T3-5 Reducing Knowledge Loss When Experienced Staff Resigns/Retires

Here are some techniques my colleagues and I have advised, tried and/or monitored to reduce knowledge loss when experienced staff is resigning/retiring:

• Over a period of several months, the retiring staff confers with his understudy whenever the former makes an important or critical decision or problem solving episode. He explains the situation, what factors he looks at, what are the risks, and why he chose the solution. In other words, the coaching process is focused only on important decision-making episodes.
• For a very busy executive about to retire, ask few but high-value questions. For example, we asked an executive who was centrally responsible for conceptualizing and overseeing a unique program: “After doing this program several times, what advice will you offer a new executive who will take over the program? Let us say that you have only 10 minutes available to provide this advice.” The 10-minutes limit forces the executive to “skim off the cream” and thus provide the most high-value advice culled from his long experience.
• One difference between an experienced staff and a neophyte is that the former has much tacit knowledge about what could go wrong in a particular activity, business process or project. Interview the retiring staff or ask him to list the risk factors involved, and the corresponding signs (we use the terms “pink flags” or “red flags” to differentiate between levels of probability and seriousness of a risk) that he looks for to check if the risk seems to be materializing.
• Ask the resigning/retiring staff to collect and provide you with his work templates. Turn this over to the understudy or replacement, who must be able to ask the retiring staff questions whenever the manner of use of any template is not clear to her. This technique presupposes that members of the organization is aware of the value of, and can recognize work templates and other reusable knowledge objects/products.
• Request the retiring staff if he or she can be occasionally consulted by phone after retirement.
• Do not call a project “harvesting knowledge of retiring staff.” Who wants to be “harvested”? This was odious title of an actual project in one organization and the project did not fly. “Knowledge turnover” or “knowledge transfer” or “understudy program” sounds better. The other reason for failure is that the actions called for on the part of the resigning/retiring staff were not part of the terms/contract of employment of the staff. Therefore the next tip is:
• Insert “knowledge turnover” provisions into the employment contract of knowledge workers.
• Form an informal “consultants pool” consisting of retirees in a specific area of work and set up agreed protocols for consulting members of the pool on problems in their specific area of specialization.
• If a work process is relatively specific, predictable or uniform, encourage a retiring experienced staff to accept outsourcing jobs after his retirement. In one factory, the owner even sells the associated equipment at a much reduced price.
• If the retiring staff is a business development officer, an account executive or a marketing officer with personal and crucial relationships with business partners or clients, he introduces his understudy or replacement to the business partners/clients (and their secretaries or assistants), brings her to business and social events where the business partner/client will be met and briefs her on the specific and unique personality characteristics, requirements and expectations of each business partner/client.
• Adopt a company policy that replacements must be hired or identified at least 30 days before resignation or retirement, and corresponding company procedures for knowldge transfer during that period.

  Cheers!

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T3-4 Identifying Non-Technical Skills that Affect Productivity the Most

We cannot always assume that, in any specific work context, (cognitive) knowledge assets are all we need to manage for greater productivity and innovation. Affective or non-technical skills and aptitudes can also be important.

In fact, in one of my multinational corporate clients, we found that non-technical skills account for more than two-thirds of the variation in employee productivity! We explained this finding by observing that this organization manages its (technical or cognitive) knowledge assets so well that doing more of the same would produce less impact on productivity than doing something else that they nearly forgot: enhancing non-technical or affective skills. I dare assert that many organizations practically have a blind spot in this area.

Over a 1.5-hours lunchtime brown-bag session in another multinational client, we were able to identify non-technical skills that greatly affect productivity the most by asking one simple trigger question: “From your experiences and observations, what are the skills and aptitudes of a high-performing professional staff which are not reflected in their CVs/resumes?”

This particular client operates over many Asian countries, and their professional staffs have to deal with clients from different Asian cultures. Among the outputs from this short lunch session were: cultural sensitivity, politically savvy, emotional intelligence, communication skills and people skills.

