Thanks to David Gurteen, I was invited to a KM Forum at the Henley Business School. Showing my ignorance, I assumed Henley was in London, but it's actually about an hour outside the city in the beautiful countryside.
The business school sits literally 100 yards from the Thames river, and across the river are wide open fields. It's quite a learning, pensive, reflective environment.
There were maybe 60-80 people there. I knew a few people and I was very excited to meet Chris Collinson in person. I've watched his work for years, and of course, he's even better in person. In fact, I sat right next to him for the entire morning!
We sat at round tables with about 8-10 people per table. The Henley folks explains the school and the day, then we listened to 3 presentations. Then we had a great lunch, then a workshop all afternoon. I learned several things and I'll share a few here...
Most people have a hunch about what's going to work or not work, how do you make those hunches available to the org in real time? As opposed to looking back (which we often do), it's more about looking forward (which is hard).
We learned about an interesting tool. One company uses a real time process to collect feedback on process effectiveness. They call it "analysing weak signals and early warnings". They use an analogy of "if you drive your car only looking in rear view mirror you'll be in a ditch pretty quick". One question they ask in their tool is about how well their employees understand the specific change that is about to happen. They also ask people if they think the project will finish on time and/or on budget.
A different company described their km challenges as "projects and staff turnover, knowkedge transfer between projects and people to build customer confidence and enhance our capability"
I saw a matrix that I immediately went back to work and used. The left column listed 9 flows of knowledge as well as 4-5 other categories. The column headers across the top listed key processes and tools. So, for example, the 9 flows were employee to employee, external org to internal org, employee to external org, etc (eg all 9 combinations of the Venn diagram that includes employees, groups and external). The tools would be internal examples such as communities of practise, expertise location, etc. Where the columns and rows intersect, you can put a red amber green status regarding their effectiveness. It ends up being a very nice heat map chart visually showing you effectiveness and use of tools.
One company shared what projects they're working on in km. Those projects were Knowkedge maps, identifying knowledge domains, Organisational network analysis, identifying experts and lists of expertise, capability catalogue, storytelling events, defining km responsibilities for people, getting sr buyin, aligning k strat to biz strat, putting km in performance reviews, promoting networked knowledge and working km into their university. I'd be interested to hear more about why they chose those activities, some of them cause concern for me.
One interesting comment was "we need to get km beyond the activists and the interested". They called it Knowledge mobilization.
I heard a fun comparison of organizations to musicians/bands. Musicians practise all the time. How do we practise in our orgs? Music has many "layers", what are the layers in our orgs? In jazz, they feel the pulse, adjust (improvise) and move on. Do we do that, should we? What would "Organisational improvisation" look like? Some might say that's exactly what we do every day :)
I'm a fan of the Snowden Cynefin sense making framework. I think I heard someone named Ralph Stacy defines "complexity as a process". I'll be looking into that.
The workshop was interesting. We studied three things - stories, forces and solutions. At our small tables, we each told a story, a real example of a current challenge at work. Then each table chose their favorite story (at their table ). We then studied the "forces behind" the story. "Unconscious bias " might be a similar framing for "forces behind ". You're basically looking to list what might be invisible, assumed, and causing some of the mini challenges in the story.
After hearing the stories and forces, you then collectively brainstorm solutions. It seemed to be pretty effective in our little group.
Another interesting quite was "It's more impactful to re-live than to report". And "What techniques do u use for problem preventing as opposed to problem solving"
I enjoyed the day, met great folks and had great conversations. The Henley KM Forum is a good group.
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