Preparing
for Conversation #2 with Verna Allee
A Maxim a Day
Keeps Disaster Away
Verna Allee
Verna
Allee Associates
Martinez, California, US
 Introduction
AOK members will
recognize Verna Allee personally as a frequent poster to the
STAR Series and those who have been with us for a few years will
remember she took her first turn as moderator in April, 2003.
At that time she introduced us to value networks and said,
"There is really only one management question: What do we
need to pay attention to in order to be successful?" To
the traditional profits, expenses, production and labor Verna
added knowledge, understanding and intelligence to create value.
She was, and still
is, part of the era of KM that might have been described as the
'Big Bang.' The energy of change had exploded, galaxies were
forming and no one knew for sure where they were or what the
future would be. There were no maps, no history, no guideposts
to follow. As Verna and the rest of us struggled to find our
place in the new world we looked for some sort of order, grabbing
for particles as they floated by, looking for safe harbor, developing
theories and experimenting with practices that would make sense
of a radically different order.
During this new
discussion, Verna hopes to lead a collective look at where and
how far we have come. With you, she want's to take stock, review
what we've discovered, what we have learned for certain and what
we still need to know. Please join Verna Allee in this two-week
self-examination of the Maxims of KM.
Back
to top
Biography
Verna Allee, M.A.
(http://www.vernaallee.com)
is recognized worldwide for her work in value networks, knowledge
management, intangibles, communities of practice, and new business
models. She is a practitioner, thought leader, author, and frequent
keynote speaker. Through her global value network of partners,
including  Euro-Focus in Germany and Vision 2020 in Brussels,
she consults with a wide variety of organizations-from global
corporations and entrepreneurial startups to government agencies
and global action networks. Her many customers include Telenor
and Hydro Aluminum in Norway, HP, Boeing, Cisco, Environment
Canada (government), Ag Research (New Zealand), The Institute
of Public Health Ireland, The World Conservation Union (IUCN),
PricewaterhouseCoopers, Identity Commons, MWH, Sun Micro Systems,
Oracle, Eli Lilly, and Motorola.
Verna is a Fellow
of the World Business Academy and advisor to the European Commission,
the Brookings Institution, and other policy advisors. In July
2001 and September 2003, she was featured in cover articles for
knowledge management journals as one of the top people in the
knowledge management field. She is on a number of Advisory Boards
including the Collaborative Intelligence Lab at UC Berkeley,
the Institute for the Enterprise of the Future with George Washington
University, and the Hazel Henderson's Ethical Business television
series. She is visiting professor at Greenwich University (London),
Hanken Business School (Helsinki), University of Waikato (New
Zealand) and CROMA Business Academy in Zagreb (Croatia).
Verna's publications
include The Future of Knowledge: Increasing Prosperity through
Value Networks (2003) and The Knowledge Evolution
(1997), which is a continuing best seller in the knowledge management
field. She is also co-editor with Dinesh Chandra of What is
True Wealth and How Do We Create It? (2003). Verna is a contributing
author to several books and journals and is on the editorial
board of Inside Knowledge magazine. She is co-developer
of The ValueNet Works Fieldbook™ and the GenIsis™ application
that supports her powerful and innovative methods. Her colleague
Oliver-Schwabe leads certification in her methods and moderates
an on-line community of users from around the world.
Back
to top
Pre-Dialogue
Remarks
max . im (noun)
- a succinct or pithy
saying that has some proven truth to it
- a general rule,
principle, or truth
Five years ago an
AOK dialogue serendipitously began what we now know as the STAR
Series. Yipes! Has it really been that long? Steve Denning (then
at the World Bank) and his colleagues Michel Pommier and Leslie
Shneier asked if 'rules of KM' were forming and started us off
with a few pithy principles of KM such as:
- Knowledge sharing
is essential to economic survival
- Communities of
practice are the heart and soul of knowledge sharing
- Virtual community
members also need physical interactions
- Story telling ignites
knowledge sharing
In the late 1990s
we had Larry Prusak's enemies of knowledge management that included
cautions against mechanistic thinking, over reliance on technology,
top down KM. He reminds us that knowledge is in groups - not
individuals. I proposed a "delightful dozen" of my
own in my 1997 book with things like "knowledge is messy;
knowledge seeks community, no one is in charge" and so on.
Lately I have been
trying to "catch" myself and notice what maxims keep
falling from my lips on a fairly regular basis. I can't help
but notice that they seem to have changed or evolved over time
to quite a different set. (This is a good thing I think because
it might indicate that I am teachable and accidentally learning
something from time to time.)
