunities. For example, what already exists in the organisation to support the end users accessing knowledge? What exists to support the curation, creation, and lifecycle management of knowledge?

Engage your relevant technical stakeholders in this process to ensure buy-in to the strategy and ensure the KM strategy aligns with the internal IT strategy.

If necessary, engage with the relevant vendors (existing and new) to talk through your requirements and see what they can offer.

Its always useful to attend industry events and participate in Knowledge Management forums to keep up to date. 

Process

Analyse existing processes to identify what's working well and what needs improvement. When going through this process, it is often easier to build KM practices into existing processes rather than creating new methods from scratch. Some process examples could be: -

• How is the end-to-end content lifecycle managed? 
• Where does content originate? 
• How is it captured? 
• How is it reviewed and validated? 
• How does it get published to the end user?
• Is there an end-user feedback loop?
• How are end users trained on using knowledge?
• How are users notified of knowledge updates?
• How is knowledge circulated and shared?
• What is the continuous improvement process to review, improve or remove content?
• What are the ongoing Engagement and adoption activities?
• How is the KM team trained and coached in their roles?  
• How do you onboard new starters (identified in the people section) on the KM culture?

Governance

Governance is needed to ensure that the KM strategy is on track and delivered as planned. For example, there could be a steering committee of various stakeholders to make critical decisions (in line with the strategic principles) to ensure the strategy is delivering value. Ongoing Senior stakeholder engagement and buy-in are crucial to the continuing success of KM, and the overall Governance structure must make sure this happens.

Consider creating a KM centre of excellence within the organisation, focussed on sharing best practice and keeping up to date with the latest KM industry trends around Content, Technology and Business process.

Metrics and Benefits

Metrics and benefits often get overlooked, but very important to keep on track against the broader KM Strategy and show the value it is delivering. Define the key metrics for your KM implementation and how you can measure against them. This may combine initial benefits against a business case and ongoing BAU KM metrics.

Culture 

Culture is far less tangible than the other KM Strategy components. However, it is vital to assess the existing Culture within an organisation. For example, are people motivated to share knowledge and participate in knowledge exchange sessions? Do people feel like they can freely challenge and give feedback on knowledge? Is there a problem with knowledge hoarding amongst more experienced employees? Ultimately you want the organisation to move to an open knowledge-sharing and knowledge-management evangelist culture. 

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The Challenge

Knowledge is power but in reality, enterprises are knowledge-challenged with employees spending 20% or more of their time, looking for it to do their day-to-day jobs. Nowhere is the knowledge challenge more acute than in the customer contact center.

• Customers say that the lack of agent knowledgeability is the #1 impediment to getting good service (Source: Forrester survey).
• Contact center agents point to the same knowledge challenge with their tools being the biggest barrier to delivering good service (Source: eGain survey).

Training can help but it is not cheap, with US companies spending $92.3B in 2021 (Source: Training Magazine). Here is why the agent knowledge problem has become more daunting.

• Traditional training programs have been disrupted by the pandemic and hybrid work models, with 75% of agents still working remote. These agents have no next cube to walk over to for answers.
• Humans retain only 25% of new information they learn just after two days, according to the forgetting curve theory of Hermann Ebbinghaus. In fact, research by the University of Waterloo found that it is a mere 2-3% after 30 days!
• Today’s contact center agents are millennials and Gen Z with short attention spans—12 and 8 seconds respectively (Source: Sparks and Honey). They would rather just learn on the job.
• Agent attrition continues to be very high. This compounds the training challenge since L&D organizations have to start from Ground Zero with a constantly recurring stream of new agents.
• It is hard to teach situational knowhow, i.e., understand and solve a customer problem or provide them advice, based on a specific situation. This knowhow tends to be more tacit, requiring a way to guide agents step by step on what to say and do in the course of such customer interactions. Living “guided lives,” where they use GPS devices for driving or robot advisors for financial management, today’s agents are looking for that kind of guidance in their day-to-day work.

The Solution

The answer to addressing this formidable new training challenge is a modern knowledge management (KM) system deployed as a hub that unifies and orchestrates the following building blocks:

• Content management
• Personalization
• Intent inference, powered by ML
• Search methods for findability
• AI reasoning for conversational and process guidance
• Knowledge analytics for optimization

The knowledge hub eliminates silos, while serving as a trusted source of right answers and expertise, delivering them at the point of work, customer interactions, in this case. Leading organizations are already leveraging the hub, transforming the experiences of customers and employees such as:

• Leading telco improved First-Contact Resolution (FCR) by 37%, while reducing training time by 50% across 10,000+ agents and 600 retail stores.
• Health insurance company reduced agent training time by 33% and sustained agent performance even when 2000 of them had to go remote overnight when Covid hit.

