You can read the entire European Guide to Good Practice in Knowledge Management – Part 2 Organizational Culture here.
Below are some of the passages I found most valuable.
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Culture is perhaps the most important factor in successfully managing knowledge. It is a key influence on behaviours. This booklet looks at what culture is, how it develops and how you can work with it to ensure your KM programme is successful. It attempts to give some answers to:
1) How to get the support and active involvement of the members of the organization (issues related to human resources: motivation, competencies, etc).
2) How to organize for the implementation of KM (issues related to the formal and informal structure of the organization).
3) How to get the appropriate climate for KM implementation (issues related to specific activities and tools to be used).
Organizations, even small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), rarely involve a single culture; there will be subcultures (groups which exhibit cultural characteristics, i.e. values, norms and practices that differ from the main organizational culture and from other subcultures). One common manifestation is “departmental differences”, which can lead to the phenomenon of departmentalization or so-called “silo thinking”.
There are personal, team and organizational ‘agendas’ containing conflicting aspirations. This gives rise to the complexity of human relationships in organizations and organizations’ behaviour as so-called “complex adaptive systems”.
Individuals employment puts them in a contractual relationship in which there are expectations and responsibilities. Individuals’ “psychological contract” (i.e. their beliefs about what they owe the organization and what the organization owes them) drives them to seek, to find and to modify the culture to better serve their psychological contract. This does not necessarily imply a selfish or self-seeking motive. Public service, duty, or care for others may well be a strong value within the individual, group, or organization. The more supportive the culture the more productivity, trusting and sharing will be exhibited by individuals.
People’s identity is fundamental to their motivation and commitment. It drives what they feel is important knowledge, what, how and with whom they will share that knowledge and how they value their contribution to colleagues and the organization. It is important when mapping knowledge to identify those people whose self- worth is related to being perceived as key personnel in knowledge flows.
Managing the boundaries between individual and corporate knowledge requires negotiation and high emotional intelligence, particularly if tacit knowledge is to be exchanged, and for KM tools such as expertise directories or “lessons learned” to be comprehensive.
Some obstructive properties of groupthink include the following:
• Illusion of invulnerability: members believe that past successes guarantee future successes and so take extreme risks.
• Collective rationalization: members collectively rationalize away information that contradicts their assumptions.
• Illusion of morality: members believe that they are all moral and so could not make a bad decision.
• Shared stereotypes: members dismiss evidence that is contradictory by discrediting the source of that information.
• Direct pressure: sanctions are placed on members who dissent from the majority opinion by, for example, using assertive language to enforce compliance.
• Self-censorship: members keep quiet about any misgivings they have so that they do not voice concerns.
• “Mind guards”: members screen out information from outsiders where this might challenge the group’s assumptions and beliefs.
• Illusion of unanimity: given these other symptoms, it appears that there is consensus within the group, even though there may be many of those involved who do not agree with the group decision.
There are three common types of community, which can be found both within an organization and across organizations:
• Communities of interest are groups with a mutual interest in a particular topic whose members wish to learn more and further develop their interest in the subject.
• Communities of Practice (CoPs) bring together people to share insights, develop expertise and to foster good practice through the exchange and creation of knowledge in a specific area. They are often a focus for building specific capability in their organization and ensuring that this is protected and retained in the organization as people move on. Formal functions (e.g. Finance, Marketing, Human Resources) often offer excellent potential for inter-organizational CoPs.
• Communities of purpose have a shorter time horizon and are accountable for delivering a specific business goal. These could include project teams, steering groups and task forces.
When individuals are asked to introduce their knowledge into an organizational system, e.g. a client database, they often tend to think that they have lost the ownership of know-how that until then remained exclusive to them. The objectives set for KM in the organization therefore need to take into account the rules and habits concerning the ownership and control of specific knowledge, in order to encourage the transition from personal to organizational knowledge.
A positive experience normally means that there has been a positive and important gain for the individual; it might be increased credibility, recognition, monetary or promotional reward etc.
