May 2009 Archives

Just for the sake of clarifying the practical meaning of "knowledge transfer", here are the ten most current approaches to transferring knowledge in business environments:

1. Teaching/Master Class: Presentation of fundamental and operational knowledge; review and discussion of a learner's specific problem or results in a group. (typically performed in corporate universities)
2. Community of Practice: Groups of practitioners in a discipline that connect to seek/share experiences, develop/adopt practices or tools and develop/support a learning agenda.
3. Technical Mentoring: Interaction between expert and learner to help the learner do a job more effectively and/or to progress in their career.
4. Job Shadowing / Apprenticeship: Opportunities for a learner to observe the expert interacting with others or doing more complex work. 
5. Guided Experience / Development Assignments: Carefully selected projects or work assignments that fill gaps in experience or broaden/deepen targeted skills.  "Guided" includes expert observation and feedback. Typically research projects like case studies, lessons learned, documentaries etc.
6. Coaching: Combines mentoring, shadowing and observation to assess learner competency gaps, and guide development with timely performance feedback. 
7. Knowledge Elicitation: Interview-based approach with expert to articulate big picture, mental models and detailed "how to" and "when to" guidance. This was the main approach of KM a few years back. We talked about "knowledge books" at that time, whereas we are more into storytelling approaches today.
8. Group Intervention Methods: Synchronous collaboration methods designed for large groups with a specific outcome in mind. A good example is the Peer Assist of BP:  Experts share experiences and knowledge in a facilitated meeting with a person or team who is looking for advice on a challenge, problem or project. Other similar group collaboration methods are used when the issue is about creating or sharing knowledge e.g. Brainstorming, Open Space, Knowledge Marketplace
9. Codification / Publication: Process of codifying knowledge to make it available to a wider audience, typically with little intermediation. This can take the form of blog posts, scientific publications, books, software code.
10. Bookmarking / Library Management: Experts categorize and tag their database of digitized content, and add glossaries and thesauri, to make it easier for others to search and navigate into for future reuse.

When we talk about collaboration, we actually talk about the implicit relationship between the giver and taker of knowledge in each one of those settings. That's why learning to collaborate is by and large about practicing each one of those methods.

[this list is partly inspired by the work of Kent Greenes]

I had a chat yesterday with a friend of mine working as a knowledge management professional in a big consulting firm I cannot mention here. She was complaining that her KM practice was provided with very little guidance and support from the partners, even though they keep on repeating that knowledge management is absolutely key for the future on the company.

Another example of the knowing-doing gap...

After having worked in the KM field for a while now, I have become utterly convinced that not much can be done in terms of developing a culture of collaboration and knowledge sharing if the very top management is not driving it, albeit in a very special way. The reason is simple: as I said we are dealing with culture here, and the "Chief Cultural Officer" of a company is and will always be either the Chairman or the CEO.

In a consulting partnership, it is far more complex, because the CEO is a sort of "primus inter pares" who has limited influence on the culture of the company, which has sedimented over time. Moreover, if the incentive structure of the company favors partners who sell (whatever that means) by creating P&Ls everywhere, every partner will rush out to sell consulting missions, and will consider Knowledge Management as technical back office stuff, a sort of necessary evil that adds a burden to the overhead structure.

So how can we deal with this?

I believe the best solution, and perhaps the only viable solution, which I have seen at work in the most advanced consulting firms, is to give a partner the responsibility of running the KM program as a temporary assignment - typically two years full time -, with full authority over the associated ressources (librarians, research assistants, collaborative technology, practice leaders). Here's the catch: since the reputation of a partner, and hence her income, comes primarily from clients, she cannot take that responsibility for too long without putting her career at risk. Thus, the only acceptable way to deal with this is to make the assignment a temporary one, so that she can keep her clients.

The alternative, which is the usual 20% of the lead partner's time devoted to KM is pure bullshit. No partner will ever take the time to dig into the highly complex issues of knowledge sharing if she knows that her clients are waiting at the gate, unless the other partners are prepared to pay her for this.