Lesley Crane continues her discussion as to whether or not KM should be considered a science. . . Our survey results will be published next week.

Consequently, one can envisage that a scientific field is characterised by dominant theory, a body of appropriate research and knowledge, and a lively research agenda. From an academic perspective, the field of Knowledge Management possesses all of these characteristics.

True, some academics are critical of the lack of solid empirical research (but it does exist) in favour of what is termed ‘normative research’[1], or  research which proceeds from a hypothetical and idealistic future position, asking what needs to happen or change in order to reach it. What further muddies the waters are two interdependencies: first, KM undeniably draws on multiple diverse fields for its theories and approaches (e.g., information economics, organizational culture and behaviour, artificial intelligence[2]), and second, leading from this, it is a field that is broadly polarised between those who treat knowledge as an object (and consequently are concerned with process and technology), and those who treat it as embedded in social interaction between people (thus, it is resident in behaviour). By any measure, KM is something of a mongrel! None-the-less, KM – at least as far as the academic field is concerned – is practised as a science. More accurately, KM is an applied science: that is, a science which applies existing scientific knowledge to develop practical applications.

But, what does the scientific status of KM mean for KM practice, ignoring for the moment whether or not KM is actually practiced within organizations as such? First, and most obviously, it means that KM is a multidisciplinary practice calling on diverse talents in organizational management, human resource management and human / behavioural psychology, the cognitive sciences, project management, communications and, of course, IT/ICT, to name just a few. This conjures the KM practitioner as a multi-talented individual with exceptional adaptive skills.

Secondly, it places the enterprise of KM into the realm of dealing with the facts. Why is that important? Well, we frequently resort to ‘scientific talk’ in our everyday conversations in order to make our arguments more persuasive. “Empirical accounting”, as it is known in the terminology of discourse analysis, is known to have the effect of rendering accounts more credible and truthful[3].  From this high level perspective, simply acknowledging KM as a scientific practice imports levels of credibility and rigour that might otherwise be absent. But that would be, in reality, a rather superficial approach.

To truly leverage the benefits and values of KM as a field of science would obviously be to approach its practice in a scientific way. It would mean changing the way that strategies are developed and implemented from a reliance on ‘it worked for so-and-so’, to an adherence to formal and informal testing and trialling, adopting methods not only designed to deliver rigorous results, but results which are measurable in a meaningful way. And it means acknowledging that sometimes we can be wrong. But even results which don’t support our goals can be valuable[4]. That may sound counter-intuitive in terms of the ordinary workings of the organisation which typically frowns on error. In science, all results are meaningful and valuable, if derived from robust and valid research.

Treating KM as a science in practice also means acknowledging and acting on the understanding that sharing knowledge with other KM practitioners is vital to the development of the field of practice. That is, contributing to building the knowledge in the field. Without such co-operative and collaborative sharing one is simply working in a vacuum and people in vacuums have a habit of making it up as they go along, or of relying on repeating what has ‘worked in the past’.

One final implication of practising KM as a science speaks to the values and importance of formal qualifications and accreditations. It is true that the history and lore of KM is strewn with stories of individuals grasping the mettle and pulling off heroic feats of organizational knowledge accomplishment, all without any formal training or education in the topic. Fortunately, much of that valuable experience has been captured in books and articles. But I think of those individuals as the ‘early adopters’ of KM, and KM cannot and will not survive with an endless succession of would-be early adopters. What is needed now are knowledgeable and educated radical thinkers who can and are willing to shift the field from a vague but well-intentioned pseudo-management practice into a rigorous field and practice of scientifically-based management. As such, there is then the potential to build on successes, and to build a worthy and credible field of management and practice.

If the top agenda for C-Suite professionals is innovation and creativity, then perhaps it’s time to get innovative and creative with KM itself – in a scientific way, of course.

It's not too late to give your opinion!  Take our short, anonymous survey here:   Is KM a Science?

It comes as no great surprise that a recent investigation of C-Suite respondents finds creativity and innovation, and creating a truly service culture to be top priorities. To this wish list we could easily add sustainability, managing change in a disruptive VUCA environment, and responding to the volatility of consumer demands. All of these issues share one thing in common – they position knowledge and knowledge workers front and centre.  Easy to say, not so easy to do.

It cannot have escaped the interested reader that Knowledge Management (KM) continues to be tarnished by stories of failure: the academic literature variously apportions failure to up to 70% of KM implementations, particularly those with a strongly IT focus. 70%! Beyond academia, public forums like LinkedIn also carry their share of KM misery. There is also the matter of how KM relates to Big Data, and the issue of whether KM remains relevant in its wake.  Something is needed.

The argument here is that addressing the question of whether KM is a science might just hold the clue to how KM can finally emerge as a singular discipline, the importance and potential success of which can, at last, be cast beyond doubt.  