There are two main categories of trust, personal trust and competence (or identity) based trust. For effective KM it does not need to be at the level of personal trust, but can be competence-based. So it can take a number of forms:
• Identity based – I trust you because of your role or position – e.g. a doctor.
• Reciprocity based – I engage in trust behaviour because I believe you will too.
• Elicitative Trust – By engaging in acts of trust I will elicit trust from the other person.
• Compensatory trust – Some, but not all, will fail to engage in the needed behaviour and therefore I must take a lead.
• Moralistic Trust – I will act in a trustworthy way irrespective of what others do.
Leaders should provide purpose, direction and behavioral role models. They share ideas with, walk among and listen to members of the enterprise, customizing the message and sensing employees’ understanding of the enterprise’s direction. These qualities are important at all levels in the organization, but have more impact the higher the position held. Management involves interpreting the enterprise vision and mission in a way that makes sense and resonates with employees. Managers guide performance and offer suggestions for corrective action. KM frequently involves guiding people’s actions rather than directing; managers therefore need the skills and competences to create a climate that fosters the creation, sharing, and application of knowledge; i.e. a broader basis of leadership skills.
Credibility is strongly related to trust and qualities of leadership, both already recognized as fundamental to a knowledge–enabled organization.
• High credibility and reliability means that when you give advice or make a judgment on your area of credible expertise it is based on sound knowledge or wisdom;
• People in the organization know that when you say something will happen, it will;
• People in the organization know that when you say something will not happen, it will not;
• People accept that you have the necessary judgment, skill and insight to be able to choose correctly between what should and should not happen;
• People accept that you have the necessary backing, levers of influence, resources and if necessary weapons at your disposal to ensure certainty of chosen outcome, once determined;
• When you obtain agreement or commitment from them to deliver something, they know they have to deliver it.
For a KM intervention to succeed, those involved must feel it is important enough that they must participate, that mistakes made in learning will be accepted and that time for change will be allowed.
In a consulting company, where the members of the organization viewed knowledge as their personal possession, and therefore refused to share, the management team encouraged knowledge sharing by changing the new project allocation process. Rather than giving projects to individual consultants, they were given to a group of consultants with the necessary expertise, forcing the consultants to network and market their expertise internally to participate on projects. Only by getting invited to join new projects could they be rewarded, thus giving them a built-in incentive to advertise their expertise internally. As a result the competition for status drove knowledge sharing rather than hoarding.
The iterative process for knowledge creation involves:
Empathizing – sharing and developing ideas together through social exchange
Articulating – into explicit form
Connecting – using different explicit forms to help the idea move forward
Embodying- incorporating into a product/process/service that has value.
Part of your KM program should therefore involve mapping existing competencies, e.g. by means of “knowledge skill tests” and deciding what to do about those that are missing, by offering training or including learning by doing programs in the organization.
For sharing knowledge to become a cultural norm, the benefits of sharing must exceed the benefits of retention in the eyes of the individuals concerned. This may mean that they are better known and get invited to do more interesting work, or are more visible (e.g. leading to promotion), or enjoy being helpful to others, or receive rewards etc. Individual preferences will suggest what sort of benefits will be important for any one individual.
One electronics company developed a so-called “virtual Hollywood“ and asked “directors” (employees) to present “scripts” (improvement ideas) to “investors” (general managers) who would choose the ones to “produce” (implement). The project promoted out-of-the-box thinking and in the first year generated over 200 submissions, addressing process improvement and product development.
A learning organization is an organization creating, acquiring and transferring competence and being able to change its behavior according to new knowledge and views. (Garvin, 1993)
What does a learning organization learn?
• To use learning to reach its goals.
• To help people value the effects of their learning upon their organization.
• To avoid making the same mistakes again.
• To share information in ways that prompt appropriate action.
• To link individual performance with organizational performance.
• To tie rewards to key measures of performance.
• To take in a lot of environmental information at all times.
