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Re: Could KM have saved GM?
#case-studies
Steve Denning
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Re: Could KM have saved GM?
#case-studies
Allan Crawford
Patrick’s clarification of what he means by heavy weights really resonated with me. When I was at one of the mid size oil companies our KM team consisted of business managers with strong technical backgrounds (geology, drilling, petroleum engineering) all of whom had reputations as change agents…and all of whom were respected in the organization. Each had been in significant mid management positions..and one had headed one of our foreign business units. In our organization these were both technical and management heavy weights…all had significant futures in the company. And they were able to pick up and apply a solid set of KM tools in 6 to 12 months (CoP’s, peer assists, retrospects, AAR’s and the use of key collaboration tools).
As result of having this caliber of individuals on the team, with this experience, was that the team could walk into any office, including the CEO’s, and say “we have something that we think you should try, we’re pretty confident that it will have a significant business impact.” After explaining what we were proposing, the initial response was typically a little skeptical, but because each of the team members had “business credibility” the line people would say…I’m not sure about this, but I know your track record and I trust your instincts… so okay let’s give it a try.”
Our initial approach was to work with small teams that faced a significant business challenge. And our promise was that after working with the team for a short period of time if we didn’t deliver significant business value…we would go away.
We started by working on any problem that was presented to us. After some initial success we approached managers about more challenging problems. Within two years we were focused on the problems that were most strategic to the corporation. Our criteria for assessing this was…is this a project that if it succeeded – or failed could move the stock price? For this mid size oil company (it had a market cap of about $20B) there were a hand full of projects that meet this criterion. By focusing on these we were able to have a strategic impact on the corporation. Our efforts included both very tactical work…at the level of the working geoscientists and engineers, but also more strategic work where the outcomes of what we were doing with the lower level teams were shared vertically with management. This allowed management to make better strategic decisions based on knowledge that was coming from the people that were doing the technical work as well as what we were learning from our partners and our contractors at the technical level.
Ultimately the company was sold to Chevron….which I believe was the right strategic decision. And KM played a role in that decision. It was clear to our CEO that based on the work that had been done with the teams, we did not have the depth of technical expertise that was needed to execute the significant number of very challenging projects that we faced. Many of these projects were fairly high risk (big upside if they worked, but high cost and significant downside if they failed). These high risk – high reward projects were ones that would fit well into a larger company’s portfolio, but were difficult to manage for a mid size company. The result was a strategic decision to sell the company.
Bottom line for me, as a result of this experience, I agree with Patrick, Murray and Nancy; KM can and needs to operate at both the tactical and strategic level. The processes are pretty much the same…but it does take a different focus. One is horizontal and the other vertical. I had never thought of it in quite those terms before but they certainly apply to the work that we did and the results that we obtained.
Allan Crawford
From: sikmleaders@... [mailto:sikmleaders@...] On Behalf Of Peter Marshall
Sent: Saturday, December 20, 2008 10:58 AM To: sikmleaders@... Subject: Re: [sikmleaders] Re: Could KM have saved General Motors?
I've
really enjoyed this dialogue, which I think has been more serious and realistic
than most on KM... Many dialogues in many CoPs suffer from bouts of
incense-burning and self-congratulation I think the topic has produced this good result -- because in fact, GM is not dead yet, and it's very interesting to ask -- if we've got something which is REALLY useful as a practice or set of tools or body of expertise or whatever, why the hell wouldn't a rational buyer buy it when they face the need? GM certainly is in dire need. Are they actually irrational? Has their culture and environment and complex barriers to change so warped their understanding that they are incapable of recognizing the value of KM to them? And if so, doesn't that actually mean that large-scale, strategic KM doesn't exist or can't work? After all, in order to have value, strategic KM would have to work exactly in environments where it wasn't already well practiced. It has to be capable of being absorbed and realizing value in hostile, unreceptive environments, or else it fails at it's fundamental goal -- producing meaningful change. I am worried that the situation may be something like another area I know something about -- speech recognition technology. (I know, KM is not technology, but indulge the analogy for a moment). Speech recognition has been around the corner and the obvious next big thing for 15 years... but it hasn't succeeded, because despite the obvious potential -- voice is the natural human interface -- it doesn't work well enough in practice. It seems like a great idea, but doesn't produce the promised results. The devil's in the details. Do the real-work results of KM practice match the conceptual potential that smart people love? Do they even produce positive results at all, often enough to be convincing to the un-converted? If not, maybe it's because -- oops -- they really don't work yet. Or to take a more mainstream analogy -- KM may be like green energy. The coming thing? -- sure? Worth investing in? -- sure. Worth building a deep and broad and agile strategic program around? -- yes. But don't expect miracles because it's really hard at the engineering and infrastructure and coordination of markets level. It has to work well and cheaply and efficiently, and THEN it will be adopted organically, without the need of a massive bureaucratic and academic evangelism. Broadly speaking, I'm arguing that markets do respond to innovations that already work. It's getting them there that's complex and emergent.. Is workable, strategic KM emergent or is it here? Since GM isn't dead yet, and in fact has been told they better come up with a broad and deep and strategic and agile program of change and for change right quick -- who HERE is going to make the KM case? Will it work? In the messy real world? It seems to me that evidence from Toyota on one end and Tesla Motors on the other argues yes, it could. GM has all the resources to produce value. What is their "better us of knowledge" roadmap? Peter
Marshall On Sat, Dec 20, 2008 at 12:59 AM, Patrick Lambe <plambe@greenchamele Nancy, I must finish editing the video podcast of the conversation we had in Singapore, it's highly relevant to this discussion - maybe this weekend!
