Preparing
for Conversations with Dr. Edna Pasher
Strategic Renewal
-- The Key Link Between KM and Organizations
Dr. Edna Pasher
President,
Edna Pasher Ph.D. & Associates
Herzliya, Israel
Introducing a
new topic to a market is not easy. Those of us who have been
intensively involved in the global knowledge movement sometimes
forget that there are people who are still suspicious, who think
we have just invented a new fashion.-
Edna Pasher
 Introduction
Edna Pasher founded
Edna Pasher Ph.D. & Associates, an international strategic
management consulting firm in 1978 and has assisted organizations
in both the public and private sectors in speeding up renewal
in a fast changing environment. It was that mission that brought
her to Knowledge Management as a strategic renewal process.
Dr. Pasher is a
frequent speaker in national and international conferences. She
earned her Ph.D. at New York University in Communication Arts
and Sciences and has served as faculty member at Adelphi University,
the City University of New York, the Hebrew University in Jerusalem
and the Tel-Aviv University. She developed the first training
program for knowledge managers in collaboration with the Open
University in Israel.
In 1994 her firm
identified knowledge management as the critical success factor
for organizational renewal and its consultants have become the
leaders of the knowledge management movement in Israel and active
participants in the international community of the Intellectual
Capital Pioneers. They have established the Knowledge-in-Action
series of international face-to-face and electronic conferences
on knowledge management and intellectual capital, and the Knowledge
Cafe` Forum which has met on a regular basis for about 30 times
since 1995. In 2001, in collaboration with the Israeli Management
Association, Edna Pasher Ph.D. & Associates established the
Forum for Knowledge Management and Innovation. In 2002 Edna started
an interest group on Innovation and Metrics, a Community of Practice
active on-line on Knowledge Board, the Portal for the European
KM Community.
Her firm is partner
in a major European Union funded project -- NIMCube, designed
to develop a holistic reference method for the re-use and innovation
process of knowledge in the field of new product development.
This approach -- complete with a ToolKit and software application
-- tries to create new knowledge by transferring existing knowledge
into a new context.
Realizing the implications
of knowledge strategy at the national level, Dr. Pasher also
created the Intellectual Capital Report of the State of Israel
-- "Hidden Values of the Desert" -- in which indicators
provide a benchmark of the progress of Israel against other industrialized
nations of the world..
Edna Pasher Ph.D
& Associates founded Status, the leading Israeli monthly
magazine for management in 1991 and Rom Knowledgeware, a firm
that provides IT solutions for Knowledge Management.
We are fortunate
to have Edna for two weeks as moderator of the STAR Series Dialogues.
Please prepare by reading the following two articles.
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Saving
KM by Driving Strategic Renewal of Organizations
KM seems to be dying
even before it has matured. I have followed it from the very
beginning in the early 90`s and it makes me very sad. It seems
that it is so obvious why KM is so important for the sustainability
of organizations -- so why is it so slow to mature and why is
there so much disappointment around it while it is still in its
infancy?
If we want to save
KM, we need first to acknowledge these hard facts and only then
move quickly from problem to solution before it is too late.
What are the barriers
to KM?
First of all, the
fact that KM deals with the intangible. This is the tragic irony
of our field. By definition it is very difficult. Very few people
are happy to deal with intangibles. The real revolution of letting
go of the old management models of the tangible world, that are
no longer working in a world of intangibles, has hardly begun.
Here is a little personal story about it:
I recently had a
conversation with one of my associates who is going abroad to
continue her studies. I asked her for feedback and insights how
we could manage our consulting firm better. She said-bring in
a manager. Now this is very interesting. I always try to practice
what I preach, so it is natural for me to let my team self manage,
let the tasks be divided in a self organized way, as we have
all learnt from complexity theories. It seems that my own employees
look for more command and control! It left me with food for thought.
Another barrier
for KM growth is the waste of resources on IT support for KM
that has failed. Organizations that looked for quick fixes got
enthusiastic with KM and the fantasy that they could now store
all the knowledge of their employees and they went looking for
an easy solution and bought KM software, installed it and were
eagerly waiting to see all the knowledge of employees captured
in it-and then were disappointed to find out that the system
stayed pretty empty. This is of course no surprise for those
of us that understand that knowledge workers will participate
in KM only if it focuses on their own needs, if it supports their
work, if it frees their time for creative work.
