Preparing
for Conversations with Victor Newman
SuperKnowledge:
Stories of Pragmatic Knowledge Activism
I hate
the phrase 'knowledge sharing':
knowledge building makes more sense.
Victor
Newman
Chief
learning officer
European Pfizer Research University
Victor Newman, author
of The Knowledge Activist's Handbook -- Tales from the Knowledge
Trenches, will counsel AOK members on his unique brand of
pragmatic knowledge activism embodied within: The SuperKnowledge
Declaration (begin by thinking about what kind of value you want
to create and deliver).
Victor is particularly
interested in unpacking the SuperKnowledge concept and building
stories of successful implementation, as well as answering questions
based on his recent book. Please note that Victor's views
on the management of knowledge are his own and are not intended
to reflect official Pfizer, Inc. policy.
 Biography
Victor took up the
role of chief learning officer of the European Pfizer Research
University based at Sandwich, England in August 2000. His background
in business integration and knowledge mean that he is a passionate
advocate of pragmatic solutions that connect knowledge across
the drug discovery and development process to deliver global
best practice.
Victor's interest
in military history, experience as a remedial TQM implementer,
and TLA (three-letter-acronym) hunter in manufacturing and service
industries provide much of the background for his consulting
stories. He is the inventor of the "Barefoot," "Predator,"
"Baton-Passing" and "SuperKnowledge" KM approaches.
Victor is a board
member on three KM publications and is the author of Made
to Measure Problem Solving and his Knowledge Activist's
Handbook was recently published in February 2003 by Capstone/Wiley
& Sons Publishing.
His interests include
his family, windsurfing, coaching mini-rugby, and classical music.
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The
SuperKnowledge Declaration
Copyright
by Victor Newman
The idea of knowledge
management tends to be obscured and yet its meaning is obvious:
the deliberate management of knowledge to deliver specific outcomes.
One of the most
futile pastimes in knowledge management literature is the question
of the value of knowledge management. This question, taken to
its logical conclusion, is rather like questioning the value
of paying attention and the forms that paying attention might
take. Entire conference proceedings are dedicated to this topic.
The futility of the question is largely due to the tendency to
see knowledge management as a collection of discrete technologies
or techniques instead of as a distinct way of thinking. The value-measurement
question then becomes one about the extent to which an observer
or participant of a business activity was consciously implementing
recognisable Knowledge Management technologies or applying other
repertoire involving the management of knowledge to deliver specific
outcomes. In other words, were you trying to do Knowledge Management
in the belief it might get you where you wanted to go, or were
you deliberately trying to be successful by paying attention
to the knowledge that might get you there? It's the deliberateness,
the purposiveness that is key. To misquote an old, irritating
Harry Enfield comic character: "Now, you didn't really want
that to happen did you?" -- Or was it just an accident?
The most important
elements in driving an organisation's success is more than the
sum of the knowledge in people's heads integrated into its business
processes; it is also the ability of that organisation to deploy
its knowledge productively. At this point it is worth understanding
some basic concepts or knowledge about knowledge (K2) that determine
productive mobilisation of knowledge and its realisation as value
in the marketplace.
- That knowledge
is not of itself, power. The sheer possession of knowledge is
insufficient. If we reverse the equation, then it becomes clear
that power is not knowledge, and that some major elements are
missing. Therefore we could propose that Power equals Knowledge
plus marketing (where marketing in turn, equals delivery and
positioning). Unpacking knowledge "delivery" involves
understanding how to compose the knowledge into discrete chunks,
manage their sequential delivery and reinforcement. Unpacking
"positioning" involves connecting the knowledge with
a perception of crisis in its audience (so that it solves a problem
that is generally understood) and managing its timing of appearance
and reinforcement).
- The value of knowledge
is relative and not absolute, and is similar to that of fruit
in being determined by the relative availability of competitive
alternatives, and the need to manage and exploit the convergent
timings for the arrival of the knowledge to ensure edibility;
and the emergent hunger of its customers.
- That things don't
happen: when we choose not to implement them. The decision to
make something happen is stressful because it implies an open-ended
commitment to control known and emergent dependencies to deliver
a specific outcome. That sometimes groups make a surface commitment
to implement an idea that is undermined by a covert decision
to allow failure by not raising and focusing energy on controlling
the necessary dependencies.
- That the key bottleneck
to deploying knowledge productively, is expert knowledge power.
That your knowledge experts often create positional power by
locating themselves at the bottlenecks of strategic decisions
and retain positional knowledge power by blocking off rivals
or driving them out of the business. Ironically, your organisational
hierarchy reflects where your expert knowledge power is, and
that flattening your hierarchy can mean that you destroy positional
knowledge power and end up as a service business.
- Your ability to
innovate and hence your pace of innovation is determined by the
ability of your knowledge experts to create new knowledge and
manage its succession into the business. This in turn, is determined
by the boredom threshold of your experts and the ability of leaders
to create an environment where existing knowledge has to be deployed
into the organisation and rapidly replaced. Knowledge experts
need to become inured to the pain of giving up their children
to strangers and creating new ones. The positional knowledge
power of experts may be an inadvertent product of their lack
of training in managing knowledge succession.
