T1-5 High-Octane Knowledge Products by a Development Organization

Imagine: the top managers and executives of a development-oriented organization are ready to listen to you about KM. They are open to KM but they want to be sure that KM will benefit their organization. They are all busy and although it is difficult to bring them together, you succeeded in scheduling a one-hour slot for a KM activity you will design and execute. What will you do?

I was actually faced with this situation in two instances: a regional inter-governmental organization and a United Nations regional office. What I did then I now call “Zeroing in on High-Octane Knowledge Products”.

Development-oriented organizations are after results and outcomes that are far more complex than those of private corporations. Their stakeholders (the equivalent of “customers” for private corporations) pursue varied interests and agendas, operate at different levels (some are at the community and local level, some are at the national level, and others may be at the bilateral, regional or international level) and wield different types and magnitudes of power (financial clout of donors, regulatory clout of governments, military power of rebels and militias, local monopoly power of dominant businessmen, etc.).

The process I designed and found quite effective proceeded as follows:

1. Brief lecture (5 minutes): using prepared PowerPoint presentation on what is “knowledge” (assets that enable effective action) and “knowledge management.”
2. Small-group workshop (20 minutes) on the first question: “List three of your most important stakeholders, and for each one, what important action does your organization want them to do more effectively?” The group outputs are written in large kraft or Manila paper and posted where everyone can read. If there are 5 groups, there will be 15 important stakeholder-actions (duplication can occur across small group outputs).
3. Voting (5 minutes): Each participant is given a red ball pen and he/she is asked to read all the important stakeholder-action pairs listed by all the groups. He/she selects three which he/she regards as the most important, and writes a red asterisk on each of the three.
4. Plenary discussion (15 minutes) on the following questions: “Which stakeholder-action pairs garnered the highest votes? Do you agree or disagree? Comments? Did we miss any important stakeholder-action pair?”
5. Last question followed by plenary discussion (15 minutes): “What knowledge product/service (existing or still to be innovated) of your organization can best support each of the top three stakeholder-action pair?” Those are “high-octane knowledge products” or services the organization is producing or can produce.

The logic follows from the same KM framework discussed in the F Series of my blogs (and the same color-coding also applies).

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My observations:

• The workshop illustrates the principle that knowledge enables more effective action, and makes this concrete via the concept of “knowledge product” or “knowledge service.”
• Best ideas tend to come from the topmost executives, most likely because they are the ones more familiar and concerned with stakeholders in relation to the organization’s strategic objectives.
• Development organizations often do not directly produce the desired social outcomes they aim for. What they do is to provide products/services to various development actors or stakeholders who produce or contribute to those outcomes. The workshop is a good way to prioritize and identify the greatest social value-adding outputs (or “high-octane knowledge products“) that the organization can produce.
• The exercise can lead to identifying a high-octane knowledge product/service that the organization is not yet doing, i.e. it can help them set specific targets for R&D or innovation/design of new knowledge products/services.

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T2-3 Cues for Product or Service Improvement

An inexpensive source of valuable knowledge for product and/or service improvement is customer complaints and customer dissatisfactions. Of course, solving customer complaints or dissatisfactions prevents or reduces loss of customers.

Some customer dissatisfactions are so mild that the customer herself may not be aware of them. Ask a customer for feedback during the initial stages of use; long afterwards, she would have adjusted to the product and forgotten her mild dissatisfaction. Ask “What feature(s) of the product do you like least? Why?” Different features of a product produces different value added for the average customer; least value-adding features offer the best opportunities for product improvement. Non-value adding features could be removed. Two different product features appealing to different customer segments suggest creating two versions of the product that are customized (i.e. more value adding for both) to their respective segments.

Observe if the customer makes improvisations (which can be unconscious) in the product or how she uses it. These little customer improvisations are cues that she perceives a gap in the product’s usefulness.

A bakery company in Japan involves customers (housewives) during all stages of their R&D, from the evolution of the product idea to exploring and testing various options and on to product launching. Of course, if you are one of these housewives it would be natural and expected that you personally promote the product to other customers after product launching!

An indication that a company sees and captures the value of customers’ feedbacks for its R&D is when the R&D unit and the sales or after-sales services (or other frontline or customer-facing unit) is under the same company executive. Otherwise, the flow of feedback information from frontline units to the R&D unit is either absent or inefficient. These two seemingly unrelated departments are actually crucial for value creation by the company. Management guru Peter Drucker said, “Marketing and innovation produce results. All the rest are costs.”

