FOR WHAT IT'S WORTH with Blake Melnick
FOR WHAT IT'S WORTH with Blake Melnick
Because You Need to Know
Join us for an enlightening conversation with Edwin Morris, the trailblazing founder of Pioneer Knowledge Services, the first U.S. non-profit dedicated to advancing knowledge management among other non-profits.
Edward and I discuss the essential role of knowledge management in nonprofits, highlighting how it can enhance organizational effectiveness and innovation. Edwin Morris shares insights on his journey into the field, the significance of personal awareness, and the human connection in knowledge sharing.
Our discussion covers among other things:
• Knowledge management explained through personal empowerment
• Importance of communication and trust-building in knowledge sharing
• Insights from military applications of knowledge management
• Value of knowledge management for nonprofit organizations
• Strategies for integrating KM into nonprofit practices
• The need for continuous improvement and innovation in organizations
• Recommendations for fostering a knowledge-centric culture
• Podcasting as an effective knowledge transfer mechanism within organizations
...For What it's Worth
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Well, happy New Year and welcome to this week's episode of For what it's Worth. I'm your host, blake Melnick, and this is the next installment in our series, the Many Faces of Innovation. My guest this week is the founder of Pioneer Knowledge Services, the first and only not-for-profit knowledge management firm in the United States that caters specifically to the needs of other not-for-profit organizations. Please meet my guest, edwin Morris.
Speaker 2:Hi everyone, I'm Edwin K Morris and I live in Wicky Watchie, florida. Hi everyone, I'm Edwin.
Speaker 2:K Morse and I live in Wicky Watchy, florida, and the interesting thing around where I live is the actual Wicky Watchy Springs, which is home of the only place on the planet where they have live mermaids. So there's shows there and it's pretty cool and we are about three miles from the Wicky Watchy Springs. I absolutely love working in the field of making things better because part of my mechanism is around identifying and just seeing things that could be improved and, to my wife's chagrin, I vocalize a lot of it and she's a very patient woman. So that's my love. I love transforming and making things better, and that comes from an old infantry mantra about making it better for the next guy. You have to improve your space because you may not be there long and somebody else will be, so that's the intent.
Speaker 2:Most fantastic job experience was probably doing what I'm doing right now. I founded a non-profit and I absolutely love doing this. It's a whitewater opportunity because nobody else was doing knowledge management and being a charity in the same breath. So the last book I read was Thin Air, which is a sci-fi novel by Richard K Morgan. I got into Richard K Morgan just recently because another book of his was made into a sci-fi show that I absolutely loved called Altered Carbon. The stuff they present in this film and I'm sure the book is so out there it's so mind-bending and that, to me, is a key ingredient to finding out what the next is. You've got to be following along these imaginary things that somebody has figured out in their mind anyway, and it may not be applicable yet, but at least it starts people thinking of the future and what could actually be Knowledge management, organizational structures, leadership those are all things that I am passionate and have a long history with, and I'm thrilled to be here.
Speaker 1:It's great to have you, and it's always nice to speak with a fellow knowledge management practitioner and somebody that's as passionate about it as I am, and so we are going to talk a lot about knowledge management, and we're going to talk about your organization, pioneer Knowledge Services, but before we do, I just wanted to give you a shout out for your approach to doing guest introductions. I've basically thrown it back to you the same approach that you used with me when I was a guest on your show, and I love it, because it allows your guests to really talk about the things that are important to them, that they're passionate about, but also to represent themselves in the way they would like to be represented. Yes, so thank you for that.
Speaker 2:I'll send you a bill, Okay fair enough.
Speaker 1:I don't have to do this on every episode, do I? I'll put it in the show notes. Well, listen, we've both been involved in the field of KM for many years and we both know the practice is not new. We talked about this in my interview and gained real prominence in the 1940s with the work of Deming, joseph Jernan and Armand Fagenbaum. And yet people still have a hard time getting their head around knowledge management as a discipline.
Speaker 1:In many respects, knowledge management is a siloed discipline.
Speaker 1:It's well known in certain industries, particularly mission critical industries military mining, oil and gas, any kind of extractive business, any business where there is a high risk for loss of life, impairment of critical assets.
Speaker 1:But outside of those mission critical industries and perhaps outside professional service industries like KPMG and Deloitte, who all have KM practices, it's still relatively unknown and I still find that people believe it's a fad. It's the latest business fad and in all of the time you've been practicing knowledge management, I still have people coming up to me, people I've known for a long time, saying Blake, I really don't understand what it is you do, and I've tried to explain it in the simplest of forms using basic analogies. If I share what I know with you and you share with what you know with me. We're both more knowledgeable. Things as simple as that to more complex definitions, using examples from industries in which I've worked, and still it's hard for people to get their head around the whole idea. There's a practice called knowledge management and it has value. How do we get that idea across in a simple way?
