Why L&D Should Learn About Knowledge Management

You are working on a large proposal and need information urgently about a technology tool that supports your recommended solution. You recall that your colleague, Arthur, worked on an analysis of this tool about six months ago. Arthur recently left the company and no one is quite certain about where he stored his work products. “Try the SharePoint site,” suggests one associate. “I think Arthur put his project materials on a thumb drive and gave them to Becky. She’s on vacation, but you can ask her when she returns,” replies a well-meaning team member.  You scout around various sites for about an hour and realize that you have no choice but to recreate Arthur’s recent work.

This is but one example of the myriad situations we face every day. In the interests of efficiency and effectiveness, most of us want to build on the work of others. Unfortunately, finding what we need, in the form we need it, when we need it within our own company is harder than finding a 15 year old document through a Google search. Several studies have given us hard data for what most us feel: we spend nearly 2 hours per day searching for information.

With social, informal and collaborative learning solutions on the rise, efficiently connecting people to the right people and content is more important than ever.

A short trip in the way-back machine

In the mid-90’s a colleague and I formed a knowledge management function within the consulting arm of our employer, a large technology company. We were among the early adopters including BP, Intel, Schlumberger and IBM. We won awards for our practices and holistic approach. We believed these practices would stick and become the norm.

Ten years later, knowledge management was still seen as important. In 2006, CLOMedia published an article on the critical competencies for Chief Learning Officers (CLOs).  The authors said:

This competency set is driven in part by the exit of baby boomer employees and the desire to capture their knowledge, and in part by the strategic need to forge better links between individual competencies and corporate business needs. For our future CLOs, this means familiarity with tools for evaluating, capturing, organizing and disseminating critical organizational knowledge in order to manage individual and corporate intellectual assets more effectively.

Unfortunately, Knowledge Management appears to have fallen out of fashion. If Google searches provide any indication, interest in the term “knowledge management’ has declined 63% since that CLOMedia published that article.  What happened?

First, older knowledge workers did not retire en masse as predicted. When the economy tanked in 2008, baby boomers stuck around. Crisis averted (or at least delayed), we didn’t worry about workers passing on their knowledge to their colleagues. Second, it was unclear who owned Knowledge Management. Was it IT? A new function? L&D?  Lacking a clear owner, organizations tended to take a decentralized approach to the discipline. Content managers and CoP leaders concentrated on their individual niches rather than come together to produce a seamless user experience.   Third, knowledge management was harder to implement than anticipated. Embracing Knowledge Management was as much a cultural shift as it was about capturing, organizing and disseminating critical knowledge. Fourth, improved technology held out the promise that we ‘didn’t need to manage knowledge’. With improved search capability, content tagging and more powerful technology tools, in theory, if someone documented the knowledge, the knowledge seekers could find it. Finally, we never quite figured out how to rigorously measure the impact of connecting people to knowledge. Measuring hits on knowledge repositories or anecdotal evidence was not enough to overcome the skepticism that the return was worth the effort.

Over the years, as I talked to colleagues with whom I had worked during the knowledge management heyday, no one seemed as excited about its promise and potential as they had during the late 90’s and early 2000’s.  Yes, fads come and go.  Unfortunately, when the fad fades, we forget about the underlying concepts that made it valuable. We move on but leave the critical lessons behind.

Back to the Future

As Learning & Development practitioners, what are we facing today? Employees live in a fast-paced, changing world where agility and adaptability is crucial.  Our choices are seemingly endless. We can ping a colleague on instant messaging, connect on social networking sites, do a google search, and use an online resource within or outside our firm.  We feel empowered to build skills and capabilities that interest us, not simply those the organization wants us to build. Free or low cost webinars are available every hour of every day. Having ‘knowledge at our fingertips” is not just a nice catch phrase, but critical to our productivity and creativity.

To address the changing landscape of learning, many Learning & Development functions have embraced informal learning at least in concept if not in practice. Organizations are using social networking tools to create communities of practice, using content management platforms to store, tag and organize content, employing badging and gamification to drive knowledge sharing and learning behaviors. While these organizations are heading in the right direction, they are finding (or will find soon), bumps in the road.

