A solution looking for a problem

Knowledge Management rubs me the wrong way.  The idea seems simple enough, so simple that it appears obvious and good – if people share their knowledge they will make everyone more effective at their jobs.

It probably offends me because it’s almost the exact opposite of process orientation.  I’m sure in reality that they’re quite compatible, but the place it’s coming from feels wrong to me.  I happen to believe that people are inherently lazy.  There’s even some evidence now that it might be genetically encoded in us to be that way.  Of course, we also see lots of evidence for this in behavioral economics.  The Pension Protection Act took advantage of people’s inherent laziness to help them save for retirement.  Rather than having people opt into their 401k, they can now be automatically enrolled and have to opt out instead.  Surprise, surprise, enrollment rates went through the roof AND people stayed in the plan.  We are built to be lazy.

So, with that in mind, the idea that people who have formed these ‘informal networks’ will be willing to volunteer their time to write down everything they know and submit it as a ‘knowledge asset’ just doesn’t line up with my belief system.

Worse than that, the value of Knowledge Management (KM, hereafter) is difficult if not impossible to measure.  In theory, every employee saves time be reusing knowledge that already exists – if only they can find it effectively.  But since the effect of KM isn’t detectable, KM people talk about about the key X’s that make KM successful – engage, reuse and something else I can’t remember. 

It doesn’t matter anyway.  It’s the first time I’ve seen a project proposal come with X’s and no output measurement (Y).  It’s very typical for someone to give you the end result – Y millions of dollars saved a year or Y% reduction in cycle time.  Often they can’t tell you what about their process actually makes the difference – whether it’s the co-location (I only bring that up because I just read an interesting article which showed that co-location by itself might account for a majority of the benefits that Agile folks claim) or the peer reviews or who knows what.

But no!  Knowledge Management is a solution looking for a problem.  We’re told what makes KM work well, and yet we can’t tell what effect it has on anything.  Honestly, even if I don’t know why it works, thus causing me to have to engage in a long study to figure out what a given process has value, at least you can compare it to other processes and figure out it HAS value.  Not so for KM – they mostly skip over that part and say ‘trust me, it’s good for you.’  I think I’ll pass.

Communities without silos

I’m not much a fan of the new Knowledge Management trend I’ve seen going on.  The gist of the idea is that within and across the silos of a company’s functional organization these spontaneous communities pop up to share information that is otherwise blocked from flowing by the corporate structure.

They are not ideal to the company for a couple reasons.  One, management can’t control the communities that occur without management intervention.  Management likes to control things, so it’s very frustrating to them to have these little communities exist without their approval.  Two, knowledge that is shared through the community has value to the business but isn’t being recorded anywhere.  If the community breaks down the knowledge it collectively had is lost.

Where I am, we’re struggling with creating new communities, even though we’ve hired in a very knowledgeable and talented individual to help build them.  I started to wonder what the issue was exactly.  In theory, these communities for knowledge sharing already existed here, they were just informal.  If we created the structure for them to formalize, shouldn’t people flock to the new corporate-supported structure?

One possibility would be that no communities really existed to be made into something formal.  But why would no communities exist?  Could the company have acted in a manner to squash the informal communities deliberately?  Not deliberately?

Deliberate supression seems unlikely.  First, you’d have to recognize communities to squash and informal communties wouldn’t be easily recognized.  It’d just be people talking to other people.  No websites, no blogs, no meetings, no shared data in any written form at all.  No proof that anything was going on.

So what kind of non-deliberate action could the company have taken to destroy the seeds of community?  What if it is the way the company is structured?  Typically, companies have silos that are relatively stable and encourage up and down communication of information.   Crossing silo boundaries occurs at a management level where necessary to coordinate projects.  But what if the silos weren’t stable, what if the organization was matrix staffed?  If that happened, perhaps an important seed of community is missing – people never stay together long enough to build the trusting relationships needed to form the foundation of a community. 

To have a formal community and informal one must exist first.  With the odds being good that you would not work with the same person or team again for a year or more, when would you ever build up the informal network to share ideas?

It’s a stretch I know, but I haven’t yet figured out why people didn’t flock to a place to share knowledge they were already sharing.  I’m a believer that there’s a simple force at work here – that the 80/20 rule applies and single cause is keeping most people away.

Given the sheer number of people at the company I find it hard to believe some of the more cynical reasons like “we’re a culture that doesn’t share” (it goes against human nature, if you can believe Mark Buchanan’s ‘The Social Atom’), “everyone’s too busy” (always too busy to make their own life easier?), and “there’s no management support for it.” (isn’t that the point, it’s a community, there’s no formal management at all)

I think we’re looking at something more subtle at play here.