Speaker 2:It's as complex as you would like it to be. The definition is hingent upon the organization that's defining it for. So that's the first thing. So you cannot really have a universal KM is blank, because organizations will value things differently. If we talk physical assets buildings, money, those tangible assets it's easier to have a common language and a common operating system around something that's tangible. This isn't intangible, it really is, and so defining it for me is more of a personal awareness of personal leadership, personal value, alignment with the organization, and on high, the definition could be you will, you shall, you do these things.
Speaker 2:Behaviors. We're talking behaviors that add value to creating, storing, making available all the parts and pieces of where knowledge can apply itself in the personal network. So the easy answer is knowledge, is knowledge management. So if you really want to get fined, go look up the word knowledge and start there, because now we can start talking wisdom and all these other things that are around this whole swirl of activity. So knowledge management is the ability of a person and or an organization to create and extract value from organizational or personal knowledge.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and that's great, and I'm glad you mentioned the individual too.
Speaker 2:Now for those listening, if you're just fresh into the concept of KM knowledge management, there's three main hubs people, process and technology. There's three main hubs people, process and technology. A lot of the organizations out there think technology first, process second, people, last or never. I think the hinge point of success of those KM programs that have been around and have been successful is that it's people-oriented. There are behaviors like proper communication, building trust, all those things that are feeder items to a good knowledge sharing culture.
Speaker 1:Right. I want to ask this question slightly differently. So you're at a cocktail party and somebody comes up to you and says Edwin, nice to meet you. What do you do? What's your answer?
Speaker 2:I would say I work in a field of learning because really it's about learning, continual learning, and the other side of that is continually asking questions. So this all goes back to your focus on innovation. So you've got to have elements in an organization of communicating building structure. So, to answer your question, I would say learning and I would expound on that and I'd wait for them to ask questions. So instead of me, you know. Oh, I agree.
Speaker 1:Yes, I've done that.
Speaker 2:Yeah right, I like to do little tidbits and let them draw it out, because if they're not interested, why should I tell them? So I make them work for it a little bit. I will say back when I started this nonprofit, one of the early folks that helped me in conversation trying to think about this, she was working on a doctoral degree in Chinese language. But the more I told her about what all this was and I would get very passionate and bubbly, she said you know, this sounds like in a Buddhist philosophy, ascension. It's getting to that point of awareness and understanding.
Speaker 1:My roots in knowledge management came from the learning sciences, from understanding how people learn human cognition. How do people advance their own knowledge, how do they acquire knowledge, how do they transfer knowledge and how do they eventually build their knowledge so that new knowledge is created? That was the root of my education and early training, but I still struggle with it because people want an elevator pitch, and the one that I use is I'm really all about helping organization make sure that knowledge flows from those who know to those who need to know to support their business decisions and their outcomes for individuals and for the organization, and that's the simple kind of elevator pitch, but it still doesn't seem to satisfy people. People do understand the concept of knowledge. People recognize that we go to university, we go to school, to become more knowledgeable, better educated.
Speaker 2:I'll give you both ends of the spectrum. Recent podcast guests and, of course, I asked this question also what is knowledge management? And she says it's this simple it's a little book, a notebook, and you want to store someone's address in it, so you pull out the tab that has that initial of their last name and you write in the name and then you write in the address and other points of interest that you want to have on the ready so you know where it is and you can retrieve it easily. And it was like you know what that's it. That's a lot of it, because people think that databases and information management and things like that are knowledge management and it's not the whole story. One of the things I want to go back to is when you talked about where the birthplace was. For me it was Peter Drucker In 1956, peter Drucker. For me it was Peter Drucker In 1956,.
Speaker 2:Peter Drucker, who was an organizational guy he started with the term knowledge worker in 1956. So there was already these forward thinkers that were thinking there's more to this than just an assembly line or just making widgets. There's a lot of pieces to it. And on the other side of the example of the old notebook for your phone contact information like who has Rolodexes anymore? I got to tell you I thought I was smart when I got thinking you know what, instead of writing all that junk on a Rolodex, I would just staple the business card in the role I'm like boom boy.
Speaker 2:I just maximize that.
Speaker 1:I did the same thing too. Yeah Right. And I was like, wow, I'm progressive here, look at me.
Speaker 2:But the other side of that is it was easier for me to tell people when they would ask about KM. I would tell them all the pain points I said here. Let me give you some examples of things that aren't knowledge management or good knowledge management, knowledge management or good knowledge management. And once you start rattling off three or four organizational or professional type of pain points that most people have run across, they're like, oh, you could fix that. Well, we could work towards that.
Speaker 1:Right. I loved in your introduction that you talked about this notion of continuous improvement and always looking at something with an eye to seeing how it could be made better. I'm certainly the same way as well. Whenever I do anything, whenever I see it, I think, boy, that's great, but I bet you it could be better if we tried this or added this to it. That is the same mindset for innovation, by the way.
Speaker 2:And I'll ask you this you're not walking into a room and counting ceiling tiles, but you walk into a place and you're like why do they have that over? That should be over there. And you just that to me. I've done it more than once. My wife's like don't tell them, don't come on, don't just leave them alone. They're there and I'm like come on.
