KPI's Drive Knowledge Flow

I have worked in performance driven environments all my working life, targets, milestones and deliverables are the things I was brought up on and while I think having targets is a great idea I am now getting a bit concerned about the widespread use of key performance indicators or KPI’s.

Don’t get me wrong I think KPI’s are a great way of making clear to individuals and the wider organisation what it is you want them to achieve and how it will be measured but (don’t you just love the but word) I am getting a bit concerned about the unintended consequences of some of the KPI’s that I have seen in use.

Good KPI’s are ones that are carefully thought through and aligned with the behaviours you want staff to display. I tend to think about KPI’s as guided missiles, you point them in the direction you want and off they go. If you have got it correct it will go where you want it to, get it wrong and it will turn back and get you!

It’s also useful to think about what else is happening in the organisation as the same time. Let’s take the following hypothetical (imaginary) scenario. The company has announced that the new document storage system is available. Nothing wrong with that. Now let’s assume that the management want staff ‘to share their knowledge’. Again nothing wrong with that. Now lets assume that a KPI is put in staff appraisals that reads ‘did you share knowledge with other members of staff?’. Simple yes or no is the measure. Again nothing wrong with that. But how will staff be able to convince their line manager that they have satisfied the KPI? Unless further information is given on how the KPI will be satisfied then they might assume that because there is a new document management system they can upload a document that and hence that will qualify as ‘sharing knowledge with other members of staff’.

The staff have done nothing wrong, they have read the KPI and then in the absence of a clear description of what is required to satisfy the KPI they have created their own. In this simple example you could end up with a lot of documents in the new document storage system but nobody re-using any of them.

If you want to use KPI’s to drive knowledge flow in your organisation, that’s great but can I suggest you think through what the unintended consequences of what you have put in place may be.

‘Systems thinking’ was one of the fundamental skills in the toolkit of the founder members of BP’s knowledge management team. As they were introducing something new (knowledge management) to the organisation it was a useful tool to teach them to think ahead and try to understand what the unintended consequences as intended consequences might be. The next time you are reviewing the results of lessons learned or a retrospect just ask yourself, “was this result of not thinking through what the unintended consequences might be”.

Knoco Ltd

Probably the best way of demonstrating the value of knowledge management in the world

Bird Island has played an important role in my life for over ten years. In very many locations around the world for a huge variety of clients I have used it to demonstrate not only that you can manage knowledge but that it produces enormous performance improvements. All of us in Knoco have our favour story about the impact that it has or about running the workshops. I think amongst my favourite was the time when one of our consultants was working in a location where they had to travel in an armoured car with close body protection (armed guards) at all times. During the workshop the close protection staff sat in the room in case their special skills became necessary. The consultant explained to the manager the impact that managing their knowledge could have. It has to be said that the manager who had been educated in a management style that is no longer widely practiced since a certain wall came down didn’t believe him. By the end of the Bird Island exercise the benefits of managing knowledge had become clear to him.

I have copied below the text that was in the February newsletter as it contains the links that will allow you to obtain further information. All of us at Knoco believe that making Bird Island available in this manner will drive forward the performance of many organisations around the world, far more than we could as a company, even taking account of our franchise structure could hope to reach. We look forward in the coming months to sharing with you some of the success stories of those who licence Bird Island and the significant impact that it has.

The power of Bird Island – now available to you!

Engaging people in the value that Knowledge Management can bring is a perennial problem. How can you show people that KM is really valuable? How do you turn sceptics into believers? Simply, you allow them to experience the value that KM can bring, through an interactive and measurable way.

We have been running the Bird island exercise now for over a decade. It is an amazingly simple, yet extremely effective simulation exercise that gives people a real KM experience in two short hours. It demonstrates three separate KM processes, each of which delivers an obvious and measurable performance benefit, and it includes at least two key moments at which "the pennies drop" for people. We have found it to be the most powerful sales tool for engaging people in Knowledge Management we have ever found. It's the nearest thing to "Knowledge Management Proof" that you could hope for.

You can read more about Bird Island in our article “(Probably) the longest running KM experiment in the world”.

So to give our clients and customers better access to this world-class engagement tool, we have decided to licence the exercise to your in-house trainers. We have created an online reference area for licensed facilitators, which includes a set of agendas for Bird Island workshop, full instructions for the exercise, an equipment list, all the handouts you will need, a complete knowledge asset for building Bird Island towers, the set of historical data, the PowerPoint slidesets you will need as a facilitator, and videos from key points in the exercise so you can see how it works in practice. In addition we have a discussion area for Bird Island facilitators, and an image gallery for you to share pictures from your winning teams.

