Knowledge Management practices can be highly improved through supporting work culture advance minority communities.

Have you been in a team meeting where the leader expects everyone to come on time and has rolled out the agenda before the meeting to ensure he is understood? We all want to be heard. As the meeting starts the leader sets up his slides and begins the session pointing at each slide in the line of sight with his joystick hoping that he has the viewers’ attention. Its break time and during this time he connects with a few individuals seeking feedback about the session and connecting it to their day as they smell the coffee. As the session begins there are breakout rooms and slowly it is time for activities. This is when the audience really gets a taste of what they have grasped as there is one person who clearly comes out a leader. Soon it's time for the day to end and the leader asks the team 'So what did you like?' and rolls out the feedback forms with the hope that his knowledge truly connected and touched a chord that wants the audience to say 'I learned more than I expected.'
So, was the training truly effective?

Knowledge Management is a touchy topic - some want it to progress because they want to be heard and recognized, and others want it in-sight so their teams can create & share valuable information that can be traced. However, when teams see individuals walk out the door and get a feel (touch) of their own culture of not creating a safe workplace where knowledge can be shared freely, is where the real problem lies. We need to ensure that we serve KM according to the taste of our customers, partners, teams, and most important have a taste for it ourselves when building an inclusive culture.

Everyone is talking about workplace diversity and it is important for driving business. However, few understand the right techniques.  Let me explore below:

1. know-what (accessibility v/s inclusive design): Persons with disabilities are experts in adapting to their surroundings. Ever imagine the HR orientation and introducing a person with visual impairment to his surroundings? Most of the time we provide accessibility by giving a larger system or software. Truly however, we are called to apply instructive design principles, then we can ensure we 'solve for one and extend to many'. Recognizing exclusion is more important than accepting inclusion, and recognizing our own biases helps us seek out new ideas to truly create a diverse workplace.

2. know-when (inclusive best practices within KM teams): Many times we know that inclusive workplaces are the key to ensuring we bring these diverse ideas to the workplace. We want teams to start engaging in creative thinking and engage to create new work practices. However, we fail to integrate these best practices into designing our workplace policies and in-time training practices remain the same. It is important we recognize that having diversity in the KM team can also encourage sustenance, as quite often these individuals themselves would evolve as leaders and recognize the need.

3. know-how (it all starts with inclusion hires doing KM): There are so many levers we use to ensure our users are adopting KM practices; knowledge is flowing through the organization, and is helpful to those who need it at the right time and the right place. However, can we guarantee it is helping the right person all the time? Organizations that invest in diversity work practices like having team leads with hearing impairment, pair up with interpreter's and conduct technical courses to the larger team help them develop empathy. This ensures we are open to learning from people with a broad range of perspectives that help us create products designed for the larger user community, including people with hearing, visual, and other kinds of impairment.

4. know-why: Once KM impacts innovation and is acknowledged and sustained, it becomes a lever for business change. Leaders start measuring it and investing in sharing a narrative of how it has impacted business. However, culture is contrary to inclusion as it involves changing mindsets, having those tough conversations with leaders who do not want to practice hiring persons with disabilities, coaching team members who truly bring diverse viewpoints and growing them as leaders. It is important we identify leaders who can be a part of the boardroom and have these conversations to truly ensure we are advancing our community as a diverse workforce.

5. care-why: Having built a truly inclusive knowledge management ecosystem as leaders, we want to define the right metrics and measure the business value. Many times this extends to our customers, and we need to solicit truly how our workplace practices impacted through KM is making their products, culture and practices incrementally improve.

In-Summary: If we ‘care-why’ to create long term value for our clients but do not recognize that inclusion starts with seeking out new ideas to truly create a diverse workplace, we are missing true business value. We need to align our workplace and recognize through the right KM practices that we can advance our workforce to develop empathy, ideas, and build products that are aligned to inclusive design. In time the incremental value we create for our customers alike would help us gain market share of a larger community that would improve our own work practice culture.

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. 

Today, successful organizations have established Knowledge Management as a key driver for driving their Digital Transformation roadmap. To achieve this, it is imperative that the collective objectives from the km program. should be aligned to the individual goal setting for the team. However, there is a problem?

It is a known fact that not everyone in a team can work at full capacity 100% of the time. This means that only a percentage of their efforts are at full capacity. So, most individuals learn to focus on perfecting proven skills based on aligning to know what they do best and not NECESSARILY something that should take up one's day.