How could a scientific status offer a way out of the doldrums? Is it a science – could it be a science? Would it matter, particularly to KM practitioners? What would be the implications for KM practice, and how would this help KM’s case? However, addressing the core question is no straightforward matter!

Quite simply, to forensically examine the question of whether KM is a science or not requires at least some consensus on what we mean by three concepts: (1) science, (2) KM, and (3) knowledge.  Such a consensus does not exist on any account. For each, there are countless books and articles, and any number of (often heated) forums. In fact, the question over the scientific status of KM has itself a lengthy history in the academic literature. It would be impossible to encapsulate all of these perspectives here, but one cannot simply avoid the question. So, at the risk of further simplicity, I propose some common sense criteria for ‘what is science’, leaving the reader to apply their own definition for KM and knowledge.

Science is the accumulative practice in which new knowledge, acquired through rigorous observation (empiricism) and experimental research, builds on the foundation of existing knowledge. So, science is defined by its research, both in terms of accumulated knowledge, and its methods. Without wishing to become lost in the maze of debates over the currency and value of ‘experimental methods’ and ‘the empirical approach’, the fundamental perception of science is that it deals with the facts.  Most importantly, science posits that facts can be repeated or falsified through testing whereby theory is supported or discarded. Science proceeds either from a position of a theory of a state of affairs which is tested, or it conducts tests then formulates a theory to explain the test results in the most parsimonious way possible. But the key thing is that science deals in facts – knowledge. Now that statement in and of itself is the topic of considerable debate, but for the purposes here, it is an adequate proposition.  (click here for Part 2)

What is Your Opinion?  Please take our survey and let us know:  Is KM a Science?

Part Two of this article will be published next week, along with the survey results . . . stay tuned!

It’s that time of year again to take stock of where we are, what we’ve done, and envision doing something different in the future. The popularity of setting New Year’s Resolutions speaks to our natural affinity for change.  According to the Statistic Brain Research Institute, 45% of Americans set New Year’s resolutions, yet only 8% of those fully succeed. 

Whether you are in the ‘resolution setter’ category or not, would you like to really be successful at what you’d like to change?

I would! I’m a setter and I also fall in the 74% who have infrequent or no success at achieving their resolutions.

I am committed to moving to the ‘successful’ side this year. After studying neuroscience and change for over a year now, I know too much about how the brain works to allow myself to get into a failing position again.

My old way:
    •    Go Big.
    •    Set Audacious Goals.
    •    Write down big list of changes I want to make.
    •    Deny the long-held habits (dysfunctional as they were) that I’ve created over the years.
    •    Beat myself up in my journal for failing to make progress.
    •    Resolve to do better tomorrow.
    •    End the year no closer to where I want to be than I was a year ago.

What I’ve learned:
1. Changing Habits is like bending steel with your bare hands. Like the Grand Canyon shaped by the flow of Colorado River over centuries (Can You Move the Grand Canyon?). The brain naturally wants to line up what you are doing with something it has done before to leave more room for addressing the unknowns, thus defaulting to our well-worn habits. I remember reading that the best way to start a ‘quit smoking’ goal is to go on vacation. Back home the same triggers are there and the brain goes on auto-pilot in responding to them with a cigarette. On vacation, the pattern is disrupted making it easier to change your response.

2. The brain can only focus on one thing at a time. Tackling multiple changes, like any attempt at multi-tasking, makes you less effective than focusing singularly on one task. (Try this multi-tasking exercise to see what I mean). The more choices we have the more ineffective we are at making them. Customers offered a choice of 6 kinds of jam purchased a jar more frequently than those offered a choice of 24 kinds. (Lyengar and Lepper, 2000, cited in Barry Scwartz’s paper, “Can there ever by too many flowers blooming?’)

3. Right and Left Hemisphere Integration. We must engage both our Right and Left hemisphere to put all our resources behind the change. Especially in western culture, we tend to rely too heavily on the left hemisphere of rationality, logical, and structure. Lists of change tasks, tracking schedules, and the like are helpful but insufficient to motivate us for the long term. The Right Hemisphere, home to creativity and values, must also engage to put context and vision to how the change task fits in the bigger picture of our life. Vision boards, metaphors, and stories can give your resolutions a long life.

4. Making changes requires Neuroplasticity, the ability of the brain to create new connections. The brain’s ability to make new connections is increased by these five actions: getting enough sleep, proper nutrition, physical exercise, novelty, and focus. If ‘exercising more’ or ‘eating less’ is one of your resolutions, now it is tied in to the bigger picture of long-term brain health. No matter what your change goal, we still need to support the brain pattern changes we want to make by providing a good environment for the brain to operate at its most effective.

5. The importance of DO and BE. As a society, we tend to focus heavily on the ‘DO’: “In order to lose weight I will eat salad for lunch.” That’s a Do, a task. Specific? Yes. Measureable? Yes.

