Putting Lessons Learned into Action

Acronyms and jargon have a wonderful way of locomotion - especially around my being.  They manage to enter the ear and leave through the mouth, silently, stealthily without a trace.  And as I continue to struggle with AAR, LLR, RCA and the like, I came across yet another term - A3.  Fortunately, this time around it was not an acronym, but just a hook to hang a process on.  A3 is a process followed by Toyota to record process improvements, and the name is derived from the paper size they originally used to write these reports - they probably still do!

So, the topic is about how organizations learn from their mistakes, and ensure that these lessons stay with the organization.  Most quality programs statute an improvement process which usually starts with something called the Lessons Learned. This is usually a stand-alone document or gets associated with a Project Legacy Report or something similar.  The intention, of course, is to record the lessons learned during the execution of a project, or in the process of identification and resolution of a problem or issue the organization was faced with.  However, in most cases, this gets recorded more as a matter of following due process and usually gets stored in some remote location, never to be retrieved again.

In a "social enterprise" - one where people in an organization are networked, have easy access to each other, are able to have conversations on ideas, insights and issues and knowledge is easily transferred through people or content - making the switch from tacit to explicit rather effortlessly - it ought to be easier to make lessons learned available across a larger cross-section of people.  However, what is more important is to ensure that this lesson is put in action, institutionalized - either through a process improvement or a skill improvement program and results in tangible benefits to the organization.  This can happen only when knowledge (or rather the use of knowledge) can be measured.

Lesson Learned Reports also have a rather tedious method of being static and inhibiting exchange of ideas - even after the report has been prepared.  This can be avoided by making the report preparation itself a dynamic process - one which happens as the problem identification occurs and the solution is identified.  And when such a process becomes interactive, and happens in a collaborative environment, chances are that there are a lot more people following the progress, and therefore stickiness or ability to recall the lesson is higher.  Also, in the process of tracking progress, there are other teams of people who are simultaneously experimenting with the solution and coming up with modifications and suggestions.  The dynamic nature of such a solution has the ability to impact a practice (or a process) making the institutionalization of such a change much quicker.  The impact of such a change is also quickly shared across the organization and becomes measurable.

How are lessons learned (LLR) or After-Action-Reviews (AAR) conducted in your organization? Share your feedback on how good this tool is in causing business improvements.

Making sense of chatter - the knowledge manager's role

“In a post-Cold War era of ‘openly available’ information what you need are observers with the language ability, with understanding of the religions, cultures of the countries they are observing. Inman thought we needed fewer spies and more ‘slightly batty’ geniuses”

– From “What the dog saw”

As we observe organizations from the perspective of Knowledge Management maturity, the ones lower down the scale are still struggling with the problem of making information available, while the ones that have gone past that stage have a different kind of problem – one of information overload.  These organizations that have implemented core solutions and sophisticated business intelligence applications have a new problem to deal with – how to make sense of all the information that is being pushed out to them.  One the one hand you don’t want to set off alarm bells at every trough or dip in a trend graph because of an over-sensitive intelligence system; at the same time you don’t want to be caught napping because you have made your trigger-points less sensitive.  Many a time we are able to connect the dots only post-mortem; perhaps a lesson learned a little too late.  And with Big Data and the rest of the talk about integrating noise from twitter, linked in and what-have-you…this problem is only going to get bigger.

Knowledge Management is full of such ambiguities.  How do you trust decision making tools that are based on probabilistic inferences based on incomplete and fragmentary information? Or would you rather wait for evidence-supported narratives that perhaps reduce your ability to prepare a response in time to avoid a disaster?  Is it possible for organizations to create a system that will allow fragments of information to be deciphered – to see a pattern even as it starts emerging, and then prepare an appropriate response? Can organizations become adaptable enough to be able to create an ecosystem that will allow such information to flow so that such analysis is possible? Is the knowledge manager supposed to be this “slightly batty” genius who can enable this?

