Why consider Conversational Leadership?
Our world has notable peace and turmoil. We can see peace between countries that were at war just a few decades ago. And we can see peace in communities and families that have worked through their challenges. Alongside this peace, we can also see turmoil in countries, communities, and families.

Peace and turmoil exist within each of us as individuals also. I can experience moments of happiness, joy, calm, and contentment within myself, and I can also feel moments of anger, disappointment, confusion, and strife within myself.

There are many ways to look at peace and turmoil. We can look at them through a technological lens. For example, we’ve seen technology expand from audio to video, to automation, to prediction and beyond. We can also look at peace and turmoil through a leadership lens. For example, we’ve seen leadership expand from styles of directive, to supportive, to coaching, to delegation, and to collaborative.

How does this relate to KM?
Knowledge Management has progressed collaboration and the flow of knowledge for several decades now. We’ve seen KM expand from within a single organization or community or nation to more and more examples of “external-facing” KM.

Given your specific purpose and objective of KM, we’ve collectively seen quite a bit of KM technology. For example, the “Conversation Prism” offers hundreds of techniques to serve specific collaboration needs. We’ve also seen many KM processes. For example, Knowledge Transfer processes, Expertise Location processes, Knowledge Café processes, etc.

Conversational Leadership has the potential to be another expansion of KM culture, processes, and tools. Especially from a cultural perspective, it is quite often that we hear about the challenges of “buy-in for KM” and “barriers to knowledge sharing.” Most organizations are hierarchical in their design, and so we often hear about “top-down” or “bottom-up” or even “peer-to-peer” patterns of influence and decision making. What if the concept of leadership was based on both your position and your leadership skills? What if we reminded ourselves of the difference between leaders and leadership, and more purposefully balanced the individual and collective aspects of leadership?

As KM continues to grow and expand from information management to experience management, to idea management, to collective leadership and beyond, we have an opportunity to develop from collaboration, innovation, and decision making to complexity, sensemaking, and Conversational Leadership.

Patricia Shaw, a former professor at the Business School at the University of Hertfordshire and founder of the Complexity and Management Centre, says,

“One of the ways of thinking about leadership, is thinking about convening conversations that might not happen otherwise.”

We often provide KM tools and techniques as broad solutions to challenges, similar to how engineers apply engineering tools and techniques to problems. Most of us think that we’re defining the challenge as best we can, and thinking as broadly as we can about the solutions. What if it were less about defining the problem, even less about the answers, and more about skillfully creating and contributing to an environment where conversations can flourish? Maybe that’s similar to one of the KM definitions of “creating an environment in which unique and critical knowledge can flow?" Notice the focus on conversation and leadership in this case.

What is Conversational Leadership?
Conversational Leadership is about appreciating the extraordinary but underutilized power of conversation, recognizing that we can all lead, and adopting a conversational approach to the way in which we live and work together in an increasingly complex world.

It is a relationship-building and community-building vehicle. It helps us to understand each other better and, in doing so, better understand ourselves. Furthermore, it is a collective sensemaking tool that helps us make better sense of the world and thus improve our decision making by bringing different perspectives to bear on an issue.

How to learn more
David Gurteen and I are running a Conversational Leadership workshop in the UK from 3-7 August 2020.

You will spend much of your time in conversation during the workshop:

• First, to make sense of the Conversational Leadership concept and its principles
• Second, to practice and improve your conversational skills
• Third, to build strong relationships with the other participants and create a sense of community

You will learn about and experience two powerful conversational methods, the Knowledge Café and the C-group.

The Knowledge Café is a conversational process that brings a group of people together to make a better sense of a complex issue, share experiences, learn from each other, and build stronger relationships. Many of the sessions will take the format of a talk followed by a Knowledge Café to allow you to fully engage with each other and make better sense of the material.

The C-group is an experiential and transformative learning methodology that enables a small group of people to practice and develop their interpersonal and conversational skills. You will take part in several C-group sessions throughout the workshop.

Conclusion
Conversational Leadership may be an extension of KM, or it may become an entirely new discipline, or it may blur into a new discipline. What an exciting opportunity to learn and contribute to the emergence of a potentially new discipline. Let’s practice a way to continuously respond to these questions together:

• Are we having the conversation(s) we need to be having right now?
• Are we having those conversations in the way we need to be having them?
• In what ways are we building or breaking down our community through these conversations?

The essence of Conversational Leadership is to make sense of the complexity we face every day through conversations that have awareness and discussion similar to the questions above. The potential application of Conversational Leadership might be one aspect of the way to provide inner and outer peace for us all.

