Rony Dayan's Blog

Applying Theory U by Otto Scharmer to Communities of Practice

Rony Dayan — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 08:10:00 GMT

I've enjoyed reading Joe Firestone's articles about KM in National Government (http://kmci.org/alllifeisproblemsolving/?s=National%20Governmental%20Knowledge%20Management) and will try to apply his ideas in my current function as Director General of the Israel National Council for Research and Development.

Diving into the Theory U link (http://www.presencing.com/docs/publications/execsums/Theory_U_2pageOverview.pdf) was a completely different experience and it reminded me of the time during which I was the CKO of Israel Aerospace Industries, when we tried together, Yossi Pasher and myself to build and sustain the activity of communities of practice. These are gatherings of different people, coming from different organizations, only having in common the technological difficulties they are facing. These are ordinary people, while Otto Scharmer had the privilege of "charming" (what a convenient name) "leaders and innovators". Those are very special people, as Barbara Streisand sings about lovers.

While reading the theory, I have been trying to associate it with my experience with technological community members (probably most of them not being born leaders). Starting with Co-initiating we have indeed built into the beginning of the process, the instance of listening to each other, first with showing off their capabilities in order to re-enforce their self-esteem, but then, after confidence has been built, with an honest disclosure of their problems and difficulties. I guess I have to skip Co-sensing as these were very practical people mainly sensing with their head (rather than with their mind and heart), and interested in solving the issues they brought with them to the community. Presencing would then be the stage at which the participants started seing the big picture, out the tiny localized pseudo-different issues each one of them brought to the community, and trying to figure out a future situation in which most of these problems would not exist. Co-creating has been performed when solutions were generated within the community for the benefit of one of its members. I don't think we have ever reached the Co-evolving stage and maybe only time and persistence would have brought us there (hinting to the actual KM practitioners at IAI, or as the French say "une pierre dans leur jardin").

What ever happened to good old KM?

Rony Dayan — Tue, 25 Dec 2007 21:13:00 GMT

What ever happened to good old KM?

Yesterday the Israeli KM forum gathered at the Israeli National Roads Company (search for INRC) and was presented with an ambitious and quite successful, albeit young knowledge management program, credit to Yevgeni Artzav, the local knowledge manager. One of the features of the program has been challenging the ever actual problem of 'baby boomers' leaving with all their knowledge and experience the active rows of the company and populating the cohorts of retired personnel. They have taken upon themselves to capture knowledge from those gray-haired experts for the future benefit of the young troops joining now the company, and should be commended for it.

I couldn't believe my ears when critiques started to be heard from people in the audience, claiming that "you can't force people to submit their knowledge" – (of course! Who ever talked about forcing? The nice thing about it was in the way these people where convinced to share, and communicate their experience for a good cause).

Last week I met an old friend who told me out of nostalgia that he remembers how when serving in the early sixties in the IAF, he was sent to the Dassault enterprise in France. The rule there was that there were no loose paper blocs in the company. Everybody was assigned to a notebook and any briefing, note, comment or report had to be written there. Notwithstanding, these notebooks were double-paged so that anything written in them, would automatically be copied to the next page. At the end of the day, the departments' secretary were collecting those second pages to file them in a typical company repository as fitting those years (not too many computers, document management systems, or wikis were then available).

It seems to me that nowadays, KM is limited to blogs, wikis, networks, and story-telling. Capturing, creating, and retrieving knowledge may not have the glamour of the Web 2.0 techniques, but they belong to the basics, that when missing, there is no basis to build on the modern KM.
We are a young discipline who cannot afford to discard our first and second generation of 'good old' knowledge management, only because there are new techniques, which all have a powerful potential, but which will have to survive the short life cycle that actual hypes have.

Transforming our KM forum into a Future Center

Rony Dayan — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 20:12:00 GMT

As I was telling you in the entry of the 28 September 2007, our KM forum is preparing itself for a transformation into a Future Center. The deliberations between its members were dealing with the target purpose, content, and form. We have decided to try and resolve these in local face-to-face meetings around the world, to be followed by an on-line overall gathering after we are better prepared.

Alice MacGillivray pointed at the expected dilemma for the defining team. My recommendation is to position the forum clearly as focused and aligned as possible with the agreed upon goals and to define its competencies to enable it to create the future (to move from visioning to action as fast as possible as Edna Pasher suggested).