The year 2009 was when we first heard about Cognizant becoming a serious threat to the Big Three.  A Forbes article of 2010 explains the rise and rise of Cognizant to a position where it has even overtaken Infosys.  While there is quite a detailed note on the strategy adopted by Cognizant to become a dominant player, what has probably been left unsaid is the preparatory work it has done to metamorphose into a serious challenger.  The integration of so many acquisitions, the transformation of its culture, and the transition from a process-driven organization to a knowledge driven one has surely played a significant part. The subsequent years of continuing dynamic growth seem to suggest that the decision to use Knowledge as a primary driver of growth was indeed one of the key factors responsible for such a quantum jump in Cognizant’s fortunes.  In 2007, together with the young and dynamic CEO, the Chief Knowledge Officer - the “slightly batty” genius, R Sukumar charted a course for Cognizant 2.0 – their integrated and pervasive, collaborative knowledge management system.  I have been following his impassioned speeches on Knowledge Management, and what little is available in the public domain s probably sufficient to provide evidence that they have a very vibrant and impactful KM system in the organization.

Sukumar is one who I would like to call a truly “batty genius”; the idea of bringing on someone like him to a role that is generally considered a “put-to-pasture” function was path-breaking and indicative of the importance accorded to the knowledge management initiative.  Although many companies already had some form of knowledge management going on, most of them were under the garb of quality initiatives; Cognizant took it a step further by making it a prime driver of strategy.  And being someone who had been in the system for quite some time, he was the kind of person who understood the culture of the company and could speak the language.  He had worked in the frontline and knew the pains and pressures; it is this kind of a person who is best suited to don the mantle of a Knowledge Manager.  I wonder if Sukumar can give an inside perspective that goes just beyond the tools and technology aspect of Cognizant 2.0, and provide an insight into the role the KM team performed. 

In a sense, the role of a Knowledge Manager in an organization is quite similar to what countries do in war time (or even peace now) – to follow closely events occurring in countries that can be potentially detrimental to their domestic and international interests.  Where there is a veil of secrecy surrounding such operations, a corporate entity requires a lot more openness.  The information that is “openly available” needs to be transformed to insights; this transforms the function to into one of collaboration – one in which the knowledge manager enables the organization consume the extant content, while facilitating active conversations that will throw up interesting insights.  And like top secret government organizations, the process of integrating the insight into the strategy becomes a centralized role.  However, the information, the analysis and the insights themselves are crowd-sourced, in other words, obtained locally from the people who are best informed.  The knowledge manager has a team of knowledge stewards who constantly scan the “chatter” while enabling subject matter experts ensure that the entire organization receives value from the content that is available in the knowledge repository.   Their role becomes one of interpretation and analysis of these conversations, engaging with the organization in enabling these conversations take on new meaning, influencing conversations that drive the organization towards their knowledge-driven strategy to the end objective of achieving sustainable competitive advantage.

Does your organization have a Knowledge Manager?  What kind of structure do you think best suits an organization – one in which information analysis is centralized and becomes the function of a specialized team? Or one in which there are silos of information analysis, but a centralized function that is responsible for transforming insight into learning and then to knowledge?

#disclaimer: I have no personal or professional interest in Cognizant, nor do I hold any shares in this company.   My fascination for this company primarily stems from their involvement as one of the key participants of the KCommunity in Chennai. 

Knowledge Management and the ketchup conundrum

“There is another lesson in that household scene though.  Small children tend to be neophobic: once they hit two or three, they shrink from new tastes.  They would, when confronted with something strange on the plate – tuna fish, perhaps, or Brussels sprouts – want to alter the food in some way that made the unfamiliar familiar.  And so she turned to ketchup, because, alone among the condiments of the table, ketchup could deliver sweet and sour, and salty and bitter, and umami* ( a loan word from Japanese meaning pleasant savoury taste – umami is the taste that the tongue perceives distinct from the other four)”

- From “What the dog saw”

This seems quite similar to the experience we come across when we speak about Knowledge Management solutions too.  Managers having experience Business Intelligence, Analytics, Content Management, and Collaborative tools, now baulk when they are confronted with anything else that is new.  They seek to understand Knowledge Management from this familiar territory and would like to experience KM from one of these standpoints. 