With the knowledge hub complementing training, your contact center agents will become super-agents and all your employees will become super-employees!

The Global Knowledge Index helps countries and decision-makers to understand and respond to related transformation and challenges more clearly. For years, organizations have been benchmarked against each other using Maturity Models based on structured policies and processes that are designed to achieve Metrics that cater more to securing leadership sponsorship for running a successful KM Program than actually delighting the user, as the goal is never to begin with the end in mind.  

“You can’t know where you’re going until you know where you’ve been.” - Maya Angelou

If we look at the CX Strategy we can infer how ideally firms should setup KM programs and empower employees and customers to solve complex problems, hence aiding in Innovative practices that contribute to growth.  Let us understand how...

Understand your audience and create user personas

At inception it is a good start to invest in building a Content Management Systems (CMS). With time there would be a pattern of how the same is being used. Users would be motivated to use it more often or show specific reasoning as to why or what is missing. This information is key to understanding some of the on-the-ground challenges and improving on your CMS - turning it into a Customer Experience Management Platform.

To goal is to build user personas that clearly identify who our target audience is and their motivation for using the platform.

Analyze your Business Objectives

KM has to be aligned to the business strategy for it to succeed.  Popular maturity models spell the narrative wrongly and demand that short-wins are important for seeking sponsorship and with this goal in mind leaders design dashboards that are sacrosanct and become de-facto standards, impeding innovation and creativity. 

Reverse-engineer the experience you want to deliver

If we indulge in achieving small wins such as focusing on building a culture of knowledge sharing - helping the users to share feedback, then we understand the vast use-cases that target users are demanding, and we see linkages to a few of the org-wide business metrics, such as improving organization agility through Expert Knowledge aids in Rapid Innovation.

Hire team players and get them invested in the process

To gain insights to design a Futuristic KM platform you need passionate team players who look for unmet knowledge-related needs and can devise KM practices that engage leaders, teams and champion catalysts to drive adoption at scale. These are individuals who have a customer experience mindset and pay attention to how teams engage and help in building champion networks, using creativity at the workplace and personalize the experience for leaders to sponsor KM programs.

Eliminate bad design early in the game

Many users avoid using a KM Platform as they find it challenging or a cumbersome design. Users are asking for a personalized experience - something that they habitually use everyday, feeding their reputation and helping them to be productive. The KM experience has to be consistent throughout and the success is measured by how they recommend it and share outcomes of ways it helped them. It is important to also build trust and ensure that any negative feedback is addressed, which would spread by word of mouth and create many deterrents in the mind impacting future use (hence, brand appeal).

Pay attention to customer feedback

It’s a fool’s paradise as many leaders who don’t advocate using KM platform themselves would have had just one or two bad experiences, and hence the narrative to avoid experimenting with using the platform. In reality, if we address this feedback and build features to address these unmet needs we can see the adoption improve. Hence, it’s important through quarterly surveys to provide feedback on ways the platform is being improved and engage - a sample set of the target user group in design thinking workshops to collect feedback that would improve the platform with time.

Research your competition

Today, with AI and many 3rd party tools having in-built KM, it is a challenge to compete and design a state-of-the-art system. Integration of the KM platform with this competing platform can be one answer, but given the budget constraints of tech teams and the need for security standards, there is a debate on having two parallel platforms targeting the same use case.  Hence it is important that by design the use-cases are clearly laid out and the KM team is clear of ways in which the Change Management has to be done for ensuring sustenance of the KM practices that would result in long-term benefits being measured.

Build systems for quick and effective resolutions

Imagine a user not finding help on how to use the KM platform and having to walk away. It is important to make sufficient documentation available including video tutorials and access to live chat for user queries to be responded to and help them progress and not lose trust in the platform.

With the advancement in automation and features like auto tagging, it is possible to make the experience more user-friendly.  Today with advancement in AI & Machine Learning there are tools to also track how users have visited the portal in the past and have recommendation engines to auto-send personalized messages and track their responses - and this increases adoption. 

Understand your customer experience metrics

There is no ideal KM Experience Management Platform and final measure of success is if we can co-relate ways in which the user need is being met. It is through a mix of qualitative and quantitative data that we can say if KM is truly matured.

In-Summary

What effect does your KM content have on the performance outcomes of an organization? Many define this as a Maturity Model that helps leaders secure a budget to start on their KM Journey. In-time what is missing is many promising initiatives are derailed as they fail to create a lasting Customer Experience (CX) that can increase adoption and define metrics that lead to sustainable growth. 

To understand how to design an effective KM Experience Management Platform it is important we relate to CX Strategy and while not all the stages are important, certainly a large number are relatable. If we start with the end in mind, which is co-relate ways in which the users' need is being met, we can eliminate bad design.  By using Design Thinking we can truly empathize with our audience and create a Futuristic KM platform.

