Back To Basics: KM and Adult Education

OR, "I Am A KM Snob"

Ohhhhhhh, so many things going on this week...apartment hunting in DC (major pain in the ass), trying to figure out Rita Ora's ethnicity....I mean, she could be Albanian like it says on her Wiki page but she looks at least half Black AND she dated a Kardashian and, except for Kourtney, we know how they roll.

What else...I am officially over these "idealist peddlers" harassing folks on the streets of DC to listen to their spiel about whatever organization they're repping.  They could take a few cues from their homeless competitors, namely, say your piece and keep it moving!  'Cause, let me tell you, you are taking your LIFE into your hands steppin' in front me to block my path to the Metro at 6pm to ask me if you can ask me a question - you just did!

Ain't nobody got time for that!

Recently, I attended the Global KM Health Share Fair hosted by  the Global Health Knowledge Collaborative (GHKC).  Since the field of public health is new ground for me in my KM career, I hoped to get some insight into the ways in which KM is is being used in the space to help me be more creative.  Unfortunately, my takeaways weren't quite what I set out to acquire.

For starters, I made the realization that I am indeed a KM snob.  What is that you ask? In a nutshell, if I don't feel that a person adds to my understanding of KM then I'm not interested.  If I don't feel like a networking relationship will help me to grow as a professional or individual then I'm not interested. And, if I don't feel that someones understanding of KM is consistent or in line with mine, then I'm especially not interested.  This might seem ironic - possibly, even moronic, considering that my entire profession is about promoting communication and knowledge sharing, but honestly, that's just where I'm at these days.  Over the course of my nearly 10 year career I have certainly put in my time meditating on KM and sharing my insights on the subject with anyone remotely interested (and several folks who weren't) but too often those conversations seem painfully one-sided (and not just because we likes to talk, which we do). At this stage of my career I need professional relationships that are equally give and take, not ones where I'm giving solely to help them grow.  Yes, it's nice to give but sometimes we wanna be Johnny at Christmas instead of being Santa all the time - milk and cookies ain't the same thing as a Samsung Galaxy 4S, I'm just sayin'.

My second, unexpected realization, was that folks in this space don't seem to do as much sharing as you'd think or expect. There was whining about competition for donors/funding dollars and the need to differentiate themselves from their "competitors" in terms of publishing research and program activity and maybe I'm just being an unsympathetic jackass but it seemed that too many of these folks were operating in a spirit of fear - yeah, I'm getting spiritual - that flies in the face of the work that they are doing. At the end of the day, we are working to save lives and, in some cases, eliminate illnesses in poorer, underserved populations that don't exist within Western nations. There may be competition for the limited resources to achieve these goals but collaboration is free y'all!

Interesting side bar: Considering how fearful some of these organizations are about sharing knowledge and information, sharing fearlessly is a great way to give visibility to those organizations willing to try something different.

Anywho, while I sat there feeling like a fish out of water because everyone else has their history and experience within the space in which they (and now "'I") work to bond over and I'm being a "judgey" KM snob looking down on them for not knowing as much about KM as (I like to think) I do and not trying harder to know more about KM or to develop innovative ways to approach KM I started getting critical of everything: the layout of the room, anything anybody said, what the girl next to me was eating at breakfast (and how).

To be fair, I did make an effort to share my thoughts in small group work sessions but, honestly, no one seemed very interested in what I had to say.  And while I'm willing (in the space of time it takes to write this post) to consider that it's because what I said wasn't particularly interesting, it's common knowledge that everything I have to say is, at a minimum, interesting, so I don't think that was the case.  I think it's because the reflections and contributions of other people, doing exactly the type of work that they do, frustrated by exactly the same challenges they are confronting, and saying exactly the same things they believe (not to mention all of those people who don't like to be aggressive about the truth preferring to sugar coat every bitter pill until they rob it of it's effectiveness), were more compelling than some dude who was, essentially, asking them to reflect upon how their attitudes and perspectives (read: bias) influence how they do their work and the results they see.

Yeah, real-talk, I was that deep.

