By Bijoy Goswami, CEO, Aviri Inc., February 5, 2003

There’s an old Chinese saying: pick up your coat from the collar. Indeed, bad things happen when you pick it up from the sleeve – the coat hangs clumsily, the rest of it dangling on the floor. Holding it from the collar produces an entirely different effect – the coat hangs nicely and behaves quite well! You can sling it on your shoulder and walk down the street singing a happy tune.

Practitioners on the journey of Knowledge Management in organizations have been trying to discover the collar of the KM Coat. Sadly, ten years on, we’re still fumbling for it. We encountered a number of solutions along the way that seemed like the collar, but learned from painful experience otherwise. Some of these legitimately belong on the KM coat – such as the sleeve or pocket – but not the vital collar.

For the benefit of practitioners either just beginning, in the middle of a KM project, or wondering how to make your KM initiative naturally grow, I’d like to share three of these “pockets masquerading as collars.” I will conclude by turning my attention to the true collar of the coat. For those impatient to get to the conclusions, go to the section titled “What is the Collar?”

It is my sincere hope that in the spirit of KM, you will not reinvent the lessons learned. Not only will you avoid the unnecessary pain of carrying heavy boulders up the KM Mountain, you will instead discover that your knowledge-sharing initiative will begin to feel more like coasting downriver.

I. The Collar Is Not a Database of Documents

The term “KM” itself is guilty here. It implies that there is knowledge that somehow needs to be managed. “Where is this knowledge?” we ask. In documents is the standard reply, so let’s set up a repository where everyone can submit their valuable documents. When someone needs to know something, they turn to the database, run a search that returns the documents they need.

All this would be nice, except for the cascading set of false assumptions that blocks it. First, 80% of knowledge does not exist in documents (or email, for that matter). Indeed, to say that 20% of a firm’s knowledge is contained in the documents it generates is very generous. Most of the truly “useful knowledge” is tacit and dynamic – in the heads of the firm’s employees, and very contextual. This alone shows that the collar is not in documents.

However, for argument’s sake, let’s imagine that our objective is to capture the 20% of codified knowledge. This is a noble goal, but we then crash into the second, and much more troublesome barrier – why would those who are meant to populate these databases with their very important documents do so? What is in it for them? First, if they indeed possess some kind of valuable document, why would they simply donate it to the corporate database? Perhaps out of the goodness of their hearts? This is highly unlikely, especially since that particular document means a bonus or a raise or even a promotion for the individual. We seem to have forgotten about the massive failure with communism in nation states. In communism, for example, the farmer was asked to give up his land ownership "for the good of the country" while in KM, the knowledge worker is asked to give up his knowledge for the good of the corporation. Is it any accident that Knowledge Management shares Karl Marx’s initials?

Second, even if we had an organization of totally altruistic individuals, how would they know what documents others might need? It is usually very unclear if a document an individual has created will have any future value for others.

Some companies have decided that if they motivate their employees with bonuses or other incentives, they will submit documents. Indeed, this has occurred and document submission went very quickly from zero to unmanageable at one firm. Everyone got a bonus that quarter. However, the common complaint about the database became that finding information in the repository was much like finding the proverbial needle in the haystack. Furthermore, the quality of submissions was uneven. Much easier to pick up the phone and call Jane, who always knew how to answer the question(s) regarding a particular tax issue.

Documents do indeed have a place in our knowledge initiative. Indeed, we do want the 20%, which is codifiable to be in a place where people can easily find it. Knowledge workers shouldn’t have to reinvent knowledge that is reproducible. Even if we did manage to capture documents, we have neglected the other 80% of knowledge. Documents are not the collar. They must come later.

II. The Collar Is Not a Smart, Artificial Intelligence-Based, All Knowing Technology

Many KM practitioners in organizations have made remarks like the following:

“We must automate the collection, sorting and sharing of knowledge because otherwise, people will never do it”
“If only we had a smart piece of software that could make sense of all these documents and data!”
“Knowledge is captured in email, so why not scan email to find out what people know”

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the analog in the world of computing to KM in the business world: full of great and seemingly infinite promise, with reality falling far short. Many technologists have entered the world of knowledge management offering a panacea that will either scan documents or look at email and “divine” what individuals know. There are two issues to keep in mind. First, we must acknowledge (and technologists must come to terms with) the fact that AI technologies and all their derivatives are nowhere close to HAL[1]. 2001 has come and gone and still our basic model for reproducing “intelligence” using computer algorithms is primitive. Most computer scientists will freely admit that thirty years after the field of AI was born and many fanciful prognostications were made, we still do not have computers that can pass the Turing Test – where a human interviewer quizzes the computer behind a curtain and decides whether it is human or not.