Complexity and diversity ------------> Focus and alignment

Future prediction ------------> Future creation

The following is my proposition to the Israeli chapter, to try and sketch the scope of our discussion so that we can be better focused and more efficient. My assumptions are:

1. The purpose of the forum is to enable its members to better perform functions facilitated through Knowledge Management.
2. The forum will not be limited to business or enterprises interests.
3. The following matrix describes the scope of KM areas of potential influence:

Organization type: -->	Personal	Enterprises	Communities	The world (?)
Issue: ↓
Adaptability to change
Competitive advantage
Economic model
Education
Ethics		Effect goal
Innovation
Knowledge moments
Methods
Organizational culture
Sustainability
…
…

We will add other issues as required, and at the intersection of any organization type and an issue we will try to specify 'effect goals'. As Jack Ring said: "'Effect' goals can be translated to Value goals and even to Principles of interrelationships". Each of these goals can be examined for Requisite Variety regarding the Extent, Variety and Ambiguity in the organization's context; (Second order cybernetics advises that these must be conducted, on-going, in parallel with specific focus areas)".

Just as a reminder - requisite variety – defined by Ashby, as an organization's internal diversity must match the variety and complexity of the environment in order to deal with challenges posed by the environment (Ashby, W.R. (1956), An introduction to cybernetics, Chapman & Hall, London). To maximize variety, everyone in the organization should be assured of the fastest access to the broadest variety of necessary information, going through the fewest steps. This will be achieved through the involvement of diverse point of views brought by a variety of participants.

As Bill Hall proposed, the future center is in fact a group or coalition of “future tasters” who would try to extrapolate existing trends into the future and try to learn how to “live” with their potentially good and bad consequences. Having “tasted” the future, these people could then try to develop strategies and educational programs to help maximize benefits and minimize the hazards.

Learning organization vs. organizational learning

Rony Dayan — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 17:19:00 GMT

If for Knowledge Management, it would be true to say that its theory is much simpler than its practice, the opposite is probably true for making your organization into a learning one. All it takes to practice it is awareness, curiosity, and assiduity, while its theory ties into system thinking, complexity theory, a discipline of reflection leading to mental models, a collective discipline leading to a shared vision for the group and to collective learning – the five disciplines outlined by Senge, P.M. (1990), The fifth discipline: The art and practice of learning organization, Doubleday Currency, New York.).

Learning and knowledge can be seen as reinforcing each other: sharing knowledge and identifying new areas for learning. Yet, existing knowledge can obstruct learning and new learning can overturn existing knowledge. One could therefore surmise that the accumulation of knowledge can inhibit learning which may account for the paradox of those firms who trumpet that they are knowledge driven while simultaneously giving early retirement to their most knowledgeable, or at least experienced, managers (Ambler, T. and Styles, C. (2002), Connecting Firm-level Learning with Performance).

It has been claimed that learning organization is to be thought of as a direction, while organizational learning, which is a fundamental component of the learning organization, is seen as a heuristic device to explain or quantify learning activities. This suggests that emphasis should be put on understanding how learning is defined, acquired and used at the individual and organizational level (Garavan, T. (1997), 'The learning organization: A review and evaluation', The Learning Organization, Vol. 4, No. 1, pp. 18-29).

Learning organizations are skilled at five main activities: systematic problem solving (this activity rests heavily on the philosophy and methods of the quality movement), experimentation with new approaches (involving the systematic searching for and testing of new knowledge), learning from their experiences and past history (companies must review their successes and failures, assess them systematically, and record the lessons in a form that employees find open and accessible), learning from the experiences and best practices of others (sometimes the most powerful insights come from looking outside one's immediate environment to get a new perspective), and transferring knowledge quickly and efficiently throughout the organization (for learning to be more than a local affair, knowledge must spread quickly and efficiently throughout the organization). (Garvin, D.A. (1993), 'Building a learning organization', Harvard Business Review, pp. 78-91.)

During the last five years, I have been active at influencing the conversion of Israel Aerospace Industries into a learning organization, through the application of Knowledge Management.

· Systematic problem solving – The management of the KM program using the Hoshin Kanri method, incorporating measures from the inventory of the business and operational targets, is a way as systematic as it can be, to relate actions to goals.

· Experimentation with new approaches – one of the KM procedures instituted in IAI was meant to stimulate people to look for new knowledge relevant yet external to the organization.

