078 This month’s tip:

Make time to play.

An old friend of ours, juggler and performance artist Michael Menes, is the very model of both discipline and creativity. When you watch him work, you're struck by two things: you're impressed by the off-center thinking that inspires his routines and awed by the hours of practice that must have gone into perfecting them. People often ask him how he comes up with these bits, and his answer is sometimes "indirectly."

When you're trying to sort out a particularly knotty problem, working harder isn't necessarily the answer. Sometimes, you have to be willing to take an indirect path, with side trips that seem unrelated to your goal. We've given this advice before, but it's worth repeating. Pull back from the desk and do something different. Something playful. The problem will still be cycling around in your head, somewhere below conscious thought, and the solution may seem obvious when you come back to it. Some companies have made the concept of productive play part of their culture, but it's still the exception rather than the rule. Making time for it can be a challenge, but it pays off in the long run.

 February 2010 - Volume 8, Issue 2

Keeping Knowledge Inside

In the early days of KM, there were those who dismissed the concept as self-evident. In their view, managing Knowledge was simply good management, of the kind that's been practiced for years: Protect what you know, and try to spread it around. Learn from your mistakes. Encourage innovation. Isn't that just common sense?

Maybe it is. Last month, Fortune magazine highlighted six companies that have never laid off a single employee in response to economic conditions. None of these little profiles explicitly mentions Knowledge Management, but the themes of KM and Communication are there. SAS cut back on travel in favor of conference calls and video conferencing and engaged employee support with frequent communications from the top. Wegmans Food Markets was able to increase organizational flexibility and maximize performance by cross training employees for different jobs. Mercedes-Benz USA cut costs, but opted to protect its workforce by instituting pay cuts for the 28 most senior executives.

At these firms, management understands that knowledge is their most important asset. That knowledge involves both sales and development know-how, but also inter-employee networks and the kind of shared cultural understanding that's needed to get things done. If the knowledge is eroded by economic conditions, it makes it much harder to bounce back. The challenge for KM practitioners, of course, is making this case. The benefits of KM are very hard to measure, even though many of the best companies intuitively understand them.

Creation Spaces & Knowledge Bases

It's over a decade since KM was the next big thing, and those of us who were committed to it in the early days are still surprised that so little has changed. The same questions we were wrestling with in the 1990s are still up for consideration today. The relative value of connecting people with artifacts versus connecting people with experts. The importance of context. The pros and cons of using incentives to encourage participation. The challenge of measuring value.

John Hagel III and John Seely Brown have an interesting article at Bloomberg.com, suggesting a new kind of Knowledge Management system. Rather than a traditional repository, focused on capturing knowledge that already exists, they imagine something called a "creation space." Knowledge depreciates more quickly than it used to. That means it makes more sense to invest in platforms that encourage the creation of new knowledge, rather than the storage of existing knowledge. By leveraging technology to lower human interaction costs, you should be able to mobilize large, diverse groups to develop new ways of doing things. Focusing on knowledge creation also provides a different kind of motivation. Knowledge repositories are built largely on faith: if you take the time to contribute, you might someday benefit from the contributions of others. Creation spaces deliver immediate value, since they're working on the problems of the moment.

This is all very 2.0, but it's one reason why social networking tools may do more to advance the cause of Knowledge Management than any of those knowledge cathedrals we were building ten years ago.

Ratings & Context

There was an interesting topic last month in Stan Garfield's SIKM discussion group, related to the use of five-star rating systems, particularly inside an enterprise firewall. Do they work, or do we end comparing apples and oranges? Should the identity of the person doing the rating be factored into the results? What about systems that combine ratings with comments? How do you deal with inappropriate ratings from people who are trying to game the system? It seems simple enough until you start peeling off the layers.

It reminded us of a two-factor rating system once proposed by a colleague in Melbourne. He suggested that each artifact in our knowledge base be considered according to “Relevance” (is this in line with what I'm looking for?) and “Re-usefulness” (will save me time and effort?). An artifact with high Relevance might be exactly on target, but still score low on a Re-usefulness scale. An example would be a PowerPoint presentation that's too sketchy to be of any help, even though it covers exactly the right scenario, in exactly the right language, industry and geography. An object with high Re-usefulness might have extremely helpful content, but still have low Relevance. Perhaps a detailed Case Study complete with commentary, deliverables and pictures of the project team, for a service line that's been discontinued.

The cool part is that used together, these two metrics can point out where intelligent investments could add depth to relevant material, and also flag materials that should be archived. Picture a two-by-two matrix, with the re-useful and relevant material in the upper right, and the not re-useful, irrelevant material in the bottom left. Any knowledge base needs a way to manage the life cycle of its artifacts, and this approach has a nice, common-sense appeal.

Creativity Pays

Our individual experiences suggest that some people are more creative than others, but it's less clear if creativity is something that can be taught. There are techniques like brainstorming, designed to stimulate creative interaction, but going through a few brainstorming sessions isn't likely to change a person's Creativity Quotient. However, there's a body of research indicating that creative people share certain personality traits, which suggests that companies could screen for people who fit the profile.

Whether they are artists, inventors or scientists, creative people score highly on tests that measure "openness to experience," and do poorly on "agreeableness" -- they don't necessarily play well with others, which is something to keep in mind if you plan on hiring them. Research at the Norwegian School of Management found that the right kind of leadership and the right environment is even more important than hiring naturally creative people. Managers need to demonstrate genuine support for creative practices by nurturing the kind of flexible environments within which they can flourish. Companies that emphasize budget constraints and fault-finding don't offer much promise for creative thinking.

The direct payoff comes in the cost savings that can be gained through more creative approaches to operations, as well as the competitive advantage that innovative products deliver in the marketplace. But there are indirect rewards, too, on the human resources side. People like working for winners.
 

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