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T0-2 Starting a New KM Language in Your Organization

Starting KM in your organization also means starting to learn a new KM language among your members. A simple tool towards this end is an FAQ on KM (FAQ=frequently asked questions) which can be circulated among members or placed in the KM webpage in your intranet.

Download CCLFI’s FAQ on KM by pressing “Ctrl” while clicking HERE. The FAQ will appear in a new browser tab.

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Thanks to Wordle for the above “word cloud” of the FAQ

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T2-1: A Quick Way of Mining Customer Knowledge for Service Improvement

The purpose of KM is to support creation of market value or/and social value. Who is the judge whether in fact value was created?

The answer: your internal and external customers. In the non-government and development sectors, the answer is the same, but the language is different: stakeholders. The user of the output of an action is the best judge of the effectiveness of the action, and the effectiveness of the knowledge assets utilized for that action.

When an action results in satisfaction of customers or stakeholders, value is created. Wherever the results of action is traded, then a measure of the value created is the price customers are willing to pay for a good or service less the production and distribution costs
of that good or service.

In the development sector, where the results of actions are often not traded, what is the measure of value creation? It is the stakeholders’ degree of satisfaction. Within a corporation, results of actions are also not traded and there is no price for an internal good or service. Similarly, the measure of value creation here is the internal customers’ degree of satisfaction.

Improvement or innovation of a product or service that will result in even greater customer or stakeholder satisfaction is another objective of KM. How do we do this? Where do we start? One answer: ask the customer!

In most cases, customers know what they want and they know what will satisfy them better (in the case of breakthrough or exceptionally novel technologies, customers will realize what they want only when the new technology is in front of them). They also definitely know what they don’t want; for this reason, customer complaints are good sources of ideas for product or service innovation.

Making improvements or innovations is faster and easier when the output is a service and not a product. The service delivery process is also subject to greater variability than a product manufacturing process. Improving a service output requires a broadening of perspective: from focus only on the internal business process to focus also on the customer experience process. The two processes overlap in delivering a service. Keep in mind that value creation takes place in the latter process, and not in the former, which is only preparatory.

Based on the above, a low-cost way of mining customer knowledge for service improvement is to ask just two questions. It will take the customer only a couple of minutes to answer, but it can lead to solid creation of greater value for customers. “XX” is where you indicate the name or description of the service.

Question 1: On a scale of 0-100, what is your degree of satisfaction with our XX service or output?
(If the answer is 100, stop and do not proceed to Question 2)

Question 2: What improvements on XX can you suggest to increase your degree of satisfaction?

From asking these two questions numerous times in over a hundred organizational contexts, I observed that:

• Most of the ideas on product or process improvement from employees who perform a process do not match with those from internal or external customers who use the output of such process.
• Employees who perform a business process are better judges of process efficiency than of process effectiveness.
• In many organizations including in the private sector, asking feedback from internal customers is often not a systematic procedure nor a personal habit.
• The answer to Question 2 is high-value knowledge; acting on that knowledge will surely increase customer value.
• The entire customer experience process constitute what some calls the “Moment of Truth” or the moment when the value of an output is finally validated. Actually, it is not just one moment or one minute, but it can extend over hours or days.

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Ask High-Value Questions

“If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first fifty five minutes determining the proper question to ask, for once I knew the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than five minutes.”

— Albert Einstein

Among the 12 Manners of Voicing, asking questions is, from my experience, the most productive of learning and innovation. I have started to illustrate asking high-value questions in a prior blog post (“Personal Learning History”).

Last March 28, 2007 I was invited to be a reactor to several paper presenters in the “National Conference on Improving Competitiveness through Science & Technology Human Resource Development.” It was sponsored by the Science Education Institute of the Department of Science and Technology of the Philippine government.

As reactor I was expected to comment on the papers presented: expand on ideas I agree with, criticize ideas I don’t agree with, etc. I decided to completely change my approach. I decided not to provide answers. Instead my “reaction” was a series of questions:

1. Provocative questions
2. Mind-opening questions
3. Assumption-exposing questions
4. Mental model-challenging questions
5. Bias-awareness questions
6. Blindfolds-discovering questions
7. Discovering-what-we-don’t-know questions
8. Attention-shifting questions
9. Market opportunities-attentive questions
10. Reframing questions.