Officially started back in 1995, Knowledge Management (KM) has had a bumpy ride to put it kindly.  There are a number of reasons for this, the most significant one being that it was at its inception owned and delivered by IT (not KM specialists) and was largely dependent on databases with impenetrable folder structures. This meant that adoption of KM was poor and it nearly always failed to live up to its hype – the right information to the right people at the right time.  The problem was further exacerbated  by the fact that an IT driven approach essentially focused on explicit knowledge which has always represented at best merely 20% of the company knowledge; the remaining 80% being in the heads of employees.

And so KM soldiered on for the next quarter of a century getting as much bad press as good press (see: the famous Nancy Dixon timeline graphic below). The problem being that the promise of KM was just too good to ditch but the practice of KM was proving too difficult to deliver.

Now fast forward to today where the perfect storm in terms of technology advancement and societal change has made the need for KM more important than ever. Indeed, there is now an unquestionable Knowledge imperative for business, that is impossible for any sane thinking CEO to ignore. The need for better KM really is a very easy sell today.

Consider this slide from People Analytics curator David Green:

Simply put, the future of your company lies in the heads of a vast ecosystem made up of your employees, your partners and your customers. Without a well-designed and executed KM program with dedicated resources in place, you are playing Russian roulette with the future of your company and sooner or later it will almost certainly become collateral damage.

Call this time in history what you like – the Digital Age, the Age of exponential Change, Age of Disruption, Age of Anxiety, Generation Z  - one thing is clear companies are disappearing at speed -- Kodak, Nokia (for mobile phones), Woolworths, Blockbuster, Borders. Society is changing at speed – drones, self-driving cars, 3D printing, and robotics. Business is changing at speed – Uber, Air B&B, Google cars. The workplace and the worker is changing – automation, the gig economy, virtual reality.

So developing a KM practice as a means of helping your company to stay in the game is now a priority.

When asked what their top 3 Digital Workplace Priorities were, KM was number 2 (source: The State of Digital Workplace report, CMS Wire 2020)

However the ability to execute KM well and to make it both agile and sustainable remains a challenge. Interestingly that challenge is no longer really to do with technology (we have the tools and the appetite to collaborate at speed: social media continues to prove that beyond any doubt).

The problem remains one of culture and change. And this is why a well-designed KM program that is funded and resourced as a business priority is the hallmark of companies that truly understand the knowledge imperative and are actively seeking to use KM to improve the odds that their business and their employees have a future. 

They know that Knowledge Management’s time is now!

We're sharing with you here a series of short discussions captured on video between Stephanie Barnes and John Girard about the use of creativity in knowledge management. It came about because of the chapter that Stephanie wrote for the book John and JoAnn Girard created and edited called, Knowledge Management Matters: Words of Wisdom from Leading Practitioners. 

We seem to have spent so much time in the last 100+ years trying to drive efficiency and effectiveness into our processes. How to do things faster, with more quality, with better outcomes, reduce waste, reduce re-work. These are not bad things, but in our push to be effective and efficient many of our organisations have removed time for reflection, for questioning, for considering alternatives out of the process. These chats look at a different motivator for knowledge management: creativity and how it can be used to facilitate innovation. 

There are nine videos in the series and the topics range from how creativity, innovation, and knowledge management fit together to how to enable innovation through diversity and what organisational mindsets are helpful in when innovation is the goal.

We hope you enjoy the series as much as John and Stephanie enjoyed making it. You can see the full set of videos in this YouTube Playlist.  

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Knowledge Management (KM) is fundamental to the effectiveness and success of every organization. A strategic roadmap to maturing an organization’s KM capabilities is what sets apart organizations that leverage their collective knowledge from their competitors who don’t have a handle on it at all. That is especially the case for organizations that are in the business of offering their knowledge to their clients, such as:

• Professional services firms that provide executive and management consulting based on the expertise and experience of their consultants and subject matter experts;
• Financial advisors who recommend the optimal set of investment strategies and tools to increase their client’s portfolio value;
• Legal advisors who need reliable access to laws, regulations, and related matters in order to apply them to their client’s unique situations or mitigate risk for their own organization; and
• Retail companies that have to guide buying decisions for their already informed customers who have direct access to all of their product information online.

Most organizations see the value of KM, but struggle with determining where to start and how to show progress quickly, continuously, and impactfully. In this blog, I’ll share the elements of an Agile KM Roadmap that will allow your organization to take an agile approach to implementing your knowledge management strategy. 

Workstreams, Tasks, and Milestones

The building blocks of an Agile KM Strategy Roadmap are workstreams, tasks, and milestones that are based on a current state analysis and target state definition.

Workstreams

Workstreams are independent, yet interrelated, KM efforts that add value on their own but ultimately create a more holistic solution when combined with other workstreams. 

