Even in a recession, like a bad penny, the concept that staff are knowledge workers keeps returning to haunt organizations. In eight months, the search for competent workers has flipped to retaining talent and keeping organizational knowledge intact while downsizing.
And Human Resources (HR) is expected to have the ideas since they understand organizational learning and training.
Unfortunately, most organizations will learn what HR already knows. The techniques and processes that helped new hires learn quickly are also the techniques and processes that help retain organizational knowledge as people leave.
In short knowledge sharing techniques of:
- communities of practice
- mentoring
- lunch and learn sessions
- business process maps
- expertise directories of staff
are just as useful for retaining organizational knowledge as they are for fast learning by new employees.
What won't work is exit interviews, the mind dump from departing employees.
The Experienced Manager Builds Capacity for Learning in a Down Cycle
Experienced managers recognize the opportunity in a downturn. It is an opportunity to train staff and build capability for new business opportunities once the recession recedes. It looks like you have about a year to get new organizational learning initiatives going.
Communities of Practice are Organizational Learning on Steroids
At the top of HR's list of "things to do" should be communities of practice (CoPs). All the other techniques can happen as supporting activities to CoPs. Communities of practice may be already present in your organization. But they get more robust if a corporate sponsor steps forward to validate them, even if it is only to buy lunch. What really makes them robust is if HR steps forward to provide corporate support for:
- organizing an agenda
- recording minutes
- keeping a team space active.
Without corporate support, most CoPs are like volunteer organizations, flagging after the passionate volunteers burn out.
Starting communities of practice for organization benefit is not wise. Nancy Dixon, author of Common Knowledge, had some critical advice to Farm Credit Canada that is not captured in the conventional guides to CoPs. The HR professionals who started the CoPs found the CoPs were failing. Nancy Dixon pointed out that communities of practice follow a modified Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs:
- What's in It For Me?
- What's in It For Us?
- What's in It for the Organization?
You need to solicit "What's in It For Me?" anonymously from CoP members to get the topics that will have them show up for the next CoP meeting.
But once communities of practice fill the personal and group learning needs of staff, be prepared. They will also evolve to sharing strategic information. In Farm Credit Canada, the corporate support unit that supported CoPs evolved into a strategic business intelligence unit.
Communities of practice can be HR's role in strategic information management for the organization.
This is the picture I never took the first time I was in south central Africa.
The Baobob Tree is pretty unique (and strange) but relatively common in the southern Rift Valley of Malawi. You would think that seeing a tree this unique would require taking a picture. But this became a classic "can't see the tree because of the forest" story. Within in a month of working in Malawi, baobob trees just became part of the landscape. In spite of some outstanding specimens in Nsanje, I never took a picture. They were unique to a newcomer but part of the savanah for the locals. And while they were certainly noticeable, I even took for granted their importance as a local food.
A couple of meetings last week flagged that organizations are at risk of not seeing the "baobob trees" in their midst. As the recession digs deeper, the pressure is on to justify existing projects, collaborations and training. Even more important is to move onto the new and innovative that will position the organization to stay competitive during tough times.
Organizations are at risk of not seeing their core cultural and competitive strengths because they are taken for granted; simply assumed to "happen" and in some cases, something to be discarded in the rush to downsize and trim budgets.
Organizational learning, knowledge sharing and other corporate supports are easily at most risk. They are hard to explain; focus on behaviour rather than outcomes and require regular coaching.
But they also guarantee the highest levels of performance for organizations. When a team or corporation is not able to repeat their performance levels from the previous years (for example the Winnipeg Blue Bombers in 2008), you first have to look to changes in behaviour if there hasn't been significant changes in personnel.
Knowledge sharing is a behaviour. It is easy to have a slump and difficult to recover once the slide has begun.
Organizations looking at their competitive advantages for the future have to be careful to avoid the practice of not seeing the baobob trees. They are the competitve advantages that are taken for granted and if properly leveraged will be the platform for the next level of innovation in the organization.
Thanks to Ron Weisenburger for sending me off to You Tube to see the first video linked in this blog. The second video I discovered while checking out associated videos.
Click the links to see what 21st Century Learners are looking for, what they are doing
Youth (and only youth??): 21st Century Learners.
Us: A View of 21st Century Learners
The inter connectivity we take for granted with the Internet and new technology tools is causing a profound cultural transformation. We assume the World Wide Web (www) means Whatever, Whenever, Wherever.
It affects us in our learning. It is the air our children breathe daily. It affects the clients we interact with as we coach and point to change.
It's about conversation. It's about the co-construction of information and knowledge. We are experts. Yes ....and No. We co-construct our most useful knowledge with our learning community, our clients, our peers, our gurus of expertise and experience.
It is about conversation. Knowledge management is about enabling really good conversations. If you are helping people engage in conversations, you are a knowledge manager.
This will be a series of columns of what I am learning about "fast learning". It is fundamentally about organizational learning and individual adult learning. But it is driven by today’s challenge of "learn fast" with new tools.
Qualifier: The opinions expressed here are my own and are not reflective of the organizations I work for or belong to.
I work as a knowledge management specialist in the provincial government of Alberta, Canada in its department of agriculture and rural development. Our work fundamentally involves influencing economic development through adult education processes. There is also regulation and risk management support and advice in the financial and environment areas. But whether we are conscious of it or not, we are regularly led back to adult education processes because we are dealing with agricultural business people who are adult learners. Development requires change, change requires learning. How do we learn … fast?
Working with business people in a high-risk environment keeps one focused on keeping it simple and making sure it works. And talking about change and learning with customers also makes it easy to bring it back inside the organization. Alberta Agriculture and Rural Development can rightly claim it is one of the more innovative departments of the government of Alberta. Not because we always do thing right but we are led by our work to pay attention to the "right stuff".
Being a "corporate coach" on knowledge sharing and collaboration gives me a unique perspective on organizational behaviour. I get the corporate view. I can see the innovators at work, their early successes, the emerging new skills and the outline of processes and tools they need. It is then my job to get the early adopters to pay attention, work with me in making the processes and tools simple so the new skills can be learned fast. In an environment of demanding customers, the staff of Alberta Agriculture have no time for me if I cannot make their work easier.
I have also led a couple of volunteer organizations; a pottery guild and the Devon United church and helped a community soccer association. Volunteer organizations are great places to try out new organizational concepts. Stimulation of something different is usually welcome; failure is not as personally threatening and because the scale is small, fixes or abandonment of a bad idea is easier. So I admit that my understanding of organizational learning has been strongly influenced by watching volunteer organizations work. I hope they forgive my experiments.
All this leads to what I think is the core challenge to organizations today. How do they learn fast? A significant component of that challenge is how do their staff, their volunteers (private, public organizations also have "ghost" volunteers), and their customers learn fast?