You can read my short (only 5 substantive slides) presentation by holding “Ctrl” and left-clicking HERE to view my presentation in a new tab.

Learn to ask high-value questions. I call them “high-value” questions because they can lead to answers that are high-value knowledge, for example:

1. Delighting customers instead of just satisfying them, and thereby converting customers to willing and eager salespersons convincing their friends to buy your product.
2. Changing how we see reality: this is why “reframing” questions are very powerful. For example, if we change how we view the market then it may enable us to see new market opportunities that we hardly saw before. This can lead to —
3. Challenging and changing the assumptions behind our business model, resulting in a better or new business model that can revive a losing business or radically outstrip all competition or lead to an entirely new and successful business venture with its own niche!

Cheers!

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Indigo Learning Practices (L Series)

Group learning is superior to individual, isolated learning. Most of us went through school using the individual, competitive and concept-based learning model. There are many reasons to believe that collaborative and practice-based learning will be the next learning model for production, innovation and conflict-prevention in the 21st century:

• Group learning lies in the indigo quadrant (see lower left cell in the diagram below that clusters KM tools) and major world problems (e.g. global financial crisis and many on-going military conflicts) stem from our lack of knowledge in this quadrant. Read more about this in the blog post “Emerging Indigo Practices.” “Indigo quadrant” is the lower-left or tacit-group quadrant in the expanded KM model described in the blog post “Q27- Combining Megatrends #1 and #2: the Next Societal Innovations” and applied in many subsequent posts.
  

  A CLUSTERING OF KM TOOLS

• For effective group learning, group members need to learn how to value and nurture mutual trust. Trust is an indigo quality that is the fundamental value driver behind all forms of relationship capital. Trust underlies the worst fears and threats to our planetary society. Read more about this in blog post “A Value Driver behind Relationship Capital.”
• Two long-term global megatrends converge towards the indigo quadrant. This means that major societal innovations are expected to emerge from the indigo quadrant (see “Q27- Combining Megatrends #1 and #2: the Next Societal Innovations”). Such innovations must steer clearly away from value-destruction and towards value-creation (see “Q25- Robin Hood versus the Sheriff of Nottingham” and “Value-Creating and Value-Destroying Social Innovations”)
• Because corporate production is basically a group process, then it follows that corporate learning and knowledge conversion/transfer processes must be managed from a group perspective. Many organizational learning and intra-organizational knowledge conversion/transfer tools are available for this purpose (see “Knowledge pathways in a learning organization” and “Appreciating Nonaka’s SECI model”). However, the tools for group learning in the context of a network of equals or parties with different interests are few and less developed. The latter tools are needed for conflict-prevention and similar political processes.
• Social networks have become very popular. They serve needs for socialization, business and professional purposes, advocacy and sometimes for group learning and group innovation.

This L Series will deal with tools and practices for group learning within a network of equals. We could label this as horizontal or network learning, but I chose the label “indigo learning practices” to emphasize the long-term importance of indigo processes and to remind us that group learning stems from solid personal learning practices. In turn, better personal learning arises from a foundation of mastery of Power of the Third Kind.

Below will be our tentative list of blog topics. If you believe that a topic should be included, please contribute a comment (click the “Comment” link below). Blog topics that had been posted appear as links (colored text) below; while pressing “Ctrl” click on the link to read the blog you want in a new browser tab.

1. Setting a Personal Learning Mode

L11 Will to self-improve
L12 Listening
- Can we manage knowledge? (a practice in listening)
- Listening (and building cross-cultural relationship capital)
L13 Learning how to learn
- The reflective knowledge worker
- Personal learning history
L14 Voicing
- Ask high-value questions
- The art of interviewing
L15 Double-loop learning
- A tool for learning to unlearn: internal “5 why’s”
L16 Concepts can block learning
- Your judgment can block your learning
- Memories (or past experiences) can block (or unblock) learning
- External attention can block your learning

