What does a new broom know?

You may be familiar with the thought experiment sometimes called the 'is it the same broom?'. In a the 12th episode of the last series of Dr Who, Peter Capaldi asks "you take a broom, you replace the handle, and then later you replace the brush. And you do that, over and over again. Is it still the same broom?".It's actually a modern variant of the ancient 'Ship of Theseus' question, in which the philosopher Plutarch asked whether a ship which was restored by replacing every one of its wooden parts remained the same ship.

This came to mind when a client recently told me that when analysing staff turnover in a particular department of 24 people, it was discovered that not one individual had been in post 5 years ago. If every member of staff was replaced over that period, is it the same department? Well of course it is; but it raises the question of continuity, and in particular what that department knows. I thought it fascinating that not only did they not know what they had forgotten, but had no idea that they might have had forgotten anything (credit: Donald Rumsfeld). Another very large organisation I met with this week told me they were now experiencing 50% turnover per year. That's an entirely new ship, or broom, every 2 years. They had vastly ramped-up their graduate recruitment program to compensate.

The know-how and organisational learning implications of this are enormous:

1. Knowledge retention initiatives for experienced individuals or those with unique knowledge simply cannot wait until someone leaves. A proactive risk-management and prioritisation process is vital to ensure scarce support resources are used effectively.
2. On-boarding has to be effective and well-supported. 
3. Knowledge must be stewarded by professional or subject-matter networks, not just vested in an individual.  Building up this 'latent' or network knowledge capability is the most sustainable risk-mitigation for such a scenario, but rarely a priority under such pressure.

Centuries after Plutarch, the philosopher Thomas Hobbes introduced a further puzzle, wondering what would happen if the ship's original planks were gathered up after they were replaced, and used to build a second ship. I leave you to ponder what this might mean for an organisation's knowledge distributed to the four winds.

Evidence-based decisions also need Critical Thinking

During World War II, the RAF lost a lot of planes to German anti-aircraft fire. They examined all of the planes that made it back to determine where to put protective armour. The picture below show an aggregation of where bullet holes had damaged the planes. Where would you put the armour? The answer appears at the end of this post (1).

This critical thinking exercise was just one that we used during the Knowledge and Innovation Network workshop on 'Evidence-based Decision Making' that we ran last week. Having reliable and complete evidence on which to understand the problem is the start. We learned from several case studies (VISA, IBM, Healthcare policy, Macmillan Cancer Support, the College of Policing and Norton Rose Fulbright) how they gather, present and analyse data, often in real-time, on which to make decisions. How often are your organisation's decisions made on the basis of the HiPPO (highest paid person's opinion) or symptomatic information?

Another experiential learning exercise I ran required teams to consider a 'scenario' and then rank 8 pieces of evidence in order of trustworthiness (2). The scenario was:

'You are a senior manager at a large Italian IT firm specializing in stock control systems. The productivity of the software engineers is below average for the sector. The Board of Directors wants to introduce a performance-related pay model, which the Finance Director says would ‘give the workers a financial incentive to carry out more work’. Since you are not sure what causes the low productivity of the engineers, you decide to consult a number of sources before you decide to implement a performance-related pay model.'

I shan't give you all 8 pieces of evidence, but here are just 4 for you to have a go at ranking, in order of 'trustworthiness' (a deliberately vague term).

1. You contact a senior consultant at a well-known consulting firm. This consultant tells you that based on his experience with a large number of manufacturing engineering firms in the US, the most likely cause for low productivity in firms such as yours, is lack of leadership. He therefore advises you not to introduce the performance-related pay model and provide leadership training for all supervisors and senior managers instead.
2.  The Chief Operating Officer (COO) shows you the graph below, indicating a wide variation of productivity between teams. It appears that teams with a large proportion of senior engineers (5 years experience and more) are twice as productive as teams with a large number of young and inexperienced engineers. She therefore advises you to invest in the training and support of young and inexperienced engineers and a more balanced distribution between the teams.
3.  The union representing the majority of the engineers has vigorously resisted previous attempts at introducing performance-related pay. The most recent of which resulted in a threatened strike ballot and even greater reduced output whilst negotiations were underway. The Board decided not to pursue the performance-related pay scheme.
4. The HR director tells you that the most likely cause for low productivity is lack of teamwork: it is well known that engineers in general lack social skills, and as a result don’t share task-relevant knowledge necessary to solve practical problems and improve performance. She therefore advises you to not to introduce the performance-related pay model and invest in team-building instead.

As you might imagine, having 8 pieces of evidence and 6 teams ranking them, resulted in a huge and passionate debate. This was of course the purpose - applying the principles of evidence-based decision making that we had learned earlier, to situations that are often ill-defined, with missing data and a host of assumptions that need to be made. This was a brilliant and stimulating exercise. The answers (or at least the consensus view!) are given below (3).

As an example of the importance of having a rich source of evidence on which to make decisions, how about this: "When making important strategic decisions, only 29 percent of organizations considered more than one alternative. Just adding a second option made it six times more likely that the decision would later be rated as ‘very successful.’ " (4)

Here's a final example of why critical thinking needs to be applied to data (5). 

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Answers and credits

(1) Answer to plane exercise (presented by Steve Dale): You only have data for the planes that have returned, not the planes that have been (presumably) shot down. You should improve protection in all of the places that have NO bullet holes.

(2) Based on an idea from Eric Barends of the Center for Evidence Based Management http://www.cebma.org/

(3) Answers to evidence ranking exercise (in order of trustworthiness and rationale):

#2 'The Chief Operating Officer tells you that …'. This is based on your own organization's data, which appears to provide objective and reliable evidence and comparison groups. Be careful about statements such as ‘appears to’; we would like to actually see the data regarding age distribution. Data points per team member may be a good indicator of productivity, but what about quality?

