The realisation of potential
Thanks, to Stuart Jackson for his review of the Radical KM White Belt Course!
You can find his review here: https://oculusknowledgeconsulting.com/radical-knowledge-management/ and if you’d like to take the course, you can find it here: https://radicalkm.institute/.
Enjoy!
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 organizations have removed time for reflection, for questioning, for considering alternatives out of the process.
That’s not to say that there hasn’t been a lot of innovation in the last 100+ years, there most definitely has been. Whole areas of study have been developed/discovered, new technology is being developed all the time, but what about the “smaller” things, everyday things. What happens when we take away the time to think and reflect? We do things by rote, not thinking about if that’s the right thing to do, we get tired and suffer burnout, we start to make mistakes and treat people badly because we have focused on efficiency and effectiveness to the detriment of the system as a whole (see United Airline’s complete failure to respect passengers (https://fortune.com/2017/04/11/united-airlines-video/ and https://innovationexcellence.com/blog/2017/04/17/innovating-for-a-worse-customer-experience-insights-from-united-airlines/ and https://www.theblaze.com/news/2017/03/27/united-airlines-bars-teens-from-flight-for-failure-to-meet-dress-code-social-media-erupts/)
How do we bring that space for reflection, for some humanity back into our activities? By introducing time. Time for reflection, time for learning, time for asking questions, time for talking to other people, time for doing things differently, time for experimenting. Time.
I have posted a blog post about World Creativity and Innovation Week (April 15-21, 2017) on the GfWM site, you can check it out here.
I just recently received an email about disaster preparedness, it contained a scan of a document that the person who sent it to me had received. What does this have to do with KM?
Nothing and everything.
The point the person who sent me the scanned document was making was that he had received this document in the middle of summer, while people were away on vacation, it was poorly produced, there didn’t seem to be an electronic version available, and he believed that if any of these floods, fires, earthquakes etc. ever happened (or maybe that should be when they happen), he wouldn’t be able to remember the information in the document (which was about 10 pages long), and if he remembered that he had received this document, he wouldn’t be able to find it again.
Again, so what you say? What does this have to do with KM or learning or information or anything at all?
Well, if we are doing knowledge management, or learning management or information management we need to be concerned about how knowledge/information gets transferred and shared. How do the users want to receive it? What is their environment like? What circumstances will they be using this information/knowledge in? Who is going to be using this knowledge/information.
If we don’t design our systems and processes with the users in mind, all of the users, not just some of the users, they won’t use the knowledge/information and then what good is all the effort we put into implementing our KM/Learning/Information program?
Yes, I still get this question or some variation on it, even though there are lots of case studies and examples of knowledge management activities having a significant impact on the results of an organization.
The quickest and often the easiest way of winning over sceptics is by having the opportunity to do Knoco’s Bird Island workshop (https://www.knoco.com/bird-island.htm), I have seen more “light bulbs” come on for people in doing this 2-hour workshop than I ever would have believed.
I don’t want to give away any of the surprise, but by using three different KM processes (After Action Reviews, Peer Assists, and Best Practice sharing) results of the activity go from abysmal to unbelievable, increasing an average of 260%.
Even if you want to continue to be sceptical of the results that making better use of your organization’s knowledge can have and you think you can only attain a fraction of this, 10% of the result demonstrated in the workshop is still 26%. Isn’t that worth at least giving it a try?
Back before Christmas, I tweeted about the necessity of keeping an open mind in order to learn, it was part of the #PKMChat, but it got picked up by several people who weren’t part of the chat, which is nice, because it means that people were reading my tweets even though they weren’t part of the chat that I was participating in.
It got me thinking about why I tweeted that, and how important it really is, to keep an open mind, and not pre-judge something or someone.
I was delivering a series of training sessions for a client a couple of years ago, and I said to them, “imagine if that’s not true.” I was trying to get them to think outside of the box, to imagine that whatever they had assumed was the answer wasn’t. What assumptions were they making, why did they think that something was true when it might not have been?
Some of them had a great deal of difficulty with this notion, that there wasn’t a right answer, that what they were sure was true wasn’t. No amount of challenges from me was going to change their minds.
It got me thinking, there are a lot of people like this in the world, I have been one myself in the past, and there are some days I probably still am this way, but I like to think that I am more open minded now. I have travelled more, talked to more people, had more life experiences, and learned that there are lots of different ways to approach the same challenge because I’ve seen it happen and experienced it personally.
How did this happen for me? Somewhere along the line, I ran out of “answers” and had to go looking, asking questions, recognizing assumptions that I was making, recognizing that things people had told me were true and necessary, were not. It was a hard realization to come to, but I’m better for it.
Keeping and open mind and questioning is key to learning, critical thought is key to learning: don’t just regurgitate what someone else has said. It’s hard and it takes a lot of work, but it’s worth it in the end.