Connecting Knowledge Strategy to Business Strategy | Christopher Parsons of Knowledge Architecture

So this is a talk that I've been working on really since about June of last year. So pretty much right after K Connect, I wanted to pick up where we left off and so I called it Connecting Knowledge Strategy to Business Strategy. So I'm going to do a little go backwards to season seven. So some of you have heard me describe this before. I think of the work that we do in terms of seasons. So they kind of run from right after the end of K Connect to the next K Connect. So this is season eight. This is actually the season eight finale that we're doing right now. And these are some highlights from last season. So we introduced the KM Manifesto, the periodic table of knowledge management elements and then two tools to help structure your knowledge management team and figure out who does what and how do we build a team part time, volunteer full time, and a people to help manage knowledge. So I want to touch on a couple of them briefly. I'm not going to go into much detail. The talk is online. I send it to all of you in advance so it's there if you want to watch it. So just the high level parts of the manifesto. So point one was that we believe that every AEC firm should eventually have a formal knowledge management program. However, we also believe that all firms are already doing knowledge management informally, but they may not call it knowledge management. Number three is that every AEC knowledge management program is different. I still think this is the most important one because when you kind of ask like how should we structure it? What should we start working on? What are some great tips to get started? It really just depends on on what the strategy of your firm is, your priorities, your culture. It's gonna be different in every one of your firms. So there's no unifying theory of knowledge management. I was sad to find out after years of trying to find one. I've set aside that it doesn't exist. I'd be happy to be disproven if any of you can do it. What follows that every program is different is that every team is different. So depending on what you're trying to do with knowledge management, you'll structure your team differently. And finally to do KM really well. And we talked about technology a good amount, Larry started it early is it's not just technology. Yes, of course that's a supporter and enabler, but it's about people and process as well. Okay. So I introduced this last year and I think after spending yesterday, especially in the first part of the day, talking about how broad knowledge is. Right. So all the way from the kind of Pythagorean theorems and the algorithms, that's kind of more tacit, sorry, explicit knowledge all the way over to the more tacit knowledge, right. So the thing that's gained through experience, the know how work. And so it's not surprising, therefore I think that there are that many, all these techniques that people use to help manage that wide diversity of knowledge. Anything from information systems, you know, all the way through research and development and formal learning programs and communications and so on. So the key thing that I talked about last year that is still really important to reinforce is that you should think about those program elements as Legos that you can use to pick and choose the pieces you need to build versus a to do list where you have to check off everything, right? So if your KM program today looks like this, if you have a handful of these elements, the objective is not to flip over every single tile and kind of make sure you're doing everything. It's to pick and choose according to what makes sense for your company. So three kind of quick examples. If the goal is differentiating through innovation, you might assemble some of these elements. If the most important thing is to capture knowledge from departing experts, and we spent a lot of time in these elements yesterday, these might be what you pull from starting with critical knowledge and kind of moving from there. And finally, if, oops. If the goal is to improve project quality and consistency, if that's the most important thing for the company, you're gonna choose different elements. So following the conference last year, I'm kind of gonna try and pick up today where we left off. This time last year there was a lot of momentum in this community around kind of talking about knowledge management, how do we build it, what elements should we use? And I'm gonna show you some of the examples. So this is an example from Element Architects. So. So they sent me and several of you have sent me things that look somewhat like this. They kind of did an assessment of their firm. They scored all of these elements from 0 to 100 and then kind of adjusted the opacity on each of them to kind of show where they were strong and where they wanted to improve. MBH Architects, you guys are here. That's Renee. So they organized an interactive game around the periodic table that if you want to know more about how they did it, that's renewed brand, you can find Renee later. Really cool kind of team building and learning exercise. The folks from Sasaki sent us a magnetic board of elements and so you can move those around to plan and strategize. Brad, will you raise your hand? Yeah. So Brad's going to run a hangout, kind of talking about this. We have one here that you can interact with, so. And I can see that he's got a new thing, which are some blocks, which sound pretty cool. So Sasaki shared this. Jim Martin who. Does anyone know who Jim Martin is? So Jim shared he and Dan Galavan. Dan, are you around? Can you raise your hand? So that's Dan. So Jim and Dan organized a meetup in Boston for about 25 folks from 13 local AEC firms to talk about how they're managing knowledge. What elements do they