Contact us for more details, or go to the bird island page http://www.knoco.com/bird-island.htm


Knoco Ltd

Always Thinking About Safety

First an apology. I have been traveling a lot and have gotten out of the habit of writing this blog and material for the web site. I was at a meeting at the end of last week and at the end of the work session someone from the client's knowledge management team stayed behind and then proceeded to thank me for my blog and the material that we had been making available via the web site. They had used it not only during their formal knowledge management studies but also in their role within the knowledge management team. Suddenly all the work of writting case studies and blog became worthwhile.

Those that know me well know that safety is very important to me. I have worked with HSE teams around the world and assessmed how they use knowledge on many occassions. Being safe and ensuring the safety of those around us is part of our personal responsibility but today taught me just how easy it is to slip up. Today I found myself in a potentaily dangerous situation, a situation that I should have been able to avoid.

It was mid afternoon and i was sitting in a hotel room working when there was a power cut. It was still very light in the room so I decided to put my shoes on and go shopping and pick up some of the things that I needed. I was on the third floor and while I knew exactly where the fire escapes were I wondered if there as a public staircase that I could walk down to reception. As I came out of the room I saw one of the staff with a hand held radio and asked them how to walk down the stairs to reception. They said "follow me" which I thought was very helpful and surprise, surprise they took me to a fire exit.

We entered the staircase and it was brighly lit but importantly it was lit by sunlight being let into the stairwell while the door was open. That wasn't immediatley apparent. We started off down the stairs but when the door closed behind us, there was no light. There were no emergency lights in the emergency fire exit stairwell.

At that point I should have insisted we turn back, we were only about 9 or 10 step down into the stair well but for a reason I don't quite understand myself I continued to follow the memebr of staff. I normally carry an emergency torch with me on my keyring but guesss what, it was safely back in the hotel room.

I continue to follow the member of staff down the stairs who was now lighting the way using the light from the display of thier mobile telephone. They even had to hold the mobile telephone up to the wall to try to read what level we had reached.

I am not afraid of the dark but I can reassure you when the mobile telephone when out, it was VERY dark in that stairwell. By now I knew that I couldn't find my way back as it wasn't possible to read the stair level without having a mobile telephone swiched on. I had mine in my pocket but didn't want to risk taking my hand off the hand rail (and losing my orientation on the stairs) so relied on the very dim light several stairs below me.

As we reached the bottom I sensed an object blocking our exit from the stairs. Someone had pushed a hotel porter's luggage cart into the emergency stairwell. We had to navigate our way around it and then open the door into reception.

I am typing this having returned to the hotel after my shopping and can see the emergency tourch that I carry in my luggage sitting next to the bed. I can even see my small emergency tourch lying next to my security pass but where were they when I need them!

This incident reminds me of how while I have access to the best practice in hotel guest safety, I didn't use it. I knew there was a power cut in the hotel hence the lights and elevators would be out of action. It was highly propable that there would be no or reduced lighting somehwere between my room and the street. Why didn't I pay attention to the best practice of hotel guest safety? To be very honest it was becuase I was going to spend a sum of money that I wasn't entirely comfortable spending eg my mind was on trying to justify to myself that it was OK to spend that much money when it should have been on my safety.

When you want to transfer best practice and ensure that someone impliments it, you need to think about what else in happening in their environment at that time, just assuming that they will impliment it because it is best practice might not work.

And in closing, an emergency tourch is only useful if you have it with you when you need it. It might be great to have it on your security pass during office hours but where are you going to carry it once you in a hotel room / out for dinner etc etc.

KM in Humanitarian Aid Response to Haiti Earthquake

Tearfund is a Humanitarian Aid organisation whose current head of KM and IM is a charming lady called Astrid. I was recently copied on an email describing their current approach to KM:

“Our Disaster Management Teams are learning all the time so a disaster like this will benefit from the learning from the Tsunami response, the Pakistan earthquake and so on. There will naturally be a learning review and an evaluation done of this and so the wheel keeps turning. As well as the staff on the ground, staff here at Teddington will also review the set up process, and the appeals process in the months to come. Disaster Management Team have a learning system, where they are collecting learning and building good practice around sectoral and organisational issues systematically. The aim is to build this up and then make it publicly viewable as part of our accountability and transparency.”