· Learning from one's experience – We have established a two tier process of learning from experience starting with lessons learned gathered from any activity as well as from formal debriefing processes, and continuing with a structured method of deriving insight from these lessons learned.

· Learning from the experience of others – We have defined Good Practices (a more humble terminology for Best Practices) as those that have been established in any division in the company after a lengthy proof process. Yet we have also created an IAI Good Practice, which is one that has been originally established in one division and latter adopted by another division (from another group).

· Transferring knowledge – 15 communities of practice have been established referring to technological subjects and including members from many of the 24 divisions of IAI, transferring knowledge from one to another and sharing lessons learned, good practices and technical expertise.

As Garavan said, a learning organization is a direction for a journey and IAI has started it.

Present an image of a long-term future as the outcome of a Change Process

Rony Dayan — Sun, 07 Oct 2007 10:54:00 GMT

As I was telling you last week, our KM forum has decided to reinvent itself and the deliberations now among those who are more active in the process, are about the character it should have as it emerges from this transformation. Three things come to my mind for discussion on this topic:

What creates the situation that makes an organization decide to change?
How does the organization decide to what does it want to change?
How the organization does implements the change it has decided for?

The first question has been answered extensively by researchers who have inquired the change process in organizations. Regarding "saving the organization", Change Management has already established that one of the first things to be done in order to motivate an organization to change is to convince it that a major crisis is occurring - establishing a sense of urgency; (see also the Change Management page of my website at www.knowandmanage.com). See also Hugo (2005), in Building the real-time enterprise: "It often takes a crisis to get peoples’ attention or to get them to take their situation seriously. Good leaders find ways to raise the urgency level. They can let a small crisis happen by not fixing something and letting it fail" (Hugo, M. (2005), 'Embracing change', in Hugo, M. Building the real-time enterprise, Vol. Chapter 4).

Yet Senge, P. (1999), in The lost chapters of The Dance of Change reminds us that "... find it easy to recruit members by playing on fear and anxiety. These tactics are so ingrained that they unwittingly use them in contact with other organizations, particularly corporations. “There’s a crisis coming, and you’ve got to do something about it because you helped create the crisis!” This may be true, but it leads to disheartening anxiety, and deadens inspiration because it represents a short-term focus. It’s far more effective to present an image of a long-term future in which corporations, as well as other entities, have a significant and beneficial role to play, and to help corporate leaders see that role." (Senge, P.M. (1999), 'Leadership in living organizations', in Senge, P.M. Leading beyond the walls, The Drucker Foundation).

The third question is also pretty well documented in the literature, and much has been written and said about enabling change. In his book Leading Change, John Kotter lays out what he calls the “Eight-stage change process”. This process has come to be recognized as a standard by many people (John Kotter, 1996, Leading Change, Harvard Business School Press: pg. 33). The eight stages are:

Establishing a sense of urgency
Creating the guiding coalition
Developing a vision and strategy
Communicating the change vision
Empowering a broad base of people to take action
Generating short-term wins
Consolidating gains and producing even more change
Institutionalizing new approaches in the culture.

In the change process, people may be operating in many of these stages at the same time but each stage needs to occur to make it possible for the next one to happen.

To these I would add a recommendation to put in place at least for the first period a monitoring procedure to follow up on the change implementation as for instance:

Results so far (what percentage of target group has been converted to the new method?
What are the changes to basic operational practice?)
Results so far: change in mindsets (mental models)
Difficulties found in implementing the change?
What could we learn from the implementation process?

The second question is much less documented as the assumption is that the organization contemplating a change has an established mission, and change considered is only on how to achieve this mission. Nevertheless, as we are experiencing in our own organization, we are not sure we know what is our mission and that makes the change process very complex because its basis remains to be defined as much as its end state. What could maybe help are a few directions I'm borrowing from the SoL Research Guide (2003):

What were/are the objectives of the change initiative?
Scope / boundaries of the change initiative?
Context, background to the change initiative, what was the imperative "case for change?