Some learning of participants from these short sessions were:

• With the right trigger question, high-value tacit knowledge can be elicited and cross-validated by a team in a short period of time.
• We have much individual tacit knowledge about what works well which we are not always aware of as a group; KM serves to convert these into more useful group explicit knowledge.
• Managing knowledge is not enough; emotional factors must also be managed but the management tools for the latter seem relatively unrecognized and unorganized or not systematized.
• There seems to be a gap in the HR Department’s screening/selection and performance evaluation frameworks.

You are welcome to read my previous blog posts related to this one:

• KM is Not Enough!
• Knowledge is Not Enough
• Some Stories about How Personality and Culture Come into Our Knowledge Management Practice
• A Success Factor in KM: Motivating Knowledge Workers

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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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Listening to Life

People do not notice nor give value to those things that are always available or always around them all the time — air to breathe, solid ground beneath their feet, the local culture, being alive, the support of a loved one — until those things are taken away from them, or seriously threatened to be taken away from them. It is paradoxical: anything that is omnipresent tends to escape our notice. Consequently, we fail to appreciate it.

Many species of fish and other aquatic animals are born, live their lifetimes and die immersed in the water all the time; and so I believe they do not notice the water. Dolphins, which can jump out of the water momentarily, have experienced being out of the water; and so I believe dolphins do notice the water. Spinning dolphins even delightfully and playfully shoot up into the air spinning, and splash back into the water. They do it again and again, in apparent glee and enjoyment.

When I was a young man I dated girls at the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in Laguna province in the Philippines. The first time I visited IRRI facilities, I was struck by the beautiful scenic view of the green rice fields, the rows of coconut trees and thatched huts in the distance, the blue-green mountains nearby and the bluer mountains afar. I blurted a remark to one of the girls about the marvellous scenery surrounding them. She said, “Oh, we do not notice them anymore.”

We are immersed in life and its repeating patterns so often and so much that we have stopped noticing life.

People who had looked at Death face-to-face — for example, people who survived a life-threatening illness, or an accident that was fatal for many companions, or any event where they thought they would die — are people who afterwards better saw how precious Life is and who thereafter lived Life more fully. Like young children, they listened, experienced and savored life more intensely. I know, because I survived an illness that threatened my life for nearly four years.

Take your local or national culture. You grew up within it. It is around you all the time. You never even knew what it consists of — until you leave your town or your country and travel to another culture. It is when you are outside your culture and you are confronted with an alien, strange or different culture that you begin to be aware of your own culture!

Nearly two decades ago, I studied an indigenous local spiritual culture. They have a daily practice that they taught me. It is called “pagbabasa ng Buhay na Aklat” or “reading the Living Book.” By “Living Book” they refer to your own life and daily personal experiences. It consists of closely observing, and internally and externally listening to the micro and macro events in your personal life in order to discern patterns, movements and cues as to where Life is taking you as well as where you want Life to take you. They call one’s life the “Living Book” because they believe that God communicates and interacts with every person through numerous micro and macro events in his or her life. In other words, your life experiences constitute your own “Living Scripture” that you have to “read”. “Reading the Living Book” is a practice of passively listening to Life, as well as actively engaging Life. It is a beautiful practice.

Using knowledge management language, “Reading the Living Book” is sensing of tacit individual knowledge, while reading a religious scripture (whether Christian, Muslim, Judaic, etc.) is reading explicit group knowledge. The first is personalized and private, compared to the latter which is common and public.

Early Christians, and modern-day Pentecostal Christians, use the Greek word “rhema” to refer to direct, tacit, personal experience or communication from the Holy Spirit, in contrast to “logos” which is the written, explicit record of that experience. Unfortunately, when the Bible was translated from Greek to English, both “rhema” and “logos” became the “Word” thereby losing the important distinction between direct, tacit, personalized sensing (“rhema”) and the indirect, explicit, public record (“logos”). This shift is one of the reasons why, in my analysis, Christianity lost the virtues in the indigo quadrant (see the diagrams in my previous blog post “Evolving Forms of Governance”): it shifted from rule by the many and inner disciplines of the early Christians during Pentecost, to rule by the few and canon law/doctrinal controls in the modern Vatican-managed Catholicism and various Protestant congregations. Please note that Protestantism is closer to the indigo quadrant than Catholicism.