Tearfund’s current CEO is a big supporter of KM in the organisation – he arrived with it in mind from his previous experience elsewhere.

Tearfund:

- Has learning for continuous performance improvement built into what it does as a matter of routine;
- Has clear management support and expectation that KM will be done;
- Understands the power of an effective Corporate Memory that is owned and maintained;
- Invests in KM for learning because they understand that the return is worth it.

Tearfund's knowledge management system was established by a former member of Knoco. We wish Tearfund well in their current and future efforts.

Knoco Ltd

Using All The Available Talent

Someone told me this story recently and I listened to it I found myself wondering how often know-how and learning in a company is not shared because of a lack of expectation or management support. As I listened I found myself wonder just how a company could exist when it was only getting a fraction of the potential from its staff. Let me tell you the story as it was told to me.

The person had been head hunted to join an important department in the company. He created his first strategy paper and submitted it to the manager. It came back with many corrections almost to the point of being unreadable. He thought it was a case of a difference of style so made the corrections and resubmitted it. Again it came back with lots of corrections on it. He was standing at the coffee machine looking rather glum when someone in the department asked what was wrong. He shared how he had submitted the strategy paper and it had come back with lots of red on it and even when he updated it, it had yet again come back with lots of red on it. The person listening broke out into a smile, “The first thing you have to learn in this department is that the boss doesn’t think anyone can do the job as well as he can so no matter how good the paper is he will rewrite it and rewrite it until you can’t recognise it and it is almost as if he had written it in the first place. Do what the rest of do, create something that is good enough, submit it and let him work himself to death redrafting it”.

In organisation clever people are hired but do we always listen to them? Or as someone said recently, “we don’t know at which level the good ideas are being squashed”. When I asked about it he suggested that the company couldn’t possibly be hiring people who were obviously smart and yet they were still doing things the way they had always done them.

Knowledge is like any other resource, it needs to be nurtured, if you ignore it, it will wither and die. If you are a line manager or perhaps an executive, what are you doing to ensure that the situation that I recalled above isn’t happening in your organisation and you are allowing staff to operate on two cylinders rather than four.


Knoco Ltd

Health Check for Communities of Practice

I have been working with communities of practice this week to conduct health checks on them. In order to do this we used a methodology which is based on key success factors that you would expect to see in any community then for each of those key success factors we measure the level of maturity that the community has reached.

One of the things when doing health checks like this is to ensure that the community fully understand the context of the measurement. For example if you know that it typically takes five years to reach a particular level and the community your are working with has been in existence for less than a year than it will be highly unlikely that they will be at the top end of any of the maturity scales. I say highly unlikely and not impossible because it could be that the community have done a lot of learning before and have been able to accelerate their progress.

Use of collaborative technology is a good example of this. In some organisations the collaborative technology is well embedded in normal business processes so how a community uses it will be rapidly accelerated and you would expect them to score highly in the technology category.

Counter to this is building trust between community members. This takes time. There are processes and activities which can assist to accelerate this but this is essentially trust between community members is one of those things that increases (or decreases) with time. Trust is something that needs to be worked on, leaving it to chance can lead to a less than optimum outcome.

The health check is also designed not only to indicate where the community is currently but also what they need to do should course corrections be required.

So far the results of the community health checks tend to show that these communities are on track. Several interventions have been identified that will ensure that they continue to work towards delivering the goals they have established for themselves.

Knoco Ltd

Managing Old Knowledge

The New Year is almost with us here in Scotland but as I type this it has already arrived in Australia. I can watch the video of the fireworks in Sydney, Australia and it brings back wonderful memories of trips to that tremendous city. Not least of those was my wife walking over the Sydney Harbour Bridge. She had been looking forward to it for a considerable length of time, indeed I think it was going to be the highlight of her trip to Australia but on the day of the big walk it was raining. She did the walk over the bridge wearing wet weather gear! She described it as a mind blowing experience and one that everyone should everyone should experience.

What have you done with the knowledge you had this time ten years ago?
I was reminded earlier today that it is ten years since the great Y2K computer scare. Do you remember the sense of doom when we thought computers were all going to stop at midnight? Lots of effort was put into understanding what might happen and how to counter act the worse case scenarios. Remember the scenario planning and contingency plans that were developed. What have you don’t with it?
A happy and prosperous New Year to all.

Knoco Ltd