Another barrier
to KM has to do with the fact that it has focused on re-use of
existing knowledge and not as much on creating value through
innovation or new knowledge. The focus on high productivity of
existing knowledge has-in retrospect-an element of greed in it.
In the mid 90s during the first generation of KM, companies first
discovered the meaning of knowledge as the creator of wealth.
In addition they discovered that when people leave, their knowledge
goes with them. The big thing was how to turn individual knowledge
into organizational knowledge; how to turn tacit knowledge into
explicit knowledge. This trend neglected the fact that people
must want to share their knowledge and if they don't, no fancy
software will convince them to, and it will stay empty.
So what should we
do to make KM the real leading activity of every manager in every
organization? It seems we have to start with some unlearning.
We need to let go of old management concepts that were fine in
Taylor`s time, when most of the workers were doing manual work.
We have to let go of command and control. We have to understand
that knowledge work is actually all volunteer work. You can make
people come to work on time and leave on time, but they have
to choose to contribute the best of their brain work. They have
to choose to please a client, to help a colleague, to share their
lessons learnt from their mistakes with their team. This is the
challenge of KM. It has first to create awareness that we need
to look for new forms of organizations; new work environments
where knowledge workers are happy to create and share knowledge.
We have to realize that by hiring people we have not hired their
knowledge, but we have the opportunity to encourage them volunteer
their knowledge to the organization, as they develop their own
knowledge.
If we do not want
KM to die we have to quickly lead a management revolution that
is so necessary in the knowledge age for the sustainability of
KM and the sustainability of organizations.
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Strategy,
Knowledge and Communication
In today's fast-paced
business environment, organizations must continually renew their
strategies. The first step is communication.
The three components
of the title to this article are the three focuses companies
must maintain if they want to succeed in today's dynamic business
environment.
In the past it was
enough to develop a strategy and simply follow it for a few years.
In those days, executives would spend a long time developing
a strategic plan. The knowledge necessary for this task was kept
at the top level of the company. Line workers were not expected
to ask strategic questions; instead, they were told to work on
tasks generated from the strategy developed at the top.
In large corporations,
executives would outsource strategic planning to management consultants,
who created a strategic plan for them. In small companies, especially
in privately owned ones, the top executive would make the strategic
decisions himself. (It was mainly "himself," and not
"herself," at the time.) The strategic plan was translated
into objectives for middle managers, who communicated them to
supervisors for implementation with their teams. This was a lengthy
process. Sometimes it took more than a year, during which time
the workers were not involved at all in the strategic process.
Those days are gone
for a few reasons. First, things change so fast that strategies
need to be reconsidered often. Second, knowledge workers hate
to work for companies that do not involve them in the strategic
process. Third, strategy making can no longer be outsourced,
since in a fast-changing environment it is the organization's
most important core competency.
How does an organization
continually renew its strategy? Through effective management
of knowledge. And knowledge management is possible only in organizations
that intentionally create communication environments. Thus we
have the full circle: from communication to knowledge to strategy.
Why is knowledge
management key to strategic renewal? Because the best way to
adapt to a fast-changing business environment is by linking the
islands of knowledge that exist throughout the organization.
This ability to adapt is what strategic renewal is all about,
and it is an outcome of collaborative wisdom. Incorporating all
the knowledge and perspectives within your organization helps
you create the future.
Why is communication
key to knowledge management? Because knowledge becomes productive
when it flows. What Peter Drucker calls "high productivity
of knowledge" is achieved when people share knowledge. Conversations
have become the most value-adding activity in the organization-within
teams, among teams, and even beyond the borders of the organization.
Information technology
has been a key enabler to knowledge management. But knowledge
cannot be easily captured in information systems. IT is most
effective in helping organizations manage knowledge when it allows
for virtual communication environments that let people carry
on conversations without physical constraints. The most important
knowledge is often tacit and cannot be easily documented, but
technology makes it possible for people to communicate that knowledge
throughout the organization.
One effective tool
for promoting strategic conversations is a "knowledge café,"
or ongoing virtual conference. The knowledge café allows
people to participate in a communication environment that is
at once both intimate and geographically dispersed. It lets people
virtually gather at the same time and place, helping to create
and communicate collaborative knowledge.
As a management
consultant, I find I am most effective when I serve as host to
a knowledge café in a client organization, thus helping
strategy emerge naturally instead of trying to plan it mechanically.
And I have a personal strategy, too. When I grow old and no longer
am able to travel the way management consultants need to, I will
sit at my desk at home, virtually hosting knowledge cafés
around the world.
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