But if having salad for lunch makes you grumpy the rest of the day, it affects your ‘how am I BEING?’ state. If I’m managing my diet to eat better or lose weight, how do I want to BE when I am doing that?
    •    Do I act grumpy and deprived?
    •    Do I make others uncomfortable by judging what they are eating or gloating my superiority that I perceive I am making better choices than them?
    •    Or do I savor each bite of food?
    •    Do I allow myself a treat now and then?
    •    Do I display positivity and engagement?
    •    Am I aware of the shift in my emotional state this new way of Doing is having?

Having a “BE” intention connects our resolution to an inner desire to act in a certain way. It engages the Default Mode Network, that brain network that allows you to dream and make new connections from the data points of your life. (The “Do” part of goal achievement activates the Task Positive Network). When setting a new course of change, you will need courage, engagement, and innovation to fortify your resolve. It is too easy to let anger, frustration, or disappointment in our own failures settle into our attitude. A “BE” intention provides a long-term context for the impact we want to have on ourselves and others, bigger than task accomplishment.

An intention sets a desired standard and also recognizes our human frailty. As an example, “I know this change will be hard and I accept that I will not always accomplish the task I set every time, AND I will approach this with courage to be a more positive me.” Courage becomes my intention and puts the task in context of the bigger change it is representing—courage to live differently.

How does this change how I am approaching this New Year?

To DO: I get bored easily if I am not seeing progress, and I also have more than one thing I’d like to work on this year. I am picking one area that I want to change each month and setting one micro-habit to change in that area. I am tracking my progress in following that change, on both a tactical and emotional level, and appreciating myself with something honored when I sustain the change. On the 1st of each month, I’ve scheduled a goal review and update to set a new one for the upcoming month, sustaining one and beginning another.

To BE: I am setting an intention of how I want to be this year: Energizing Joy. Living a joy-filled life is important to me. I experience many people whose energy and verve for living seem to be totally sucked out of them, usually by work that is not fulfilling. Energizing joy is me living meaningfully, mindfully, and purpose driven, and finding deep fulfillment from that process, and this radiates to others and energizes them to make the changes they want to make.

I’ll keep you posted on how this is working.  
On New Year’s Eve, I’ll be raising a toast to your change success in 2016!

I am coming back to a popular and dear topic to many here: e-mail vs. conversations (I’ll use ‘conversations’ loosely, to refer to ‘enterprise social’ platforms in general). The discussion that seems to occur most often in my own experience, is regarding the “WHAT” (e-mail or ‘social’ tools) but not nearly as often on the “WHEN”, "HOW", or even more importantly in my opinion: the “WHY”.

If your team is currently debating over whether to use e-mail, or a social tool like Yammer or Groups in Outlook (available to Office 365 users), my advice is to first think through and discuss at least the following:

• What is the Business Problem you are trying to solve?   Or, what are your objectives?
• What is your Strategy for meeting these objectives?
• What Tactics will you use, to implement your strategy?

Let's go with a not to un-common example I think, to illustrate why it is so key to start with these essentials, before jumping into the tools side of things.

1. Business Problem:  Due to current market pressures, you need to cut costs but your team is already very streamlined and processes are standardized and largely automated. There is little room for further cuts, or any remaining cuts having much impact other than temporary relief. Hence you decide to maintain costs as much as possible, while instead increasing productivity. You know that there are inefficiencies around e.g. decision making and problem solving between and within your teams, so you decide to focus on the organisational structure. 
2. Strategy:  The current organisational structure is hierarchical: decisions are made at the top (the Executives), routed there by middle management that does nothing more than enforce policies and routing decisions up and down the chain. At the bottom of this pyramid, you have the teams who are supposedly the subject matter experts but they are not empowered to make decisions, only to implement them. You decide as your strategy, to eliminate unnecessary lead time through in-efficient decision making, by flattening the organisation and empowering the experts (possibly those are the people facing your customers on a daily basis too), retrain middle management to support and develop their teams instead of routing decisions and giving orders. The executives will still make the strategic or critical decisions, but they will now make more educated decisions, as they will base them on input and advise from the experts.
3. Tactics:  This is where you build your Communications, Training, Incentive plans etc. You are implementing a major change, that impacts every single person in your organisation and you need to make the change happen together with them, not make the change for them (or even worse: do it to them!). Unless you have trained Change Management Professionals in-house, my recommendation really would be to train and certify some key staff members, or in-source an Adoption Change Management service. Change is not achieved by making the decision, informing your teams and forcing a new tool or rule book onto them.

Have you noticed? I still haven’t talked about implementing a single tool yet!