The classic examples would be taxonomy design and governance, content strategy, and search design and implementation. Each of those workstreams alone will help an organization standardize the way it manages its knowledge and information while improving content findability. The outputs of these efforts can be combined into a web portal that indexes multiple repositories of good, quality content, resulting in optimal access to that content regardless of where it is stored.

Tasks

Tasks are the discrete steps towards producing the deliverables in each workstream. They are defined not only by the activities involved, but also the appropriate methodology for ensuring that the task is completed based on best practices.

Whenever EK designs a taxonomy, one of the critical sets of tasks is Top-Down Analysis, which involves conducting interviews, focus groups, and workshops with stakeholders and subject matter experts to identify primary, also known as “core,” and secondary metadata fields and values that should be included in the enterprise taxonomy design.

Milestones

Milestones mark the delivery date of a deliverable that adds value to the overall effort. This is important because all tasks within a workstream need to be purposeful, leading towards something that can be used. This may seem intuitive, but often times KM practitioners go through many efforts of producing something of value to the organization without ever delivering something that can be used to guide decision making or begin implementing. 

Examples related to taxonomy include the delivery of a report that summarizes all of the top-down and bottom-up analysis efforts and how the inputs gathered have helped to formulate the first implementable version of a taxonomy design. This report will not only summarize the work done, but provide the foundational information and next steps for continuing to improve the taxonomy design.  

Independent vs. Dependent Tasks

The art of crafting an Agile KM Roadmap is based on prioritization of efforts, as well as identifying the areas where tasks are contingent upon one another. In most cases, if you follow the approach recommended above, you’ll have a series of independent tasks that don’t require one to be completed before beginning another. There is a benefit however to sequencing your tasks in order to maximize how much value you add to the organization in the shortest amount of time.

Although not absolutely necessary, identifying and coaching the right group of individuals to lead each workstream is critical when it comes to driving efforts forward without losing steam. Without a sense of ownership and accountability for the outputs of the overall roadmap and each workstream within it, stakeholders assume that someone else is leading the efforts. Being explicit about who is Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed (RACI) brings transparency into who is doing the work vs. who is guiding the work. The key here is not only conducting a thorough stakeholder analysis that identifies the individuals needed to gain buy-in and adoption, but also hand-picking KM leaders (or those with high potential to become one) based on their interests, capabilities, and proclivities. 

Agile Tools and Ceremonies 

Once you have identified what you are doing, who’s responsible for doing it, and the order in which you’ll do it all within a set time period, such as 6-months or 1-year, you’ll need a way to track progress and a method for building in continuous improvement. Keep it simple to start with and then only build complexity as needed..

You can go low-tech and have a Kanban wall dedicated to the tasks you have To Do, are Doing, and those that are Done, utilizing a post-it per task. There are also no-cost, online options, like Trello, to help manage your tasks. Make sure that you manage your KM team’s “Work in Progress” capacity, meaning you allow them to commit to tasks, rather than assigning them tasks, based on their availability and their expertise-level to complete the task within a time-boxed period (or Sprint).

Set-up recurring meetings like a Sprint Planning session and a Sprint Review session to make sure everyone understands all that’s involved with each task, specifically the “Acceptance Criteria” that will determine whether a task is completed. In your agile cadence, build in time to check in with your team to determine what’s working and what’s not working so that you can identify actions and action owners that will help to improve your process and team dynamics.

A Few Final Recommendations

Now that we’ve covered the basics of an Agile KM Roadmap, here’s what you need to build into your plan to maximize the benefits of your efforts:

• Start with your users: Whether you are undergoing KM efforts to benefit your internal workforce or your external clients, you need to understand what your users need and want. Look at KM from their perspective by asking them questions, watching them work, and requesting information related to past effort that may or may not have worked. If you truly understand who you are doing this for from the very beginning of your effort, you will increase the likelihood of success as soon as you’re ready to roll-out the KM solutions you have developed.
• Define success metrics: Spend some time thinking about what you will measure in order to determine whether or not you’re moving in the right direction. If you’re developing a Community of Practice (CoP), you can measure the number of members in your CoP, how many people attend each session, or how your participants rate the usefulness of the information you provide them on your team site or at the various events you host. Beyond the success of the effort itself, ask what Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) matter to the organization, such as revenue each quarter, and how you can align your success metrics to impact to those KPIs. With the CoP example, perhaps one of your Innovation Challenges leads to a new product that generates unexpected sales when you bring it to market.
• Manage change and communications: KM practitioners make the mistake of focusing on the solution they deliver as the end-goal when, in reality, they should be focusing on whether that solution is even used and adopted by the individuals it was designed for. Integrated Change Management is an absolute must for any Agile KM Roadmap. This is a workstream that needs to be initiated at the start of the KM effort and carried through until the end of the initiative and beyond. People who are impacted by your KM solutions need to know why you’re introducing new technology, processes, and way of doing things. This can often seem like an unnecessary disruption to their already busy workday. If they understand “what’s in it for them” and are involved in the decision-making process as the solutions are being designed, then they are more likely to change the way they do things because they were involved and engaged throughout the process, having input and insight from the conception of the KM solutions to the delivery of them.
• Leverage a combination of technical and non-technical solutions: Technology is often the first and only solution that comes to mind when organizations face KM challenges. Introducing new technologies such as a more robust Content Management Systems (CMSs) or a user-centric enterprise search portal can significantly improve an organization’s knowledge management maturity, however implementing the technology itself is not enough to yield desired results. Technical solutions are an enabling factor to good KM, but it needs to be designed and governed in a way that maximizes adoption and delivers actual business value. Your KM roadmap should include facilitated sessions that allow your users to interact with the designs, prototypes, proofs of concept, and production-ready versions of your technical solutions. It should also include sessions with senior leadership and stakeholders to help them understand how the technical strategy and product align with overall business objectives. By approaching KM with an integrated technical and non-technical approach, your efforts will result in not only an optimal experience, but you’ll also make the most out of the features your technical solution offers.

By taking an agile approach to designing and implementing your KM Roadmap, you can go from not knowing exactly where to find your knowledge and information to having an action-oriented plan for creating, managing, and finding information in a more consistent and reliable way across the organization. Within months, as opposed to years, you can demonstrate that your KM efforts are bringing order to the once chaotic landscape of systems, content, and people. If you’re ready to design your custom KM Roadmap, contact Enterprise Knowledge and our KM experts will guide you through developing a practical approach for improving KM at your organization.

Workplace culture is an intangible concept that can be influenced by a myriad of internal and external factors. One of the most significant factors impacting the development of an organization’s culture is how well it responds to and adapts to change. Many organizations share common business challenges. To overcome these challenges, each business must look to its unique collection of assets. The most valuable asset a business has lies in the collective knowledge of its workforce. Business leaders can deploy knowledge management strategies in order to establish an informed, inquisitive workplace culture.

The advent of knowledge management

Although the concept of knowledge management (KM) has been around since the early to mid-1990s, it has grown in popularity through the prevalence of modern digital solutions. Business leaders use technology to augment their KM strategies. These strategies are geared towards business objectives including:

• Achieving greater employee performance
• Gaining a competitive advantage
• Engaging in innovation programs
• Deploying continuous improvement strategies

Above all, KM enables organizational learning. This is especially valuable to business leaders looking to create an “idea culture.” However, learning cultures don’t develop overnight. They require a long term commitment as well as an eye on the future. Let’s take a closer look at some ways organizations can create a learning culture within their organizations.

Centralize communications

One of the best ways to disseminate knowledge is to centralize the mode of delivery. Internal communication tools and strategies have become increasingly more commonplace in recent years. Inc. named company communication “2018’s Tech Sector to Watch.” According to experts consulted by the magazine, a convergence between different phenomena is changing the way businesses share information. The convenience, mobility, and speed by which employees access information have subsequently influenced their expectations about communication in the workplace.

Currently, many organizations suffer from misalignment due to different departments creating knowledge silos. When information becomes isolated from the larger employee population, productivity goes down. How can businesses expect teams to perform when they don’t have access to basic information that will enable them to do their jobs more effectively? Additionally, a lack of clarity surrounding organizational objectives can lead to a lack of trust among employees. Centralizing communications is one of the best ways to make the best use of organizational knowledge, a core principle in KM strategy. To do this, consider leveraging internal communications tools or establishing a company-wide intranet for sharing information across department lines.

Prioritize employee experience

The experience an employee has within an organization plays a large role in how workplace culture evolves. Moreover, how well an organization molds its culture to prioritize learning and knowledge sharing has a direct link to its ability to engage employees through periods of change. Given the way technology is changing modes of interaction, many businesses turn to digital HR tools to help them facilitate the employee experience. Tools like these offer collaborative, contextual learning platforms where employees can discover and follow top contributors in their organization. This socially-driven learning structure fosters knowledge sharing and helps employees build their reputation and share their own expertise.

To take it one step further, companies can then certify their employees in various aspects of KM. Whether an employee becomes a certified knowledge manager, specialist, or practitioner, they’re developing practical leadership skills that will enable them to succeed.

Workplace culture is a delicate concept that requires constant care and investment in order to thrive. Business leaders looking to innovate and stay ahead of the competition have a vested interest in developing learning cultures. An optimized communication and employee experience strategy leverage emerging technology to create better KM processes.