APQC recently interviewed Jack Vinson on a wide range of topics regarding transferring critical knowledge. In part two of our interview, Jack discusses the challenge of transferring and using critical knowledge during a crisis. In part one, he talked about why identifying critical knowledge can be a difficult collaboration between management and workers.
Jack Vinson is a knowledge management advocate who has been a consultant with P3Consulting Group, a project manager at Aspen Technology, and an adjunct faculty member at Northwestern University. You can follow Jack on Twitter @jackvinson and read his blog, Knowledge Jolt with Jack.
If you would like to learn more about transferring and applying critical knowledge, listen to our free webinar 12 Best Practices to Transfer and Apply Critical Knowledge or check out our Transferring and Applying Critical Knowledge Study Overview.
APQC: You had a great blog post about urgency and how it can be a positive or a negative force. In your experience, what do successful organizations have in place to transfer and apply critical knowledge in a crisis?
JACK VINSON: That’s a great one. There’s some great writing in classic John Kotter stuff about urgency that has changed management, in general, and obviously knowledge management. If you’re trying to change the way your organization works, this plays in. I like this question about using knowledge in crisis. I’m probably not going to answer quite the way you asked the question, but that’s okay.
There’s an interesting aspect of when an organization is in do-or-die mode—something has happened and it could be an internal issue or it could be an external market issue, and they are able to respond successfully. The interesting thing about urgency suggests is that there’s a lot of things that organizations do on a day-to-day, non-urgent basis that they just stop doing when in urgent situations. The question here is, do they stop doing things that they really need to do, right-to-operate stuff, that’s going to cause them problems after they get out of the crisis, or do they stop doing things that they don’t need to do at all, but they do because of history or because somebody set a policy five years ago and, No. 1, the policy was never written down. Was it sort of an internal practice that has become written in stone? The crisis comes up and they drop everything other than the things that must get done in order to be successful. That doesn’t have anything to do with knowledge management directly, other than the great practice that is also one of the zillions of things that are part of knowledge management, of lessons learned.
John Kotter’s book about urgency was talking, really, about—given the situations that we live in today, almost always you have to be acting carefully and acting with urgency in your mind. But in a crisis or major change or whatever it is, what good organizations do, with respect to lessons learned, is they step back and they say: You know what? We stopped doing those five things that have been a common practice in our business, maybe even in our industry, and the world didn’t fall down. We still made money. We still were able to do things that we thought those policies helped protect. Maybe what we need to think about is whether there is a way to run the business at whatever the normal pace is now— and again, the new normal and all that fun stuff—and learn from how we successfully navigated the crisis. Frequently what happens in lessons learned is a discussion of: Why was there ever a crisis?
You should probably do that too, but the best organizations really think about not only, “Why was there a crisis?” but, “How were we so successful? What was it about the resiliency?” Now we’re talking about Talib, and I just saw a great article by Michael Cook about resiliency. “What is it about the organization that enabled us to survive that, and can we learn from that?” Then, of course, a lot of that is the knowledge that’s the tacit understanding of how the business works, the tacit understanding of how we run things, and if we can articulate that and get some of that out into the open, it can really help the organization think about how it wants to operate in the non-crisis mode.
APQC: One interesting thing you brought up is that you get into a crisis and your main focus is, “We’ve got to survive this crisis.” Sometimes, like you said, businesses will come in and say, “We were doing all this stuff and we didn’t need to do A or B. We’re getting along just fine.” On the flipside of that, Jack, have you seen experiences where an organization gets through a crisis and survives it but once it come outs on the other side leadership says, “You know what? We stopped doing A and B and that was okay in the crisis, but now that we’re through we’ve got to get back to doing certain things because our customers expect us to get back to doing that?”
JACK VINSON: Identifying the things that we must continue doing: We put something on hold that we normally do to make it through the crisis, but maybe it’s a right-to-operate, it’s a legal requirement or a regulatory requirement. We were allowed to put it on hold, but now we have to go back through and fill out all the paperwork. There are some of those that need to happen. I like, better, the example you gave of: There’s a customer requirement. They gave us a pass for the last two months because we collaborated with the customer and got an agreement that we could pause doing that. The question I would of course ask is: What is it about the way we’ve operated in the last two months that was okay? Is there some way that we can think about doing whatever that requirement was differently, so that we can be a little bit more flexible—I was about to use the word “agile,” but that has other implications—and still meet the needs of the customer? The customer could be an internal or an external customer, of course.
There’s another aspect of crisis management that connects to the stuff Dave Snowden has talked about in complex adaptive—he doesn’t talk about complex adaptive systems, but—the fact is that, particularly in crises, the situation emerges out of the actions that you take and the circumstances you’ve been put into. One of the things that I really like, in the context that he talks about it, is that organizations that do best don’t necessarily plan for this specific crisis, but there are some clear boundaries and guidelines by which people operate. If those boundaries and guidelines make sense no matter what, then, even if you’re thrown into a slightly different situation, the way people can work together still makes sense, the best examples being people who do natural disaster emergencies. They do emergency preparedness, the police and the fire and the medical professionals work together and they understand what their roles are. Even if it’s different individuals in those roles at the time of the incident, they understand how they need to work together so that the system can work under this immense crisis. Most businesses don’t work under that kind of pressure.
