Nurturing Learning Organizations
The transfer of knowledge within a learning organization is a complex task. However, taken seriously and with the support of senior management it can be accomplished. Not that I have met any learning organization in its full sense; I haven’t and I don’t think I ever will. But such generative learning condition is to be cultivated, even though you may never be able to become a true learning organization. Achieving such a level is like achieving the full sense of personal humility, or even Zen. Once you believe and affirm you have reached it, you would have just missed it.
To succeed in shaping your organization’s future, you must develop an organization that learns well, efficiently and constantly. Such learning is critical, because competing in rapidly changing environments means your organization must be able to track your environments, identify changes, and adjust to these changes. You must try new things and determine what works and what does not work—increasing what does and swiftly abandoning that which does not. Then you must build a new cycle of learning upon this learning in a never-ending fashion.
Therefore, knowledge professionals and executive staff must be aware that if organizations are not able to cope with the rapidly changing business environment, which also encompasses technology and human behavior within the organization, it will die. I strongly believe that organizational learning will become as important to corporations as vitamins and minerals are to the human body: depleted of it, the whole system gradually breaks down and becomes ill, and if not replenished, it eventually succumbs.
According to Garratt (p. 67, 2000),1 loops of learning (and transferring of learning, I might add) allow the critical review of all levels of the organization. Such continuous learning enables the organization to sense and respond to the changes in its external and internal environments to ensure the survival and development of the energy niches that support it. This is a very holistic approach, much like nurturing a living organism, as most of the learning and transferring of it inside the organization is personal, private, very often uncodified, hidden and, most of all, a defensive way of coping with the effects of a seemingly nonlearning employer.
Effectively Transferring Knowledge
Why is knowledge transferring so important?, you might ask. Back in 1498, Wang Yang-Ming was already saying that “knowledge is the beginning of practice; doing is the completion of knowing.”2 The former Chairman of SAS Airlines, Jan Carlson, believes that “an individual without information cannot take responsibility; an individual who is given information cannot help but take responsibility.”3 The same is true for knowledge workers and their responsibility in bridging the knowledge gap inside the organization. A key strategy in this process is the effective transferring of knowledge.
To bridge this knowledge gap, knowledge workers must realize that the utmost knowledge base in any organization does not reside in computer databases, but in the heads of the individuals inside the organization. The majority of professionals inside knowledge-based organizations worldwide have college degrees. Many of them hold postgraduate degrees and a large amount of know-how based on previous experiences and specializations. The challenge is, how do you get each one of these professionals to share what they know, not compulsorily, but freely and openly with everyone else in the organization? In addition, how do you get them to accept responsibility for their actions? Where should your focus and line of actions be? In my experience, it has to cover a multitude of areas, including:
•identifying target individuals;
•knowing the barriers in the organization;
•having a code of ethics;
•fostering culture change;
•promoting Innovation by thinking out of the box.
Identifying Target Individuals
For any successful knowledge transfer activity, it is important for you to identify the individuals from whom you need capital knowledge transferred. Unfortunately, I find that the more important the transfer of knowledge is, and the capturing for that matter, the more difficult it is to identify and locate these professionals, never mind get them to share what they learn or know. Take for instance the global consulting companies. To locate their professionals can be hard at times. Often, if you were to weigh the average amount of time professional consultants spend between offices across the country and the globe, at any point in time, you may find that 86% of them will be outside the office and many times outside of the country.
In an organization where the office is not the place where business is conducted, knowledge transfer can be a very hard job to accomplish. The same is true for any other organization, maybe not at such high levels as in the professional consulting industry. For instance, if I am in my office for 40 h a week, then my time in the office is less than 25% of my available time. If I consider the times I am working from home or a hotel room, then the percentage falls even more. Among the big six consulting firms, you may find that their consultants are in the office
less than 14 percent of their available time.
Therefore, knowing where your people are and how they will contribute to the transfer of knowledge is very important, and must be taken into consideration before you establish a collaboration strategy.
Identifying Organizational Barriers
What are the barriers you are likely to face in attempting knowledge transfer implementation? These barriers are real, and they exist in every organization. A typical one is the structural barrier of hierarchical organizations, such as departments, groups and divisions. Different operating companies in different countries, language and cultural barriers are often present as well. There are many more barriers and you must take the time to identify them and have a strategy to overcome each one of them prior to any knowledge transferring initiative.