After you start driving the change within your organisation and people start to adopt to the new requirements and opportunities, you may realise that to enable your now empowered teams, you need better communications and ways for your teams to co-operate within and across teams. You may also find that people need better and quicker access to information and new ways to share their knowledge, to be able to make decisions on the front lines. You now need to develop a Collaboration Strategy and a plan for how to implement it. At some point one of your tactics will surely be, to find the knowledge collaboration (Knowledge Management; KM) solution that meets your needs, and best supports the knowledge sharing and collaborative team culture you have evolved.

So what is my key take away here? What is the point that I am trying to make? A simple Pareto analysis, based on my own experiences of driving adoption change management in the KM and Collaboration space for almost 3 years now, and the learnings my team has made, which says: it is 80% about people and process (culture); and only 20% about the tools or technology.

Learn more about how we work with Knowledge Management internally, in Microsoft Enterprise Services, from this brief customer success story: Microsoft Services Reimagines Knowledge Collaboration with Cloud-Based Platform (Campus). It also emphasizes the importance of leading this as a people- and culture initiative first and foremost, following with the solution. We have presented our own learnings at several international KM conferences, and shared and exchanged knowledge, with many of our global customers already. And all seem to agree: it’s 80% people & culture – the rest is technology.

PLEASE NOTE:  1)  The views and opinions expressed here are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer; 2)  The Business example is freely based off of the story about how "flattening the pyramids" was Jan Carlzon's key strategy, to turning SAS (Scandinavian Airlines System) around in the early 1980's. He shares his story in Moments of Truth (Riv Pyramiderna!). I just re-read it and guess what... It still applies, just in a different dimension.  Thank you for inspiring a few generations of leaders, and aspiring leaders, by now @Jan Carlzon!

We now want the same digital experience and service levels at work as we get in our personal life

The world of work is undergoing significant change. Worker expectations have shifted in so many ways. Employees want to use their own devices and applications to get their work done. They expect to have their views and ideas aired and to get rapid feedback. Access to information and to decision makers is often more important than financial remuneration. Transparency and Collaboration are the new corporate mantras.

Why has all of this happened so suddenly? Is it the rise of the so called millennials? Or is there something more widespread at play here?

The clue to understanding this profound shift in workers and the workplace lies not inside the organisation but rather what is happening outside company life.

Start with yourself. Examine the way you manage your life today and the service levels you expect:

• You want to find information from your local council or give instruction to your doctor’s surgery. You go online and within seconds you are able to execute on those needs.
• You want to move money from A to B, you cut through any bureaucracy and complete the transaction quickly, silently and often on the move.
• You want to research a holiday but avoid the sales and marketing machine of the provider. So you go to a site like Trip Advisor where you can compare notes with ‘people like me’. Trusted sources obtained for free and on demand.
• You want to solve a problem or plan for a situation that pertains to both your private and organisational life - e.g. travel updates and bookings, weather checks in multiple locations, route planning, dining arrangements, car hire - all of these actions you now source an application for and execute from your smart phone.  

Now at work you become frustrated with the relative poverty of the communication tools at your disposal. You want to collaborate with a group of co-workers to get a project or task completed efficiently. You know how to do this in your private life – e.g. you have a Facebook group for local child care sharing or what’s app group for organising football training. So you explore collaborative technologies for the workplace and find that there are indeed similar tools available that are focused on your work needs and objectives.

In this world of self-service, the idea that the IT department (or any other department) can continue to prohibit employees from using collaborative tools of their choice to get work done is both impractical and ultimately self-harming.

Workers now demand the same digital experience and service levels at work as they get in their personal lives.

And this is where we arrive at what is known as the Social Knowledge Management imperative. If disparate group of employees go off and start collaborating on a self-service basis then they are in a sense destroying the very thing they are seeking to remedy. Several collaborating groups with no obvious visibility of each other are in fact creating new organisational silos. Valuable company knowledge and learning opportunities which were once (or are currently) locked away in hard to access folder structures are now trapped in multiple uncoordinated collaboration groups. This situation will not work and someone (and their team) has to take responsibility to get this right.

Providing a well-thought-out space for company collaboration, a digital place that accommodates rising employee expectation and marries with organisational objectives is not something that can ever happen of its own accord. Social KM managers (and their team) have to act as custodians of Collaboration Culture. They have to plan, plant and nurture the Company ‘collaborative garden’ with tremendous attention to detail, to both business and individual needs and they have to do this over a long term.

Rooven Pakkiri will be covering these topics in his Social KM course February 22-23, 2016 - London, UK.  Course details posted soon.  Contact KMI for details.

The course is aimed at anyone in organizational management or leadership who is trying to figure out how to meet worker expectation or executive directive for increased transparency and collaboration in a business context. Throughout the 2 days the course moves continuously between theory and hands-on practice as participants get to experiment with collaborative technology in a safe and bespoke business focused arena.  (NB: a Wi-Fi enable laptop is essential for this course)