Are we finally remembering that we are human?
Start with an and age old organisational knowledge and learning problem and all too often you end up with the same old solutions - the following challenges are from 2015 or maybe 1995, do they ever really change?
Scenario 1: “How do we do a better job of capturing knowledge from these baby Boomers,” the CEO asks? “Simple, we use SharePoint to capture their knowledge so that anybody can access whenever they need to know something,” says the expert. “Excellent,” says the CEO, “go forth and build it.”
Scenario 2: “How do we do a better job of innovating,” the CEO asks? “Simple, we use SharePoint to setup an innovation portal,” says the expert. “Excellent,” says the CEO, “go forth and build it.”
In these scenarios organisational knowledge and learning “experts” turn too quickly to technology “solutions” and machine thinking, without thought of consequence. It is as if a 21st Century propensity for instant gratification has managers and leaders committing the cardinal sin of jumping to “silver bullet” or “simple” solutions without considering the starting conditions (culture, leadership, spaces etc.) and stakeholders, the agents, people, that shape practice in organisations; it is as if people, except, of course, the “expert” solution designer, are of no consequence.
“Silver bullets” for what are, more often than not, complex problems lead to organisational policy and practice that lacks commensurability with the environment they are designed to optimise, control, nudge or enhance. In plain terms, people (leaders, managers, users) end up unhappy or dissatisfied with the solution and you end up back at square one - when this occurs someone inevitably suggests a new strategy, with no thou
ght for the governing variables that underpin said strategy, and the cycle begins again. The cycle repeats. Fatigue ensues. HR Managers, KMers and L&D experts lose credibility and Harvard Business Review ends up publishing a cover that suggests that your function (HR/L&D/KM) should be blown up - see the HBR Jul/Aug edition, where HBR suggested just this for HR.
Fundamentally, the challenge is that the “problem” that “experts” are trying to address is a human one. The problem is complex - wherever there is competition/cooperation you will find complexity - which, logically, means leaders and managers need to stop relying on the conclusions of a single “expert” and re-humanise the way we approach organisational challenges (e.g. engage and involve a wide range of people in solving the problem). This begins by grasping that when speaking of organisational knowledge and learning, we are speaking of verbs, not adjectives - fundamentally, the activities organisations are interested or see value in are grounded in action, human action.
To explain further, Ian Fry recently wrote a LinkedIn blog, which appears to have now been removed, where he reported on the key take-aways from KM Australia 2015. Ian focused on a keynote that proposed that the value of knowledge lies in the capability/competency of an individual/group/team/organisation to acquire, share, use and create it. It is not knowledge or learning as an “asset” that is of value here, it is the human ability to take action that is of value. Ian proposed that Knowledge Capability was the silver bullet to make Knowledge Management more relevant - as I say, people love a silver bullet, unless you’re a vampire that is.
This idea of “knowledge capability” over “knowledge management” should not be such a shock. Organisational knowledge and learning is all about people and therefore people and their capabilities should surely be at the heart of any organisational knowledge/learning effort (btw, thanks to John Bordeaux, Stuart French and others for pointing out that “knowledge capability” is not new, being something I have been speaking about for several years - something readers of my blog over the years will be more than aware of).
What Ian’s blog did demonstrate is that knowledge/learning influencers are finally starting to challenge the idea of what organisational knowledge and learning is really about - I for one, after banging my head against the virtual social media wall for years, am thrilled to see this happen. However, talking the talk is one thing, walking the walk is something totally different.
One of the problems is that all too often machine thinking can slip into the models we use to make sense of/shape our world; the consequences being an increased lack of commensurability with the phenomenon (organisational knowledge and learning) that organisaitons are working with. As an example, take my friend Dave Snowden’s Cynefin model - to be clear, I am a huge proponent of Dave’s work and this is not an attack on the Cynefin model - where, I would argue that you can witness “dues ex machina” - I believe this occurs where Cynefin proposes that one should “probe-sense-respond” in the complex domain, where I would argue, as humans, we first need to experience a sensation thaty prompts us to probe; we do not randomly set about probing an environment without first experiencing a sensation that prompts us to do so.
“These thoughts, however, have been caused by sensations, and those sensations are constrained by something out of the mind. This thing out of the mind, which directly influences sensation, and through sensation thought” (www.peirce.org)
What I am trying to get at here is that we are human beings, dealing with human problems. So, why not reboot? Start from scratch; experience the sensations, rethink the fundamentals, engage and involve people and just see what happens?
You’ll be amazed at what people can achieve when they understand the problem.