A similar distinction occurred in the development of Islam: today there is a distinction between various practices of tacit discernment of Allah’s will (maarifah, haqiqah and tariqah) and the more common reliance on explicit or written laws (Shariah) and the Koran.

The KM distinction between tacit and explicit knowledge is an excellent framework for better understanding these distinctions: one is contextual personal knowledge and the other is generic second-hand knowledge. KM also helps us see that there are losses accompanying conversion from tacit to explicit knowledge.

Abraham, the forefather of all Jews, Christians and Muslims, did not have any scripture to rely on (fortunately!). So he used direct tacit means to listen to God. He listened very well, even if he could not at first believe what he heard. Most modern-day Jews, Christians and Muslim rely on their different scriptures (unfortunately!) and their different mental models and judgments are now leading them to misunderstand, hate and even kill one another. Watching all his children now, Abraham must be an exceedingly unhappy soul.

In 1995-1997 I led a team of experts in Filipino culture and indigenous spiritualities in designing, testing and piloting a Pamathalaan Workshop under former Philippine President Fidel V. Ramos. Pamathalaan, according to President Ramos, is “pamamahala kasama ni Bathala” or God-centered governance. One of the experimental workshop modules was a form of listening to Life patterned after the indigenous practice of “reading the Living Book”. It is an inter-faith process of consensual discernment. If God is omnipresent, then our tendency is to fail to notice Him (or Her). The water sustains the fish, but the fish never notices the water. The process is therefore a conscious practice of noticing and listening to God or to Life (is there really any distinction between God and Life?) all around us every day or moment of our life.

In 1997, I was browsing in a bookstore in San Francisco when I chanced (perhaps it was not “chance”) reading the following excerpt from the back cover of a book. The excerpt “jumped out” and I knew it was another corroboration of the Pamathalaan Workshop. I bought this book and all subsequent books by its author, Neale Donald Walsh. Neale “wrote” these books through the process of “automatic writing” (whereby the author’s hand holding a pen or pencil involuntarily moves and writes, or without the conscious control of the person). The title of the book is “Conversations with God: an Uncommon Dialogue, Book 1.”

“So go ahead now. Ask Me anything. Anything. I will contrive to bring you the answer. The whole universe will I use to do this. So be on the lookout; this book is far from My only tool. You may ask a question, then put this book down. But watch.

“Listen.

“The words to the next song you hear. The information in the next article you read. The story line of the next movie you watch. The chance utterance of the next person you meet. Or the whisper of the next river, the next ocean, the next breeze that caresses your ear — all these devices are Mine; all these avenues are open to Me. I will speak to you if you will listen. I will come to you if you will invite Me. I will show you then that I have always been there.

“All ways.”

Put this blog down (it is second-hand knowledge) and start gaining your own first-hand knowledge. Start listening to Life.

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Can We Manage Knowledge? (A Practice in Listening)

A lively discussion is now going on after I opened a new page on “Will KM Disappear?” and posted it too in the Linkedin group “Knowledge Management Experts” (to read the comments, click that page on the panel to the right or click HERE).

Some are saying that we cannot really manage knowledge. Others are saying we have been doing it all the time. I have my own views but I wanted to listen and learn (see my previous blog post on Listening) and really understand the thinking behind the comments posted. Why are the views so widely divergent? What does each commentor mean?

I think we need to be clear and precise what our referents are when we say the words “manage” and “knowledge”. Otherwise, confusion and fruitless debates will follow. Some say that labels are unimportant and let us just get on with the work. In this particular instance, we need precision of communication. In a work team, unclear labels will lead to communication gaps and then to performance gaps.

First, note that people do not talk about “managing an idea or concept”. Rather, they talk about “managing a process” involving ideas and concepts. Similarly, some are sceptical of the term “managing knowledge” but instead say “managing knowledge processes”. Nonaka prefers the term “knowledge-based management” instead of “knowledge management” (read Nonaka’s talk in Bangkok last January 2007).

Accordingly in the table below I detailed a range of knowledge processes that we actually refer to when we say we “manage knowledge”.