Speaker 1:They're probably just waiting for my great goodness.
Speaker 2:It's almost like I can't make it stop. I can't just, you know, so I'd like to hear your side of that.
Speaker 1:I'm the same way I do with my own work whenever I finish something, I go I really don't like this and I go back and I constantly revise my work, even stuff that I've written 10 years ago. I go back and revise that and update that Because, of course, as you learn more, you realize, boy, those things that you said, the things you wrote about, were either naive or underformed.
Speaker 2:And you got to go back and fix them. When you said that, I was like well, don't let perfection be the enemy of the good.
Speaker 1:Right, right yeah, or an enemy of done yeah.
Speaker 2:Because there's a point where I get get things about 80% and I'm like good enough, just get it out the door, let's go, cause it's going to change anyway.
Speaker 1:So, and that's what the research shows, I had a guest on the show a couple of weeks ago who was talking just very much about that around in the context of learning is what you want is to try to get your students at that 80 to 85% level, and of course it's in business too. 85% is kind of optimal productivity. When you say 100%, then it starts to enter the realm of diminishing return, where all of a sudden you miss stuff and you're trying to manage too many things at the same time and the quality of the work suffers. So that 85% rule is a good one. I'm that way. When I initially launch something, it's usually afterwards, when I go back and it's more a personal thing, and I say, if I'm going to hand out this article again, I'm going to change this.
Speaker 2:Because you've changed right, Right your perspective and you are not at that spot in time on the planet when that was created and everything in your brain has a bit of different perspective now. Maybe you got a better night's sleep, All those things that are factors of cognition. And yeah, it's easy to start spotting. I was like, wow, I turned that in. It's like what the hell?
Speaker 1:Much of the research around innovation and knowledge building behavior cognitive behavior suggests that people that advance knowledge are continually going back to old knowledge and revising it and improving it and advancing it, much the same way as a company like Google does. They have a knowledge bank. So people that have really good ideas for which there's no context yet within the company, there's no product, there's no service or the company's just not ready to move in that direction. They have a place to keep those ideas because they've recognized that sometimes great ideas and great thought die not because they're not good, but because there's no context for them yet. And if you somehow can collect those and keep them, you can go back to those ideas and move them forward into time.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's a brilliant concept because you're not kidding. People will come up with stuff all the time, and if it doesn't fit, there are people like, oh, what the hell is that? That's smart thinking. Holy cow, I did not know that.
Speaker 1:Smart as long as you've got a way to tag those ideas to make them retrievable.
Speaker 1:It's not unlike the after action review process, right, because you're documented something that's happened and then you're actually moving that knowledge forward in the context of a military operation, which I know you're familiar with. But you're moving that information forward to the next team that's going to take on a similar assignment. To take on a similar assignment, to take what you've learned and then advance and improve upon it in the next stage of the missions. There are organizations that do this, naturally, but a number of companies I've been working with recently do this on a very formal basis. So they have an idea bank or an idea hopper to collect these ideas, but of it requires a degree of curation and somebody has to be aware that it's there, somebody in charge of it.
Speaker 2:I just noticed, within the last year, teams added that in or I noticed it within the last year the idea bank, the idea collector. So I think there's a brilliance in that. I want to go back as we have defined knowledge management. You know, one of the great resources for KM, I think, is IBM, so I draw upon IBM's material often. So I want to share what IBM defines knowledge workers, because I think if you can tell people what to look for in the work, maybe they would get the KM in total a little easier.
Speaker 2:So knowledge workers are an essential part of the evolving digital workplace. You can find them playing the role of a department lead with extensive institutional knowledge, or acting as a subject matter expert called out to be a consultant on a specific challenge. But the definition is a worker. A knowledge worker is a professional who generates value for the organization with their expertise, critical thinking and interpersonal skills. I wanted to say that because that's the first time I've read that or seen that where they're bringing in the person communication skills. Being able to collaborate means more than just communicating. It is more of an ability to be social.
Speaker 1:Yeah, sure, informal knowledge exchange and knowledge sharing happens because you're social. In the early days of knowledge management, space or place was very important. Organizations would build these spaces for informal knowledge sharing, places where employees would want to go and work and they would join other employees from different departments and they would hang out. It could be a cafeteria. Canada Life had this sort of living environment in their building, a living wall rich in oxygen, so it kept you awake and they'd encourage their employees to go down there and work and have meetings down there and other people would overhear what they're talking about and that kind of thing.
Speaker 1:That was very big in the 90s and then it sort of went away and now it's coming back again.
Speaker 2:It's the same in home building. You went from little rooms and then open space. Is the concept now so same in the work environment? I can remember quite a few times being a contractor for the US Army when I got out and it's cubicle farm, it's just cubes. Nobody talked over the cubes much because it was like a library or an old library where no talking.
