7 deadly sins of knowledge management - part 1
Summary
In a massively distributed world of work, effective knowledge management is a superpower for your people. On this site, we’re already discussed many things you must do, to foster knowledge sharing. This post is the first, in a two part series about things you shouldn’t do.
Don’t get overly focussed on browsing as a method of accessing information. We’re already in the AI age and people take social interactions and effective search as hygiene factors for knowledge sharing. Focus more on those aspects.
Don’t confuse your people with competing systems. Be crystal clear about the purpose of each system, and be bold if you must kill a system.
Don’t limit your pilot to a small part of your organisation. This will limit the network effects you’re likely to see with social and AI powered tools. Instead, pilot with broad use cases that address most employees.
We’re in the age of massively distributed work. It’s an era that I suspect will be tougher than the remote work revolution of 2020. When we all were working from home, our interaction patterns were homogeneous. Now with some companies taking a “hybrid” route, some being all-remote and some regressing to the office, the world of work is more heterogeneous than it’s ever been.
This heterogeneity isn’t just across companies. Work patterns aren’t homogeneous within companies either. Unless a company has invested in office space for all its employees, some people work remotely all the time and others visit the office at different frequencies. Many companies are still hedging their bets. The recent economic downturn and layoffs aside, many employers haven’t forgotten “The great resignation”, “The great renegotiation” and the phenomenon of “quiet quitting”. They don’t want an economic recovery to catch them flat-footed on the talent front. This means that they keep the option of being remote-first, even as they encourage people to return to the office (RTO).
So people are working from everywhere. Home, office, or a third place. And they’re working with colleagues across the world. This is where I believe knowledge management or dare I rebrand it, “knowledge sharing” assumes fresh importance. When you can tap into the collective knowledge of your colleagues, regardless of where you work, you now have a distributed working superpower.
Ok, but that’s obvious. What’s not obvious, is how companies shoot themselves in the foot when implementing knowledge systems. So in a series of two posts, I want to tell you about seven big mistakes. Scratch that. I want to tell you about the seven deadly sins of knowledge management in the 2020s! There’s a lot you must do right, but also you must steer clear of these KM blunders. Let’s look at the first three.
1. Getting stuck in a time-warp
The ages of information sharing
A decade back, the term “commodification of IT” became popular in enterprise circles. It showed that as people’s access to innovative technology improves, they expect it in daily life. If a majority of your daily life is at work, then people expect similar technology at work, as they encounter it in their personal lives. No wonder, many modern, enterprise tools are the same as the ones we use in our personal lives.
The way we share and consume information as well has transformed over the last several years.
Until the early 2000s, most people “browsed” the internet, clicking from link to link to get to the information they needed.
But Google’s popularity transformed behaviour in the early 2000s. They ushered in the search age. More people went to the information they needed, directly from a search engine than by browsing a hierarchical site. The search age holds strong even today.
Shortly after the search age became mainstream, came the social media age. With Facebook, Twitter and other such networks, everyone became a content creator. For all its ills, social media sped up the creator economy of the internet. Peer-to-peer connections became a primary mechanism to share and consume information. You’ll agree that the social media age and the search age are running in parallel today.
And that brings me to today. We’d have to be living under a rock, to not recognise how AI is becoming one of the big ways to consume information. And I’m not talking about just ChatGPT. Think about Siri - that’s AI. Google Discover? That’s AI too. YouTube’s recommendation engine? That’s AI at work as well. I do not doubt that AI will sit at the centre of any information-sharing strategy for the foreseeable future.
The reason I’ve illustrated these ages; is for you to identify where your knowledge strategy sits. If you’re overly focussed on information architecture, branding and page creation, I argue, you’re stuck in the browsing age. People have moved on. They expect to ask the system a question and get an answer. Your systems must recommend content based on people’s interests. People should have a way to connect and build their enterprise networks. Sophisticated, reliable search results don’t delight people any more. That’s what they expect. Don’t get stuck in a time warp. Implement enterprise systems that rival the consumer web.
2. Nurturing competing systems
Many years back I heard this term called “innovation marginalisation”. Companies kick off their knowledge systems with statements such as, "This is a cool, crazy experiment. We're just going to put it out there and see what happens. In a few months we'll decide what to do with it." I appreciate the sentiment of this approach, but to most people, it’s not confidence inspiring. Experiments appeal to early adopters but they scare everyone else away.
The other big mistake is to nurture competing systems, especially the systems we transition from. Andrew McAfee talks about the 9x endowment effect, where "We value items in our possession more than prospective items that could be in our possession, especially if the prospective item is a proposed substitute." People usually prefer their existing way of working to a new way of working. No one enjoys leaving their comfort zones. Why would you want to have multiple systems serve the same purpose?
A flip-side to competition is unnecessary competition with email and instant messaging. Let's understand that these two tools are ubiquitous in the workplace. Just like we haven't been able to weed out the phone yet, we’ll continue to need to email and chat to run businesses. So instead of competing with them, integrate them with your knowledge platform to engage late bloomers. Competing with a system that you can't kill is just a bad idea.
3. A limited pilot
Have you ever heard the suggestion of piloting your knowledge and community platform with one team, to see how it goes? Knowledge sharing in the enterprise is all about serendipity and breaking down walls. By opting for a limited pilot, there's no question of breaking down the wall, because innovation is within a closed group. There's also a limited chance of serendipity because the chance of accidental discovery from our strong ties is less likely.
Andrew McAfee
"Serendipity is possible when we’re collaborating with our close colleagues on a well-defined project, but that’s probably when it occurs least often. It’s much more likely during wide forays and broad searches, the kind that are so easy to do with current technologies."
Back in the day, McAfee recommended going "as broad as possible right away". Even if all parts of the business aren't on your platform from day one, it's important to target use cases that touch everyone's work lives. Address breadth-first instead of going deep with a particular function. Breadth onboards everyone to the platform in a short time. It allows users to exploit the emergent nature of such enterprise social networks.
In the interest of brevity, this is where we stop today. Next week, I’ll introduce you to four more of these deadly sins. In the meantime, if you can think of more such sins, leave a comment on the post or reach out to me directly on LinkedIn or wherever else we’re connected.