So, for this stint
on STAR Series (gosh, I love that title!) I thought it would
be fun to have a conversation around our "favorite maxims"
and "hot questions." We all have favorite little maxims
and pithy sayings that come up over and over in our conversations.
Can we reflect on what we are relying on most heavily at this
particular point and what is the larger issue underlying it?
These might be tried and true classics or might be ones that
have come to the forefront as being especially compelling or
meaningful right now.
What are the tried
and true principles that you have come to believe in even more
deeply than when we began? What has withstood the test of time?
For me I think one would most surely be those around community:
knowledge seeks community (Allee), knowledge is in groups (Prusak)
and communities of practice are the heart and soul of knowledge
sharing (Denning et al). That was a theme we all hit on in the
beginning and it seems to have become an even stronger theme
today. In fact I cannot think of a single company known for excellence
in knowledge sharing that does not use a communities of practice
strategy. They might call it something else - knowledge networks,
expert communities or something like that - but the supporters
and champions are quite explicitly applying community of practice
principles.
What are some of
the other "classics" that have withstood the test of
time and practice? What are the ones that people still find most
relevant today?
I notice too that
there are also some "emergent" maxims that I am relying
on quite a bit. What are the new principles and issues that are
beginning to emerge and how do they help us tell our KM story?
What are we saying or emphasizing differently today than what
we might have said a year ago? Where are the edges of a real
breakthrough in perspective for us personally, more broadly across
our field, in management practices, or more directly within an
organization you are working with?
Here is an example
of a somewhat newer one that I find myself iterating over and
over: "We are moving from a world of jobs to a world of
roles." This shift of perspective is critical in understanding
the changing foundations of how we organize work. As we become
more and more networked people we negotiate more around projects
and our roles in the project. Yet, we are often stuck in job
descriptions that don't allow for these other roles. LaVeta Gibbs,
whose group heads up all the contact centers around the world
for Cisco sums it up pretty well. She says, "Our group is
funded for the obvious role of providing knowledge to the customer.
Yet we are capable of playing and even expected to play other
roles. We play an analyst role in understanding the customer
feedback we get, an advisory role into the strategy and decision-making
activities, a consulting role to production and we are innovation
partner for development. How can we make those other roles more
visible, supported and appreciated both in my own group and in
the larger organization?"
Another little principle
I put forward is to remind people that we just made up the concept
of "the firm." I love this quote from Peter Drucker
in 2000 for Fast Company. "The corporation as we
know it will not survive the next 25 years. Legally and financially
perhaps, but not structurally and not economically." (Of
course we are now 6 years into that prediction.) What if "the
firm" as we know it becomes just one organizational form
of many? What is emerging? Then how do we organize, how do we
make decisions, how will accountability work? If we are truly
in a world of collaboration, roles and projects then we will
need to learn how to "make up" very different forms
of organizations, yet as a general business population this is
not something we have been trained to do.
A personal favorite
and one that usually sparks a lively discussion around leadership
is "You cannot administer a network you can only serve it."
Our illusion of and desire for control is so pervasive in business
thinking that this maxim requires an enormous shift of perspective.
I first heard something similar from Meg Wheatley who says, "You
cannot fight a network with a hierarchy." This principle
is proving quite powerful in my business conversations.
Here is another
one that I find is a powerful punch line: "If you don't
have a way to tell your story other people will make it up for
you."
Everywhere I go
now people are expressing deep frustration with the performance
indicators that are driving their decision making - and they
feel helpless to fight them. Their "hot question" is
"how can we fight back?" When we explore this we find
that they are being given mostly industrial age performance indicators
or financial measures such as financial ROI, revenue and cost
reduction, which are mandated by some politician or CEO. In KM
we have rather conveniently side stepped the educational work
around the intangibles story and now it is coming back to bite
us in an uncomfortable part of our anatomy. Without this foundation
the people we are asking to support our efforts have no way to
tell the story of why we should do it or demonstrate the big
wins on the non-financial aspects of building capability. There
is a learning curve in how to speak this language and I see KM
people expressing the same frustration with metrics - where in
my view it is our job to develop, tell and educate people into
that new story. Even when I introduced this topic in the last
STAR Series it generated more whining than productive suggestions
for how to get on with the job.
Here are a couple
of other quickies:
- Transformation
happens one darn person at a time. (Sigh)
- Conversation is
the cellular level of knowledge creation - and the most ignored.
Anyway, you get
the drift. So I am curious - what, for you, are the tried and
true "classics" and what are the newer or "emergent"
maxims that you find yourself relying on in your current conversations?
Join the Dialogue,
February 20 - March 2, 2006
Back
to top
|
