Knowledge Management

Most organisations know they have vast reservoirs of knowledge vital for future success, but lack the ability to tap into them. Just published, Knowledge Management can help your organisation explore where that knowledge is, and how to tap into it to release its creative potential.

Moving beyond the theoretical and technical aspects of Knowledge Management, this loose-leaf manual seeks to make the subject immediately relevant and practical. It provides you with dozens of ideas for building knowledge sharing into work processes and focuses on the human communication required to make Knowledge Management possible.

Most people have been brought up to guard their knowledge possessively as individuals. These ready-to-run activities will help break down these barriers and reinforce new mindsets, creating a new culture of knowledge sharing.

This pack is inspiring, and it'll give you a complete range of ideas for knowledge management - and every one of them you can try out with confidence in your organisation. You can apply these activities to a wide variety of practical workshops and courses including change management programmes, culture change, building on a Learning Organisation event and creating competitive advantage through people. Knowledge Management is positive and effective. It has direct commercial benefits. Developing it creates competitive advantage and encourages better performance. This pack isn't idealistic or academic - it shows that Knowledge Management is something we can aspire to and reach ... with this pack, it's attainable and practical.

List of Activities:
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1  Terms and definitions: what do you know about Knowledge Management?
Knowledge is the competitive asset of our time. Knowledge Management is concerned with the wealth-creating potential of knowledge. This activity ensures that the participants understand the basic concepts in this emerging interdisciplinary field.

2  The Knowledge Worker: it's not just what you know, it's knowing what to do with it
This activity emphasises the importance of developing ourselves as Knowledge Workers, both for our own employability and the success of the business. The activity incorporates a questionnaire, which is used in an exercise where participants assess each other's capabilities as Knowledge Workers and define priority actions to improve their contribution in the knowledge economy.

3  The Knowledge Management culture: what do you know about how you create and use what you know?   Knowledge now gives the competitive advantage. Organisations need a culture of support for the gathering, creating and use of knowledge if they are to keep pace with the profound changes that will impact their market position. This activity aims to increase the participants' awareness of their organisation's knowledge capability. It engages them in a process of defining the action strategies necessary to help their organisation gain an edge in the marketplace.

4  Environment scanning: where's the knowledge?
The first step in gaining value from knowledge is knowing where to find it. This activity involves the participants in locating the knowledge in their organisations and thinking about what helps or hinders them in tapping into that knowledge. A series of short case studies is used to show the value of a knowledge sharing culture.

5  Knowledge delivery: what, where and when?
Knowledge sharing is vital in order to keep ahead of the game. Having an attitude of mind receptive to knowledge sharing is essential but sometimes not sufficient. Different contexts require different kinds of knowledge sharing and transfer. This activity provides a useful tool for determining the appropriate knowledge sharing and delivery strategy.

6  The role of IT: does IT really know?
IT should not be seen just as a way of storing information. It is an enabler for more value-added gathering,sharing and creation of knowledge. Organisations have wasted millions on systems that don 't fulfil their knowledge needs. This activity explores the major factors that will serve knowledge needs, rather than providing an information glut.

7  Mapping the invisible workplace: what's really going on around here?
Most of the knowledge required to create innovative products and services is not laid down in the formal structures and systems of the organisation. The valuable tacit knowledge resides in the informal networks of relationships. This activity helps the participants to describe and identify the points of high knowledge leverage in the informal 'shadows' of the organisation.

8  Knowledge networking: the worst time to build your knowledge network is when you need it now
Networking provides us with 'connection power' to enable us to obtain the knowledge we require quickly and efficiently. This activity enables the participants to look strategically at their own knowledge networks and to identify what they need to do to strengthen key high knowledge value relationships.

9  The role of storytelling in Knowledge Management: tell it as it is
Knowledge Management is very complex. Stories are a very powerful way to represent complex, multi-dimensional concepts. While a certain amount of knowledge can be reflected as information, stories can hold the key to unlocking the vital knowledge which remains beyond the reach of easily codified information. This activity demonstrates how the ancient art of storytelling can be used as 'expert systems' for storing, linking, and readily accessing information to encapsulate the 'voice of experience' in a memorable way.