But I couldn't help it!  Listening to some of the comments just had me on an Adult Ed rager.  I know that I'm probably the only (or one of a few) KM professional who went the route of an Adult Ed course of study, but I truly believe that getting anywhere from the intersection of KM Avenue and Public Health Street demands an understanding of these Adult Ed principles courtesy of Malcolm Knowles (with a little help from the Queensland Occupational Therapy Fieldwork Collaborative (QOTFC):

• Adults are internally motivated and self-directed
• Develop rapport with your audience and encourage a Socratic method of learning to encourage critical thinking and elicit participation
• Show interest in peoples thoughts, opinions, and feedback
• Provide regular constructive and specific feedback (both positive and negative)
• Encourage use of the range of KM tools and resources available within your organization
• Encourage individual KM activity that reflects folks' needs and helps them to achieve their own goals and objectives 
• Acknowledge folks preferred learning style of each member of your audience/team/staff
• Adults bring life experiences and knowledge to learning experiences
• Understand the needs and skills of your audience before attempting to secure their buy-in or commitment to something
• Facilitate reflective learning opportunities
• Adults are goal oriented
• Provide meaningful learning experiences that are clearly linked to your audiences goals
• Provide relate-able, real-life examples 
• Ask questions that motivate reflection, inquiry and further research.
• Adults are relevancy oriented
• Provide some choice in KM activities and tools so that participation - and learning - reflect the interests and habits of your audience
• Adults are practical
• When making choices about assessments, interventions, and availability of resources and tools, take the time to clearly explain and discuss your rationale
• Be open, honest, and explicit about the impact and usefulness of tasks and activities in which folks are engaged
• Adult learners like to be respected
• Take an interest in your audience
• Acknowledge the wealth of experiences that folks bring to the process
• Regarding folks as colleagues equal (and maybe even superior) in life experience
• Encourage the expression of ideas, reasoning and feedback 
• Secure buy-in at every opportunity

Your organization may have this massive need (directive and/or mandate) to improve how knowledge and information resources are shared but folks' level of participation reflects their individual need, not your wants.  People may put documents in the knowledgebase because they have to (and manage it when told to do so) but active engagement happens when they see relevance to their own work.  If you're not getting this type of engagement stop bitchin' about folks not beating a path to the wonderful system you've gifted them with (clearly, in a vacuum) and start asking them what it will take to make that system and the processes you've established into a tool that meets their needs.

Quick & Dirty: "Real" Applications of KM

Happy New Year!!!

I had planned on having my KM3.0 rant be the first post of 2009, but I've been busy trying to finish up my Q1 Goals at work and the time I thought I'd have free during the holidays ended up being used to party like a rockstar for four days straight (although Mary's in East Atlanta didn't have that song available for Maryoke last Saturday).

Anywho, one of the things I love about my current job is the opportunity to break new ground in how people understand KM. Most folks in my organization either have no idea of what KM is or a very narrow idea so branding is super critical. And, a key component of any branding strategy is the ability to define service offerings which is what I've been working on today for my boss.

Once you get beyond content management, which most people think of as the sole function of KM, you really get into the various ways in which all of that information can be leveraged. This, in my humble opinion, is what puts the 'knowledge' in knowledge management.

While there are many different activities that can potentially fall under the domain of KM, this list is really only relevant to the activities my organization's KM team is involved in (or looking to expand into). Still, this might be a good starting point for folks seeking to demonstrate the value of KM beyond content management (which, I've still included).

1. Content Management…
…refers to the set of processes that support the lifecycle of information, from acquisition, organization and dissemination to expiration.

2. Business Intelligence…
…refers to the process of aggregating and analyzing metrics and data about a particular business unit or function to identify and provide recommendations on potential opportunities.

3. Competitive Intelligence
…refers to the regular, frequent, proactive, and systematic collection, analysis, and management of data, information, and knowledge concerning the business environment in which an organization operates.

4. Key Intelligence Topics (KITs)…refers to topics of great importance which provide purpose and direction for Competitive Intelligence reporting. Three basic KIT categories are:

• Strategic Decisions and Actions (including the development of strategic plans and strategies);
• Early-Warning Topics (e.g., competitor initiatives, new technology developments, and government actions); and,
• Descriptions of Key Players (including competitors, suppliers, regulators, and potential partners).

5. Succession Planning/Knowledge Transfer…refers to the process of planning for the smooth continuation and success of an organization by:

1. Developing, sharing and transferring critical knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs) from out-going to in-coming staff through a combination of training, coaching, and mentoring; and
2. Identifying the ever-evolving KSAs needed to maintain competitive advantage and strategizing the development and/or acquisition of suitable human resources.

6. Knowledge Discovery
…refers to the systematic analysis of user provided data to reveal previously unidentified patterns, trends, and relationships about customers, products, services, and other activities that can lead to new and profitable business opportunities.