2. Communicating

L21- On Michael Jackson, or our mental models of people we know
- How we form judgments of other people: female circumcision, lying, the jury system and the scientists’ “sacred p<.05"
- When judgment closes the door to productive communication
L22 200% listening
- Internal listening and anger management
- Listening where mental models of people conflict
- Listening to life
L23 What is your communication intent?
- Tools for conscious shifting of communication ends and means
- Personal intangible assets and intentions
- Communication intents behind Indigo Practices
L24 Announce your communication boundaries
- Another communication boundary: how far can you self-disclose?
- When your communication boundaries are breached
L25 12 types of learning, part 2
L26 Bohm’s dream: a revolution in how we communicate
- John Lennon’s dream: a world free of mental boxes and mental fences
- The dream of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: humankind’s discovery of the “second fire”

3. Setting a Common Space of Mutual Trust

L31 Transparency in intentions
L32 A free and open space for sensing each other’s meanings
L33 Sensing one another’s internal drivers
L34 Respect
L35 Building energy from appreciative sensing
L36 Sharing your most fulfilling moments
L37 Process partnering

4. Together We See the Whole

L41 Story listening: seeing how she sees
L42 Seeing how we see
L43 Seeing the forest, not just the trees
L44 Connecting the cosmic dots: three “Big Bangs”
L45 Problem-finding then problem-solving
L46 Sensing the emergent
L47 Indigo governance: consensual discernment

5. Co-Creating Shared Realities

L51 “Big Bang #4″?: conscious co-evolution
L52 From win-win to build-build
L53 Senge’s “presencing”
L54 Isaac’s “generative dialogue”
L55 Co-ownership
L56 Co-creation
L57 Bridging leadership

Below is a tentative (and still evolving) mind map of how the above topics are organized.

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Q28- Recap of KM Virtues and Gaps, or Will KM Disappear?

This Q Series had been a successful one; 16,267 hits came in since it started. We end this blog series with this summarizing post. To better appreciate an item that strikes you, I suggest reading the blog which explains that point. The blogs are accessible from this post through embedded links (which appear as colored text). While pressing “Ctrl”, you can click on the colored text to create a new tab to read the previous blog post referred to.

Virtues of KM and OL (organizational learning):

• In the global knowledge economy, value is being created more by intangible assets, which include knowledge assets, than by tangible assets. KM can help managers address value creation more effectively and comprehensively.
• A value added from KM is an integrative framework that cuts across HRD, IT, QM, etc. — management tools that look at “slices” of organizational reality.
• Examining the validity of our often unstated or unconscious assumptions and beliefs that affect our decisions and actions is a valuable process in OL. This is true whether applied at the individual, corporate or international level.
• Innovative OL tools developed by Senge and his colleagues are in the area of innovation itself: sensing the emergent, and actively participating in bringing the emergent future into present reality.

Gaps in KM and OL practice:

• The use of the common word “knowledge” predisposes to much confusion and misunderstanding because among KM practitioners “knowledge” has a specific meaning different from the common meanings of the word.
• KM focuses on cognitive factors, and tends to ignore affective, including motivational factors that also determine performance.
• KM does not address the more important and prior question of “for whom?” and “what for?” KM to support creation of market value could lead to different management decisions from KM to support creation of social value. KM for the development sector is complicated by the different interests and goals of the many actors involved.
• Some KM practitioners fail to align KM to organizational goals. They use supply-driven KM instead of demand-driven KM, or knowledge-push instead of knowledge-pull approaches. Good KM that starts with what internal and/or external customers want is not always practiced.
• Corporate KM can unwittingly support sub-optimization, or corporate value creation that entails social costs outside the corporation.
• Double-loop learning is well-known as a concept but its practice seems rare. Double-loop learning looking at internal root-causes of a problem is an even rarer practice. OL has tools to bring out people’s unconscious/semiconscious limiting assumptions, yet it seems the practice of those tools is also rare.
• The plethora of KM frameworks is confusing. Examples are the knowledge cycle and maturity models where explicit alignment with organizational objectives is missing. We need a KM framework generic enough that it can be applied at the organizational, community, national and planetary levels.
• The intellectual capital framework is excellent for pointing managers’ attention to intangible assets. However, there are many other forms of assets or factors that contribute to value creation than the three categories of intellectual capital.
• Some qualities of human capital (e.g. corruption) and of social capital (e.g. factionalism, conflict, ill reputation) result to value destruction.
• Knowledge is not the only ingredient for effective action and value creation. Intent is the second ingredient that KM practitioners must also recognize and manage. This is the reason why KM practitioners discover that (a) motivating knowledge workers often should accompany KM, and (b) power relations affect KM outcomes.
• Managing knowledge that is already there is not as important as creating new knowledge; personal and organization tools for accelerating innovation are important.