There is a subtle difference. When we try to make technology be intelligent, we fail. On the other hand, when we employ a system that exhibits intelligence, we get much further. One of the best examples of this is search on the web. After many years and countless millions of venture capital dollars invested, a company co-founded at Stanford with the unlikely name “Google” took web search by storm. The rather profound and shockingly simple insight of the co-founders was this: there is an inherent weighting to a web page contained in the links to that page in other web pages. Individual website content creators are making decisions to link to other sites using certain terms. Sergey and Larry rightly conjectured that a search engine that simply “counts up the votes” in the form of links, and returns the most-referred pages at the top of the result would work extremely well. Today Google is the dominant search engine, producing highly accurate results in the first page of results. The profound insight from Google is that the system itself does not have to be intelligent. Rather, it can exhibit intelligence using simple rules – much like ant colonies, the human brain and basically every other self-organizing system in nature. Once technologists catch on to this, we will see extremely useful technology in KM.

The bottom line for KM-practitioners, even in a world of emergently-intelligent-ant-algorithm-based technologies, is that it will still take human beings to sort through the results, discern which knowledge is relevant to a particular situation, apply that knowledge, take the feedback, alter the course and ultimately, solve the problem. It is not that technology has no role in the world of KM. Rather we must be cognizant of technology’s inherent limitations. It is certainly not the place to start!

III. A Culture-Changing And/Or Incentives-Driven Initiative Does Not Make a Collar

An automated AI-approach appeals to many KM practitioners because of their painful experiences trying to get individuals to share their knowledge. While technology is one alluring (and flawed) response to non-participation, another route is often taken which is equally flawed: culture-changes and/or monetary or other incentives to get people to participate.

Most culture-changing initiatives start when the KM manager discovers, much to her dismay that no one wants to share. What is missed is that no one is sharing the way the KM program told them to share. Long before we came up with fancy words to describe it, people have been sharing knowledge – in the modern organization, sharing goes on. Even in the most cutthroat and competitive of corporate environments SHARING GOES ON! It is a fact of the modern workplace that without sharing, people simply would not be able to succeed. Whether this is the sharing of ideas and knowledge, relationships or ways to communicate and package those ideas, it is occurring. Produce any organization, no matter how “dysfunctional” and you can guarantee that sharing goes on. The challenge is not to change people’s behaviors of sharing or try to “make them share” through cultural change or incentives. It is by discovering how they are doing it today and helping them to scale their current behavior.

Incentives often become the catchall solution for a lack of participation. In many cases, companies use monetary iincentives to make sharing occur. Bonuses are based on the amount an individual shares or the number of documents they submitted to the corporate database. Or non-monetary games are created such as, “the best submission wins a company mug.” The problem with incentives is that they are a game. Posed with a game to play, people react in either by playing or opting out. Both rarely produce the desired behavior. When individuals decide to “play” they scrutinize and understand the rules of the game and figure out how to create a winning outcome for themselves. Case in point – the document repository that went from no documents to millions with a massive reduction in quality. When individuals opt out, it is because they are insulted that a game was constructed to make them behave a certain way.

When we as KM practitioners think that we know what the right behaviors are, we make our first mistake. When we construct incentives and culture-enhancing programs, we compound it and accelerate failure. Not only are incentives not the collar of the coat, they probably don’t belong on it at all!

What Is the Collar? In a Word: People

At the gates of the Oracle of Delphi in ancient Greece[2], visitors seeking to learn their future were confronted with two words: Know Thyself. This same advice applies towards unleashing the wealth of knowledge[3] in our organizations.

In The Tipping Point, a popular book, especially in KM circles, Malcolm Gladwell identifies three unique kinds of individuals he terms: mavens, connectors and salespeople (evangelists). I will use the term “evangelist” when referring to Galdwell’s “salesperson” in the rest of the article. [4] Mavens discover and create knowledge, connectors know people and build relationships, and evangelists combine people with knowledge they need to create action. In Marcus Buckingham’s insightful book on management, First, Break All the Rules, he discusses the difference between talents, skills and knowledge. Buckingham explains in detail that while skills and knowledge can be learned, talents cannot. Illustrating this point through the allegorical story of the scorpion and the frog, he concludes that great managers understand the core talent required in a particular job. They consequently hire, manage and fire individuals based on these talents. What are the talents, according to Buckingham? They are: analytical – working with knowledge; relating – working with people; and results-creation – creating action in the world. Unsurprisingly, these map directly onto mavens, connectors and evangelists. In one the most comprehensive personality-typing works, Personality Types, Don Riso describes the Enneagram, an ancient nine-type system. The nine types are derived from three core types, which once again map to mavens, connectors and evangelists [5]. The list goes on. Like the famous example of blind-men touching the elephant, a long list of individuals in diverse fields - academia, business, psychology, anthropology – have arrived at the same understanding through different paths.