Additionally, KM can provide assistance in the development of:

• Communities of Practice
• Organizational Literature (including White Papers, Action Reports, and Case Studies
• Human Resources Policy and Planning (HRM & HRD), and
• Technology Infrastructure Planning

The one thing that I didn't include in this list was the education and learning (provided by the KM function) around each of these areas. Keep in mind that with branding, marketing and education are yin and yang; every service offered by your KM function will involve educating your target audience.

Quick & Dirty: Additional Thoughts on KM Certification

Well, so much for posting on "the regular" with my Quick & Dirty posts. I've been staying on the grind and hustling to get roll-out and present the proposed FY09 KM strategy and haven't had much time for any kind of consistent blogging, but I've had tons of thoughts on topics so I'll try to kick those out quickly and silence my guilty conscience.

So, back in May I did a post on KM Standards and Certification and after working on my 'Curriculum' post I started thinking more on what a proper certification program should look like for KM.

For starters, I (the royal 'we') wouldn’t want to take a program that covered information from a very high-level. Which, of course, doesn't help the newbies to the field.

I would imagine that the best course of action would be to offer two tracks - one for KM professionals and one for non-KM folks. The non-KM professionals track would be for folks who are looking to understand KM from a high-level, they may or may not be planning a career in KM, they might just be interested in developing their own understanding of (KM for Finance, KM for Marketing, KM for R&D, etc.).

The KM professionals track could start with the essentials (which could be skipped over for KM professionals who are past this point and jump right into the meat…well, maybe there could be a quick, fast-track course to cover some critical essentials, but it would be a survey class featuring highlights - nothing intensive or in-depth. However, the “meat” of the courses in this track would focus both on a combination of theory and practical application. The theoretical courses would be more focused on forward thinking aspects of the field or, perhaps, focused applications of KM, stuff that goes beyond the standard discussions and day-to-day applications of KM, in fact, stuff in these courses can generate courses in practical applications of KM. Conversely, the practical courses would focus on the day-to-day applications of KM - knowledge audits, metrics development, strategy design and implementation, KM branding, and so forth. Personally, if I was actually in the market for getting certified (as a newbie and maybe as a practicing professional), I'd want a course or program that gave me useful tools as well as some background on the field, the thought leaders, a timeline of the field – critical events, guiding thoughts, principles. I think that these are types of 'knowledge tools' that a quality program would help one to acquire.

Just sayin'.

Sigh, one down, hahahaha.

Quick & Dirty: Thoughts on a KM Curriculum

I know, I know, I’m a total flogger! I’ve seen my subscription numbers plummet and I’ve felt the guilt, but in my defense I’ve been craaaaazy busy with my new job…not busy enough to miss a single episode of Gossip Girl (what, are you kidding?), but that’s just one hour out of my otherwise hectic week.

I’ve been working (slowly) on a new full-length blog, but I’ve started to realize that perhaps I should take a stab at kicking out more "quick and dirty" posts to address many of the KM thoughts I’ve been reflecting upon lately but don’t (or can’t) seem to find the time to blog about at length. Between these and my OOTB posts (which should be easier to write now that the election is over) I should keep my readers and fellow KM-ers happy and reflective :-)

My current position has raised a lot of questions for me about managing knowledge in a large bureaucracy, most of them focusing on the impact of politics (within the KM function) and how it impacts the pursuit and implementation of KM (clearly not well) and also, how one might exploit conflict and office politics to achieve something positive (essentially turning negative behavior into something useful and constructive). Anyway, since I’ve got a(n imaginary) timer ticking down at my desk and in keeping with the concept of a "quick and dirty" blog post, I won't take time to dig through my daily journals to generate a list of those questions, rather I’ll blog about a question that a co-worker just asked about an hour ago: What did I study when I first began my foray into KM that helped me to learn and understand the field?

I’ve already envisioned, at some point down the road, teaching KM in both corporate and academic environments and helping to compile compile a KM resource list. Although, to be honest, I’ve only made notes, here and there, regarding what would appear on such a list. I do happen to have 80% of the articles I read on KM during college and grad school and occasionally I’ll thumb through them and shock myself with how outdated (and maybe a little ridiculous) they are in the present. Sometimes I surprise myself with an article that is still timely, I’ll have to look through them again and maybe blog a post about how KM (through the literature) has changed..or not, over the years.

Anywho, to the task at hand, I doubt I’ll be able to come up with anything definitive in the next 5-10 minutes, however I’ll give it a go and I invite others to offer suggestions about what they think should be added.

