Day 1 (morning) at Henley KM conference

Very interesting set of talks on the first day of the Henley Knowledge Management conference - the first time I have attended this event.

Jacqueline Gallinetti (Plan International) described creating a knowledge sharing culture in a federated global NGO. Very much a practitioner's guide, she described attempts to start small and pilot, which created ripples of change but were not successful until there was support from the top. THe culture change started with a new business goal and commitment to KM linked to this goal. They introduced research initiatives into KM and local initiatives, and put in place a programme structure to grow these. This developed a strategy, pilots and helped elaborate the full requirements for their organisation.

Moving from strategy to reality (making it real) involved formal/structural parts (document sharing processes, an IM strategy, knowledge & information architecture, an academy, intranet upgrade) and importantly the infromal parts (recognising what already existed, rewarding & modelling behaviours, supporting local initiatives, learning circles). The support from the top was demonstrated by making KM a management issue, including performance management competences, reporting on KM metrics and putting resources into the knwoledge architecture. An inspiring story to start, with much work still to do.

Arthur Shelley (@Metaphorage) disucssed "knowledge flow" - moving beyond knowing what to do ... into action to do it. He emphasized starting with the value of KM (and describing the behaviours but without mentioning the terminology of KM) ... then the people, process and finally the tools (the opposite way to how it's normally considered, maybe). Starting from the value, working with the business goals ... the knowledge flow can generate the superior performance required by executives ... a virtuous circle. But making the change requires coaching leaders in new behaviours, developing a style of letting go ... KM and control don't play well together!

Karl-Erik Sveiby challenged the ubiquity of the innovation paradigm ... highlighting how radical innovation can lead to temporary incompetence across markets. Using the example of the banking crisis, and the financial failures from 1987-2007, his research showed a period of "temporary" incompetence that lasted several decades as the financial sector came to terms with the consequences of technology developed in the 70's. The dominant belief systems within the domain/system drive sets of behaviours that deny the existence of data that doesn't support the accepted model ... leading to eventual failure. There was subsequent discussion about the unintended consequences of the Internet revolution ... what long term impacts will we feel, and what temporary incompetence are we/markets experiencing during the current experiment.