want to go deeper into? What are their priorities? And as far as I know, that was the first kind of local AEC KM meetup that's happened. And if you're interested in organizing one in your city, I think you could go to either Jim or Dan and kind of get some pointers from them and feel free to use me as well, because I can connect you to people that are in your city that you can connect with if you want to have a similar kind of local meetup. And finally, my mom got in on the action, so. So my mom. So Einstein has this thing, and I might not get it exactly right, that you never fully understand something until you can explain it to your mom. And so I talk to my mom every week walking into the office, and she asks me what I'm working on, and I just end up going into detail into these kind of tools really early on. And it's a great test because my mom is not a knowledge manager. She doesn't work in aec. And so she focuses me on simplifying the ideas and making them easy to communicate to someone who just doesn't swim in our ocean all the time. And so I sent her a really early draft of this periodic table, and she said to me, you should put that on a mug. She doesn't really talk like that, but I needed something and it makes me laugh, so you should put that on a mug. And so then I'm like, no, it's too hard to execute. I've done mugs before, and the graphics are never quite right and blah, blah, blah. She goes, you really should put it on. People love mugs. And I just changed my impression midstream. You heard that? And I'm like, I just don't want to do it. And so then this went on for months. On my walk in, it's like, have you done the mugs yet? No. Have you done the mugs yet? No. And then radio silence. And I'm like, okay. I finally convinced her that we shouldn't do it. And then in the mail, she sent me this. So she took a really screen cap that she had taken off my computer and taken it down to the local store in Greenwich and said, can you put this on a mug and send it to my son? And so here it is. So thanks, Mom. She'll be watching. So I tell you all of this because what was happening kind of after the conference is really this wave of enthusiasm for knowledge management, and people were running out, paddling out, trying to catch the wave. And it was fun to watch. But as I saw more and more people kind of paddling out, coming back with very similar questions about, ok, it's exciting. I've done some stuff. Now what? Right? I need a plan. I need some kind of way to get started. And the most common question I got that I was unprepared to answer after last year was, how do we develop a knowledge strategy? This is one people kept coming back to. It's like, how do we do it? How do we develop a knowledge strategy? And I didn't have, in my view, I didn't have a satisfactory answer, but I really wanted to find out. And so in order to do that, I wanted to unpack it. And the first thing I, I wanted to go back to. So, like, so what is strategy? And I say it that way because we all use the word. Who here uses the word strategy? Right? How many of you feel confident you know what it means? Like, yeah, like 10%. So, and I think that's right. We all use it. We talk about people as being strategic or having a strategy, all these things. But, like, what does it really mean? So I did what I do and I hit the books. And so for pretty much the balance of the summer, I spent time going through some books I had read in the past on strategy, finding new books, watching talks, looking at KM strategy specifically. So there's a bunch of stuff that's out there. So reading those things as well, Some of your firms were generous and kind enough to share your business strategies with me as part of this research. And even for some of your firms that have KM strategies, you sent those. So I spent a bunch of time reading. And the thing I came. You can imagine there's no singular definition of strategy that exists, but I came across one that I quite like. So the way I look at strategy is it's the art of distributing limited resources to achieve your goals. So we all have limited resources, People, time, effort, passion, emotional bank account, Right? In order to achieve big things, you can only do so many at once because you have limited resources in your firm. Even the biggest organizations and companies in the world still have limited resources. So you have limited resources and you need to know how to distribute them. But the second part of this definition, this is why I really like it, is it talks about focusing those resources on goals. And what that led me to is a really important follow on question, which is when developing a knowledge strategy, how do you know what your goals should be? It's not that easy, right? So how do you know when you're doing knowledge strategy? So great, where do we point all this energy and this enthusiasm? Where is it focused? And so I found the answer and I'm going to share it with you. The secret to knowledge strategy is to connect knowledge strategy to business strategy. And you're thinking, I flew all the way from Australia or London or New York or Boston to come here. This or I just walked over from San Francisco. Right? It's obvious. And this is true if you're in marketing or if you're in it. Like this is the secret, right? It's universal. So can we agree? Does this make sense to you guys? Show of hands, if you think this makes sense. Okay, great. Second question. Is this easy? Show of hands if you think this is easy to do. Aha. So we all know this is what we need to be doing, but it's hard. Why is it hard? It's hard because the business strategy is not always the same in all of our companies. And by that I mean this. I'm gonna show you two different scenarios. One is an ideal business strategy. Here's what I think. It looks like it exists. It's current. It's been communicated