So, for a KM initiative to succeed, perhaps it is important that we are able to make the unfamiliar familiar by bringing in ingredients that the neophobic manager is familiar with.  Introducing the concept of KM from a perspective of what they encounter in their daily work situation perhaps will make it more easily adopted within the organization.  The challenge then, is to find the right flavour that will appeal to the manager.

The other aspect of the ketchup is that the ingredients need to be so well blended together that none of these flavours stand out distinctly.  Well, yes, different people have different preferences for tastes, and so you have variants of the ketchup – Maggi’s hot and sweet tomato chilli sauce…which is…well different…and many other such combinations which try and cater to individual preferences.

The learning here is to bring in the appropriate blend of these tools that will allow the user to get familiar with the KM tool from a familiar territory.  So, how can knowledge be served with the right blend on top of your daily work in a manner that this allows you to benefit from the value being added, whilst still keeping you in familiar territory.

Do you see this as a possible mechanism for making knowledge management an easy-to-implement tool in organizations?

*ps: copyright acknowledged for the paragraph taken out of “What the dog saw”, Malcolm Gladwell, Back Bay Books.

Quest for the KM Chimera

"Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No! It's Superman!  Like the mythological Chimera, Knowledge Management seems to be made of many different aspects of business.  In turn, people perceive it differently - interpreting it in as many different ways as they perceive it.

Knowledge Management may be simply defined as a set of strategies and practices used in an organization to identify, create, represent, distribute and enable adoption of insights and experiences. Such insights and experiences comprise knowledge, either embodied in individuals or embedded in organizations as processes or practices.

Any tool or system that facilitates one or more these components will likely get categorized under the broad ambit of Knowledge Management.  For example, if we were to look at the various tasks, then the tools that will get covered under this would include:

·         Identify insights and experiences - Business Intelligence, Business Analytics, Data Mining, e-Discovery, Search Engines

·         Create, Represent and Distribute - Content Management Systems, Taxonomy Classification tools and methods, Social Collaboration tools et al

·         Enable adoption of insights and experiences - Learning Management tools, Business Process Management tools, et al

A few of them perform one or more of these activities in a very narrow slice of the overall business - like Customer Support and Service, Customer Relationship Management, or Infrastructure Management.  Most others work best in one of the above with the ability to feed into the other aspects of the definition - for example, BI enables identifying insights, but the rest of the activities are mostly carried out outside of the scope of a BI tool.

Although I have listed Learning Management tools and BPM tools under the third aspect of KM definition, in reality these happen in a very passive manner, disconnected from the definition of KM itself.  BPM tools, especially are good at defining business rules and changing processes that can cause improvement in performance, but will not be able to relate to the actual experience or insight that caused this change.  Similarly, LMS tools can impact learning and enhance competencies in people but will not be able to measure the performance enhancement.

Any organization looking on the path of operational excellence will look at integrating one or more aspects of this into their process and people improvement initiatives.  However, depending on the level of automation of business processes and the KM maturity, their choice of Knowledge tools will vary. Depending on the urgency and level of maturity all of these applications will typically end up vying for the same slice of the budgetary pie (as opposed to the budget available for core and peripheral applications that are more transactional in nature)

A Knowledge Management tool, should ideally straddle all three aspects of the definition either in collaboration with other tools, or as a stand-alone tool.  The ability to adopt insights and cause a shift in the way the organization works at the process and people level, is really where Knowledge Management will become a key driver of Business strategy and Performance improvement.

What tools do you know of, which serve one or more of these functions in a seamless manner?

Teaching the elephant to dance...

In his book "Who says elephants can't dance?", Louis Gerstner, the CEO of IBM who is credited with its massive turnaround towards the end of the last century, talks about the painful process of re-engineering the organization, as part of the process of the turnaround he effected.Reading that part reminded me of the very similar problems that much smaller organizations face...ones who have grown rapidly, and suddenly find themselves in the 'A' league.  They grew rapidly because of the entrepreneurial spirit of the core team, each person vested with the responsibility of making that division or department matter.  This is especially true of the new age companies, those in the IT, Telecom and mobile segment.  Equally suddenly, they begin to discover that what brought them to this point is not good enough to take them further.