What we need next, a new KM or the next discipline after KM:

• KM is about improving how team members work together. We need smarter ways of sensing and understanding each other’s meanings and values in order to better work together or at least to avoid wasteful conflicts.
• If KM is about seeking “what works better”, then we need a kind of KM that looks into how we structure our institutionalized goals. For example, a “triple bottom line” works better for the greater majority of the population than a purely financial bottom line.
• Mankind’s unlearning cycles take years, decades and even centuries. We need new and better tools for voluntary and conscious paradigm shifting.
• Learning in a group context is potentially superior to individual isolated learning. We need more and better tools for group learning particularly in groups that consist of people with diverse interests or conflicting values.
• For the sake of individual and world peace, we need new and better tools to enhance bridging social capital: generative dialogue, dialogue of civilizations, bridging leadership, etc.
• Since KM is for effective action, we need a deeper KM that can extend the limits of human performance, such as by extending the ability of a person to control his own inner states.
• We need a new and better OL which can extend our individual capacities to learn from daily life. We need a “finer-toothed comb” for maximizing our individual processes of learning, for understanding the broad scope of learning and for improving our operational knowledge of group memory and intra-organizational knowledge flows.
• We need to understand the deeper nature of human creativity and innovation, and apply that in solving many serious problems in our planet.
• Because power affects KM outcomes, we need a new analytics of power in relation to value creation and value destruction. Social innovations can be better understood in terms of a scale of value creation/destruction.
• Innovations most crucial for solving serious world problems lie along tacit-group processes, which I labelled “indigo practices.” We need a new science and technology for innovating indigo practices. New paradigm shifts are required for this to happen, including at the very foundations of current scientific practice and current left-brain dominant educational systems.
• The term “knowledge management” may not last long but I believe the underlying need to create and manage intangible assets in the new global economy would stay much longer (74% of Gross World Product is created by intangible assets).

We will start the new L Series on “Indigo Learning Practices” in the next blog. Stay tuned in!

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Emerging Indigo Practices

From previous blogs, I tried to show that major world problems stem from our lack of knowledge in the indigo quadrant (lower left quadrant in the diagram below):

• The $50 trillion global financial crisis resulted from loss of business confidence or trust. Using KM language, it is loss of stakeholder capital, which lies in the indigo quadrant (see “Q22- $8.3 Trillion: Cost to Americans of Disinvestment in Trust” and “A Value Driver behind Relationship Capital”).
• The numerous on-going armed conflicts all over the planet and the threat of a global nuclear war are manifestations in low or negative relationship capital, which belongs to the indigo quadrant (see “War: Consequence of Negative Relationship Capital”).
• Weaknesses in KM initiatives often lie in the indigo quadrant (see “Tacit-Group Processes in KM”). Because organizational cultural and behavioral issues need to be addressed, experienced KM practitioners accompany KM initiatives with change management (click “Change Management must accompany KM” in the CCLFI opening page).

When two long-term societal megatrends are combined, we discover (see “Q27- Combining Megatrends #1 and #2: the next societal innovations”) that the next significant societal innovations are expected in the indigo quadrant. In my contribution to the book “The Future of Innovation” (to be published by Gower in the autumn of 2009), entitled “The Future of Innovation Must Be Sought in Non-Technological Spheres” I wrote, in part:

“Mankind has demonstrated that its ability to technologically innovate is far greater than its ability to anticipate, learn and solve the negative social consequences of those innovations…

Innovation in the future will be driven by common threats confronting mankind. Ironically, most of those threats are man-made. Innovation will proceed in the general direction of preventing and resolving conflicts, governance at all levels, advancing human rights and human security, cross-border agreements in preventing and fighting crime and terrorism, eliminating social exclusions and other social ills that lead to poverty, generating consensus on environmental problems and solutions, and value creation.”

