practical Knowledge Management

The bias of experience

Mon, 3 Oct 2011 10:42:45 +0100

I am a fan of Appreciative Inquiry and Positive Deviance. I believe we do have a choice about whether to learn from what works rather than what has failed. I know others who are less positive about these approaches and prefer to learn from problem solving or what hasn’t worked. Some time ago I learned that there is no such thing as failure, only feedback.... as long as you don’t stop trying to achieve what you set out to do.

I listened to a TED talk recently. It was Ben Goldacre on ‘Battling bad science’.

He has written a book called ‘Bad Science’ and in the video discusses at machine gun pace the flaws in the way people interpret cause and effect. I was at the same time amused and concerned by his talk.

He discusses the use of Funnel plots to determine publication bias. That led me to thinking that by selectively choosing the successful outcomes we are creating a bias and should be careful about the recommendations. Equally if we only learn from failure without looking for the positive examples we may also be producing a bias.

Perhaps when we have a recommendation we should test it against positive and negative outcomes.

Or am I making the wrong connections?

I’ll be interested to hear the thoughts of practitioners of Appreciative Inquiry or Positive Deviance, and also in those that have used funnel plots to determine bias.

An example of a Peer Assist that made a difference

Sat, 2 Oct 2010 13:05:27 +0100

Here is a great example of how Thai rice farmers used the Peer Assist process to learn from each others experience to grow rice organically. Over the course of 4 harvests they not only shifted to organic rice growing but improved yields, improved their health and spent less time working in the paddy fields. They saw the benefits of learning from each others experiences and continue to meet.

It’s as easy as riding a bicycle!

Fri, 24 Sep 2010 11:41:45 +0100

With downsizing and redundancy currently a major concern for many, people are rushing to learn how to capture the knowledge of people leaving their organisations. But how effective can it be? Here is a short video using learning to ride a bicycle as an example.

Knowledge sharing needs to be a continuous process not something to do when someone leaves. It cannot all be captured in writing and in any case the person moving on may not be in the right frame of mind to share. Communities of practice and mentoring are effective ways of sharing your knowledge with others.

BP and the oil spill

Wed, 4 Aug 2010 12:26:08 +0100

I have been watching the response to the oil spillin the Gulf of Mexico with a mixture of anguish, sadness and concern. It is more than 5 years since I left employment with BP, following a period of secondment to the United Nations AIDS agency UNAIDS. I have been surprise at where my loyalties lie and how they have changed during the course of the response. Stepping back from all the emotion, I don’t feel in a position to judge whose fault it was, whether the response was adequate, or whether sharing and learning was adequate within BP. I’ll leave that to others.
However there are three main themes on the topic of knowledge management that seem relevant to this story:
1. What knowledge and information are we basing our views on?
2. What sort of environment has been created for collaborating and learning?
3. How well have the risks been managed?

Let’s deal with these in turn.
1. Most of the information we have to base our views on are directly from the media – television, the internet and the press. My Member of Parliament in the UK, David Heath, recently wrote a press article on the future of political reporting.
“I am very worried about the standards of political and other reporting. If we need new politics, then perhaps we need a new journalism too.
Much that is written in the national newspapers is sloppy and under-researched. A lot of it comes from press releases and chats over lunch rather than looking for facts.
As a result, much of it is drivel. On top of that you have a layer of unconcealed prurience masquerading as incisive investigation, concentrating on celebrity and trivia over substance, and the whole edifice looks remarkably shallow.”
I have some sympathy with this point of view. The press has moved from reporting news events to providing instant analysis and answers, assigning blame, searching out the high numbers (of casualties, demonstrators or barrels of oil spilt.) Accuracy is not the aim, finding the highest number someone is prepared to state is. In addition, the internet reinforces extreme views by replication, which has the effect of seeming more convincing even though there is no more information.
At the same time BP is providing its own information – video feeds of the well head, video explanations of each attempt to cap the well and stop the flow. Some think there is a bias to that information.
We make our judgements based on the information provided, coupled with our own knowledge, biases and values.
2. One of the biggest barriers to learning the lessons from mistakes is the litigious society we have created. Learning and sharing takes place in a trusting environment. So many incidents – from train crashes, to fires, to conflict situations, to explosions -are subject to litigation that people are afraid to open their mouths. Even for minor car crashes our insurance companies instruct us not to admit liability even when our instinct is to explain our actions and assumptions to others involved.
There are few reports of collaboration for this response. BP did acknowledge cooperation between various government agencies and itself. Other oil companies have provided knowledge, experts, equipment and advice to support. I’d have liked to have seen much more cooperation especially with the US government to fix the problem and clean up first, then learn the lessons, and only then address the issue of who pays and who if any is negligent. What I saw and read was a mix of assigning blame, politicking and maintaining reputation; hardly the environment conducive to listening and learning from each other. What are the chances of really learning the lessons so that we can prevent something like this occurring again?
3. We need to manage the risks and for that we need knowledge. As individuals we rarely avoid risks altogether else we’d never get out of bed. We all handle risks not avoid them. When we assess the risk we judge the probability of occurrence, the impact if it happens and the amount of control of influence we have to mitigate the risk. It does come down to judgement and that judgement comes down to having the relevant knowledge.
Malcolm Gladwell in “Blink” shows examples where only a small amount of knowledge is required to make a decision. People who are risk averse often seek more and more knowledge rather than make a judgement. We need less knowledge than we think to make a decision, rather we need the right balance of knowledge and judgement according to our tolerance to risk. What concerned me was not that BP took risks but the response plan to mitigate the risk did not seem to be operational.
The basic principles of Knowledge Management outlined in “Learning to Fly” are as relevant as ever and are being applied within and between many organisations around the world. It is the application of the techniques that matters and the actions taken once you have the knowledge.

The demise of the expert

Tue, 2 Mar 2010 12:09:31 +0000

There has always been a tension between innovation and the reuse of knowledge. Innovation focuses on creating new knowledge or applying old knowledge to new situations whereas reuse focuses on finding, adapting and applying knowledge that already exists.
In the company I worked for, the focus was on reuse of knowledge as these provide the quick wins in doing things better, and rather than research they focused on being an early adopter of knowledge. This led to closing some centres of expertise such as refining engineering and encouraging networks, or communities of practitioners (CoPs) based at operational sites, supplemented by external experts.
This in turn led to the belief that there is no such thing as an expert, rather that expertise is the collective knowledge of a CoP. Together the community can generalise and make sense of what is known collectively, and structure that knowledge is to make it useful.
Over time that belief has been modified. Some so called experts brought in to help an organisation offer nothing more than their own experience but a true expert offers more than this.

An expert:
Is a member of the relevant community of practitioners with access to the collective expertise
Sees patterns and meanings which is not apparent to the less experienced
Can apply the knowledge in a variety of situations, some of which have not been encountered before [“Knowing which tool to take out of the tool box”]
Learns new knowledge with little effort and can relate it to what is already known.

So for the enterprise this means:
Getting access to the expertise by being part of the community and structuring the knowledge to make it useful
Focus on making sense of the knowledge through pattern recognition and visualisation
Collaborating with others to boost the confidence to apply the expertise to new situations
Provide an encouragement to learn, learning becomes a key objective of the organisation.
For existing experts it means offering the enterprise what they need, by providing access to expertise, pattern recognition and collaborating on solutions.
And a word of caution, the more we believe we are the expert, that we know best, the more we close the door on learning something new.