to the whole company. It's specific. So which three to five things are we gonna do? It's measurable. So how will we know? If we say we're gonna do these three to five things, that we achieve success and it's prioritized. So let's say of those three to five things, we only have the resources to get to two. Which two? Right. So this is what an ideal business strategy looks like. Show of hands. If your business strategy looks like this, like 10%, good for you. For the 90% of you that didn't raise your hands, I'm guessing it's something like this. So it doesn't exist. Or it exists, but it's outdated. Or it exists and it's current, but it's closely Held within some partners or very senior people within the company, or it's been shared. But it's very kind of vague in nature, kind of aspirational. It's kind of describing a future state of kind of who we hope we are five years from now. But it's kind of short on how do we get to those things. Right. And how are we going to know if we were successful or. It's a big, long list of stuff to do. How many people have a strategy that kind of resembles something on this slide? Right. So that's most of you. And I don't think that's to pick on people in this room or even our industry. I think this is true in general for most organizations. So the reason this is important is that I don't think this means. Okay, so Chris, you said the important thing is to connect the knowledge strategy to business strategy, and we don't really have one, or it's not specific and I can't connect to it. So therefore I cannot write a knowledge strategy. And I don't think that's true. I think that you can be successful in the face of these adverse conditions. I've seen it done, and I'd like to see a little bit more of it. So that's where I kind of focused the effort. Once we kind of got into really identifying the problem, that it's like, okay, the core issue is there's not often an ideal, clear business strategy. I think then I kind of had the marching orders on how to build something for you guys. So I added a sixth point to the manifesto. So I believe that you can create strategic value through knowledge management without an ideal business strategy. I think you have to. Okay, So I think all great initiatives should have a spirit animal. And this is the spirit animal in my view of knowledge strategy, the badger. Now, for those of you who are nature nerds, actually show hands. If you're kind of nature animal nerds, great. My people, you would know that this is an American badger, not a honey badger. For anyone playing along at home, he has, in the kind of distinguishing feature I want to call attention to is he's got some really awesome claws. Like, look at those claws. They're pretty amazing. And badgers dig. This is what they do. They dig burrows. It's key to their survival. Sometimes they kick small animals out and enlarge their space. They are diggers. And that is what you're going to have to do, because if you don't have that ideal business strategy, you're going to have to dig to Find out what's most important to your company and I'm going to give you some tools that should help you do that. So the badger's thinking, where should I dig? Let's find out. So we're gonna talk about creating business value with knowledge management. And we've got a five step process. This is something that I have been working on along with a couple folks in our teams, Susan and Zuku, to really help us use this internally with client success as well as I wanted to create a broader framework for knowledge management. And it turns out the answer was the same, which is beautiful. So the first step is to discover the top three to five business priorities of your company. And even if they're not written down, the second step is to identify the stakeholders for each of those priorities. The third step is to, with those stakeholders, establish success metrics for each of those priorities. Step four is to create a 12 month roadmap. So we're focused on a little bit shorter time horizon than the typical three to five year strategy. And finally, you want to measure success quarterly, check in with those stakeholders, make sure that you're still on plan, those kind of things. And I'm gonna go through each one of them in detail. So let's start. Our badger is going to be our companion for this journey. So he or she is going to start digging on step one. And so I'm gonna show you some of the places you can dig. So one of the places, if you're fortunate enough to have some of these things available in a format that you can get access to. So maybe a business strategy, maybe a business plan or a marketing plan, or an employee engagement survey. There's all kinds of things which I would characterize as key documents that you can use. So find those, read those, those are kind of great near the surface kind of things you can find. If you can't find those, you can use a tool that we built. It's a list of common business goals. So it'll kind of help orient you and point you in the right direction. So this is and, and I'm going to use this fictitious company throughout my presentation. And so Ann's the managing principal. She's on her way to work. She's talking on her phone, which is illegal in California and dangerous, and I don't think you should do it. But she's busy, right? And so what's on Ann's mind when she's driving into work as a managing principal? What are the things that she's thinking about, worried about, excited about and I would argue it's basically about five things. So the first one is winning work, right? How are we going to have enough work to do what we're doing 12 months from now or 18 months from now, or 24 months from now? The second one is doing the work. Do we have the skilled people that we need? Is it quality? Are we going to get sued? Are we going to win awards, all of these