DECONSTRUCTING THE PHRASE “MANAGING KNOWLEDGE”

From the above deconstruction of the phrase “managing knowledge” we can better —

• Understand why some KM practitioners say that only explicit knowledge (or “knowledge artifacts” or “knowledge objects”) can be managed, and insist that tacit knowledge of employees cannot be directly managed (by managers and executives);
• Understand why other KM practitioners who equate KM solely with organizational KM will say that mankind has been managing knowledge all the time (even before the term KM was invented) and will equally insist that asking whether knowledge can or cannot be managed is asking a silly question;
• Understand why KM practitioners who include also personal knowledge processes in KM will say that managers and executives cannot really manage knowledge in employees; they will also insist that managers and executives can only facilitate, support, motivate or incentivize the knowledge and learning processes going on inside the heads (and hearts) of their employees;
• Understand how the above (often unstated or unconscious) differences in referents inside the heads KM practitioners (who are all well-intentioned) set up or predispose them towards miscommunication and fruitless debate (I wrote this blog post to avoid this); and
• Understand why change management and similar behavioral tools — which address personal knowledge processes (nearer the bottom of the table) — must often accompany KM.

Here is my 2 cents worth:

The most important knowledge process in the above table is knowledge use/application/practice (the bottom one in red text). There are only two value-creating steps in the knowledge cycle, and knowledge use/application/practice is one of them. If this step is missing or faulty, all other knowledge processes would amount to useless expenditures. Since this value-creating step is affected most heavily by personal factors, KM must include “personal KM” or personal knowledge processes in its scope of concern and therefore also scope of definition.

Therefore, personal KM cannot be optional because personal knowledge processes in each employee are at the foundation of effective organizational KM.

What do you think?

(My thanks to Fernando Goldman, Skip Boettger, Jim Coogan, Harold Jarche, Douglas Weidner and John Tropea for their comments, which made me think this issue through.)

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Left Brainers and Nonaka’s “Ba”

My friend and colleague Joitske Hulsebosch of Netherlands commented today on the previous blog:

“Hi Serafin, very interesting. Did you hear about Daniel Pink? He wrote about the left-brainers ruling the western world, but thinks it is time for right-brainers now. Though he writes from a western perspective, it is interesting to see him explain both sides of the brain.”

I promptly called my favorite bookstore in Quezon City and they are readying a copy of Daniel H. Pink’s “A Whole New Mind: Why Right Brainers Will Rule the Future” for me to pick up this Friday. (Thank you Joitske!) According to author Daniel H. Pink’s website, the main argument in his book is that “the era of ‘left brain’ dominance, and the Information Age that it engendered, are giving way to a new world in which ‘right brain’ qualities — inventiveness, empathy, meaning — predominate.”

In 1981 Dr. Roger W. Sperry won the Nobel Prize for discovering that the left and right hemispheres of our brain think differently:

Left brainers (or people whose left brain is overdeveloped while their right brain is underdeveloped) tend to go for engineering, computer science, information technology and mathematics. Right brainers tend to go for creative and entrepreneurial activities, designing, relationship building, strategic sensing and pursuit of adventure. In knowledge management, KM guru Karl Erik Sveiby observed that KM practitioners either adopt the “technology side” of KM or its “people side”. Left brainers are best in using IT for KM, but they tend to misunderstand the more tacit aspects of KM such as KM guru Ikujiro Nonaka’s “ba” and SECI model. I have read many criticisms of Nonaka that reveal to me more about the mindset of the critic than about what Nonaka is writing about.

“Ba” is the communication and interpersonal space built and nurtured between two or more people; it is characterized by trust, empathy and shared meanings. Practice of “ba” belongs to the indigo quadrant. It is an area of practice that right brainers are good at.

Remember that for centuries, the Japanese have been creating and transfering tacit knowledge from master to pupil through their traditional “iemoto.” Japanese iemoto schools have produced great masters in tacit knowledge of kendo, kabuki, ikebana (flower arrangement), chanoyu (tea ceremony) or chado (way of the tea), yakimono (pottery), sumo wrestling, Zen practice, Noh (a drama form), etc.

An example of a tool that helps a person shift from left-brain thinking to right-brain thinking is the “koan” in Zen Buddhism. Koan is another Japanese innovation. A koan usually takes the form of a question or riddle that quickly befuddles the left brain and thereby exposes the very limitations of the left brain to itself.