What I took away from that conversation was that our
problems are not just located at the top of organisations, but are pervasive
throughout organisations, specifically in how we support knowledge flows
vertically along power-relationships
But in reality, organisations such as GM are a socially produced balance of powers held in tension each imposing constraints from many directions. It's a culture that produces and reinforces its incapacity to act at many levels - at least, that's my guess from working with many other very large organisations. Getting a change of heart and practice in the boardroom would not survive long if you didn't get changes of heart and practice all the way through the culture - the legacy culture would just spit the dissonant leadership team out.
I take Murray's point and I think yours too, that the "tactical" KM game appears to be a different game from the "strategic" KM game, and that many - most even - knowledge managers are much more comfortable at the tactical level. I take the point that KM needs to get more serious at the strategic level. But I don't think it will, at the end of the day, be a qualitatively different game, working with different rules. It's the same game, just oriented vertically.
This is why when I say we need more heavyweights, I mean heavyweights in KM practice, not just thought leaders commenting from the sidelines, invaluable though they are. We need knowledge managers inside organisations who can command the respect of their peers and superiors, who can figure out how to influence people more powerful than they are, embed the practices you speak about, who can show impact and outcomes, and who can share what they learn with their colleagues in other organisations. Otherwise all this is just chatter.
Patrick On Dec 20, 2008, at 11:34 AM, Nancy Dixon wrote:
Over the brief history of KM we have had a number of shifts in focus, each one broadening how we think about knowledge and bringing us new practices.
Early on we thought collecting explicit knowledge was the way to do KM, so we built large repositories. Those were helpful, but did not give us the gains we hoped for. Then folks like John Seely Brown and Nonaka broadened our perspective and we began to see there were ways to share tacit knowledge, and Wenger gave us a practice to do that with. We broadened our perspective with the help of Pfeffer and Sutton, from thinking that only expert knowledge was useful, to recognizing that those who do the work have knowledge born from their everyday experience that can help the organization move forward. Maybe these are the giants of which Patrick speaks, those who have helped us see a new perspective.
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Re: Could KM have saved GM?
#case-studies
Steven Wieneke <steve@...>
Peter,
toggle quoted message
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KM isn't dead at GM. We are currently working with them to put the next generation of Technical Memory right in the design engineer's work flow in their design math data. There are many KM like activities just not called knowledge management. Thanks, Steve W From: "Peter Marshall" Sent: Saturday, December 20, 2008 2:05 PM To: sikmleaders@... Subject: SPAM-LOW: Re: [sikmleaders] Re: Could KM have saved General Motors?