Users want to find the closest match of ready to consume content that is trustworthy and most importantly something that fills the wireframe that they have put together through their own research. With the rise of the digital age and advancement in technology, users are made aware of Content Relevancy - a key metric to consume content. Users are therefore expecting High-Value Content to be delivered at their fingertips, and here is where the folly lies as most organizations charter KM teams to meet this expectation.

Take for example an IT company which has many employees, some are new entrants into the workforce, others lateral experienced hires, managers, group managers, vice presidents / business heads and so forth. If you now see clearly you are not talking about creating content for an abstract audience, but a well-defined persona of users who rate the content based on how easy is it to consume to enable them to become successful. 

Hence, it’s important we familiarize ourselves with the process of Content Curation, which is defined as Collecting, Organizing, Selecting, Packaging and Promoting the best content that is tailored for an audience (users).  So what are some of those practices that can help us develop better collections addressed towards these personas of users?

Identify trigger points to deliver content to the group

Once we have zeroed down on a user group we need to ensure we are aware of pushing the content to them and enabling them through this medium to get hooked on to accessing our content and pulling them closer to becoming brand ambassadors of our content. Hence it’s important we focus understanding their unmet needs that should be addressed through our content.

Creating Fresh Content  V/s Curate the Content

As a Knowledge worker you come across leaders, champions and a host of networks. Its important you follow some of their best work whether it a thought paper, research article, knowledge nugget, webinars or other credible content. Take for example a newsletter weekly edition every good curator has a weekly planner of how he wants to schedule this content and while the supporting pieces can be curated from various sources it helps to manage the central piece and create fresh content so the story progresses with each new edition.  I guess we all are familiar with the Pareto Principle where it’s your 20% fresh content that delivers 80% of the hits.

Don’t limit yourself as the only Brand Ambassador of your Content

Content is no good if it cannot be marketed. And many a time as KMers we forget that it’s not just our job to make sure our best content gets delivered out there. So how do we ensure we identify which content can be marketed by our leaders, peers and gets noticed. It’s important to have a watch on the competition yes as many marketers are in need of content and pretty much are the brand ambassadors that Knowledge Managers should credit for ensuring higher touchpoints of the content we curate. Yes, making our knowledge systems accessible through blog posts, webinars and the likes ensures some of our experts get noticed by marketers and their content gets externally published making our work shine.  So don’t limit yourself to only managing your content strategy alone. Like they say don’t lose the trees for the forest always have an eye on the bigger picture and how your content is credit worthy to other communities.

Sharing credit can make you 'content searchable'

There is a plethora of good content out there and many times although we design our content well in advance and define the sources to gather them from we notice that the piece has already got posted most often by the author. So how does this handicap our content delivery process does it make our viewers lose interest even before we want them to find the content? What could be the solution? Well it’s important to ensure we reward our contributors before others do and publish them in our hall of fame ensuring they feel valued with providing us a steady stream of content that is well researched, timely and ensures they reach us as a first choice.

CTRL-R Managing your Content and keeping it up-to-date

The same old problem of governance where Knowledge Managers are chartered with archiving content that is dated a year back. We see less viewership and no this signals lesser number of hits and hence call for action to archive the content by triggering a few reminders. What instead if we take the same piece and work on it adding a few relevant links, headlines re-packaging it and sharing it with the author for the final proof read? There is a high chance it goes to the leaders and they take notice and on publishing the content post it on their private handle or tweet it highlighting their POV for an industry topic that they follow.  This could be the silver bullet and differentiates good curators. Content Curation is as much about the presentation of good content and sometimes enabling our audience with re-packaging their content ensures we develop better collections that are up-t0-date based on our own expertise managing topic based content over time.

Invest time to discover new content and be bold to critique it

CoPs are a great place to notice someone’s point of view and credit them. As a Community Manager we are also chartered with ensuring we respond to every post and at times critics play a big role in leading us to the right content. It’s important to not play silent spectator at all times and sometimes engage in a interaction to challenge a viewpoint as it helps us to learn more about the SME and in-time develop some of their content to build on our existing collection.

In-Summary

In this digital world where content relevance is measured by how practical, credit worthy and ready content is to be consumed it’s important we ensure we understand the importance of curation. While we are designing our content strategy it’s also important we are open to understanding our user persona’s and investing in defining the right trigger points to deliver high-value content to them. As Knowledge Managers it’s also our call to action to hone our content writing skills and contribute to enriching existing content through our deep industry research skills and ensure we expand our network of content creators crediting them. Over time we are all called to play critic and engage and identify SME’s some of whom we can co-partner with to sustain our collections of content and invest our time in becoming experts in our own industry or topics a curators.