The KM Curriculum
Although I have an undergraduate degree in Urban Policy Studies and the majority of my time was spent in Economics and policy-related courses (and nearly every French course I was able to take), a good chunk of my courses were in the areas of Organizational Behavior (OB) and Organizational Development (OD), as well as coursework in Business Analysis and Strategy. In my humble opinion, these areas are seminal to working in KM. After all, KM is all about helping organizations to understand how they operate and to recommend (and implement, if that's your role or objective) strategies for improving areas of need. Even though these recommendations may involve non-traditional solutions, courses in these areas help to provide valuable insight into how many organizations operate and “think”.

If you’re wanting to learn how the people in organizations “think” then definitely you’ll want coursework in Psychology and Sociology, which was a requirement for me and, I think, most undergraduate students. I also recommend courses in Adult Education and Human Development. As I’ve blogged before, the number one reason I decided to pursue graduate study in Adult Education is because I felt that in order to understand how to implement and facilitate change, I needed to understand how people learn and adapt to change. I’m not knocking B-School (much...in this post) but I took enough Business courses to know that the answers aren’t there. If they were, we wouldn’t see the same problems (particularly with change management) cropping up time after time. Successful businesses (and business practices) aren’t merely adaptable they look outside of traditional business avenues for solutions and inspiration.

One field that I never properly studied in school (because I was already kinda good at it and my mother wisely suggested I explore new and unfamiliar territory) is Marketing. Over the last few years the concept of KM Branding (an article on which I promise I will write and shop around and eventually post to this blog before the end of the year) has really helped me to understand the intersection of marketing and education and its criticality in successfully implementing change - period, least of all KM.

Statistics and Program Evaluation. Math was never my strongest subject in school and processing data isn’t my idea of big sexy fun, but the 30+ hours of statistics, analysis and evaluation (including survey design) courses I was required to take between undergrad and grad school has been invaluable to me, particularly when you’re dealing with organizations that only seem to understand "bottom-line" business communications. It’s always a challenge learning how to translate KM goals and efforts into these types of communications, but if you learn one thing about implementing organizational change it’s that having data to back up your recommendations is essential and gives you unparalleled credibility…the rest is all in how you spin that data (see Marketing above).

One course that I’d wished I’d taken is Technical Writing. I pick up skills like it’s nobody’s business, but having this particular skill-set from the beginning would have been much appreciated. Again, it goes back to being able to translate ideas into requirements and documentation that can be universally digested. One resource that I didn’t discover until my last semester at GA State (mostly because its availability was only disclosed to the B-School students, even though all students had access) was the university’s suite (LMS) of online courses for learning various applications (e.g. MSOffice, Illustrator, etc) and programming languages (e.g., SQL, PHP, HTML, etc.). Not that I would have recognized the true value of this resource at the time, but, in hindsight, as a KM Strategist (and not a KM Architect) I would have been better prepared for some of the technical demands of the field. Fortunately, there’s some benefit in having a Sr. Systems Analyst/Engineer for a father (who maintained one of the most high tech households on the block). Just one of the reasons why I pick up new skills and new tech so easily.

All right my time is up and I’ve got to back on the professional grind. There’s definitely more that I could add to the above, but I’d love to hear what additions others would make!

Out of The Box - Week Ending 8/15

Has this week flown by or what?? My only complaint is that I've got bags under my eyes from staying up late watching as much Olympics coverage as I can coax out of my telly. Well, I do have one other complaint, about the Olympics: is it too much to ask to see a little more tennis coverage? I'm reeling from the losses of the Williams sisters and Fed, but can we see anything more than swimming, gymnastics, and boxing (that's on one of the 24-7 cable channels every time I fip over to it). Kudos to Michael Phelps though, always a pleasure to watch dolphin-boy tread water. And, passport or no, is it obvious to anyone else that at least two of the Chinese gymnasts are just out of Huggies?!?!?!

Quite coincidentally this week's reads seemed to provide a variety of ideas for KM practitioners looking to branch out into independent consulting or to expand your practice if you're already doing your own thing, as well as innovative marketing and branding tactics.

• Idea #1: Teach a KM class.
• WTF of the Week: Spray-on condoms!?!?!?! Uhh, okay.
• Idea #2: Conduct KM audits as supplements to business valuations.

• Strategm: Develop Your Competitive Advantage: In this whiteboard video, Erica Olsen lays out why you should define your competitive advantage and how to do it.

• Innovative Marketing Technique: How to Make Money Off of Free iPhone Games