things? How are we doing great work? The third one is managing talent. So how are we going to find people, recruit people, retain people to be able to do all this stuff that we want to achieve? The fourth is just actually running the business. How do we keep the machine running? How are we making sure that people are getting paid, that we're getting paid? All that stuff's happening. And finally, how is she thinking about designing the business of the future? So where's the company in 2020 or 2025 or 2030? And so these are the kind of things that are generally running through your leadership's heads on the way into work. And so I built this out and this is a tool. So I'm gonna share this deck with all of you guys afterwards and it'll be obviously online for free. I found the way that I've used it is with leadership, and you guys can use it with leadership. It's a really great kind of tool to start a discussion. So for each one of these, I've got kind of some sub goals. So for example, for winning work, it might be improving the ability to cross sell, or it might be, how can we use knowledge management as a firm? How can we develop more compelling insights? And so for each one of these, each one of these business goals, there's a knowledge component that can support it. And that's what the kind of core argument that I'll make is, is that you don't necessarily want or need a standalone KM strategy. What you want to do is figure out what's most important to the company and figure out the knowledge aspect to support those key priorities. So if it's doing the work, it might be improving quality, it might be improving access to expertise, right? So who are the people that we've got throughout the company who can help you do your best work? It could be making projects more profitable. If it's managing talent, how do we get novices up to speed faster? How do we onboard people? How do we create a culture of engagement so that people wanna come here and stay here for a long, long time? When we look at running the business, how are we managing Risk. Right. If we're doing mergers and acquisitions, how are we integrating them appropriately? If we have corporate priorities and goals in a strategy, how do we communicate that so people know about it? These are all problems that KM can help support. And finally, in terms of designing the business, maybe one of your offices is kind of pioneering a new service or a new approach or entering a new market that can then be shared with other people within the firm. So these are all knowledge problems. And so the way to do this is to sit down with someone and say, circle three to five things. And then after they circle the three to five most important things, have them stack, rank them in order, have them tell you what their priorities are. And you'd be amazed. This actually happens pretty quickly. People can get there because they can't tell you if you just ask them the question. But when you start having them react to this, it can really provoke a good conversation. So this is a great tool you can use as a badger. You're all badgers now. Now you know, or you should be. So another tool you can use is a tool for prioritizing critical knowledge. And we talked about this a lot yesterday, but I think it's so important I want to come back to it a little bit. So we saw some good examples of questions that you can ask to elicit priorities from leadership, from Jim, from Dorothy, from others. And I've got a few more to throw onto the pile. Now, of course, I don't care if you use ours or Jim's or Dorothy's to write your own, but I think what you'll see is asking these questions is a really good tool. So here are three. One is what knowledge is most critical to winning ideal projects and clients over the next two to five years. Right. So an example could be you've got a health core healthcare operations consulting practice. You want to grow it, you want to scale it, whatever that might be. What knowledge is most critical to delivering top quality projects over the next two to five years? And it could be construction administration. Right. Third, what knowledge is most critical to running successful business operations over the next two to five years? And that could be financial management. So you kind of, you'll get these. And so I've done this exercise several times. I did it most recently at a CEO, AEC CEO conference. I got two groups of 25 CEOs. We went through this exercise. I gave them 10 minutes, it took them seven, basically on average. And they got nine, 10, 12 things pretty quickly in each one of these categories. So step two, once we kind of ran through that exercise was to put them out on a matrix. And so this one's very similar to the one that Dorothy showed. I've adapted it from apqc so I think you can see if Dorothy APQC have kind of stamped it. It's an interesting and useful tool. So on one axis you've got the impact. So this is the consequence of what happens if you were to lose some of that critical knowledge. And on the y axis you've got the risk. So what's the likelihood that will lose this knowledge? And so the exercise you go through is you take the answers you get from those questions that I just shared or the questions you write and you drop them with your kind of person you're interviewing or working with into these different quadrants. So for example with the financial management one, so the cfo, she's already given notice, right? She says she wants to retire. She's been with the firm for 30 years. She's going to retire at the end of next year. So that's high risk. It's a known. She has said I'm out, right. But she has trained the people who are replacing her. She's put good systems in place. She said, I'm happy to be part of the search process to find my successor and if you want me to stay on longer part time contract, whatever that might