In order for any knowledge transfer initiative to be successful you must not focus your efforts on a department or an operating company, but on the total company, across all of these barriers. To do this you will have to focus on increasing the ability of the individual in communicating his thoughts to others in the organization, as it would be the collective result of a lot of individual actions that would be necessary to produce a result for the company. The question is how do you increase the power of these individuals sharing their thoughts with others in the organization?
There are many areas you should concentrate on in attempting to become a learning organization and striving to transfer knowledge at the same time. One of the main areas of attack should include increasing the power of individuals in sharing their thoughts and overcoming the organization’s barriers.
Encouraging Culture Change
Board of directors and executive staff are responsible for the climate they create in the organization. Such climate has a major impact on the organization’s ability to share knowledge across time and space. Over the years I have seen this as the most difficult aspect of knowledge transfer. By default, people have always taught themselves to collect knowledge over the years as a way to achieve power, or as a way of professional self-preservation, to say the least. What is thought in colleges and universities is that knowledge should be acquired and used, but we never learned how to share it.
Another important aspect to consider is with regard to the quality of the people that you, as a learning organization, can bring to this relationship with partners, supply chain, and distribution channels, which will determine the level at which your organization can operate in this relationship. The higher the quality of the individuals engaged in this knowledge transfer, the higher the quality of the knowledge that can be brought to bear on any problem that your customers and co-workers bring to you. But don’t underestimate other levels of the organization, as every individual, independent of their role, can effectively contribute to this KM initiative. At Buckman, their goal was to have 80 percent of their organization effectively engaged on the front line by the end of 2000.
Such level of knowledge sharing/transferring assumes different shapes according to the organization in which it is implemented. It may translate, as in Buckman’s case, in how do they get as many people as possible creating and transferring as much knowledge as possible in the best way possible in order to have a positive impact on the customer. Some organizations may focus on making sure that there is a high level of interaction between the organization’s people and paying customers for a measurable frequency and duration. For others, it might be to ensure that the majority of their people actively use their electronic forums, web portals and e-mail, or even to ensure that they get their accounting right, which may include profit recovery activities, so that their groups measure up to this new corporate goal.
My advice is, no matter what the nuances, idiosyncrasies, and specifics of any given learning organization, the goal of knowledge transferring strategies is to bring about the full weight of the knowledge that exists in the hardware, software, and people, in a relevant and useful manner, to bear upon the requirements of the customer. I believe that any learning organization, especially those that realized they must adopt a generative learning attitude versus an adaptive attitude, is doing a lot of these things already. But if they can get all of their people exercising knowledge transfer at all times, a tremendous power can be unleashed. The goal here is not to go after definitions, numbers, procedures, or any other quantifiable business goals. It should be about involvement, commitment, creativity, passion, and ultimately the freedom to do everything the organization can, and to use all of the knowledge it has, to make sure that it has done its best to satisfy customers—inside and outside the organization—in all areas.
Knowledge transferring will only be successful when you are able to fully and effectively engage all of your people, with a technological system and within cultural surroundings where they can all be comfortable practicing it. Only then will you have sufficiently addressed the collaboration and knowledge transferring issues of your organization.
KM Strategies to Foster Knowledge Transfer
As discussed earlier, learning must be turned into action in order to be effective. A learning organization is a breathing organism, and if it is not flourishing, it is dying. Value and use the knowledge of the organization on the job, turn learning into action, and achieve KM performance. You might be in for a surprise here, but do the people in your organization know how to create value and make money for the company? If so, do they know what kind of knowledge they need to accomplish this?
Just as any professional sports team, players have their strengths and their weaknesses. They perform better in one position rather than others. As part of becoming a learning organization, you might have to deal with miscast positions, as well as not-so-fit ones. The way employees deal with knowledge, and the positions they hold, can mean the difference between your organization’s success and failure. Thus, be prepared to conduct some knowledge performance targets to match.
Therefore, building a KM strategy is often the best starting point when attempting to implement knowledge transfer strategy. The implementation will require you to know and understand what knowledge and systems the organization needs to enhance for its competitive advantage. There are four key components in KM you must address: KM applications, intuitive content management, KM culture, KM-based governance.