I've really enjoyed this dialogue, which I think has been more serious and realistic than most on KM... Many dialogues in many CoPs suffer from bouts of incense-burning and self-congratulation I think the topic has produced this good result -- because in fact, GM is not dead yet, and it's very interesting to ask -- if we've got something which is REALLY useful as a practice or set of tools or body of expertise or whatever, why the hell wouldn't a rational buyer buy it when they face the need? GM certainly is in dire need. Are they actually irrational? Has their culture and environment and complex barriers to change so warped their understanding that they are incapable of recognizing the value of KM to them? And if so, doesn't that actually mean that large-scale, strategic KM doesn't exist or can't work? After all, in order to have value, strategic KM would have to work exactly in environments where it wasn't already well practiced. It has to be capable of being absorbed and realizing value in hostile, unreceptive environments, or else it fails at it's fundamental goal -- producing meaningful change. I am worried that the situation may be something like another area I know something about -- speech recognition technology. (I know, KM is not technology, but indulge the analogy for a moment). Speech recognition has been around the corner and the obvious next big thing for 15 years... but it hasn't succeeded, because despite the obvious potential -- voice is the natural human interface -- it doesn't work well enough in practice. It seems like a great idea, but doesn't produce the promised results. The devil's in the details. Do the real-work results of KM practice match the conceptual potential that smart people love? Do they even produce positive results at all, often enough to be convincing to the un-converted? If not, maybe it's because -- oops -- they really don't work yet. Or to take a more mainstream analogy -- KM may be like green energy. The coming thing? -- sure? Worth investing in? -- sure. Worth building a deep and broad and agile strategic program around? -- yes. But don't expect miracles because it's really hard at the engineering and infrastructure and coordination of markets level. It has to work well and cheaply and efficiently, and THEN it will be adopted organically, without the need of a massive bureaucratic and academic evangelism. Broadly speaking, I'm arguing that markets do respond to innovations that already work. It's getting them there that's complex and emergent.. Is workable, strategic KM emergent or is it here? Since GM isn't dead yet, and in fact has been told they better come up with a broad and deep and strategic and agile program of change and for change right quick -- who HERE is going to make the KM case? Will it work? In the messy real world? It seems to me that evidence from Toyota on one end and Tesla Motors on the other argues yes, it could. GM has all the resources to produce value. What is their "better us of knowledge" roadmap? Peter Marshall On Sat, Dec 20, 2008 at 12:59 AM, Patrick Lambe <plambe@greenchamele
-- Peter Marshall ------------ Email: peter.marshall@ Mobile: (949) 689-7000 Skype: ideasware GTalk: peter.marshall |
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Re: Could KM have saved GM?
#case-studies
Peter Marshall <peter.marshall@...>
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Re: Could KM have saved GM?
#case-studies
Steven Wieneke <steve@...>
Jerry,
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Not at this time. Thanks, Steve From: "Jerry Ash" Sent: Tuesday, December 16, 2008 10:06 PM To: sikmleaders@... Subject: Re: SPAM-LOW: RE: [sikmleaders] New Venture Hi Steve. |
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Re: Could KM have saved GM?
#case-studies
Patrick Lambe
Nancy, I must finish editing the video podcast of the conversation we had in Singapore, it's highly relevant to this discussion - maybe this weekend!
toggle quoted message
Show quoted text
What I took away from that conversation was that our problems are not just located at the top of organisations, but are pervasive throughout organisations, specifically in how we support knowledge flows vertically along power-relationships. I think just focusing at the top is seductive in many ways - it might create an illusion of effect, it certainly feeds one's sense of importance, and probably fills the grocery basket more effectively than focusing lower down in organisations. But in reality, organisations such as GM are a socially produced balance of powers held in tension each imposing constraints from many directions. It's a culture that produces and reinforces its incapacity to act at many levels - at least, that's my guess from working with many other very large organisations. Getting a change of heart and practice in the boardroom would not survive long if you didn't get changes of heart and practice all the way through the culture - the legacy culture would just spit the dissonant leadership team out. I take Murray's point and I think yours too, that the "tactical" KM game appears to be a different game from the "strategic" KM game, and that many - most even - knowledge managers are much more comfortable at the tactical level. I take the point that KM needs to get more serious at the strategic level. But I don't think it will, at the end of the day, be a qualitatively different game, working with different rules. It's the same game, just oriented vertically. This is why when I say we need more heavyweights, I mean heavyweights in KM practice, not just thought leaders commenting from the sidelines, invaluable though they are. We need knowledge managers inside organisations who can command the respect of their peers and superiors, who can figure out how to influence people more powerful than they are, embed the practices you speak about, who can show impact and outcomes, and who can share what they learn with their colleagues in other organisations. Otherwise all this is just chatter. Patrick Patrick Lambe Have you seen our KM Method Cards? http://www.straitsknowledge.com/store/ On Dec 20, 2008, at 11:34 AM, Nancy Dixon wrote:
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Re: Could KM have saved GM?