Speaker 1:You know A lot of organizations or people that have a background in organizational development. Knowledge management will look around a space, a facility and see where people are congregating to have conversations the old water cooler analogy. I did this. We noticed that engineers would congregate in certain parts of the hallway and so we said well, I wonder what if we put up whiteboards so that while they're talking they can sketch out ideas, and what if we replace those with digital whiteboards so they could take pictures of the things that they were drawing on the board? It's really knowledge management by design.
Speaker 1:You have to spend time within the organization to figure out where people are actually sharing knowledge informally and then try to create those spaces or help enhance those spaces so that it happens more often and that it becomes a place where you can start to identify some of that knowledge that's within the organization. It does take a fair bit of skill to do that. I want to jump over to talk about you specifically. You're a veteran of the US military I'm not sure what branch Army Army and you had two tours of duty in Iraq and that must have been a life-altering experience.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And then you became a trainer and a lessons learned knowledge leader and a knowledge lead for various government contractors. How did you find your way into knowledge management during your military service?
Speaker 2:How did that all happen? I was working as a fairly high executive, as a contractor for a new directorate at the Intel School, the US Army's intelligence school, which is in Fort Huachuca, arizona, and I was working for a directorate that was building distance learning products. So I was in constant contact with our chief knowledge officer for the post, for the two-star level, and the IT guy, the S6 guy, g6, the US Army. In 2006, timeframe had started to formally adopt knowledge management and so in that the US Army was starting to bring guys out to do training, to do certification training, and I had opportunity to become certified through Dr Dan at KM Pro out of DC. He came out for a week and I went through the training and it just lit me on fire. I'd never heard of knowledge management until then not formally, but taking that course with Dr Dan just lit gas fire underneath me like you couldn't believe. I felt like I found home, as in our earlier discussion about being that guy, that's like if you did this or you made that, did that, making things better, and that's really the essence of what Dr Dan said is that you do that for an organization. So as soon as I was certified in that my first thing was to find a master's degree in it.
Speaker 2:At that point, there was only two colleges that I found in the US that were offering online learning and knowledge management, so I ended up at Kent State University. In their information architecture and knowledge management masters of science, I was building stuff for school that were actual products for work, and it was just like this whole confluence of energy and the creativity and learning and purpose and everything all came together Well. Out of all that, I ended up breaking my back in 2012, so I left contracting and I was thinking how can I make life better on a societal level? And that's when I decided to create a nonprofit that did knowledge management for nonprofits. There was a John F Kennedy quote or at least he was cited as the source that said a rising tide lifts all boats, and I use that framework because if I could help those that are underpinning a factor of society somebody that's giving shoes to kids or some, what are all these non-profits out there filling gaps?
Speaker 2:of just humanity, and if I can help them do things better, cheaper, faster, everybody wins.
Speaker 1:What value do you think knowledge management has for the not-for-profit sector? What do you think you can do for them?
Speaker 2:I would say for those in a non-profit world, they should perk their ears up. When you're dealing with a bunch of volunteers, you have great opportunity to tap into that tacit knowledge if you had the tool set in order to do that. Now, most organizations probably have a pretty regular turnover in their volunteer base People come, people go, people come, people go. So where's that continuity of knowledge for the organization in that pool? So that's the first thing I would focus on, and then just reducing friction. If you can reduce friction, that means there's less heat, and if there's less heat that means you need less lubricant. So if you translate that to a business operation, if you can reduce waste and redundancy and sharing of knowledge is shined upon and promoted and actually supported, then those pain points, those frictions that come around, all those pieces can be reduced and hopefully nullified, therefore saving the organization money Right and as a not-for-profit, money is hard to come by initially.
Speaker 1:anyway, a lot of not-for-profits depend on volunteers and they volunteer because they believe they have something to give, ie they have some knowledge that's worth sharing that they believe will help further the goals and aspirations.
Speaker 2:Or they're just aligned in the values. You know, I believe in this. I believe in what they're doing. Why I decided on this was I felt there was value if I could be a partner in the process or the project. In the process or the project Meaning I could also be part of the collaboration in the way we could get grants or solicit money as two nonprofits working together to get something done, and for-profit doesn't have that opportunity.
Speaker 1:You're right. It certainly does give you access to grants, and government tends to want to give money to not-for-profits as opposed to for-profits.
Speaker 2:The interesting thing was. So I was in the degree at Kent State and the idea started percolating about doing this. So after graduation I had already been exposed to the world of KM and some high-level folks and I wrote a paragraph of this idea and I sent it to the top four of those echelons that I knew of and I was in conversation with and I said hey, what do you think about this idea? And they all said nobody's doing that, nobody's done that, nobody's doing it.
Speaker 1:I was like perfect, Then I'll do it. It's interesting. You mention your time at Kent State. I advised on the start of that program at Kent State. I attended a symposium there I think it was around 2013. And the woman that was heading up the program, Denise Bedford, called and said will you come down and speak at this event? Because we're trying to start this program here at Kent State? And as I was driving down to Kent State, what was playing on the radio For what it's Worth? And, as you know, this ended up being the name of our podcast. So it's great to hear that you went through that program and that you found it of value.