But they can work under the crisis. Many people use examples of the military, right? They train and train and train in non-wartime so that, when they get into wartime, everything shifts to the people on the ground and the situation as it develops, and the people back home have much less influence on the day-to-day than the people on the ground, in the situation, at the time. The people in the general office set the direction and make sure that everyone is prepared so that, when the thing happens, they can do that. I think that’s the other part of organizations. The role clarity really helps. What are our operating principles?
All this stuff about—again, not knowledge management directly but that clearly helps us—culture and values, and I like the term “boundaries” because then you stop talking about culture and values. What are the boundaries under which we operate, and when are those boundaries fluid? When are they brick walls? Those things can help organizations survive crises.
APQC: If a client or CEO asked you, “We’ve got to get better at transferring and applying critical knowledge, but I’m not sure the most important thing that I need to do to start the process correctly and have it go well,” what would you tell him or her?
JACK VINSON: It’s really a question of: Do you know where you need to apply this critical knowledge? And how do people need to be able to get it? Do you have a company of 50 people all in one place, or is it 50,000 people all over the world? So it depends. Then it’s going to be a long talk about the technology.
I think what I’m interested in is: How is that going to help you, as the CEO or chief operating officer, enable the company to grow? And of course: How is that going to help you, as a C-level person, do well? Hopefully your and the company’s definitions of “do well” are aligned.
The key question there is: Where is that critical knowledge? And again, defining “critical knowledge” as the knowledge needed to get things to flow. Where are those flows getting stuck?—which might mean thinking about the way your work moves in a different way. What causes you the biggest concerns on a regular basis?
In that conversation, I probably wouldn’t worry about: What is your greatest fear of this business? No, it’s: If your business is doing fairly well, what’s going to keep it from growing? That’s the limitation kind of view. What would you need—again, from a flow perspective, not “I need to buy this new machine,” or “I need to hire 50 new people” or “500 new people.” But rather, what’s going to enable the organization to flow? That’s going to suggest a lot of things, but one piece is going to be this critical knowledge aspect. Once we see where that is, then I start asking more detailed questions. What do we already have in place? What’s working? What’s not working? Why is it not working? Okay, there are these aspects; let’s go and think about that. Assuming that the organization understands this flow of work and flow of product, flow of ideas, flow of projects, flow of supply chain— all of that is related—then you’d have a good idea of where your lever is. If I’ve got a long enough lever and I’ve got the right fulcrum, I can move the world, right?
APQC: Do you think that people’s perceptions of KM tools are starting to change? Are people saying, “You know what? The tools are good and they’re important, but it’s not going to be this magical box, panacea, that’s going to solve all our KM issues?”
JACK VINSON: I would like to say, “Yes, I see that change,” but unfortunately, I don’t. It’s a reality. Just if you look at popular media, so if you look at the news, however you consume news these days, anytime there’s new technology, people are just fascinated with: Oh, it’s going to boost productivity, or it’s going to change this.
I’m also a polyglot; I love listening to many, many different things. So, I was listening to Stanford’s Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders series and they had somebody on from a venture capital firm that’s sponsored medical-related innovation. She gave examples of a lot of organizations that are doing technology, but the reason behind those innovations was they’re really trying to find ways to remove the arterial sclerosis in the industry that they’re looking at—in this case, it’s medicine—to improve the flow, to improve outcome. So, they really have a good sense—again, in the one-hour talk I listened to—the key for them is they want to improve the outcomes. There’s a goal that they have in mind, and they look to fund organizations that seem to have a way to improve outcomes. Reducing the amount of time it takes to do something, or reducing the potential for errors, or enabling better information flow, all these great versions of language that look at: Here’s something I see that’s stuck, and it’s a big enough problem that I think I can create a solution for it, and of course, make money, because those organizations are all for-profit organizations.
The thing behind the tools—whether it’s social media or the latest project management stuff or the new version of Google, Apple, Chrome, Microsoft stuff—is that they’re not going to solve the problem. A tool may reduce a limitation, it may satisfy a need the way that no other technology can, but if it’s not part of a larger ecosystem, it’s not going to make that much of a difference. I think that’s the story. Again, whether it’s social media or anything else, the real story is, “Does it remove a significant limitation? Does it satisfy a need that hasn’t been satisfied in that way before?” Apple’s iPhone is a beautiful example of that. Nobody knew they had that need, right? Nobody knew that they needed a car when Ford came out with a cheap, affordable car.
That leads down different paths for people, but the key, in my mind, is there are some other pieces around the technology. What problem do you think you’re solving? What value do you think you’re creating? What systems were in place previously, and how much are they going to need to change if you bring in this new capability?
If you’re going to need to change a lot, then maybe the solution you’re bringing in needs to change? Maybe you need to think about: You know what? We need to do some work on the organization before we even think about bringing in some new software or new way of using the current software. And then we can bring in the software because we’ve molded the organization in a way, and this software is then going to release some new capacity for us, whereas if we just threw the software in, it would just get stuck.
I worked with an internal IT organization where they do customization of their off-the-shelf software. Then, after many years, they did an analysis and said: Oh my god, we’ve done all these customizations, and maybe 50 percent of them are still used. So, they spent all this time doing customizations and modifying, and then they discovered that easily 50 percent of the changes they’ve made are not valued by their end users.
It’s unfortunate. Maybe, at the time, it seemed like a need. So, there was some big disconnect for them.