We have experienced a similar situation as a smaller company getting acquired by a larger one, and suddenly having to cope with a vastly different cultural and business environment.  The freedom and agility that made us successful and brought us to the attention of the company that acquired us suddenly became our bane; this was now perceived as chaotic and "unprofessional".  The challenge became how to continue to remain nimble and agile while still being able to leverage the strength of the larger organization.

The question that remains is how do we teach the elephant to dance....or I would prefer to re-phrase that to "How do we not become elephants"!!!  Can these organizations continue to remain agile, retain their entrepreneurial DNA, and yet draw immense strength from size?  Does that size actually contribute to any of their strengths?

As an organization that develops and implements KM solutions, we have often been confronted by this question.  I believe the ability of an organization to retain its core values is essential for its long-term survival and sustainability.  As an organization grows in size, the traditional methods in which knowledge was shared and decisions begin to change.  The oft-repeated "water-cooler" insights are no longer possible.  However, these very insights that occurred in informal conversations (tacit knowledge) is what created the possibilities.

The organization needs to find new contexts to communicate, be related, and stay connected.
Insights that were possible because of conversations, and because the data needed to analyse them were smaller have now grown in order of magnitude.  How can these still be parceled into smaller chunks that make them still conversation-worthy, and therefore create the potential for insights.  How can managers be prompted to look at information, explore and discover lessons that they can apply.

Organizations can continue to be agile and entrepreneurial if the knowledge that they can harness from being a larger unit can be accessed easily, collaboration among these smaller units is available for the larger organization to benefit from, and it becomes possible for the organization to sense and respond to threats and opportunities without having to resort to militarization of their culture - uniform processes, monolithic systems, cumbersome workflows.

A framework that enables collaboration and sharing of insights, captures and transforms these insights into learning and promotes the institutionalization of a mechanism to leverage this learning will ensure that organizations can continue to appear chaotic, remain competitive and stay agile...and grow.

Would love to hear your views on this.

Microfinance and the Swadeshi Movement

With the Microfinance movement tottering due to an unhealthy combination of greed and lack of political will, Gandhiji’s birthday is a good time to take a pause and look at the mess we have created, and the possible way forward.  Rural India, especially needs a good dose of the Gandhian movement today – at a time when inflation has reached an all-time high, rampant urbanization is destroying the ecosystem of our sustenance model, and the Government does not seem to have any cogent plan to resolve either issue.

For Gandhi, the spirit and soul of India rested in the Village communities.  He said “the true India is to be found not in its cities, but in its seven hundred thousand villages”. The spirit of the Swadeshi movement was embodied in his slogan “Production by the masses, not mass production”.   In effect, Swadeshi was to be the corner stone of economic independence – not just for the village communities, but for the entire country.  Somewhere between Self-Help Groups and For-Profit Microfinance companies we seem to have lost this very important message.  What should have become a community of self-reliant people developing a sustainable and growing ecosystem has been hijacked for narrow and pecuniary interests; successful not-for-profit organizations that built a sustainable scalable model lost their way when they converted themselves to for-profit bodies, while the rest of the “social” organizations still leave us wondering whether private enterprise is after all delivering more social good.  In between all this the hapless victim seems to be the microfinance customer.

Even as early as 1999, CGAP had realized the need to introduce an appraisal guide (http://bit.ly/qReGrR) to enable Funders evaluate the performance of Microfinance Institutions on the two counts of Financial Performance and Social Performance.  A key aspect of this is the evaluation of internal processes and orientation towards social performance.  Since then, there have been many tools designed to evaluate the Social Performance aspect of Microfinance Institutions.  It would not be very difficult for the government to mandate social performance audits as part of a regulatory process.  The sustainability of the microfinance institution could also be evaluated from the strength of their internal processes.

I am tempted to believe that a Swadeshi-like model for microfinance would perhaps result in sustainable growth where the true benefactor would be the microfinance client.  For this to happen, the microfinance institution would transform itself into a facilitator of the ecosystem, and not merely remain a provider of credit.  In today’s setting, an urban microfinance group is taught skills such as soft-toy making, agarbathi manufacturing and other similar activities.  However, in most cases, while the NGO involved steps in to provide training, there is no guarantee of a market for such goods.  The gullible client takes a loan to buy the materials required to make the soft  toy, but is ultimately unable to sell it.  It is not very different in the villages, where instead of soft toys, they end up making baskets.