Speaker 1:So I've got a better sense now of Pioneer Knowledge Services, why you started it and why you went the not-for-profit route, and I really like your thinking because I think you're right. I think not-for-profits can really benefit from knowledge management. They have to run lean, they have to be efficient and they have to be effective. When I say effective, the difference between organizational efficiency and effectiveness is effectiveness involves people. So let's talk about the podcast. So you have two podcast series on the go. One is Because you Need to Know and the other is KM Lobby. So tell me about what you're thinking was around developing those two series in the context of Pioneer Knowledge Services and addressing the needs of not-for-profits.
Speaker 2:I had been in year four or five of Pioneer Knowledge Services and my wife at the time said you should be doing a podcast.
Speaker 1:I'm like I don't know jack about podcasting. I don't know nothing about that.
Speaker 2:She's like I think you should. She and I both shared a radio and television production background back in college, so she knew that I had experience doing broadcast, not podcast, but anyway. So that's what initiated the concept. The end state of why is that? We wanted to have people on the show that were either nonprofit-oriented or experienced, and or knowledge management. That's, our two types of guests for the most part.
Speaker 2:I've leaned in the last couple of years to entrepreneurs people that are building things, people that are seeing issues and creating solutions. So I've had some entrepreneurs on just because I'm an entrepreneur and I think it takes a brave person to try doing something that's never been done. So I like shining a light on that. So that was the idea and then it grew. So it grew in a couple different ways.
Speaker 2:So in the early years of being a nonprofit I had a hard time one learning how nonprofits work. Never been behind the wall of a nonprofit, I had no idea. Grants, all that stuff, no idea. So it's been a long process to learn all those things. And that when I would go in cold, call on a nonprofit to say, hey, we're here to help, and it all boiled down to give me a list of the things you can do and how much it costs. So my initial thought to how I was going to apply myself to a nonprofit would be holistic, enterprise level. I would have to come in and really do an analysis of what's going on. So my intent was I'm going to go look under the hood, talk to the people, see what the culture's like and if I felt that there was going to be goodness from this effort, then we could go forward. But I never got that far.
Speaker 2:I could never get through the door, I could not talk correctly to an actionable sale, so the podcast ended up being the thing that I could do. Alright, so I can do this. And so the intent was at least I'm talking to non-profiteers and sharing knowledge and experience from all these people. So that will be something that we can do, that as we continue to try to understand the market and how we can help. So, going back to the litany of oh, where's your cost sheet? And I'm like well, it depends on what you need. I can't just come up a list of things. It's not like I'm building websites and so I could never get there. Well, out of the efforts of the podcast, that became a revenue generation for the nonprofit, because we started podcasting as a service. I had an organization, a national company, reach out to me to say, hey, we've tried doing our own podcast and we stink at it. Can you be our guy? And I'm like sure. So that ended up being a three-year hitch that generated a fair enough revenue and all the money went in the coffers of the organization. So maybe this podcasting thing could be a thing Fast forward to just this year and one of my guests was the European Space Agency's lessons learned guy a couple years ago.
Speaker 2:He reaches out to me early this year and says look, I'm going to be part of the 24th European Conference on Knowledge Management happening in Portugal and you need to submit a paper, an academic paper, on what you're doing with podcasting. I'm like really, oh yeah, so we did and we got our first academic paper published. But it fine-tuned the concept of podcasting to the point where now we're talking about a intra organization within an organization, building a knowledge cultural expansion of the people via podcast. The main crux of the paper is this that if you have a good protagonist, if you have a good can opener to tacit knowledge which means a very good listener, a very good questioner which means a very good listener, a very good questioner, somebody that can converse you could build a new knowledge exchange with an organization behind the wall.
Speaker 2:That is just for the organization that brings out all this tacit knowledge and makes it a shareable item. But we want to take that one step further. We want to fine-tune it to make it more of an actionable business intelligence tool. That the first stage is the conversation. Second stage editing, making it sound good. The third stage now is the business intelligence view that's going to pull out chunks and push it to the parts of the organization that need it or could really use it. So we're not telling them oh, go listen to this 20-minute podcast. No, we're going to slice and dice intelligent pieces and make them actionable.
Speaker 1:Well, I love that and in fact our motivation for starting for what it's worth was quite similar. Two of my biggest pet peeves that I have over the years of practicing knowledge management is number one the ludicrous practice within many organizations of using exit interviews as an effective knowledge capture mechanism for employees leaving the organization. Firstly, it's a typical HR tool and the resulting knowledge rarely finds its way into operations or standard operating procedures. Secondly, to expect any meaningful knowledge exchange to occur in a 45 to 60 minute Q&A interview with the employee, who may have been with the organization for 25 plus years, is limited by the questions being asked, the knowledge of the employee's specific job and skill set and the skill of the interviewer. And finally, the whole experience lacks context. One of the things I've learned in my career is that tacit knowledge emerges in context, in other words, well-doing. Asking somebody what they know about something specific rarely taps into this deeper knowledge, because it's hard for people to articulate what they know and the question may not enable them to tell you what they know.