10 Knowledge interviewing: we know more than we can tell
In a world where the cycle times of scientific advance, social and organisational change seem to be getting shorter, the temptation may be to try and hurry the communication process. However, the danger is that we end up 'surface swimming' and not accessing deeper tacit knowledge which could help us to manage change more effectively. This activity describes and demonstrates some simple communication techniques to enable us to make important tacit knowledge explicit, so that we can benefit from each other's experiences to manage change and certainty.

11 Gleaning tacit knowledge: time-lining
When we are all acting at speed to complete projects, meet deadlines and compete with our competitors we may lose vital learning and knowledge gathered on the way if we don't take time to consider what we have experienced. It is of enormous value if we can do this. Not only can we pass on useful learning to others but we are less likely to make the same mistakes ourselves in the future. This activity demonstrates a technique called
'time-lining' which enables participants to capture useful tacit knowledge from people's past experience.

12 Making our thinking explicit: don't make as ASS of U and ME
One of the major blocks to developing new knowledge is our fixed assumptions about how things are. Each of us has a map of our world, but that map is not the territory. In order to understand the complex changes taking place in the business environment, we sometimes need to slow down the communication process by identifying and challenging our underlying assumptions.This activity gives the participants the opportunity to identify
some of their assumptions and underlying mental models.

13 Harnessing customer knowledge:customers call the tune because they know the score
Organisations are becoming more customer focused so as to develop service levels that make them the provider of choice. To match service to the needs of customers, we need to tap into the customer’s knowledge and experience.This activity provides a framework and process for capturing valuable customer knowledge.

14 Generative learning for continuous improvement: looping the loop
Chris Argyris pointed out that ‘smart’ people often don’t learn because they don’t question their mental models and beliefs. Many continuous improvement processes don’t involve questioning the underlying ways of thinking. As a consequence, the processes and behaviours do not address the fundamental issues. Knowledge about mental models or governing variables may enable us to rethink this.

15 Systemic thinking: the tree is not an object but an expression of processes
People are used to thinking in straight lines where A causes B which leads to C. Systemic thinking involves describing the world in terms of feedback loops and multiple effects which change over time. The approach allows us to look at problems more comprehensively and to find points of leverage in a system where we will get a
maximum return from our investment of effort.This activity involves the group in a systemic analysis of complex problems using the different perspectives of the individual participants to map the system and find points
of maximum leverage.

16 Capturing collective brainpower: getting everyone into the room together
Our organisations need to be more inclusive if we are to capture the potential and knowledge that every employee has.We can’t always predict where the best ideas will come from. We need to bring people into the decisionmaking
forums, including those we think ‘unlikely to contribute’. This activity adopts a technique called ‘future search conference’, to include everyone in the enterprise of defining the culture that will sustain organisational growth.

17 Scenario Planning: gaining knowledge about the future
One of the blocks to organisational learning is when we fail to notice changes in the business environment until it’s too late. Scenario Planning is a way of helping us to become more aware of the forces of change that will affect the future of the organisation. In effect, the process enables us to gather knowledge about possible futures.This activity shows participants how they can use their existing knowledge, combined with creativity and group dialogue to generate plausible future scenarios, and what they can do to prepare for these possible futures.

18 Dialogue: gaining collective wisdom
To create new ways of thinking and doing things, we need to learn to communicate differently.Too often, when teams and groups get together to discuss issues, the sum of the parts seems less than the parts. Dialogue is a powerful group communication process. It can produce new ways forward which couldn’t be anticipated before the dialogue started.This activity introduces the concept of dialogue and gives the participants the opportunity to
engage in a dialogue session.

19 Managing complexity: keep it simple
When faced with the amount of information we can now access, we may feel overloaded.We need to have a workable filter system, so we can decide what really is important.This activity introduces the participants to the work done on complexity theory; there is also an exercise on discerning simplicity out of complexity, so
that we can make meaningful decisions when faced with large amounts of information.

20 Knowledge into action: closing the knowing–doing gap
Companies can seem stuck in inertia because they have difficulty translating what they know into action.This knowing–doing gap comes from a general willingness to talk rather than take action.This activity provides a framework for turning knowledge into action.The participants engage in a practical exercise designed to encourage a ‘felt responsibility’ for specific goal-oriented steps to improve the Knowledge Management process.

21 Personal action planning: do you know what to do?
In this activity, individual participants define what they need to do back at the workplace to become more effective Knowledge Workers: to enhance their future employability, as well as enabling them to add more value to their business or organisation.