The Swadeshi movement advocated the creation of goods and services that would be consumed internally, and only then export the surplus.  In a sense, every village would be a producer-consumer, with the village community deciding on what goods could be imported, and how much would be exported.  In today’s context, a network of communities could very easily produce goods and services that were complementary and would boost the overall productivity of the villages.  Such a network would be able to realize a better price for their goods, without having to depend on middlemen.  The role of the microfinance institution needs to transform into the facilitator of such a network, where, apart from playing the traditional role of providing access to finance, they could implement best practices, engage agricultural scientists for enhancing crop yields, and ensure training that would really benefit the farmers.  The community could also learn from each other, where lessons learned or innovations in one sector or village can be transplanted in other areas.  The MFI would be a knowledge manager – capturing and sharing knowledge across communities. 

Does this mean that MFIs are necessarily not-for-profit organizations?  It just requires the microfinance institution to look at a larger role and move beyond the role of providing credit only.  They will need to step up and ensure that social performance is top on their agenda – financial performance will automatically follow.  When a need is converted into a demand, then we are bound to see a market at the bottom of the pyramid.    Instead today, we see an exploitation of the BoP, under the mistaken assumption that there is a demand. 

One hopes that Gandhiji’s message does not remain just in the history books or meaningless hyperbole of political speeches, but is transformed into useful action taking into account today’s reality.  I am sure that his messages are applicable in today’s context just as much as they were more than half-a-century ago.  Jai Hind.

The Knowledge Asset - A perspective

Many years ago, when my father was explaining economics to my brother, he used a very interesting analogy, which continues to stick to the mind – “Money is round…so it can roll; money is also flat, so it can be stacked”!  He was explaining the importance of the need for money to flow through the system, while retaining the need to save and keep sufficient reserves.    Looking at it from the perspective of knowledge management, I find that it holds well in the case of knowledge too!  Well, after all it should – Knowledge is wealth!

“Knowledge is sticky.  Without proper processes and enablers, it will not flow” – Carla O’Dell

Research by Kalseth [1] and others have shown that where knowledge management is integrated into the business strategy of the enterprise, and / or is embedded into the core processes of the organization, implementation has been successful, and the organization has been able to realize the benefits of KM.  However, in the absence of this, most efforts have resulted in implementation of huge content management systems with no quantifiable or measurable benefit to the organization.   We see examples of the need to integrate knowledge into the core operational framework everywhere.  In insurance companies for instance, when underwriting a risk, the underwriter applies his prior knowledge about the risk, while determining the type of coverage, and the clauses (or endorsements) to be included.  In order to ensure that the risk is determined correctly, a checklist is essential to capture all the elements of risk.  This checklist is nothing but a list of questions that the underwriter is expected to run through and confirm before deciding to underwrite the risk.  Obviously, this is a list that has been compiled over several years of experience of the organization – knowledge stacked (in a repository).  However, it really begins to work only when, as part of the underwriting process, the underwriter is able to pull out this checklist and verify that all the aspects of the risk have been covered.  Where, the risk is new to the organization (or to the underwriter) he seeks the assistance of experts / colleagues in the organization (knowledge stacked in the heads of people) – which now flows through the organization, as he collaborates with others in the process of discovering the extent of risk.

We clearly see the dual aspects of knowledge too carrying the properties of “being able to be stacked” and “requiring to flow” for organizations to benefit.  Profit from knowledge! Make it part of the core framework of your organization’s processes.  Measure it and manage it, like you do every other process.  Knowledge is everybody’s business.  But, if you intend to treat it like wealth, also make sure you assign a knowledge manager – like you would, a wealth manager.  After all, you do need to make sure, it flows…and it stays!

[1] Kalseth K, Knowledge Management: Development Strategy or Business Strategy. Information Development. 2001, 17:163-172.