Fine, but how is this related to KM? First, most KM efforts focus almost entirely on mavens – those with the knowledge. We try to capture their knowledge (section 1 above) or give them tools to discover and create knowledge (section 2) or motivate them to “give up” their knowledge (section 3). We have excluded two very important players integral to how knowledge is brought into the world – specifically connectors and evangelists. If we assume an equal breakdown of mavens, connectors and evangelists in our organizations, we have effectively excluded two thirds of the organization!

Mavens: Knowledge + Knowledge = New Knowledge

Even with our maniacal focus on mavens, however, we’ve missed the boat. In their groundbreaking book, Driven, Nitin Nohria and Paul Lawrence discuss the core human drives to “acquire” and “defend.” This is intuitively true – mavens, for example, feel a sense of ownership to their knowledge and also, a need to defend that knowledge. The document-submission approach completely ignores these core drives by not only asking people to “give-up” their knowledge, but also by disassociating the knowledge-creator from their knowledge. Furthermore, mavens feel differently about sharing their knowledge based not only on their personalities (for example, mavens tend to have very little patience with non-mavens), but also relative to their reputation in the organization. If Jane, a maven, has just joined a company, her desire to share her knowledge – even standard, mundane or trivial knowledge – is very high because she can build her reputation and “reciprocity capital” with that knowledge. She roams the organization advertising that, “No question is too stupid, I’m glad to help! ” However, six months into her job, Jane’s reputation has grown and her desire to answer those questions has dropped dramatically. Comfortable in her place in the organization, she now wants to be able to choose how to help others. Jane’s behavior will differ greatly from a connector or an evangelist, who are each motivated by different drivers. Following these natural incentive trails (much like ant colony scientists follow the pheromone trails) is important and incredibly useful.

Connectors: People + People = New Relationships

Connectors differ from mavens in that the object of their study is not knowledge, but people. If mavens’ function is to combine knowledge with other knowledge to create new knowledge, then connectors’ function is to combine individuals with other individuals to create new relationships. Connectors spend time with people, seek to understand them and build strong relationships. Just as mavens trade their knowledge, connectors trade their relationships and seek to extend their reputation for knowing who knows. They create a new connection to the knower. And just as mavens feel ownership of their knowledge IP, connectors feel ownership of their relationships and must be allowed to protect them. Mavens and connectors put a new twist to “it’s not what you know, but who you know.” In fact, it’s both.

The most powerful way we develop trust in others is through our direct experience of them. Connectors play the vital role of scaling trust – by leveraging their direct trusted relationships between individuals so we don’t have to undergo the time-consuming process of developing trust in others’ through our own direct experience.

Evangelists: People + Knowledge = New Actions

Evangelists are motivated by action. Evangelists, consummate storytellers, are constantly combining people with knowledge to create actions. On a continuum of people and knowledge, evangelists sit squarely in the middle. Not as interested as mavens to spend time understanding the nitty-gritty details, they’d rather know that the answer is 42 and then get as many people to believe it through their powerful persuasive skills. Indeed, rarely will mavens popularize their ideas – evangelists will do that for them. Steve Jobs, the evangelist, brought Steve Wozniak, the maven’s elegant PC design to the world. Malcolm Gladwell’s unique contribution with Tipping Point, for example, has been to spread the word about concepts that have been around for a while. Not as interested in developing as deep an understanding of people as connectors, evangelists tend to have large, superficial networks – if only because the message has to get out to as many people as possible.

In Conclusion

People are the collar of the KM coat. There is a consistent framework to understand people, capturing not only the “types” of individuals in a firm, but also the “forces” that bind these individuals together and guide their actions in a knowledge network. This person-centric approach empowers the leader of a knowledge initiative to avoid the common pitfalls, develop a self-sustaining strategy for knowledge exchange, make smart technology choices, and ultimately succeed where so many others have not.

REFERENCES

[1] The intelligent, self-aware computer from Arthur C. Clarke’s “2001: A Space Odyssey”
[2] and her modern counterpart in the film, The Matrix
[3]Tom Stewart’s book, The Wealth of Knowledge speaks to the unlimited potential on the other side of unleashing knowledge in our organizations.
[4] The term “evangelist” is more generic and not as tied to a specific role in companies as “salesperson.”
[5] In the Bhagavad Gita, India’s ancient philosophical text, 3 paths of “enlightenment” are described – that of llove/relationship, knowledge/wisdom and action.

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