#case-studies
Patrick Lambe
John: great post and reference, this is very much in tune with what I'm trying to express.
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Murray: as my Moog reference to Steve indicates, I am very sceptical of any view that says KM can somehow magic away the capacity of people in leadership positions to make just plain bad decisions. KM can't "save" any organisation if the people themselves don't want to be saved. Only people can do that. And sometimes - often even - people get fixated on bad, unproductive paths despite the good advice and techniques at their disposal. To that extent the "preachers" might be important, and the availability of techniques and practices to make it difficult for people to get away with bad decisions are certainly important. But KM should not be confused with the preaching and persuasion activity, and tools and techniques will never replace the need to take responsibility individually and collectively. We need KM to get better at overcoming the oh so easy ways we make mistakes in coordination, remembering and learning at small and large scale - we ALSO need to get into the habit of taking more responsibility for ourselves and for our colleagues, because the availability of a technology (in the loosest sense) only goes part of the way, and will never account fully for the capacity of human beings and groups of human beings to be wilful. P Patrick Lambe Have you seen our KM Method Cards? http://www.straitsknowledge.com/store/ On Dec 20, 2008, at 9:50 AM, John D. Smith wrote:
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Re: Could KM have saved GM?
#case-studies
Nancy Dixon
Over the brief history of KM we have had a number of shifts in focus, each one broadening how we think about knowledge and bringing us new practices. Early on we thought collecting explicit knowledge was the way to do KM, so we built large repositories. Those were helpful, but did not give us the gains we hoped for. Then folks like John Seely Brown and Nonaka broadened our perspective and we began to see there were ways to share tacit knowledge, and Wenger gave us a practice to do that with. We broadened our perspective with the help of Pfeffer and Sutton, from thinking that only expert knowledge was useful, to recognizing that those who do the work have knowledge born from their everyday experience that can help the organization move forward. Maybe these are the giants of which Patrick speaks, those who have helped us see a new perspective. Each shift in perspective has allowed us to make use of a greater amount of the organization’s knowledge and of more types of knowledge as well. With each shift we have continued to benefit from the existing practices, but we have broadened our thinking about what knowledge is and added new practices to support our new insight. I am suggesting it is time to broaden our perspective again. We have been thinking of knowledge as tactical and using practices such of COP’s, AARs, content management systems, lessons learned, people finders, etc. to move that tactical knowledge laterally. It is time to broaden our understanding of knowledge to also think of it as strategic. As I wrote earlier, strategy is a product of knowledge. It involves making sense of data, that is, analysis and interpretation, and includes visioning and even hope. It is a different kind of knowledge than we have been dealing with – but knowledge none the less. In most organizations, a very small percentage of the collective intelligence is applied against this ambiguous knowledge task. The small group at the top may be very smart people, but even very smart people have blind spots, biases they are unaware of, and are sometimes tempted to build self-serving strategies - as perhaps GM teaches us. As KM professionals, I believe we are ignoring the people at the top of our organizations and the processes they use to create the strategic knowledge they employ. We have viewed the top primarily as a source of funding and support – not as a part of the organization that has a critical need to deal with knowledge more effectively. We have not asked, “Where is the top getting the knowledge they use to make strategic decisions? How are they exploring and accessing diverse views? What processes do they use to make sense of the knowledge they acquire? How do they insure that the knowledge that filters up from the bottom is not distorted or diluted?” I believe we need to turn some of our attention to this part of the organization and use our KM knowledge to build practices that use the collective intelligence to create more effective strategies. Nancy Nancy M, Dixon Common Knowledge Associates www.commonknowledge.org 202 277 5839 "Ask better, learn more" |
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Re: Could KM have saved GM?