An example of a koan is: “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him!”

What are your thoughts upon reading this koan? What do those thoughts tell you about how your mind usually works?

A left-brainer trying to understand this koan is like a left-brain KM practitioner criticizing Nonaka’s “ba”. After Googling, here are some actual examples of left-brain explanations I found in the Internet:

“A logical interpretation of ‘kill him’ is ‘cease to cling to his footsteps if you wish to match his wisdom,’ but I would never claim that this is what the passage means.”

“I think that this is saying that if you meet the Buddha by the road (an actual road, i.e., a man preaching where there are people), he probably isn’t the real Buddha.”

“…you do have to ‘kill’ your master to surpass him.”

Those remarks reveal the left-brain empirical orientations of the writers.

Let me attempt at one answer that illustrates the point I wrote about in my previous blog:

“Buddhist” literally means “internalist” because the aim in Buddhist practice is for YOU to attain the INTERNAL state of Buddhahood or enlightenment. Hence, you don’t look for the Buddha on the road or anywhere outside of yourself; you discover the Buddha WITHIN you. You don’t walk and look around; you WAKE UP to a larger reality. What the koan is saying is that you should “kill” the very idea of trying to meet the Buddha on the road (or anywhere outside yourself). That idea is an obstacle to your growth; get rid of it.

How about you; what is your answer to the koan?

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Appreciating Nonaka’s SECI Model (#23)

Let us review the four critical tasks of a learning organization (numbers 1-4 refer to the figure below):

1. Build those tacit knowledge in workers that contribute most to value creation;
2. Convert useful tacit knowledge into explicit forms that are easier to reproduce, replicate and reuse; this explicit knowledge is collected in an organized fashion into a knowledge repository or Organizational Brain;
3. Provide the right explicit knowledge to be reused or practiced by the right knowledge workers; if substantial volumes of explicit knowledge have been collected, it becomes possible to recombine, digest, analyze, correlate and otherwise “mine” the collection to generate new insights and conclusions that are actionable;
4. Procure needed expertise or knowledge from outside.

The tasks revolve around the green quadrant because (a) it is the quadrant where most value creation takes place, and (b) most of the knowledge in an organization is located in the green quadrant.

According to Laura Birou, only 10-20 percent of an organization’s knowledge is explicit. Robert H. Buckman of Buckman Laboratories estimates this fraction at only 10 percent. William H. Baker Jr. estimates it at 20 percent. Furthermore, not all of this explicit knowledge is captured in the organizations’ IT-based information systems. What IT does well is facilitate the replication and transmission of explicit knowledge so that more knowledge workers can use/practice them, convert them to their tacit knowledge, and create value for the organization.

Notice that the well-known SECI model of Nonaka addresses all four critical tasks of a learning organization:

1. Socialization: tacit-to-tacit knowledge transfer from expert to learner
2. Externalization: conversion to explicit group knowledge
3. Combination: combining new explicit knowledge with other existing explict knowledge
4. Internalization: conversion back to individual tacit knowledge

The SECI model is not the only mix of knowledge pathways that performs the four critical tasks. In the previous blog post, notice that the Case Study 3 organization also addresses all four critical tasks of a learning organization. The mixes of knowledge pathways do vary from organization to organization.

In Case Study 3, the explicit group knowledge is in the form of a Learning-Oriented Systems Manual (=organizational brain), which at this point in time is not yet web-based. This illustrates the fact that although information technology can be an excellent enabler, it is not an absolute necessity for a learning organization.

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Knowledge Pathways in a Learning Organization (#21)

I wrote in the previous blog about the “Organizational Brain” (lower right or yellow quadrant in the diagram below). The Organizational Brain is a superb instrument for storing, providing, replicating and leveraging explicit knowledge but explicit knowledge by itself cannot create value. Information just sitting in a database does not create value. It is only when PEOPLE apply knowledge that value can be created (upper left or green quadrant in the diagram).

There are few exceptions. In a fully robotized factory, technology (~explicit knowledge), almost by itself, creates value. I said “almost” because there will always be humans overseeing the factory. Even in highly automated systems such as Ultra-Large Crude Carriers (ULCCs), about two dozen crew members are needed to manage its sophisticated technological systems.