be, I'm happy to do it to help transition my role to the next level. So yes, high risk, low impact, right? We don't think this is going to be a big problem, so you don't have to worry about it. Construction, administration, right. So in our scenario, the firm that we're talking about is pursuing really aggressive, cutting edge design engineering projects. They're doing work they haven't done before in design. And the worry is do we have the technical chops to pull this off? Can we make sure that we build it, build it right and don't get sued? And so that is a high impact issue. But they feel like it's low risk because they have a handful of experienced people in the CA group. They're kind of Gen Xers, early baby boomers. So they're not going anywhere soon. The work is interesting. So they're not really worried about people leaving. And if those people were to leave, the work is interesting. So it's easy to hire new people to replace them. So that one high impact, low risk. So in the upper right hand quadrant we've got the healthcare operations consulting example. So for this firm moving into, well, growing their healthcare practice and Moving along the food chain in terms of their work with healthcare firms is the top strategic priority. The problem is they want to get up in front of the projects, right? They want to do consulting with the administration and the management teams of their healthcare clients before the actual building projects start. Right. The problem is they've got one person who knows how to do it. They've got a subject matter expert. He lives in Detroit. He's like one of a handful of national experts who know how to do this. And he's spending his life on a plane, right? Because he's working nationally, he's got two young kids at home and starting to think maybe it'd be easier to work at a local health care firm and I don't have to kind of live on a plane. So high risk, high impact. This is where the badger wants to dig to and spend your time. And when I ran this exercise with those two groups of CEOs, it was amazing. We got down to two, one, two, three things in the upper right hand quadrant. So what that meant was we don't have to stress out so much about the 11 or the 12. It just made them relax. And this is a forcing function and it's kind of that separating the signal from the noise thing we talked about. So this is a great tool to use. Okay. And finally, and I'm spending the most time on discovering priorities, right? Cause it's the most important and useful thing is to dig deeper into what I would characterize as KM requests. So an example of a KM request is we need to share more lessons learned. How many people have gotten an email or someone come to their desk and said something like this to them? Like, this is really important. We need to do this. Okay? Most of you, right? The problem is which lessons, which lessons are more important than others. So you'll work with really smart people. They're making mistakes, but they're also making breakthroughs on a daily basis. They're learning all day long. It's what they get paid to do. It's one of the reasons people like working in this industry. So we're not going to capture all those lessons. It's just not going to happen. So you need something to give you some kind of hierarchy to understand which lessons are more important than others. And so that's the opportunity to dig in and find out what's that underlying business problem or opportunity that's behind the request. And so in this example, we find out through digging that the firm had 26 change orders last year which cost them $435,000 in unbillable rework in the last 12 months. So, okay, we found something. So maybe those lessons would be good ones, the ones that led to these problems. Okay. So that's something you can do as a badger in terms of digging and finding out what matters most. Okay. I want to move on to identifying stakeholders. So how many people know what a Rasci or a Raci chart is? Just a show of hands. Okay. Like half of you, Right. So I'll go through it for the other half. So let's say that business priority, one of the ones, actually the number one thing you recovered was that reducing change orders, issue issue, the R in the Raski is responsible. So this is the person from the business side who's gonna do the work to achieve the business goal, right? Reducing those change orders. So this isn't you as a knowledge manager. This is the person from the business that's gonna have to get this work done. The A in accountable is the person that's gonna sign off to say, yes, this is the top priority. This is how we're gonna measure success. And the buck is gonna stop with them. So that's the person that the board, the management team, the executive committee, whoever runs your company is gonna look to and say, so what's up with change orders? Right? That's your accountable person supports. So this is oftentimes, not always, but oftentimes where knowledge management fits in. So you're gonna provide time and effort and resources and passion to help them achieve whatever this goal is, Right? It could be software, it could be techniques and tactics, emotional support, whatever it is, this is supporting the business and helping achieve this goal consulted. So these are folks that don't necessarily need to work on the initiative or the project, but they have information that you need in order for it to be successful. So for example, in this change order thing, we may need the director of architecture, we may need the project management director, we may need the CFO because he or she has information on the finances and the impact of these. So those are folks you're gonna have to go to to be able to get information. And finally informed are people that just need to be told and kept up to date on what's going on, right? So that could be your board, that