In the specific area of KM, this means that tools, technologies and practices for effectively managing relationship capital would be important. Below is a list of such KM tools (reproduced from a previous blog post: “Practical Hint #17: Tools for Managing Relationship Capital”):

• Social Network Analysis (SNA), sociogram or stakeholder analysis: Maps and analyzes frequencies of communication, teammate preferences, perceived closeness of interpersonal relationships, degree of agreement/disagreement, etc. between people in a group, organization or network
• Team building and team learning exercises
• Setting up a cross-functional KM Team
• Customer relations management, business development, account management, or business partnership management: Management of relationships with customers, suppliers, partners, etc.
• Customer clubs and e-communities: strengthens a company’s communication and relationship with customers, allows customers to participate in product improvement or R&D, makes some customers feel special by receiving advanced news or product prototypes, etc.
• “Customer ba”: Part of the task of some Japanese customer relations managers is to create an affirmative, trusting and creative “relationship space” between himself and the customer.
• MBTI, Belvin types and other psychological profiling tests: Assessing potential for complementarity and good mix of thinking and working styles among prospective team members
• Various tools in brand management and marketing which enhance reputation and credibility of the company
• Various HR/OD tools to enhance employee loyalty and morale: recognitions, honors and awards; policies that allow appropriate decision-making to employees; CEOs that listen e.g. allow direct emails from employees; facilities that show the company cares e.g. day-care facilities within company premises for young children of mother-employees, etc.
• Group exercise in mind mapping: Allows members to see and better understand the assumptions of other fellow members
• Professional and personal profiles of staff, Expertise Directory, company White Pages: Facilitates staff in getting to know each other and each other’s skills, expertise and talents
• Face-to-face meetings and SN functionalities among e-community or e-CoP members: Mutual trust in a virtual CoP or e-community is best nurtured through face-to-face meetings, and through appropriate social network functionalities in the website of the CoP
• Visioning exercise: Co-creating and contributing to an organization’s vision tend to enhance buy-in and engagement of members in programs, projects and activities aimed at the vision of the organization.
• Negotiation: collaborative/integrative negotiation training, skills development (thanks to Peter Spence), and related tools in conflict management
• Leadership (thanks to Peter Spence): one that knows and appreciates many of the above.

Accordingly, I have decided that the next blog series will be on “Indigo Learning Practices.” We will call it the L Series.

Cheers!

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Q27- Combining Megatrends #1 and #2: the Next Societal Innovations?

I introduced trans-societal Megatrend #1 in an earlier blog (“Q14- Naming Trans-Societal Megatrend #1: towards Yin?”). I summarized Megatrend #1 (see blog “KM and trans-societal megatrend #1″) as:

Trans-societal Megatrend #2 (introduced in blog Q26- Information: another Force for Democratization) can be summarized as:

If we combine these two megatrends and again use Ken Wilber’s framework, we have a new way of characterizing major societal innovations and anticipating where the next major societal innovations would be emerging:

Do you agree with the following observations?

1. The combined trend is towards the lower left or indigo-colored Quadrant 4 in the figure above. Using simplistic language, the trend is towards the democratization of religions (Quadrant 1 to 4) and the spiritualization of democracy, free markets and science (Quadrant 3 to 4).
2. There is a mega-tension between Quadrants 1 and 3 which can be seen in the conflict between Western democratic values versus Islamic fundamentalism and theocracy (which underlies the events in Iraq and Afghanistan, terrorist attacks in Europe and North America, and tension between European cultures and cultures of Muslim immigrants in Europe), the conflict between scientific empiricism and religious faith (seen in Matthew Fox’s creation spirituality versus traditional Catholic doctrines, Darwinian evolution versus creationism from Genesis), and the conflict between laissez faire capitalism and various economic models that emphasize the humanistic, psychological and spiritual dimensions (such as “Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered” by Schumacher, Bhutan King Jigme Singye Wangchuck’s “Gross National Happiness”).
3. Regressive forces are represented by those groups which aim to maintain or go back to communism, dictatorship, theocracy, monopolistic control of national economies, etc.
4. New practices are emerging in Quadrant 4, which I call “indigo practices.” I will write about this in another blog. The interactive practice in double-loop learning that I am proposing in the last blog (An Invitation to Interactive Practice of Double-Loop Learning) is an indigo practice.
5. A most interesting convergence between Quadrants 1 and 3 is happening between Tibetan Buddhism and modern science: the Mind and Life Institute. Tibetan Buddhism comes from centuries of learning, experiential studies and applying consensual corroboration in the inner worlds; while modern sciences comes from centuries of learning, empirical studies and applying consensual corroboration in the outer worlds.

I introduced the ideas in this blog in an earlier paper on “Information Technology and Security in the 21st Century” which I read at the Asia-Pacific Security Forum Conference in Taipei, Taiwan in December 1999.