Photograph from Wikimedia Commons

Value may be created from explicit knowledge such as when a company sells the patents, copyrights, tools, software and formulas it had internally developed. Of course, the original source of this explicit knowledge is the tacit knowledge of the employees who developed them.

In short, the main creators of value are PEOPLE: individuals and teams using their tacit knowledge: this is a central tenet in the knowledge economy. In the diagram below, these are located in the left quadrants, particularly the green quadrant. Structural capital and technology (right quadrants) are only supportive. Note that the diagram is again based on Ken Wilber’s framework. You can go back to the following blogs to read about Ken Wilber’s framework: (click on any link)

• Tacit-Group Processes in KM
• KM and Trans-Societal Megatrend #1
• Four Types of Memory

There are four critical tasks facing a Learning Organization:

Task 1: Enhance employees’ tacit knowledge (green quadrant) especially those that create most value for the organization.

Task 2: Convert useful individual tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge — the form easily replicable and re-usable by more people in the organization (conversion from green to yellow quadrant using Pathways 2, 3 or 4).

Task 3: Facilitate re-use or practice of the right explicit knowledge by the right people (conversion back to green quadrant). Pathway 6 does this. Through practice explicit knowledge is converted into the practitioner’s own tacit knowledge (see “D4- Converting Tacit to Explicit Knowledge and vice-versa”). Some organizations analyze, recombine, correlate and mine their Organizational Brain into more useful forms (Pathway 5).

Task 4: Acquire needed knowledge from outside (Pathways 7-10 in the diagram below)

Some KM tools for Task 1 are:

• Pathway 1 or replication of individual tacit knowledge: Mentoring, coaching, understudy, buddy system, lecture-demonstration, peer assist, cross-visits, knowledge sharing among a community of practitioners. Some of these KM tools tend to lie “outside the radar” of HR practitioners because the HRD framework looks at the individual employee as the unit of management, while the KM framework is based on managing value-creating knowledge across employees.
• Various tools to enhance employee motivation and engagement; our empirical findings at CCLFI reveal the importance of motivational factors (see: “A Success Factor in KM: Motivating Knowledge Workers” and “Practical Exercise: Ingredients of Effective Group Action”)

Some KM tools for Task 2 (individual tacit knowledge to group explicit knowledge) are:

• Pathway 2 (the predominant knowledge pathway for Task 2): Manualization, process documentation, learning history, individual mind mapping, blog, surveys and questionnaires.
• Pathway 3: Lessons-learned session, after-action review, wiki or collaborative authoring, group exercises for thinking together such as mind mapping, causal flow diagramming, fishbone diagramming, etc.
• Pathway 4: Video capture of story telling, company visioning exercise accompanied by documentation, minutes or aide memoire of a meeting and conceptual design brainstorming among architects

Some KM tools for Task 3 are:

• Pathway 5 or recombination: Data mining, performance metrics followed by identification and study of best practitioner, multiple regression or path analysis to detect causal linkages and contributions, statistical summaries and fitting trend lines to data.
• Pathway 6 or group explicit knowledge converted to individual tacit knowledge in many: Practicum, learning-by-doing, on-the-job training, workplace-oriented mentoring, action research, R&D, experimentation and replication/adaptation of best practice.

We know that the usual means for Task 4 are: purchase of knowledge products, hiring new employees, buying a franchise to quickly use a ready product and its support network, engaging a consultant, copying from the public domain, business intelligence procedures, etc.

I have written about these knowledge pathways in Section 3.5 of my Overview chapter in the book “Knowledge Management in Asia: Experience and Lessons” published in 2008 by the Asian Productivity Organization, Tokyo, Japan. If you wish to receive a copy of this chapter, send me an email.

See also: “Knowledge pathways: 3 case studies” and “Appreciating Nonaka’s SECI model”.

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KM and Trans-Societal Megatrend #1

Trans-societal Megatrend #1 (see Q14- Naming trans-societal Megatrend #1: “towards yin”?) can be viewed from Ken Wilber’s framework, as in the following diagram.