#1 'You contact a senior consultant at a well-known consulting firm...'. Represents professional opinion or experience since it is not clear what measures of productivity and teamwork were used. The opinion may be based on a general impression rather than reliable or valid data. How much influence does the different context (US) and different sector (manufacturing engineering) make?

#'The HR director tells you…'. Since no specific evidence is provided, the HR director’s advice should be considered a personal opinion or belief.

#4 'The union representing…'. Whilst this threat and previous experience may be a very important factor in how and when such a scheme is implemented, it is not relevant as evidence for the effectiveness of performance-related pay.

(4) Source: Professor Paul Nutt, Fisher College of Business at Ohio State University, strategy-business.com

(5) Source: Gizmodo.com

Lessons learned - the big daddy of failures

In the 1980s General Motors was in trouble. Financial trouble (Detroit was surviving on massive government cash handouts), union trouble (workers would deliberately leave rattling parts inside door panels and get drunk on the lines) and was losing massive amounts of market share to Japanese imports. Toyota and Honda were showing-up the GM products for what they were; shoddy, poorly designed, thirsty dinosaur cars. Then came a remarkable offer from Toyota - they would show General Motors how they build quality, profitable, desirable vehicles. Not only that, but they would build and jointly run a car manufacturing plant in the US to actually teach GM how to build the best mass-produced quality cars in the world. The result was the New United Motor Manufacturing Inc (NUMMI) factory in Fremont California.

Why would Toyota do that? Surely helping an ailing competitor would be like turkeys voting for Christmas?

What happened is the stuff of legend; a great story about how successfully applying lessons and transferring knowledge is nuanced and much more than replicating 'good practice'. Did Toyota know that GM would simply be unable to understand, let alone replicate, the culture and ethos that we now know as 'kaizen'? Did GM know that it was Toyota that actually wanted to understand the American way, so that its planned US manufacturing expansion would take account of US worker sensibilities?

For anyone interested in this story and the cultural and organisational learning aspects of knowledge transfer, I heartily recommend listening to Frank Langfitt's 'This American Life' NUMMI podcast.‌ First broadcast in 2010, this story is truly the daddy of lessons not learned, resulting in the original 'too big to fail' bail-out. The naivety, missed opportunities, incompetence and yes, some success will make you laugh and weep; like the big hairy auto worker whose life was changed by the experience. 

Did GM did learn and apply the lessons from Toyota? It took GM and the other US auto manufacturers decades to really take advantage of what Toyota offered them. That's probably why you are driving a Honda, Mitsubishi, Nissan, Lexus or Toyota today.

KRT SIG Announcement: Knowledge Transfer for Joiners - Please build me a spacecraft

Three years ago my son joined an advertising agency - it was his first job after university. Those who designed the agency's induction process had really thought about the know-how and know-who that somebody new to an organisation (or indeed the world of work) rarely gets . Each graduate was given a 5 week assignment that could only be achieved by them talking with campaign planners, account managers, creatives and a number of the back-office functions. This wasn't make-work, but a real project which helped them feel productive as quickly as possible. The unstated aim was of course also to help the newbies build their personal network. What reminded me of this was reading about NASA's Project HOPE - 'Hands On Project Experience'. Jon Boyle and Ed Hoffman of NASA recently published a paper http://km.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2015/03/Real-Knowledge-at-NASA.pdf that describes their 'knowledge services model for the modern project environment'. The section on how the HOPE program features a number of case-studies where early-entry NASA managers have to design, develop and launch an suborbital flight project in 18 months. In this way they learn quickly about the business, governance, operations policies and standards- and presumably started to build their personal networks too. All too often, new starters are thrown in the deep end of an existing project and expected to 'pick-up stuff' as they go along. An alternative could be to:  Engineer an induction project for new starters such that they make a contribution as soon as possible. This also reduces the 'time to competency' for the organisation.  Help them make a wide-variety of connections outside their immediate team/function Asks 'what else does this individual bring to the organisation, over and above fulfilling the job description?' This is particularly important and valuable for those joining from other organisations or with sector experience. I've come across organisations that do elements of these, but not all. Has anyone else come across intelligent and interesting knowledge transfer for joiners programs? Join in the discussion on our new LinkedIn group

ISO 9001 revision - what knowledge managers need to know

For those not familiar with ISO 9001, this is the over-arching international standard for Quality Management. After a four year gestation, an update http://www.iso.org/iso/iso9001_revision is due out in September. For the first time this requires any organization adhering to the standard to demonstrate 'the management of organizational knowledge'.

I've had the devil's-own job navigating the ISO website trying to find out what this really means for those of us working in organisational change and knowledge management.

This is all I have been able to glean about the new requirement:
1. Determine the knowledge necessary for the operation of processes and for achieving conformity of products and services
2. Maintain knowledge and make it available to the extent necessary
3. Consider the current organizational knowledge and compare it to changing needs and trends
4. Acquire the necessary additional knowledge.

Why the words in bold? I am a fan of Josh Bernoff's blog www.withoutbullshit. In this posting he talks about the insidiousness of the 'passive voice' and how to avoid it. The highlighted words above exhibit the worst of this trend. To be fair, there may be more detail on what is meant by the 'knowledge necessary' or 'the extent necessary', however I can't find them in the labyrinth that is the ISO Technical Committee's website. I certainly hope that the final ISO 9001 document is written in more explicit, directive and helpful terms. If not, this is a missed opportunity to leverage the global International Quality Standard to reinforce the importance of knowledge transfer in organizations.