Weekly Knowledge Management Blog by Stan Garfield

KM Question, Blog, Link, and Book of the Week

[Blogroll - KM Home Page - Send a Question - Implementing a successful KM programme]

KM Question of the Week

Q: I'm looking for best practices in capturing and conducting lessons learned sessions, or the process steps involved.

A: From pages 85-86 of Implementing a Successful KM Programme:

Lessons learned: explaining what an individual or team has learned as a result of their experience, using documents, presentations, discussions, and recordings – including what they tried, what worked, what didn't work, what to do, what to avoid, problems faced, how problems were solved, what they would do differently, and key insights and nuggets.

It's easier to get people to talk about successes than about failures, but there is often more to be learned from the latter. Designing a process to capture and reuse lessons learned from both can yield great benefits.

Lessons learned can be written down and stored in a repository, presented during a community meeting and recorded for later playback, and discussed in a roundtable on a conference call. A facilitator can collect individual lessons learned from multiple people and compile them in a summary document.

Avoid capturing generic platitudes such as "it's important to have a good plan" or "involve support groups early." Instead, look for nuggets such as "use one extra ounce of grease to lubricate the subassembly during routine maintenance to prevent engine failure."

Provide ways for lessons learned to be presented and discussed during community events. Don't just publish them in a document or in a database.

Once an initial collection of lessons learned has been published, ensure that it is periodically reviewed and updated. This should be part of the standard process for capturing, publishing, and maintaining lessons learned.

Consider scheduling a separate recurring conference call during which a team or individual is asked to discuss their lessons learned. Record the calls, and write down the best ideas for publication.

Also see:

• The Society for Effective Lessons Learned Sharing (SELLS) Fact Sheets
• Tips for Capturing Lessons Learned: 5 Questions to Answer with Your Team by Adele Sommers
• Learning lessons or lessons learnt? by Dave Snowden.

KM Blog of the Week

Library Clips by John Tropea (via Dave Snowden)

Knowledge sharing in the new KM

The new KM (perhaps KM 2.0):

Moving from:

• traditional management science (social sciences)
• information processing
• knowledge things
• DIKW
• recipe model-copy and roll out-one size fits all (replicate outcome)/fail-safe
• codification (tacit to explicit)
• context dependent
• best practices
• formal communities (CoP)
• hierarchy

Moving to:

• natural sciences (cognitive)
• pattern matching (sense-making)
• knowledge flow
• internalize, sense-making, path finding, execution
• safe-fail/complexity (impact based)
• narrative (anecdotes)/fragments/blogs (just in time)
• shared context
• tolerated failures
• informal networks/social computing (blogs, wiki, tagging, social networks)
• transparency/distributed cognition

The new thinking is: Does knowledge actually have to be managed? Perhaps it is more on the flow and connection between people.

What I like about blogs in contrast to just documents, is that blogs can act as a quality filter for gems in the Document Management System (DMS). If you are wondering if a document on a topic exists are you going to go solo and search the DMS, or search the enterprise blogs to see if anyone has posted and pointed to such a document?

Your search in the DMS may result in 100 documents, your search in blogs may bring up 2 hits pointing to documents; the fact that someone is pointing to these posts may say something good or bad about the quality, it’s the fact they were worthy (good or bad) of a mention.

This approach is taking the first choice of dipping into the social filter before going it alone, and that’s not all, you not only get a pointer to a quality document, but you get extra perspective around the document.

The killer message of this post is “Creating a knowledge sharing culture is a misconception”.

KM Link of the Week

Europe's Most Admired Knowledge Enterprises

Teleos, in association with The KNOW Network, has announced the Winners of the 2007 European Most Admired Knowledge Enterprises (MAKE) study. The Winners are (in alphabetical order):

1. BP (UK)
2. British Broadcasting Corporation (UK)
3. Ericsson (Sweden)
4. Mondragon Cooperative Corporation (Spain)
5. Nokia (Finland)
6. Norsk Tipping (Norway)
7. Novo Nordisk (Denmark)
8. Rolls-Royce (UK)
9. Royal Dutch Shell (Netherlands/UK)
10. SAP (Germany)

Norsk Tipping, the Norwegian national lottery, has been recognized as the overall 2007 European MAKE Winner for the first time. BMW, BP, Nokia, SAP, Siemens and UBS are previous overall European MAKE Winners.

KM Book of the Week

Financial Times - The Best Business Books of 2007 - Compiled by Stefan Stern

1. The Last Tycoons: The Secret History of Lazard Frères & Co - By William D. Cohan
2. The Secret Language of Leadership: How Leaders Inspire Action Through Narrative - By Stephen Denning
3. The Halo Effect … and the Eight Other Business Delusions that Deceive Managers - By Phil Rosenzweig
4. Zoom: The Global Race to Fuel the Car of the Future - By Iain Carson and Vijay V. Vaitheeswaran
5. The Upside: The 7 Strategies for Turning Big Threats Into Growth Breakthroughs - By Adrian Slywotzky
6. Hot Spots: Why Some Companies Buzz with Energy and Innovation, and Others Don’t - By Lynda Gratton
7. The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable - By Nassim Nicholas Taleb
8. Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything - By Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams
9. Immigrants: Your Country Needs Them - By Philippe Legrain
10. The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World - By Alan Greenspan
11. Mobilizing Minds: Creating Wealth from Talent in the 21st Century Organization - By Lowell L. Bryan and Claudia L. Joyce
12. Unstoppable: Finding Hidden Assets to Renew the Core and Fuel Profitable Growth - By Chris Zook
13. The CEO Within: Why Inside-Outsiders are the Key to Succession Planning - By Joseph L. Bower
14. The Future of Management - By Gary Hamel
15. The Puritan Gift: Triumph, Collapse and Revival of an American Dream - By Kenneth and Will Five Minds for the Future - By Howard Gardner

-END-

[The contents of this KM blog are my personal comments and do not reflect the official views of Hewlett-Packard Company.]