Please tell us what you think about these.

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KM Practice #19: Techniques in Knowledge Innovation (or: You Experience How Da Vinci Thinks)

Leonardo da Vinci's drawing of his helicopter screw concept (courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Listen to Secretary-General Takenaka of the Asian Productivity Organization:

“The days when incremental or continuous improvement preoccupied corporate managers are over. It is to innovation and breakthroughs that those managers have turned their attention. For achieving innovation, the most relevant tool is no longer quality control or quality management. It is KM in its broadest sense, which includes value creation or knowledge creation that is the most relevant.”

Listen also to the guru of all management gurus Peter F. Drucker:

“…the major task in society – and especially in the economy… [is] doing something different rather than doing better what is already being done.”

Here are some practical techniques to hone your skills in knowledge innovation. Do not just read this. PRACTICE! Set aside one day to PRACTICE each bullet point:

• LISTEN to alternative views on an issue. ASK several people the same question; you will learn different ways to view and think about something.
• Practice more CURIOSITY. Ask stupid questions. Do you recall how you thought and behaved when you visited a foreign country for the first time? Bring that kind of thinking and behavior here and now.
• When something goes wrong, ask why. Ask why again. And again. Dig deeper to discover the ROOT CAUSE. When something goes wrong or did not work well, you can bet an action was performed without correct knowledge about something. Don’t blame the person; he did his best according to what he knew. Instead, discover and supply the missing knowledge.
• Don’t be afraid of criticisms. Go beyond your usual initial emotional reaction and try to better UNDERSTAND the thinking behind the criticism. If you automatically defend yourself when criticized, you will never learn or improve or innovate.
• Even if nothing is going wrong and business is proceeding as usual, ask your internal or external customers: how can we improve our output? Don’t aim to just satisfy her, try to discover how to DELIGHT her.
• If you are allowed by your boss or organization, experiment doing things differently or doing different things. In your personal life, look for how to do the same thing better. More importantly, look for better things to do.
• Visit trade fairs, technology fairs, product fairs, scientific fairs, book fairs, etc. — and let your mind welcome, absorb and enjoy the FLOOD of new ideas. One of those ideas could re-emerge one day or re-combine with your other ideas.
• When your company keeps losing money, it means your company must stop doing something and/or start doing something new. Answering those questions can lead to knowledge innovation.
• Study and learn to apply what are the best practices in your profession; as you copy and apply them, keep asking: what is missing in this “best” practice? What “NEXT practice” is even better? The moment you discover this, you now become the new “best practitioner” and everybody else will copy from you!
• When you hear about a crazy or weird idea, stop and ask yourself: why do I think it is “crazy” or “weird”? It is one of your HIDDEN assumptions or beliefs that is making that judgment! Ask yourself: is my assumption still valid? Hearing about a “crazy” or “weird” idea offers you an opportunity to discover your unconscious LIMITING beliefs.
• Practice DIVERGENT thinking. For example, get a simple and common object like a pencil. A pencil is used for writing. Think of 33 other ways of using a pencil. For another example, get a dictionary. Randomly select a word. Then randomly select a second word. Now try to COMBINE the unlikely two words into a new and useful idea, story, practice or whatever.
• Practice problem FINDING. Wherever you are now, list twelve problems — big or small — you are experiencing. Did you discover a NEW problem you or your office colleagues never noticed? If not, List twelve more. Any NEW problem? Keep going until you find a problem no one had seen before. Voila! The solution to that new problem can be an innovation for your office! Problem finding (NOT problem solving) can lead to innovation.
• Talk to an entrepreneur who had started more than ten successful enterprises. Listen and learn how he looks at things. Watch how his mind works in revising and devising new BUSINESS MODELS and business concepts. He is constantly looking for better things to do. KM is about doing something well, but knowledge innovation is about finding what are better things to do. If you do not check what is the right thing to do, then KM might just be doing well the wrong things!
• Break your routines every now and then. Routine is the ENEMY of innovation. Try eating a new kind of food. Visit a place you have not gone to. Do something new for your spouse or significant other. Perform a “random act of kindness” to a stranger. Don’t allow the resulting initial discomfort to push you back to your usual familiar routine.
• Finally, if people will adopt, copy or use your ideas then it means those ideas are USEFUL. Then you are innovating!

Cheers!

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