The obvious question that comes to mind is while KM can do many things, how do we ensure our teams understand their goal setting is to transform our enterprise into a learning organization, and help achieve organizational excellence? We need to begin by designing the KM roadmap and align the KM workplan to goal setting by following the 'Pareto Principle'.

To be effective leaders we need to align the 5C Roadmap to goal setting.

If you can relate the activities to the Pareto principle in the above graphic, then we need to start with defining must-do activities around the below.

• Content Strategy helps you drive traffic and ensures it generates the right leads that translate into meeting your business outcomes. Most teams define this at a high-level starting in the beginning of the year, promote it throughout the year, and manage it through the content lifecycle which is a quarterly exercise. Then where is the problem? It's the content pieces that are a priority for our teams, and we must deliver them in a timely manner which is where we mostly fail to relate them to our content strategy and hence get away from our goal setting.
• Critical Knowledge is knowledge that if managed well offers a sustainable advantage. This also can be tacit knowledge that is gained through real-life, on the ground experiences and requires not just capture but creation techniques. Most organizations are building CoPs , Ask an Expert systems and other techniques including de-briefing meetings at the end of a project. Then where is the problem? We need to acknowledge that keeping the balance between keeping a watch on the grassroot level knowledge needs with prioritizing the ones with the highest likelihood and consequence of knowledge loss. There is a need to develop a knowledge map to identify at risk knowledge and then build upon this to understand how the knowledge flows within your organization.
• Communication Strategy is aimed at ensuring our critical knowledge flows with the aim to reach the right targeted audience and it flows across the organization to ensure its aimed at prompting right action. Then where is the problem? For example, organizations align as part of the KM team Communication Strategists, tasked with sharing km impact stories that talk about the business value. These practices however do not always connect with users share it on their own as the means are not standardized and this creates ambiguity for adoption.
• Culture is related to people's behaviors and many organizations align to designing incentive programs around km activities for encouraging knowledge sharing. However, if we look at small organizations, they purely drive their practices based on culture as they are constrained by human effort, time, and budget to implement KM. Then where is the problem? So, is it the founder's mindset and the values of the organization that ensure everyone shares critical knowledge as their existence depends on it for growing the organization?. Knowledge thrives if there is a sense of openness, autonomy, experimentation and above all trust that promotes risk taking with collaboration.
• Change Management Strategy is about dealing with change, and it helps in aligning the changing employee processes and behaviors. It ensures that as organization transform through their Digital Transformation journey KM continues to flow ensuring the right information goes from those who create it to those who need it. So where is the problem? The larger problem is that as we focus on organizational excellence leaders fail to turn believers and call out how through KM is where we can promote employee participation to progress on continuous improvements that foster innovation. So, there is a need to make sure leaders promote that its only through KM that the development goals can be achieved.

In-Summary

While we continue to transform our enterprise into a learning organization and help our leaders in our Digital Transformation journey it is important, we relate to the 80:20 Pareto Principles and objectively manage our goals rather than other way round.

Here are three key steps

• Identify what your key results / goals are
• Apply the 80/20 rule to prioritize your tasks for achieving the collective goals
• Protect the most important activities from the least important ones and then prioritize them among your teams and ensure you re-visit them once a quarter

This will help us to design our teams around the 5C's KM roadmap. We as leaders need to act like founders and promote a more risk-taking appetite among our teams, and show that it is only through KM that we can achieve organizational excellence.

Today, securing a budget to implement Knowledge Management at scale is a prime challenge, as the business wants to ensure you are promising to deliver tangible business value every time.  Most large organizations acknowledge that these complexities are so dynamic that often we depend on predictable answers to solve the business problem, although we know the situation might have changed. Are we asking the right questions?

Let me take three simple examples to understand this point.

• Snippet-1 (client): You have signed a new contact and the client is asking for what best practices have been delivered for other similar clients and the team is expected to make a presentation around the same.
• Snippet-2 (partner): You have secured a project as a service partner for a large digital transformation project however the incumbent is transitioning out and hence there is a need for their support for the right amount of knowledge transfer.
• Snippet-3 (vendor): There is an existing software that your users are happy with for collaboration and your sales team has received a good pricing from another global player who is offering a better deal. You need buy in from your leaders to proceed basis their experience.

If you look at these three examples, all talk about situations where one needs to depend on others being knowledgeable. We are accustomed to the same old practices for delivering business value through KM based on predictable answers. However, as one can assume in the real world, this stable state keeps changing and creates new complications that raise questions that need to be solved. It is for these questions that one must be knowledgeable to solve the right answers. How can we train ourselves?