Speaker 1:The second pet peeve I have relates to the onboarding of new employees. Organizations do very little to understand, capture and disseminate the knowledge coming into the organization, and it's important on so many levels. Right, it helps avoid just-in-time hiring for skills and competencies which already exist within the organization for skills and competencies which already exist within the organization. It improves employee retention and satisfaction rates by recognizing the value of the incoming employee's skills, knowledge, experience and passions. And, finally, it helps the organization develop a meaningful career path for the employee that builds onto these experiences. Podcasts allow employees to drive the narrative through the stories of their job experiences and, secondly, if the organization has their own podcast channel or uses a third-party service provider, they can easily both push the knowledge throughout the organization and also allow employees the ability to easily find this content when and as needed. Employs the ability to easily find this content when and as needed and it starts to build digestible institutional memory. It fosters relationships and just-in-time, fluid mentoring opportunities between employees.
Speaker 2:I'm not letting them tell their story. They're used to telling their story.
Speaker 1:I'm flipping that and digging into stuff they're not used to saying.
Speaker 2:Thinking about. You know what I mean. Yeah, yeah, right, because you're going to get the high gloss. Not much meat on the bone, so to speak.
Speaker 1:But you mentioned that is the art of questioning. You can start with the story and then take them in a new direction.
Speaker 2:And here it goes back to the fill in the blank concept, and you said it things that are important to them. Because if you can get them jacked up at the beginning talking about something that gets them juiced up, then the conversation's easy.
Speaker 1:Then, yeah you're right, it's a great practice.
Speaker 2:I want to throw in one last definition, ibm's knowledge management definition, because you can never hear enough definitions for KM. But this is a good simple one. Okay. Knowledge management is the process of identifying, organizing, storing and disseminating information within an organization. I don't think I would have used information in that context, but that's what IBM says.
Speaker 1:Well, again there's another tension, because there is a difference between information and knowledge, and I would always explain to my students and to people in organizations look, if I tell you what I know, it's knowledge to me. And it's knowledge to me because I've done it, I've applied it, I've engaged with it, I've tested it. I know it. But what I'm telling you is being transferred into information Until such a time where you engage with that, where you try it, where you embed it in your practice, then it becomes knowledge, and so it's one of those things that make knowledge management nebulous.
Speaker 2:I think an organization can hang their hat on a KM program and or philosophy, and I'll say that for those listeners that are not aware, a lot of KM projects I'll say in some organizations will get taken up, make great gains and then that one person that led the charge leaves or passes or whatever, right exactly. Then everything dies on a vine because there's nobody there to do it. That's a failed execution. So if you're looking at a KM program, at least invest enough to make it successful.
Speaker 1:That's a great segue, because I did want to ask you about something. So there's a lot of pundits out there and I've spoken to many of them over the years who will say that KM has failed. It's a failed practice, Do you agree?
Speaker 2:It can be a failed, it can be successful. I would say in the world it is not a failed. It may be failed in parts of the US, but in the world there's too much evidence going the other way.
Speaker 1:I think what they're saying is that, in terms of how organizations are embracing knowledge management as a value within the organization, as a part of their culture, it has failed.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I don't see many that have it as woven into the culture and vibrancy of an organization. That is true Not that I've done a poll, but I think it's got a strong pulse. Km as an organizational benefit has a strong pulse. I think the biggest black eye that KM has and I asked this in Portugal why is there not a center in the US that is all about KM? Why is there not an actual university that is doing KM? When I taught at Kent State, I taught the graduate program there as an actual university that is doing KM. When I taught at Kent State, I taught the graduate program there as an adjunct I identified that there's nobody in the university. In Kent State University, there's nobody doing KM. There's not a function, there's not even a talk about it.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:And I'm like so you're teaching and you have a degree in it, but you don't even do it. So I think there's this lack of seriousness in organizations to commit to something that's going to require some behavior change.
Speaker 1:I would agree. In Canada there are no doctoral programs in knowledge management. There's not really any master's level programs that I'm aware of either. There are programs in information sciences which tend to be a feeder to the library sciences, and this has always been a bit perplexing for me, especially given the strong presence of professional service firms like Deloitte, kpmg, pwc, etc. These firms have very robust knowledge management practices and have for years, and I would argue that knowledge is actually their commodity. You hire these firms because of their depth of knowledge and expertise and as a client, you're buying their knowledge. So KM as an embedded set of practices makes infinite sense. However, at least to the best of my knowledge, these firms are not selling KM as a service to their clients. Rather, they're applying KM methodologies internally to increase the capability of their consultants and to drive consistency across service areas of the organization. For example, if consultants are more knowledgeable, they're able to win more business, therefore more lucrative Right, exactly.
Speaker 2:It just feeds itself, you know. Going back to the education piece, as you were speaking and I reflected on what I said about the programs, or lack thereof. You know, back when you came to kent state, I was at that conference I think we talked, then I feel we did.