• First, few organization have identified who owns informal learning. Does L&D own it? The business? IT? Without clear accountabilities and a unified strategy, these organizations will find difficult to demonstrate that their efforts make a difference to the business.
• Second, building an informal learning framework sustained discipline. Content needs care and feeding. A person or system needs to curate the content using rules and guidelines. People need to share content and connect the dots. It will not happen by itself as many of us can attest from experience.
• Third, Technology tools are proliferating at a faster rate than we can evaluate or implement them. Unfortunately, while I’m certain many of these tools are excellent as stand-alone solutions, few appear to seamlessly integrate with legacy solutions.

1. It’s difficult to measure impact. What IS the impact of informal learning? What is the impact of losing two hours a day searching for content? How much of that can be reduce? And even if we can get to content quickly, will it be current, of high quality and usable?

Applying the Lessons Learned from Knowledge Management to Informal Learning

Does this sound familiar?  It should. We encountered them all during 90s even as we applauded the power and value of knowledge management. When we lost our wherewithal to continue, the KM excitement faded and we moved onto the next big thing.

So, here’s my suggestion: let’s look back at the KM revolution and learn from that movement, dust it off, update it and apply it to the world of informal learning.

Before we look at the lessons learned, a bit of a digression.  In 1995, Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi wrote a seminal book called “The Knowledge Creating Company.”  In their book, they described two types of knowledge: explicit knowledge and tacit knowledge. Explicit knowledge is information or knowledge put into tangible form (such as documents).  Tacit knowledge is information or knowledge in our heads that is difficult to put into tangible form (such as learning how to ski). Nonaka and Takeuchi created “knowledge spiral” model where knowledge is converted from tacit knowledge to explicit knowledge and back again. Further, they used the analogy of a typhoon that gathers power as it moves over water to describe how individual knowledge rises to organizational knowledge and then dives back down to enhance and grow individual capability.

The graphic below depicts how this process works and why we need to enable the ongoing conversion of knowledge between its tacit and explicit forms.

Their work has important implications for informal learning efforts.

1. Organizations have an important role to play in growing organizational knowledge. Identifying, augmenting, combining, harnessing and broadcasting knowledge requires organizational commitment and resources.
2. Formal learning has a role to play. When left to our own devices, we learn what we need to learn in the moment or what interests us.  Unfortunately, all too often, we ‘don’t know what we don’t know.’  Formal learning can help build the right knowledge in the right way to create a growing and thriving organization.
3. Not all knowledge application happens on its own. Often, the application of knowledge requires other resources, such as manager support and reinforcement to apply newly acquired skills. Neuroscience research supports the need for ‘spaced learning’ and repetition to minimize the ‘forgetting curve’. Will learners do that on their own?
4. Technology, tools and enablers (and of course investment) is essential. Harnessing the collective insights of employees requires processes, tools and aids to bring it together. In other words, informal learning is not free or even low cost.
5. Measurement matters. We need to integrate measurement into the day-to-day activities, harness the data we collect and use it, not simply to improve what L&D does, but to enhance individual learning and performance.

Final Thoughts

Let’s not reinvent the wheel or relearn lessons already documented. Take a page out of the knowledge management handbook and leverage its lessons to accelerate the implementation of informal learning. Here are five things you can do right now.

• Read articles and books about knowledge management and its offshoots. Learn from the past and identify how to apply the lessons learned.
• Examine how your informal learning efforts contribute to each phase of the knowledge spiral. Where are you promoting and enabling socialization? Do you have processes to incent codification of knowledge?
• Focus your efforts. In the early days of Knowledge Management, we tried to do too much and got tied up in knots. We succeeded when we focused our efforts to solve real business problems, learned as we went and expanded based on pull from the business.
• Create clear accountabilities for driving informal learning and growing individual and organizational knowledge. When everyone owns it, no one does.
• Reflect and be agile. Don’t fall in love with your creation too early. Be critical so we can evolving, learn and grow.

I’d love to hear about your Informal Learning or Knowledge Management Journey.  Email me info@parskeyconsulting.com. Please site this blog post in your subject line.