#case-studies
John D. Smith <john.smith@...>
It strikes me that "saving General Motors" is a pretty exalted reference
point for considering the health and development of KM. I think the stakes in these times ARE high, and at least for the CoP parts of KM that I can see, there is a long way to go. But we should also be looking at practice fields that are more low key and less heavy-duty, too. Charlotte Linde (an IRL alum) makes that point talking about how her study of how story-telling is used (how it's "worked," as she calls it): "Finally, I would like to acknowledge briefly the contrasts between the subject matter I am writing about and much of the subject matter of the literature on institutional memory or collective memory. I use an insurance company as my main example. Much of the research on collective memory has considered appalling events such as the Holocaust, the suppression of colonized people, ethnic cleansing, etc. In some ways, it is almost impossible to hold these topics together in the same mind, let alone in the same book, and it is possibly offensive even to try. "However, studying the way an insurance company works its past allows us to see structures and patterns in an environment that does not break the heart. My hope is that this can be of value in learning to understand how the past is worked in situations where there is much more at stake, and where the heat of the situation sometimes obscures the light that would make it possible to see more clearly." -- p 14 I'm just digging in, but this is a really excellent book: Charlotte Linde, Working the Past; Narrative and Institutional Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009) http://isbn.nu/9780195140293 It's not a "how to" in 5 easy steps kind of book. But it digs deep, which is what we have to do to get to be any good, right? The way Linde uses the term "institutional" would include the stories we tell each other about how we did or did not help save GM, save our own jobs, help any given organization or group be more effective. John * * John D. Smith ~ Voice: 503.963.8229 ~ Skype: smithjd * Portland, Oregon, USA http://www.learningAlliances.net <http://www.learningalliances.net/> * "Adaptability is the province of critique." - Christopher Kelty |
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Re: Could KM have saved GM?
#case-studies
Murray Jennex
I agree Patrick and unfortunately in a short post I don't go into the
details but I fully believe that there are many differences in culture,
perception, use of knowledge, etc. between KM in the small and KM in the large
and thus was implying that the KM in the small mindset was the real issue of why
KM couldn't save GM...murray
In a message dated 12/19/2008 9:29:28 P.M. Pacific Standard Time,
plambe@... writes:
John: great post and reference, this is very much in tune with what I'm trying to express. |
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Re: Could KM have saved GM?
#case-studies
Murray Jennex
Reading these posts it strikes me that we are discussing two views on
KM. My research shows that there is KM in the small, which tends to be
bottom up driven, focused on improving work groups/projects/teams/etc. and while
very important to the productivity of the groups using it, not all that
strategic. Then there is KM in the large which is focused on
organizational wide KM and tends to be top driven, strategic in nature, and
expected to improve organizational productivity/effectiveness. Our
discussions on saving GM would of course focus on KM in the large while the
discussion on what GM was doing with KM seems to me to be KM in the small.
My research does show that KM in the small can eventually lead to KM in the
large but they don't necessarily exist together. This may not be all that
earth shaking but I have noticed that many postings are addressing one or the
other KMs instead of us all focusing on KM in the large. Personally, I
think both KMs are necessary but after all this discussion I am beginning to
think that GM hadn't moved to the point where KM in the large was accepted and
was still focused on KM in the small. That said, it may very well be that
while KM could have saved GM, it couldn't have at this time. So now I'm
wondering if the question is really what could have been done to move GM to a
position where KM in the large could have saved it? I'm fascinated that
apparently top GM management did not see value in KM for them. I posted
earlier about measuring KM, could this have helped? Anyway, I'll stop here
rather than keep musing, any other thoughts? .....murray
In a message dated 12/19/2008 5:50:57 P.M. Pacific Standard Time,
john.smith@... writes:
It strikes me that "saving General Motors" is a pretty exalted reference |
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Re: Could KM have saved GM?
#case-studies
Patrick Lambe
Steve
toggle quoted message
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It's a young practice, and a very complex one, where the relationship between interventions and outcomes is not well understood. It's also a practice where belief in magic formulas/bullets (and the claims of charlatans to easy answers) seems widespread. This is a situation very similar, it seems to me, to the practice of medicine at the beginnings of the renaissance. Asking an early sixteenth century surgeon how medical practice might improve in coming generations would be a little silly, it seems to me, and I don't think you or I or anyone particularly could answer with confidence exactly how KM will improve and have a hope of being accurate. But if we learn anything from our history, it is that good people, smart people and very determined people, are needed to worry away at problems, learn from each other, and take positions that can be validated or invalidated. Then we have a chance of progress. Of course, somewhere in there, people like you and I and many others have a role. But to claim we have the answers and can follow them now is sheer hubris. As for your last question, I just don't get the relevance. Would Nero having a Moog synthesizer have saved Rome from burning? P Patrick Lambe Have you seen our KM Method Cards? http://www.straitsknowledge.com/store/ On Dec 19, 2008, at 8:14 PM, Stephen Denning wrote:
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Re: Could KM have saved GM?