Speaker 2:I'm sure we did, but we had envisioned it becoming a societal element. The knowledge management education forum was really looking at how do we best bring this to the people. Is it formal education? Is it just clubs and organizational structures just using it? But it all lost steam after three years of trying to build that all out. People just went to the side and it kind of died on the vine. But the intent was there to try to figure out how to make it work.
Speaker 2:So, as you were speaking, I reflected back to what I said about the lack of education and I'm starting to wonder, just thinking about all the folks that I've had on my show, and I asked them, like you did with me how did you fall into KM? Where did you come from? And there's no straight line. I think I might have heard out of all of them maybe one or two. That was pretty much a straight line. Everybody else either. Just it was a left turn, it was a right turn. I slipped and fell into it. But I think to me the skill set and abilities that make a good KM-er is, here again, a damn good communicator, listener, visionary, creativity, grit, all those things that just make somebody actionable, and I don't know if that can be a formula in an educational structure. I don't know.
Speaker 1:Well, I think the challenge is combining the theoretical, in other words the research, with the practical the application of that research and that theory in a real-world context. So my path to KM was a little more direct, and I was very fortunate to have encountered two mentors along the way, dr Carl Breiter and Dr Marlene Skardamilia, who introduced me to the theory of knowledge building. Based on their decades of research into human cognition and knowledge construction. Theory focused largely on how people learn and why certain people's professional practice is better than others, even though their knowledge base is essentially the same. What are they doing that's different than the others?
Speaker 1:And I spent five years as part of their research team in the role of head of external relations and workplace research, which gave me the opportunity to work with cross-sector organizations and begin to adapt their knowledge building principles for a business context. This eventually evolved into my KM practice and the founding of KMIC. I want to talk about the critical success factors that either make knowledge management embedded as a cultural practice within an organization or just a one-off that goes away, as you said before, once the KM expert leaves. What are the critical success factors? Do you think what will make knowledge management as a cultural practice sticky. What do you need to have?
Speaker 2:Well, first would be personal awareness Understanding at least the individual role and the cog of the organization, what their role or outcome or personal responsibility or what their organization is depending on them for. So the personal awareness piece is understanding what part do they play and why does it matter, setting the case for making knowledge important and then going into what you said with the Google idea bucket, making it permeable for people to communicate and share and not tie it to hierarchical structures and walls and divisions and all that sort of thing. Those are two big pieces, I think, that are just flat out good behavior of an organization. But to me, foster conversation, sharing knowledge, sharing knowledge development and having a security that I can call up somebody outside of my department, outside of my chain of command, and have no repercussions.
Speaker 1:I think what you're saying is that it's important for the organization and for people within the organization the employees, to understand the knowledge imperative, why knowledge is important to this organization and if the organization doesn't identify and hanging up there as a value they care about, then nobody's going to care.
Speaker 1:Knowledge sharing or knowledge practices or knowledge strategy needs to be part of corporate strategy. Not an orphan, not a project over on the side, but something that's integrated into the overall corporate strategy and shouted from the rooftops by the senior executives at every town hall. Knowledge is our commodity. This is why it's important.
Speaker 2:You bring up a good point. In a military setting, the commanders in the hierarchy of an organization, be it a battalion, brigade, whatever echelon you're at, there are certain components of building a strong culture that is always present to help strengthen the culture, because there's understanding that the organization can benefit. If we give opportunity and we sponsor activities where people connect and become aware of each other and have conversations and oh, you do what? What really? And so those things are connecting the dots in the head of the individual and in the whole of the organization. That becomes an asset. What I know you can do can help me, so why wouldn't you sponsor that as an organization?
Speaker 1:You touched on something interesting there, and that is giving your people the time to engage in knowledge sharing, in knowledge transfer activities, whether they're formal or informal, but recognizing that, giving somebody the time to learn something new and then giving them the time to teach what they've learned to the other employees, making that a part of how the work gets done around here. For example, if you're going to sponsor people from your organization to go to a conference, to take a course, you can create a social contract. If you're a knowledge-centric organization and say something like okay, we'll fund this, we'll support the time it's going to take away from your job in order to do this, but then you come back and teach us what you've learned in some capacity whether it's a lunch and learn. And again, here's another application for podcasting. It could be a podcast, right, exactly.
Speaker 2:And that is a really good use case of how easy it could be. It doesn't have to be difficult.
Speaker 1:Now some people may think this sounds like a lot of work, but in fact I would argue it is a cost savings and can really benefit the organization. So let's say you've got a team of people that want to go to a conference. Not everybody can go, so we decide we'll just send two people and they'll come back and teach the rest of us, because of course, the best way to demonstrate you've learned something is to teach it. We could make this an even broader event and open it up to employees across our organization so that anyone who might be interested in hearing what these two people have learned at the conference can attend.
Speaker 2:Kind of an emissary. The class example for me is that you go to a conference and then you come back and you're all jacked up and you're like, oh, your head's just on fire and within six months it just dries up. In my experience, but if you had it as an organizational process, you have four days after you get back from your conference to hold a luncheon or teach us about what all the goodness is, then that helps the social network, it helps the process and it also helps the expectation that, oh, I guess if I learned something I should probably share it.