It is now time for
a paradigm-shift in knowledge management. We've tried the massed,
people-intensive frontal assaults of traditional knowledge management
involving databases and Intranet: where sharing is good, knowledge
is great, more knowledge is better and having all the knowledge
is best of all. Just as the British Army realised after July
1st 1916 on the Somme that Robertson's simplified tactics of
mass were too costly, we need to emulate the kind of thinking
that replaced it and which meant that by June 1918, the British
Army was unstoppable. It's time for the deployment of knowledge
about knowledge, or a disciplined form of thinking that made
Bernard Montgomery such a hateful figure within the British Army
before Alamein and to military historians until very recently.
It's time for something
different, an approach that we might characterise as SuperKnowledge
Thinking, an approach that is closer to the style of the knowledge-intensive
Special Air Service operations of the last 20 years that we tend
to take for granted. The modern SAS approach is characterised
by a keen appreciation of outcomes and a continual evaluation
of potential risk and cost. It's time to shift from the mass,
conscript knowledge models toward an approach that is primarily
focused on delivering high-value outcomes. An approach that is
prepared to unpack and understand the prerequisites that need
to be managed and to creatively reconfigure these into a value-driven
process where the key decisions and their potentially high-value
inputs are defined, piloted, embedded and understood. And individuals
are highly-trained and encouraged to exercise personal discipline
and initiative.
The study of disaster
and incompetence is a fruitful source of potential knowledge.
What we do learn from studying incompetence is the need to limit
the projection of parental motives onto leaders who cannot live
the role; and to pay attention, to explore ambiguity and knowledge
gaps by making deliberate investments in exploring and managing
the abyss of risk.
This SuperKnowledge
declaration that follows is a deliberate, experimental train
of logic that was the accidental by-product of some reflections
on the problem of measuring knowledge investments.
If we begin by defining
Knowledge Management as "the deliberate management of knowledge
to deliver specific outcomes," and that our interest in
the deliberate management of knowledge is in the pursuit of competitive
advantage, then the following propositions become possible.
SK1 If you are seriously
interested in realising high-value outcomes, then you need to
know which specific knowledge has the potential (if mobilised)
to deliver them.
In other words,
building on GiGo (Garbage in/ Garbage out) as the model: specifically,
Valuable Knowledge if deliberately introduced into the system
of the business, could lead to High Value Outcomes (Vki:HVo).
The question we must ask ourselves is: "what do we know,
if anything that has the potential to deliver high-value outcomes?
SK2 But you can still be defeated
by not connecting the right people with the right knowledge,
in the right format at the right time. Especially when they weren't
expecting it, and want to resist it because they were not part
of the process of creating and building it.
So the question
becomes: who needs to know what, in order to make decisions that
lead to the delivery of high-value outcomes?
SK3 Then we probably need to
work backwards from high-value outcomes to identify the chain
of dependencies which, together, constitute our knowledge mobilisation
infrastructure.
SK4 We must develop a new knowledge
infrastructure applying the K2 items (knowledge about knowledge)
1-5 listed earlier that is able to identify and involve the right
populations in building new knowledge and mobilising it.
Implications
- SK is a way of
thinking about knowledge.
- Building a SuperKnowledge
approach is about connecting the business in a new way by explicitly
integrating knowledge, goals and dependencies into a logical
flow.
- If we aspire to
deliver SK effects, the more likely we are to get them.
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Amazon
Review: The Knowledge Activist's Handbook
Five years ago
a colleague of mine, on leaving Cranfield University (or Institute
as it was called then) suggested that we continue to collaborate
by meeting one day a month to attack, deconstruct and replace
motherhood models and concepts. He proposed that we write academic
papers that would change the world. The change bit was always
optimistic: no one reads academic papers, they just publish them.
But the habit of attack and replacement stuck. And this led to
the book.
Victor
Newman
A major theme is
that knowledge management has to be about innovation. He argues
in a number of pieces that for KM to provide any value to the
organization, it must enable the innovation process in all its
forms. This means supporting the Creators (the idea people),
the Implementors (the people who can see the value of the Creators'
ideas and get them to market) and the Stabilizors (the people
who keep the ship running) in the correct balance. Newman argues
that knowledge management is about stability, whereas knowledge
development is about dynamism.
My favorite thought
in the book is that having knowledge does not fix a problem,
just like knowing smoking causes cancer. The organization has
to have something in addition to the knowledge to make the requisite
changes.
To do this, he has
broken all the rules. The book is intentionally short (167 pages).
The chapters are short (two to five pages). He pokes fun at the
academics who theorize KM, but also the consultants who pitch
it, and the corporations who want to implement it.
Through the use
of concise (and very humorous) chapters, rounded with historical
context and real-life stories from the business world, he paints
a picture of how to use Knowledge for increasing the value of
any business.
A few favorite passages:
Ultimately, if your
addiction is to technology you are in for a bumpy ride. If your
addiction is to the creation and delivery of value, you just
might get what you want.
If you want to understand
how organizations manage their knowledge, look at the way they
manage projects. If they don't capture the lessons and integrate
them into their processes and behaviors, then they don't understand
knowledge management.
Reviewer
Unknown
Buy
the Book
Please buy Victor
Newman's great book through the AOK
Bookstore. It will make Victor happy and it will earn us
a few pennies.
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