Agenda for a KM forum

Rony Dayan — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 15:31:00 GMT

The AOK forum in which I have been participating for the last 2 years is in the process of reinventing itself – a process recommended to any organization being established for longer than it can remember for what its original purposes were.
Various propositions were made by its members as to what should be on its agenda; I can think of a few directions we can take it:

We keep saying that KM is all about people. Let's work a bit about this entity we call people. It will take some anthropology, some sociology and psychology, and maybe some research on the cultural differences between some of us.
We keep saying that KM is there to support enterprises thrive and survive in a competitive world. Do you really know how to relate KM to intellectual capital, and IC to the company's bottom line? If you really knew that you would have a lot more followers than you now have.
If the first generation of KM was about the organization's memory, and the second is about knowledge flowing between people, what will be the third generation about? Can you prepare yourself for it?
If Web 1.0 was about publishing anything to anybody, and Web 2.0 is about creating connected networks and sharing knowledge between their participants, what will be Web 3.0 about?
If the cradle of economics was about exchanging goods for goods, and this was replaced by exchanging goods for money and vice-versa, and if knowledge performs in a reverse economical way as it doesn't diminishes when it is distributed, is there a future to a knowledge currency?
We keep talking about knowledge and about its management. Do you know how to qualify knowledge? What is quality knowledge? How should you measure it?
If KM was performing as QM, we would have KM standards, required by customers, and managements would court knowledge managers to make sure their organization fits some kind of CMM class. Is this something we should long for? If so, how should we proceed to make it happen?

What do you think KM forums should deal about?

Networking

Rony Dayan — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 08:50:00 GMT

Shalom to anybody interested enough in Knowledge Management, Change Management, or using these to make yours a Learning Organisation. I will try on a weekly basis to relate here from a practical point of view to events I'm experiencing . Though I wil try to use as much as possible a detached academic approach, I presume that my background in industry management will play an important role in filtering in what interests me and how do I weight it.
I have been lucky to meet over six years ago with Yigal Chamish who was at the time the Knowledge Manager of the Engineering and Planning Division of Bezeq (the local telephone company). I had at the time already caught the KM bug, looking for its practical significance, and for ways to put it to work for industrial corporations to improve their competitive advantage. Yigal was also among those I consulted with, when considering studying for a PhD in the UK (a milestone I have been fortunate to complete in the field of Knowledge Management at Cranfield University a little over a year ago).
The Israeli forum of Knowledge Managers established by Yigal and to which I have belonged from its very beginning as the CKO of Israel Aerospace Industries, and now as the founder of KnowAndManage Inc., convenes on a monthly basis, everytime at the premises of one of its participants. Last Tuesday we were hosted by Yigal who discussed a subject he described as being already over the hype on the global web, though its hasn't caught yet in most organisations (and even less in Israel than elsewhere in the world) - networking.
We discussed the social aspect of creating human networks on a global basis and wandered if the same principles could be applied to the organisational one. Obviously, principles as "The Strength of Week Ties" of Mark Granovetter (1983), "The Six Degrees of Separation" synonimous to Stanley Milgram's (1967) "Small World" phenomenon, "The Tipping Point" by Malcolm Gladwell, as well as the advices of Brian Uzzi, and Shannon Dunlap in "How to Build Your Network" (2005), would be expected to be easier to apply to an organisation of 100, 1000, or even 10,000 people, while it has been claimed to exist for the world population of over 6 billion people. Mathematically, this is correct, yet I believe that the big difference lies in the characteristics of the group we try to apply the principles to. While the anonymous world comprises of a multitude of people, each having a different interest , the organisation has a very specific agenda, which sub-divides to sub-agendas all refering hopefully, to the company's. Connecting to people in the company would have to be related to its agenda one way or another, otherwise it would be considered as odd and wouldn't be entertained. Managers at any level of the company wouldn't consider themselves as such, if they didn't know the people, their attributes, faculties, expertises, and sometimes, even skills. Casting a new project is never a job left to the HR databases managers, and the project manager wouldn't rely but on himself to chose his collaborators. Therefore the straightforward application of the principles mentioned above seems to me simplistic and futile.
Nevertheless, practitioners of KM shouldn't despair, and they should indeed make use of those networking principles during their constant battle to implement the KM approach. The implementation of "Organisational Yellow Pages", shouldn't be looked upon only as a basis for networking, but rather as a means to open people to expose themselves and their ways to contribute to the organisation. A system of adding to them an expertise level as claimed by the "expert", but also as validated by the people in the company using his/her expertise, is another way to apply those networking principles. Looking for "natural champions of the KM cause" while preaching for it, shouldn't limit itself to people interested in the subject, but rather should look for people considered as "king-pins" in the organisation (a kind of "maven" in Gladwell's terms), so that advocating KM would be made through people whose opinion is valued.