#case-studies
Steve Denning
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Re: Could KM have saved GM?
#case-studies
Lee, Jim <jlee@...>
At the risk of extending this conversation beyond its value, I will still weigh in on the subject because I find the topic fascinating both personally as well as professionally. As a matter of background for my interest, I was a GM employee for 19 years before moving on to consulting. From the ‘70s through the early ‘90s I enjoyed time as an industrial engineer, benchmarking strategist, and project manager at a stamping plant. The parallels from that experience still help me today.
For example, the end goal of knowledge managers/brokers/change agents is (or at least should be) the same as that of industrial engineers: to work themselves out of a job. When everyone in an organization has the skills and the organization provides the infrastructure (culture and technology) to share knowledge “effortlessly”, then the role of knowledge manager should become practically extinct; just as much as when assembly line workers or teams can change their environment on their own, that the industrial engineer go the way of the industrial age. Simply put, when everyone in an organization is a knowledge manager, we won’t need that as a defined role any longer.
During the late ‘80s when GM recognized that it needed to understand the “external” world of auto manufacturing (meaning other than the Big 3 at the time), it created a benchmarking team known as the Organizational Competitiveness Program. One might argue that the OCP was one of GM’s first visible KM efforts. We toured competitor plants attempting understand their best practices and to apply them back at our locations. The idea was fine of course; the execution not so much. Our mission as stated was too granular—we looked at techniques and tools—far down the line from the strategy required to implement them. So while we could see what Toyota was doing on the plant floor, and try to mimic them, we could not see how those outcomes were a result of the Toyota Production System, not the cause of the gap between us and them. Not having a holistic approach to our knowledge needs scuttled the benchmarking efforts.
My project management experience leads me to believe that while PM allows one to gain experience at viewing situations holistically, senior leaders rarely come from the ranks of project managers. The parallel with KM is that PM is often termed “managing the white spaces of projects”, in much the same way that KM is responsible for ensuring the “white spaces” of knowledge flow within and across organizational functional boundaries. So while the KM community may recognize the need and value of KM, senior leaders gain their visionary prowess and set objectives based upon other metrics.
That last point is what is most valuable to me today and into the future. A discussion regarding whether or not KM could have “saved” GM can only be an academic one at this point. What I will be most interested in will be whether or not GM (or the others) will turn to KM to help lift them from this point forward. Like many organizations I come across, when business goes south, KM efforts tend to be shed, not embraced. As Steve Denning pointed out, will the demand be there?
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Re: Could KM have saved GM?
#case-studies
Valdis Krebs <valdis@...>
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On Dec 18, 2008, at 11:37 AM, Patrick Lambe wrote:
Nancy's challenge is an important one, asking us to take more |
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Re: Local KM Communities in Houston and New York
#local
Lee, Jim <jlee@...>
John, et al,
I’m in Houston occasionally, and would always love interaction with a professional society oriented group while in town. When we attempted to create such a group in the Cleveland, OH area in the past, while it was short lived, it served a small, but active community.
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Re: Could KM have saved GM?
#case-studies
Patrick Lambe
Nancy's challenge is an important one, asking us to take more responsibility than we have been so far.
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Steve's response typifies the rhetorical approach which assumes it's just a matter of getting senior managers to take KM seriously, as if KM were a slogan backed up by resources for unspecific "change", "innovations", or worse, "leadership" (whatever any of those things mean). Rhetoric doesn't solve business problems, KM is not a slogan and it's not an idea... it's a practice or collection of practices, we need to be looking at the many concrete things that need to be done, not motherhood statements, personality cults and formulas. KM is a practice, but it's just not a very good practice yet, because (a) it's still populated by individualists who compete with each other on differentiating "their" approaches from others (rhetoric outweighs reality, clever language substitutes for results) and (b) we haven't had long enough to build up a body of collective knowledge about how to do this practice well and sustainably (we still treat it like an engineering problem where problems and solutions are generic and have mechanical measures that can be applied, we are intensely incurious about the many frustrations and failures we and our peers face every day, we give each other very little opportunity to learn from each other, and people move in and out of KM practice so fast very few people get the chance to learn the practice in depth). So I don't think this is as facile a matter of reading Steve's books, or of becoming more persuasive, or even of "getting a seat" at the senior management table. It's about getting better, collectively at our practice, which will take time and hard work and commitment and a sense of responsibility which looks beyond the mantras we too frequently spout of quick wins and easy fixes. And it means we need to be recruiting more heavyweights into the practice (not the preaching) of KM, and helping to keep them there so they can grow in effectiveness and confidence. And pushing the agenda on accountability and performance , even when it seems hardest to do so. That, to me, is what "responsibility" means. Recognising how poor we are at all of this, and committing to building a probably future generation of practitioners who will be better than we are. P Patrick Lambe Have you seen our KM Method Cards? http://www.straitsknowledge.com/store/ On Dec 18, 2008, at 6:15 AM, Stephen Denning wrote:
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Re: Could KM have saved GM?