Speaker 1:Exactly. It's an intentional design process. One of the reasons we've started to focus more on innovation than on the term knowledge management or the practice of knowledge management per se is that we want to focus on the outcome. Our practice at KMIC has always been about creating sustainable cultures of innovation and excellence business excellence. I'm working from the end result backwards and I'm finding it actually much easier to do, and maybe it's because innovation is something that's out there in the world, but certainly universities are all over it. Universities are all over it. Businesses are all over innovation. They just don't know how to get there, and that's where the knowledge management piece comes in.
Speaker 2:So that's the connection that we've been trying to make. I like that. I would say that if you sat down five people and asked them to identify and define innovation, creativity and knowledge management, I don't think you'd have two people saying the same thing about any of them. So, it is very personal perspective. It's easy to say, oh, we're going to do knowledge management and people are like what the hell is it? What do I?
Speaker 1:got.
Speaker 2:What is that Innovation is similar to me. What is innovation? Is it reusing something we already have? Is it actually come up with a flashbang big idea, or is it just iterative?
Speaker 1:betterness.
Speaker 2:And, I think, any organization that does not give room for self-reflective learning and give space like we talked about give purposeful space to share, co-create, create and just absorb it. That's a big loss.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it really boils down to identifying the behaviors that the organization wants to see from its employees.
Speaker 1:If knowledge sharing is critical and important, if the capture of knowledge or building institutional memory or whatever it is, is important, then people need to be measured against these things and the behaviors have to be identified.
Speaker 1:Because for all the years I've been doing this and with all the organizations I've worked with, the ones that have gone that extra mile to identify the behaviors associated with the desired outcomes are those that have developed a robust knowledge-centric culture and a culture of innovation. But only when they go that far, when they go right down to the behavioral level and identify the key behaviors in each functional area of the organization and say to employees this is how we're going to measure your performance and we're going to use that also to hire people, to onboard people, to train people, people to onboard people, to train people. It doesn't have to be punitive, it doesn't have to be score-based. It is designed to help employees with their own professional development and grow within the organization. It really does have to come down to those behaviors because that shows the organization is walking the walk, not just talking the talk.
Speaker 2:Your description is the learning environment. That's everything. Those are all the elements for a learning environment and most organizations would never suggest that they're exactly.
Speaker 1:They're not.
Speaker 2:They're like we make widgets.
Speaker 1:Except I think we're in a different set of conditions now. I think the rate of change is such that organizations are realizing if we're not being innovative, if not keeping pace, we're not going to be around.
Speaker 2:Exactly. You're going to be closing your door soon, or bought out, or what have you? Something's going to change, or the market is going to change you.
Speaker 1:Maybe we're at a tipping point for knowledge management and maybe knowledge management has yet to realize its full potential.
Speaker 2:And for your listeners to talk about, that. In 2018, the International Standards Organization actually created, for the first time ever, a knowledge management standard, so people in the ISO world get certified as certain levels of proficiency, and I felt that was a huge win.
Speaker 2:Oh my gosh, we finally got something official and it has hit the market in different ways and I don't think it's flooded the hallways with people waving flags of that ISO, but it's a step and I think you're on to something. I think it's just, it's a slow turning wheel. You know how people are.
Speaker 1:We need the burning platform and we saw this in COVID right, and we did. If not for COVID, nobody would be entertaining remote or hybrid work models. And in addition to the knowledge management standard in ISO, there is now, as of this year, a standard for innovation. Now, reading both standards together and comparing them, there's a lot of overlap, so I'm hoping that ISO will eventually combine the two into a single spec. So, to round out this episode, edwin, what's good look like for Pioneer Knowledge Services going forward? What do you want to accomplish or see happen in the next three to five years?
Speaker 2:Two things. We conduct the Midwest KM Knowledge Management Symposium. I want that to continue to grow, morph and develop into new ways. We're looking at a hybrid opportunity to make it available globally not just a Zoom room, and that's a big undertaking. The second piece is that we get organizations that are funding us to come in to create this nesting of new tacit knowledge via conversation. My intent is to help them build it, put their guy behind the mic or gal very good at conversing and being able to tap into people's tacit knowledge and making them go down a trail they haven't been down in a while, Because I think that is a really golden nugget of building tacit knowledge for organizations that can add a lot of value.
Speaker 1:Well, Edwin, thanks so much for coming on the show.
Speaker 2:I really enjoyed our conversation this time, as I did with our last one and I'm sure we'll have another one soon. Absolutely Thanks for having me. All right, canada.
Speaker 1:This concludes this week's episode of For what it's Worth the Many Faces of Innovation, with my guest Edwin Morris, founder of Pioneer Knowledge Services, america's first and only not-for-profit KM firm supporting the work of not-for-profit organizations. Join us for the next episode of For what it's Worth, and another installment in our series in the company of readers and writers. For what it's worth.
