KM, self-Knowledge, and Transcendence

I have been focussed on personal aspects of organisational behaviour because we need to understand ourselves before we can lead and manage others. Leadership in today’s organisation is about capturing people’s trust and belief, harnessing their professional capability, opening their imagination, and motivating their efforts with passion and enthusiasm for the cause.

To me, this is the essence of knowledge management – developing business environments where all participants can reach their personal potential and attain their goals. Participants is a general term that caters for organisations (the value network), groups (business units, teams, external interest groups, communities of practice), and individuals (shareholder, board member, employee, public).

How we develop this KM environment is a decision based on the particular context. Earlier beliefs surrounding KM centred on the use of repository-style technologies to gather, codify, store, distribute (push and pull), and retire or refresh “knowledge.”  (Actually, I would argue what is “managed” is data or information at best, but that is another post to be written!)

This approach was based on the notion of “quick wins” and “one size fits all”. Quick wins – because we thought we could miraculously trap and share “implicit” or “tacit” knowledge through “explicit” or “externalised” knowledge. The outcome was that we created a mountain of unstructured information (documents, emails, reports), all of which had dubious search-ability and reusability.

“One size fits all” in the sense that we thought we could apply the same principal to all business environments to yield a new organisational “homogeneity” with respect to knowledge. The outcome of this belief was a poorly adopted and scarcely-used, redundant set of expensive repository technologies that were nothing more than “glorified databases.”

You will note the early belief saw people as secondary in the process. Once knowledge is trapped, the technology takes over. Thus the firm’s value model was based on the premise that people were present to improve the technology and therefore, technology was more important than people. This is an “industrial” value model – where the knowledge is held by the technology and the people are seen as functional “necessities” that ensure the technology uses the knowledge efficiently (i.e., via repeatable processes that create mass-market products).

There is no doubt, business in-general has moved on from these primitive and simplistic notions of organisational wealth and value. As individuals, I hope we would strongly deny or support any notion of a “production line” where the technology is valued more than the people in our knowledge-based world.

However, I believe there is an “underworld” of beliefs that are strongly imprinted into our thinking that steer us subconsciously towards this industrial mindset. Let me give an example: We all have a preference for tangibility and we are even more attuned to some sort of quantification of that tangible. Therefore, it is relatively easy to make purchasing decisions which lead to increasing material assets. However, it becomes much harder to justify expenditures that do not have any material asset value.

Therefore, my purpose in focussing on exploring our own personal assumptions and dispositions as individuals, leaders, and managers is to better improve and prepare the “ground” in which next-generation knowledge management is cultivated.

Insurmountable problems & limitless opportunity – living and leading in today’s economy

My value proposition to you in writing this blog is to begin a dialogue on how we can better lead and manage ourselves and our organisations in an environment where “dynamic equilibrium” is replaced by disruptive innovation and change.

Today, nations, businesses and individuals are faced with monumental challenges and boundless opportunities. We are living in a shrinking and expanding world.

Shrinking World? The natural barriers that have separated us in the past have been significantly reduced:

• The Internet has provided us with a medium to instantaneously transact in a low-cost and seamless manner. We are connected with the global village with an intimacy that is unprecedented in human history, it comes into our homes, it touches our lives, it frightens us, it informs us.
• The internet revolution is only paralleled by our new-found, mass global mobility. Geographical obstacles have been smoothed through low-cost effective logistics that move people and goods from port to port. Intimacy, increased information and better education have led to far higher individual expectations. We expect our governments, organisations and suppliers to know us. We expect service and we expect quality. We don’t want to be “mass-consumers.” Rather, we expect tailored products and services that suit our particular requirements.

Expanding World? Bringing us together has created enormous complexity:

• We have unprecedented access to new customers and unprecedented threats from new competition.
• Our once-protected markets are now impacted by an incredible array of events and variables. Volatility is high.
• Our customer bases are highly segmented and our products and services have grown in complexity to fill each of these market niches. This segmentation is taken to new levels of complexity when we start seeing various cultural and regional requirements for our products and services.
• While we wish to transcend our cultural differences, the diversity between people is so great that it threatens the very fabric of our global society.
• Increased complexity has led to an increased likelihood of corporate failure and thus an ever-increasing level of regulatory compliance being imposed.
• Our government and legal systems are jurisdictionally bound through lines on a map. National sovereignty leads to a highly ambiguous and contentious “patchwork quilt” of laws, loopholes and regulatory compliance requirements that are inconsistent from state to state and country to country. This creates enormous complexity in international dealings.

The paradoxes of the age abound.

The question is – how can we survive and thrive in this environment?

The answer lies in ourselves:

• Our personal success or failure is based on what we know and how we apply what we know to predict, compensate and adapt to new environmental, social and economic requirements.
• At the organisational level, agility to pre-empt and drive change will be the ability to sense, translate, communicate, share, coordinate and integrate innovation.

To ensure these processes occur in a timely and well-integrated fashion requires the development of a firm foundation of information and knowledge systems, which sustain and enhance our strategic dynamic capabilities.

Creating, leading and managing these systems effectively is essential for our future individual, organisational, national and global success.

We will discuss and provide evidence to support this claim in the coming weeks.