• To create structures and procedures that support the learning process.
• To foster ongoing and orderly dialogues.
• To make it safe for people to share openly and take risks.
What does a learning organization look like?
• Learns collaboratively, open and across boundaries.
• Values how it learns as well as what it learns.
• Invests in staying ahead of the learning curve in its industry.
• Gains a competitive edge by learning faster and smarter than competitors.
• Turns data into useful knowledge quickly and at the right time and place.
• Enables every employee to feel that every experience provides him/her a chance to learn something potentially useful, even if only for leveraging future learning.
• Exhibits little fear and defensiveness.
• Takes risks but avoids jeopardizing the basic security of the organization.
• Invests in experimental and seemingly tangential learning (related but not conforming to existing learning patterns) and in serendipity.
• Supports people and teams who want to pursue action-learning projects.
• Depoliticizes learning by not penalizing individuals and groups for sharing information and conclusions.
How does a learning organization evolve? By…
• Questioning current assumptions about learning.
• Getting an outside perspective.
• Tying the goal of becoming a learning company to organizational vision.
• Funding or creating a champion in top management.
• Looking for the `pain’ in the organization – the place(s) where more effective learning could help.
• Articulating learning organization ideas plainly.
• Rewarding group as well as individual learning success and failure.
• Finding an external competitor or other focus point to spur greater co-operative learning.
• Finding ways to collaborate internally, unhampered by boundaries.
In order to drive the community forward one should consider:
• Identifying or electing a coordinator.
• Establishing the community infrastructure – tools available to support interaction between community members – such as e-mail, discussion groups, an intranet, other tools to build/share knowledge resources.
• A launch aimed at attracting potential members, securing commitment, agreeing initial priorities and actions and consolidating the active members.
• Move into ongoing community operation, ensuring that the steering group, the sponsor and the community coordinator work with members to deliver the community’s goals.
• Evaluate outcomes, celebrate and communicate success within and outside the community, in order to keep interest and energy levels high.
The process of creating a community cannot be rushed because some self-adjusting mechanisms first need to be put in place, in order to make the community robust. The general stages that communities go through are:
• Excitement when forming – something new
• Confusion – about the purpose
• Clarification – who is to do what
• Growing – trust and respect building up
• Arrival – the community is self-directing.
Mentoring involves matching new or inexperienced employees with more experienced senior personnel, so that the intangible, tacit knowledge of an industry or organization can be passed on effectively. It allows the newer employees to grow without necessarily just learning the hard way and should create a bond between mentor and protégé. This technique can be particularly useful for organizations with a substantial proportion of employees approaching retirement age, or where there are steep learning curves, or high turnover rates.
When researching, designing, implementing or evaluating any KM program, consider using story, since it can:
• Enable organizations to value, capture and translate individual experiences into a shared resource (lessons learned).
• Develop a culture that values rich, effective and meaningful dialogue both in conversation and in records.
• Develop tools and techniques to capitalize on project team experiences.
• Explore roles and relationships.
• Tangible objects provide meaningful ‘hooks’, thereby stimulating the creation of new meanings, communities and memories.
• Provide the ‘cultural glue’ for communities and networks.
• Help explore the risks and opportunities presented by any KM experience.
Dialogue, rather than discussion, usually provides the best environment for surfacing true experiences safely and dealing with them. Therefore an environment that encourages dialogue must establish ground rules for behavior. It requires those involved to be willing to work towards co-creating an outcome and a willingness to listen without provoking justification or defensiveness.
Each community is a subculture within an organization which has developed its own cultural norms. These norms encourage or limit the acceptance of processes, technology or trust-based relationships. The experience of using technology can affect the norms of the community. The implementation of technology provides experiences for the individuals within the community and their experiences thereby modify the cultural norms. If the experience is beneficial the move towards a knowledge sharing culture is enhanced. If the experience is frustrating, more difficult than existing methods, or in other ways unrewarding, it will be seen as detrimental.