A sad indictment

I recently came across the 2012 report from the Office of the Inspector General into NASA's Lessons Learned system. It appears that many of the recommendations are  similar to that from the NASA Lessons Learned GAO report in 2002, and others such as the 2003 Columbia Accident Investigation Board report. As a result, the conclusion of this latest report is pretty damning.

As I learned some years ago madness is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Here are a few thoughts about what NASA might do differently:

• As well as fixing the 'supply' side and codification of information; what about really stimulating the 'demand' side of the learning loop? This barely gets a mention. KIN Associate Nick Milton has advocated this for ages. 

• Things are not helped by the report conflating information management and knowledge management, when the two require quite different approaches and processes. The recommendations should use this differentiation and resources be applied appropriately.

• There is a fascinating tension between the need for accountability / due-diligence and the informality that effective knowledge sharing often needs to foster trust. The legal ramifications of high profile and expensive disasters (Challenger, Deepwater Horizon, Buncefield) have done us no favours in this regard. The answer: Communities of Practice remain the most effective vehicles for the stewardship and accessibility of 'latent' knowledge and know-how. Large organisations such as NASA do recognise this but rarely do they see the same level of investment or monitoring as Lessons Learned Systems.

Let's hope we do not see yet another NASA 'Lessons Learned System' failure report in 2013.

KIN's maturity modelling reaches a new level of maturity

It is two years since KIN carried-out our second comparative study of the 'organisational learning maturity' of our member organisations. We subsequently used the results to:

• Shape the KIN programme of events
• Give an empirical benchmark for members to judge whether they are improving 
• Identify the gap between member organisations that are very mature in certain aspects and help those with a need to improve bridge the gaps identified

In Q1 next year, we will repeat the KIN Maturity Model exercise, culminating in the KIN Spring Workshop, where we will present the results. We have several new member organisations that have not participated in either of the two previous modelling exercises and it will be useful to how others have improved against previous benchmarks.

KIN itself has matured. Whilst last time we used some Google Forms to collect the data, our resident Google Guru, Phil Ridout, has done wonders using the new web tools available in Google Sites. Phil has developed a smart online tool that takes care of the entire process from data collection to presentation of results. Not only will this make the process much easier and simpler, it will be 'packaged' as a tool for ongoing use by member organisations.

The completion and analysis of the maturity model has spawned many interesting discussions along the way. One of these is 'to what level of granularity should we apply the maturity model'? This is important, as a high-level perspective may mask many different islands of excellence and poor performance. It is for this reason that we are packaging the tool so that members can also use it to identify and bridge the excellence gap within their own organisation.

The KIN Maturity Modelling Tool is still undergoing development and will be available for testing by December. I look forward to telling you how it progresses and the results we achieve.

Sometimes, you have to state the obvious because it's often overlooked. As Michael Norton of KIN Members the Local Government Association puts it  "why go to all the effort of attracting new members if they don’t contribute to the community?"

Many will join a community of practice just for what they can get out of it. There's nothing wrong with that; presumably it creates value or disseminates new insights or learning for the organisation. Those insights have to come from somewhere though. 

As Michael puts it "You want to make contributing to your group irresistible. Don’t expect to write the acceptance message and leave it at that". But that's often what happens. Michael has some practical help and some communication tips and templates that can help make more joiners active rather than passive. You can read his blog on Membership Acceptance here.

Last week I facilitated a KIN Members' site visit to Schlumberger. (See the KIN Calendar entry for November 11 here http://www.ki-network.org/jm/events-and-activities/kin-calendar)

We were delighted that Schlumberger - who were previously KIN members - were prepared to share with us their latest insights and tools in knowledge management.

As the host,  Dave Staughton described and showed to us their family of knowledge management initiatives.

As always with these type of events, the real value came not only from learning from Dave's experience at Schlumberger, but just as much from the discussion with and input from the other attendees. They were able to relate what Dave was showing us to their own environments and provide alternative viewpoints and valuable insights into tools, techniques and processes - what works and what doesn't.

My biggest single takeout form the day was that KIN should organise these events more frequently between KIN member organisations. The learning you get from spending just a few hours focussing on how a single organisation has addressed KM issues which are common to most organisations can be just as rich - if not richer - than the learning you get at any of our other events.

So, KIN members! Who's going to volunteer to host the next one ? Let me know in the comments or via email. I'd love to hear from you.

Oh, and I liked Dave's take on the perennial debate over the use (or not) of the term 'Knowledge Management'. Schlumberger have no problem using the term. For them, KM is 'Management for Knowledge' as opposed to 'Management of Knowledge'. It is the management of people, processes and systems that enables knowledge to flow around the organisation.

Stirring a linguistic hornets nest

I've never really given this a lot of thought, but during a 'lessons learnt' training course I ran today, someone asked me why I used the word 'learnt' rather than 'learned'.

My assumption has been that the former was the British English pronunciation and spelling, the latter American English.

It seems that grammatically, this is not the case, although you will almost never see or hear 'learnt' used by an American. 

OK, the correct / purist definition is as follows (deep breath...)

English (as in Queen's English):
"learned": a present participle that performs the role of an adjective by qualifying a following noun.
"learnt": a past participle that performs the role of a adjective by qualifying a noun.

These words will be participles only if used along with a helping verb, also called an auxiliary verb like "to be" or "to have". If used without an auxiliary verb, there is a possibility that the word "learnt" is actually a verb and not a participle. This depends entirely upon the sentence structure.
Both these words are derived from the infinitive of the verb "to learn". While "learned" refers to a current state of acquired knowledge of the accusative noun, in this case the the noun following the word "learned"; the word "learnt" refers to a past incident that caused the accusative noun to become aware of something or gain some knowledge.

Got that? This is all a little dense and pedantic, so my simple justification for using 'learnt' is that you wouldn't use 'meaned' rather than 'meant'. 

Go argue.