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