Let me introduce you to a proven practice: the 'SCQA story telling model' and explore it a little to understand why one requires to understand the question before we find the answers.

The SCQA model is an acronym for Situation - Complication - Question and Answer. You might have heard about the 'elevator pitch' where you must try to summarize something in five minutes. This method makes it extremely easy. Let us see the below example, which I am sure most KM professionals would be familiar with.

Situation: We are talking about any user (players) who visits a KM portal and they do not see the bigger picture of how they can benefit from sharing their expertise and experience through knowledge harvesting & sharing (context of what is happening)
Complication: This deals with what is changing and needs attention as you can see only few leaders are believers, most users come sparingly and few that visit regularly feel they are not rewarded.
Question: As we can see there is a problem. Basis the problem statement being defined we start developing the questions, many a times its hidden in the complication. Like in our case one can see that the problem is as below

To DESIGN a nimble KM system that is intuitive to the user [group] and advances them to contribute and get incentivized

Answers: Finding the answers would in-turn give rise to a solution(s). For example, in our case we design a more rewarding system through gamification, ape client systems so users start actively contributing. We involve leaders to sign the petition, so their word of mouth motivates individuals to intrinsically contribute and make HR aware of the critical touchpoints to reward users.

In-Summary

Typically, business leaders are looking for a solid pitch to assure their buy-in and sponsor budgets for KM. Most teams focus on the status quo and begin with the quality metrics and start with collecting raw data, analyzing the information to arrive at facts and then present their conclusion. However, they fail to impress largely because the pitch is not convincing.

Through the SCQA method you immediately capture the attention of the business to presenting an abstract of what is intended to achieve through a storyline which is appealing. Once we have got their buy-in then we go deeper into the facts and how we have arrived at the basis for the same which is the raw data interpretation.

Are we continuing to build for the future without really looking back?

Today a large number of product companies focus on ensuring their products are revolutionary and are game-changers - something that the larger universe desires. For these product companies there are a large number of investors who are backing their idea and pending financial viability there is a good consensus that the market would respond. However, how desirable is the product - that's the big question.

If you look at the above, there are three important criteria for every solution at the heart of innovation. Reference from The Sweet Spot for Innovation | Medium.

• A desirable solution, one that your customer really needs
• A feasible solution, building on the strengths of your current operational capabilities
• A viable (profitable solution), with a sustainable business model.

If we relate KM as a product to the above and run a survey, then most of our user's would call out 'desirability' as critical. So, is the COO of every company trying to mimic its competition and build advanced KM products aligned to this, is the larger question. The answer is most leaders do what is important for the business and hence are designing their KM products with a balance of the organizations' core operational strength, its mix of existing people, processes, and technology.

Further, as the organization grows, so does its nature of business change, and so do our practices & processes evolve to ensure we are contributing to community and society. Does KM remain the same, or does it evolve?  That might be something interesting to think about.

If you are looking at the below graphic, you could do some sense-making with the above design thinking, product-based mindset. Then we need to develop a model that imbibes 80% of our existing operational construct of the org + 20% builds new capabilities for the future.

Below is a simplistic technique where one can combine the existing people practices, current processes, and build for the future.

Automate where behaviours are known, not just repeatable practices & processes

1. Make downloaded material interlinked with the KM system so it expires every X week and the user must download again
2. Give insights to the user on areas where they utilized KM systems
3. Make KM the 1st entry point in the day

Backup in-line with the defined km policy

1. A KM audit to be done and in-line with KM policy and content for archival defined
2. Past project artifacts are archived before a resource is tagged to a new project  

Combine KM practices with existing people practices & org-wide processes

1. Make KM a mandatory section in leadership reviews so its habitual to the leaders
2. Managers get variable pay salary only for completing all pending reviews on KM portal

Divide how KM is accessible and introduce right steps for governance

1. Make all organizational announcements mandatory accessible through the KM portal
2. On entry user's provide justification and on exit must rate downloaded information 

Eliminate old practices and introduce new ways of thinking

1. Make all artifacts viewable only if linked to active users for managing content quality
2. Conduct certificates for exit employs to be granted against declared artifact checklist  

In-Summary

The ABCDE technique will ensure we can link the below five success factors and ensure KM as a Product is well acknowledged as below.

1. Exist in the “Natural Flow” of our Processes (Automate)
2. Increase Discovery to Real-time Information (Backup)
3. Improve Cross-Functional Decision-Making (Combine)
4. Enhance Enterprise Collaboration (Divide)
5. Show Value Through KM measures linked to key business objectives (Eliminate)