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Obstacles to Innovation
Since the early days, Knowledge Management has been associated with Innovation. The assumption was that if you could
connect like-minded people in a collaborative way, while also giving them good tools to capture and share information, they'd be able to come up with new ideas more quickly. KM folks recognized that
innovation was really a team sport, even if we tend to think of innovators as solitary types. We've been doing some research here, and started building a list of innovation roadblocks: things that can
stifle new ideas, despite the best intentions. Things like:
- The lack of a shared vision or strategy
- Constant shifts in priorities
- A tendency to invest in current practice, instead of in new ideas
- The celebration of crisis management, rather than crisis prevention
- A preoccupation with process, rather than outcomes
- A culture that encourages herd behavior
These sound creepily familiar to us, because they're the same things that are often cited in the failure of Knowledge Management programs. Back in the mid-90s, there was a debate in the KM community about
whether "Knowledge Management" was really the best name for what we were doing. It sounded so highfalutin. So academic. Would things have been any different if this emergent trend had been
christened Innovation Management? In the end, it's really the same thing.
The End of an Era?
This question was asked in Monday's on-line edition of The Wall Street Journal, which suggested that services like Facebook and Twitter are permanently changing the way people communicate, just as email did in the 80s and 90s. It's not that email will go away, but it will no longer take center stage. Email continues to grow, but other services are growing faster. In August 2009, according to the Neilson Co., the number of email users in the US, Europe, Australia and Brazil was up 21% from 2008, to 276.9 million people. In the same period, the number of users on social networking sites was up 31%, to 301.5 million.
The most obvious difference is that the new services are (at least potentially) faster. Questions can be asked and answers received in real time, so the experience is more like a conversation and
less like correspondence. That also makes them less formal, and less structured. Instead of one, well-crafted email to a dozen close friends, you can now send dozens of short messages to hundreds of
people you may barely know. Hell, if you're not fussy about your privacy, the sky's the limit! Why not millions?
It's a two-edged sword, though. The speed and informality that make this an
attractive option also make it harder to manage. Certainly, we've gotten emails that weren't worth the time it took to read them. Maybe most of them fall into that category. But now, there's a constant
stream of information flowing past you, and it's even harder to decide what's important and what's not. Most likely we'll continue to learn, and our tools will evolve with us. Or will we evolve with
them? For a lighter examination of this question, check this Xerox video on YouTube.
Overthinking Things
In late August, we heard an interesting radio interview with Timothy D. Wilson, an
author and psychology professor at the University of Virginia. He was talking about his book, Strangers to Ourselves, and
about his studies of decision-making and intuition. He feels the best decisions are often based on a kind of informed gut reaction, rather than on extensive analysis.
In one study, people were
shown an assortment of posters. One group was asked to consider in detail why they liked or didn't like each one. Another group just gave them a once over, and then each person was allowed to take one
home. Two weeks later, Wilson followed up to find out how the participants felt about their choices. You might expect that those who'd taken the time, would be more satisfied with their selections. In
fact, the reverse was true. The people who didn't analyze the pros and cons were generally happier. As Goethe said, "He who deliberates lengthily will not always choose the best."
Wilson's point isn't that we should act on raw impulse, but that we should gather just enough information to let our "adaptive unconscious" find its way to a conclusion. What we shouldn't do is
proceed in an overly deliberate way, making lists and calculating scores. We should let ourselves form opinions and act on them, even if we can't articulate our reasoning. The trick is deciding when
enough information becomes too much information.
KM in Context
If you're "into" KM, you likely know how it developed, from the early days of wide-eyed optimism
to its current state of retrospection and post-mortem analysis. Even if you know the history, you should take a look at Dave Pollard's three-part saga of KM, published in Smart People Magazine.
In part one, Dave observes that in most organizations, there's a serious disconnect between management and
front-line workers. They have different information needs, different priorities and rarely speak the same language. So the workers often have little understanding of what the business is all about, and
management has an equally low understanding about what's really going on. These two communities remain organizationally insulated from each other, just as they have been for the last 30 years.
In part two, Dave notes that individual workers are now taking on the job of managing their own
information and building their own networks. Individual workers are finding ways to get things done, and realizing that there's a lot of off-the-shelf technology available to help. They don't need an
"official" knowledge repository, because they can build their own. They’re teaching themselves to manage what they know, so they can take it with them, from job to job. So while large, top down
KM programs are generally considered failures, KM itself is still alive.
Part three will be out in the October issue, not yet published, so finding that linkage will be an exercise for our
readers. (Note that if you want to read all of Smart People, it will cost you, but some articles are available for free.)
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