#case-studies
Steve
We have a global change management process that is based on behaviors and identifying the new and the old and how to reinforce the new and disincentivize (not sure that is a word) the old. It also uses a structured and thought out way to reinforce the behaviors from the managers point of view and specifics on what you want them to do for you in terms of reinforcement. It is the difference between "we want you to support this change" which everyone will agree to without doing more since they think they are both supportive and done and "we want you to emphasize this in your staff meetings with these talking points and when you see an employee digressing give them immediate feedback to change behavior and show it is important." Both fall under the rubric of change management. The more powerful approach is to manage change like any other project with a project plan, targets of the change, explanation of the change and what's in it for the employee, etc. etc. My problem with a lot of "change management" is that it is all "touchy feely" and we burn incense in the room and never get to the basics of work. |
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Re: Could KM have saved GM?
#case-studies
albert.simard <simarda@...>
Well, I can lurk no longer.
I'm going to put a bit of a diferent spin on the KM/GM question. With apriori apologies to all the KM practitioners out there, I don't feel that KM could have saved GM. All the knowledge in the world is of little value if decision makers don't want to hear the message. It's no different in government. GM is dealing with a complex environment. A key feature of such a beast is that it is liable to sudden collapse. The collapse of Newfoundland's cod fishery is a classic example. Scientists had warned for years that if fishing quotas wern't reduced, it would happen. But it was politically incorrect to put people out of work who were already living on the edge. Today, there is no cod fishery. Having learned its lesson the hard way, the department has greatly strengthened its capacity for considering scientific knowledge as part of its decision making process. Regrettably, absent this hard lesson, the same cannot be said for most other departments. I see another classic yin and yang shortcoming in the current situation. Success often sows the seeds of ultimate failure. Why produce energy-efficient cars when there is so much short-term profit to be made on gas guzzlers? In 2005, I did some calculations. At that time, Canadian gas was only(!) 75 cents per liter (that's about $3.50 US per gallon). Even though we paid about an $8k premium for a Prius, I calculated that if the car lasted 10 years, I would save about $15k in gas. This has , in fact been my experience to date. When the price of gas peaked at $1.35 (about $5.40 per gallon) drivers talked about parking their Hummers because it was costing them $100 a week to drive them. I kept asking when are the big three going to see the writing on the wall? When are they going to get it? When are they going to recognize the signs that some Japanese auto manufacturers saw ten years earlier? We now know the answer to that question. Large corporations, like great ships and governments cannot alter course quickly. Consequently, it is critical that the captain looks far ahead to see what is coming. It is a question of reading market forces that everyone can see and making the right strategic choices. This isn't a KM question. KM can access and acquire, compile and organize, analyse and synthesize market forces and produce actionable intelligence to support an organization's strategic business planning. To paraphrase an earlier statement, it can bring the captain to knowledge but it can't make him drink. There - that should stir up the pot! Al Simard --- In sikmleaders@..., Nancy Dixon <nancydixon@...> wrote: organization's knowledge to accomplish our organization's strategic plan orstated objectives. We are servants of top management and as such we noteffective.
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Re: Could KM have saved GM?
#case-studies
Steven Wieneke <steve@...>
Rick,
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Great. I agree with you your conclusion to include "change management." I have found that an often overlooked step in change management is to also explain what to stop doing, which old behaviors are no longer appropriate. Your thoughts? Steve From: Rick.Wallace@... Sent: Thursday, December 18, 2008 10:20 AM To: sikmleaders@... Subject: RE: SPAM-LOW: RE: [sikmleaders] New Venture Steve |
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