When we were looking at “Tacit-Group Processes in KM” and “Gaia Consciousness”, we were in fact using Ken Wilber’s framework:

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When we were examining the global balance sheet of tangible and intangible assets (see “Towards a Global Balance Sheet”), we were also using Ken Wilber’s framework:

In fact, the expanded KM framework (see “Practical Exercise: Ingredients of Effective Group Action #15″) emerged from the simple observation that answers to “What are the ingredients of effective group action?” can be grouped in a way from where the commonly-accepted categories of intellectual capital or knowledge assets naturally emerge! Surprisingly, the grouping is consistent with Ken Wilber’s framework.

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Which falls neatly into the categories of intellectual capital:

Now, what we are observing (see Q14- Naming trans-societal Megatrend #1: “towards yin”?) is that there is a global megatrend running across many sectors of society: corporate wealth creation, global economy, community development, educational psychology, national development, national security, attitudes to environment, psychology, international conflicts, religion and organizational dynamics. In other words, the megatrend is trans-societal. It can be summarized as:

What do you think?

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Q21- Rediscovering a Core(?) of Human Capital: “Sophia”

1
In July 2006 one of the modules in a KM workshop CCLFI facilitated for top executives of a mining company in Mongolia was on “Mining Tacit Knowledge.” The workshop participants were the two senior VPs, all the VPs and senior directors.

We invited three managers who are known in the company to be excellent motivators. One of the them was the CEO. We arranged an informal setting where the three, sitting comfortably in sofas facing the participants, were asked to tell their stories on “How I motivate my people.” A Mongolian lady served as my interpreter in the course.

As their stories unfolded, I could see how interested and engaged were all the participants. The stories showed vignettes of their difficulties and victories in motivating their subordinates. From the faces of the participants and their responses (interpreted for me) the process was obviously a moving experience for everyone. At some point I asked my lady interpreter to stop and we just listened and allowed the interaction to proceed without the interruptions when she interprets for me. It was such a solemn deeply-felt group experience that the CEO later asked, “Has my management team changed so much after one workshop?”

2
In January 2007 I personally met Prof. Ikujiro Nonaka. I served as Conference Rapporteur and Editor of conference proceedings for the International Productivity Conference 2007: From Brain to Business sponsored by the Asian Productivity Organization. He read a paper on “Strategy as Distributed Phronesis: Knowledge Creation for the Common Good.” He introduced a new term “phronesis” and defined it as “the virtuous habit of making decisions and taking action that serves the common good, the capability to find a “right answer in a particular context.” He added that phronesis is “practical wisdom or prudence” or the experiential knowledge to make context-specific decisions based on one’s own value or ethics (high-quality tacit knowledge).”

3
In 2002, CCLFI documented best practices for UNDP in sustainable community development. Our first intention was to produce a manual or “How To” booklets (structural capital), but we discovered that manualization is not enough. The success of a sustainable community development project is also attributable to a talents of the community leader who ran the project. Now, how do one capture those talents in a document? We produced “vignettes” to accompany the “How To” manuals. A vignette consists quotations and pictures of the community leader as he or she tells stories about the project. The vignette shows glimpses or snipets of the leader’s character (human capital) that contributed to project success. We also shot videos. We invited ten of the best practitioners to a face-to-face Lessons Learned Meeting (LLM) where together they shared their stories, compared notes and learned from each other.

When you meet a best practitioner-leader of a successful sustainable community development project you notice immediately that he or she has “it” — that mix of qualities I can describe as a compelling sense of purpose, quietly inspirational, a “can do” attitude that is infectious, humble but strong in will, a deep kind of reflectiveness that shows in how he or she views the world and the people in it and a persona that naturally motivates people. It is a mix of intrapersonal and interpersonal qualities. We at CCLFI chose the term “sophia” to denote this mix of core personal qualities of a successful community leader.

From our expanded KM framework, I believe that the above stories are touching on a core of human capital and relationship capital where these two forms of capital intersect motivational factors. It consists of an inner drive or enthusiasm (an intrapersonal quality) and an ability to lead or motivate (an interpersonal quality).

Have you encountered a similar experience with exceptional leaders? Tell us about it.

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