Augmenting Knowledge Sharing Proficiencies
For a learning organization to foster knowledge sharing it must become proficient in collaboration. To do that the organization must be able to shift from a culture where hoarding knowledge is power, to one where sharing knowledge is power. This is not an easy task, as individuals are the ones holding the knowledge and most often they feel very insecure about sharing knowledge, becoming obsolete for the organization and losing value, which then generates the fear of being let go.
Therefore, the main challenge here for KM professionals is to get people to share what they know. Sharing is the basis of collaboration among people and any learning organization. Curiously, people across the organization often do not know what it means to share and use knowledge. So, knowledge workers must educate, empower the organization to understand such collaboration concept, and get them going. Therefore, it becomes imperative that a dedicated team is created, with special skill sets, to act as knowledge brokers inside the organization.
The following strategies of collaboration offer different benefits to a learning organization. Beware, these models require special manners and measures of organizational support, and the more models an organization adopts, the greater are its chances of becoming a successful learning organization:
•Meeting and Working the Network of Collaboration—This collaboration strategy usually commences with a face-to-face meeting, a strategy or brainstorm meeting, a business or social gathering, or even a telephone call or e-mail exchange. Two people meet, identify some synergies, identify value in each other, and then resolve to keep in touch. Although collaboration at this stage doesn’t yet exist, it has a lot of potential. If the strategy is successful, over time these two people will trade stories and backgrounds, compare acquaintances, and unearth each other’s skills, interests, and areas of expertise. Furthermore, they might build trust and rapport, even though they may not even, at that stage, have any interest in helping one another. But they remain open to the possibilities that may arise to possibly working together on a project, or have a chance to share some valuable knowledge. Such a process is far beyond the organization’s control, as at this level, the process is still highly personal and often arises through serendipity (God set the times and the places!). This personal collaboration strategy requires very little technology beyond basic communications, is often unplanned, and little support beyond providing opportunities for exposure to others is necessary. Executive education courses, seminars, symposia, trade associations, service organizations, charities, on-line discussion groups, book signings—indeed, any forum where interesting people congregate—provide rich environments for creating relationships.
•User Groups and Task Forces: A Need for Collaboration—Collaboration here is premeditated, as there was a need to focus on a very particular subject or object. Typically, this type of collaboration assumes the form of user groups, focus groups, task forces and so on, because a group or individual lacks all the skills or resources necessary to accomplish the desired outcome. For instance, President Reagan appointed a panel to investigate the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger. One panelist, Dr. Richard Feynman, used a cup of ice water and a strip of rubber to demonstrate that the explosion occurred because a rubber O-ring had failed at low temperature. But Feynman only got the idea to consider temperature because Donald Kutyna, an Air Force general on the investigative panel with him, remarked to Feynman that while working on his car, he had wondered about the effects of temperature on rubber. Just by asking questions you can promote collaboration. Bringing together communities of practice is also a more elaborate way to promote collaboration. This strategy builds on the serendipitous nature of the first (i.e., “I know a guru who can help us with that issue!”). But for active collaboration to start, or for such teams to form, people have to be able to find each other, and the life of these collaborating teams may extend beyond the current need, but it is more likely that they will evolve or dissolve as needs change.
Generation of ideas should be fostered in every learning organization. Translating great ideas into new contexts can save the organization time and money, while raising the average level of outcome quality and implementation. Of course, you may decide to modify previous inventions as they change environments, but that is OK. Velcro, for instance, has continually tailored its original product to include new resins with unique properties for specialized applications, inexpensive disposable closures for diapers and heavy-use closures like those on a blood pressure cuff.
The major requirement when transferring knowledge is to have a robust corporate memory, with a KM gathering and collaboration system for users to contribute or review ideas, experiences and work solutions, as well as to access the contributions, searching both broadly across disciplines. Web portals are particularly suited to supporting such contribution and retrieval and for enabling unexpected connections and discoveries.
Chapter Summary
This chapter emphasized the importance of nurturing learning organizations in effectively transfer knowledge among its staff and leadership. The chapter assists in developing strategies to identify targeting individuals to aid in the dissemination of knowledge and to deal with organizational barriers against the culture of change.