could be your CEO. They just don't want any surprises. They wanna know that the thing's moving along. They wanna know you're making progress if you hit a roadblock, right? They wanna know about it before it becomes a big problem. This is a good tool. You should use it. We've been using it. It seems basic and for some of you the comment might be, yeah, this is business 101. It's business 101. But does everyone do it? Does everyone do this on all these high stake initiatives? You don't, right? And so what happens, and I can tell you is actually, I'll give you a hint. Here's how to run a terrible KM program. How many of you have worked on projects like this? Right. All the people are in the room except for the people who actually need to be there. So I ran. Earlier in my career I worked on a CRM project where the marketing business development directors refused to participate and be part of it. Yet we were moving forward anyway. Right? It's nuts, but it happens all the time. So our rule is, you can't move an initiative forward if you don't have the responsible and accountable people in the room. We basically want a no shruggy rule, right? You just can't do it. It's not gonna work. I advise you, just don't do this. It's painful for everybody and it doesn't work. Okay, so that's identifying stakeholders for each of those priorities. The next piece is success metrics. How many people know what smart goals are? Okay, good. This is great. Like half of you and I don't know, I haven't been paying close enough attention if it's the same half. So good. So let's talk through those and I'm going to introduce a tool called our KM Goal validator that you can use. Okay, so smart goals, they are specific. What exactly are we going to do? They're measurable. How do we know if we're successful? They're attainable. So they're something that you can actually do and achieve. They're relevant to the company that comes back to being connected to the priorities of the business and they're time based. So by when. So if we go back to this kind of vague KM request or goal of, we want to share more lessons learned. How many people think this is a smart goal? Right. A smarter goal might look something like this. We're going to document and share all lessons learned from problems resulting in a change order over the next 12 months. So let's test it. Is it specific? Remember the question I asked before? Which lessons? Which lessons? The ones resulting in a change order. Is it measurable? Well, we said all of them. Is it attainable? That I don't know. I don't know how many change orders this firm has. So you may need to dig further and say, you know what, just the ones that are over $50,000 or $100,000 or whatever, that maybe there are too many and that means it's not attainable. So you modify it. Is it relevant? I don't know. The finances of your firm, is half a million dollars in unbillable rework relevant? For most people I know it is. Is it time bound? We're going to do it in 12 months. Good. So we took something and we just made it smarter. Right. And do you feel like the difference, like you know where to get started? With a smart goal, with the other one? It's kind of vague. So I built this tool to help you trying to write and connect, write better goals, but also make sure that those KM goals are connecting back to the business priorities. So we'll start with the why. Why does this thing even matter? So there's an underlying business problem or opportunity. This is where the badger comes in and finds out that we have this problem that I identified earlier. Right. We have those 26 change orders. So what you're gonna do at the bottom of this tool is, is circle yes or no. Do you have evidence that this is in fact a problem? Because some of you might have been in the situation where you hear there's a really big problem and then you just dig a little bit and it turns out there's only one thing, or it's really not financially a big impact, or it's not the most important thing. So partly what you need to do is validate and make sure there's evidence to support that these things are actually problems. So the what? That's where the business goal comes in. So the business goal, right, could be we just want to reduce change orders by 50% in the next 12 months. It's a smart goal. It's simple. Again, at the bottom, you're gonna wanna circle smart to make sure that it is. Now the KM goal comes in. It's the one I just shared with you. The badger goes in and says, okay, based on that problem and the business goal, we're gonna document and share lessons learned from all these problems, resulting in a change order. And we're gonna do it in 12 months. We have a smart goal. Then we get to how. And so this is. And the speaker who's gonna follow me, Arnaud Chevalier. This is where the research led me this summer, is finding out. This is where a lot of the challenges is that a lot of us want to start with how. We want to start with the KM tactics. We want to start with what we're going to do and haven't done the work in front of it to make sure it's the right thing. So it could be anything. Tactics are easy. We love tactics. You can always get new tactics and get better at them, but they're there for this one, right? Classes, videos, mentorship, intranet posts, process improvement, building new standards. There's a lot of ways that you could document and share these lessons, but you need to make sure you're working on the right problem. So at the bottom you validated it, you've made sure it hit all the boxes to the left before you kind of move forward with your tactics. So in the real world, it doesn't always play out this linearly. This is great if you can do it, but it oftentimes starts like this. It starts with somebody coming to you with a proposed tactic. Right. Has anyone had that happen? Okay, good bright room. We should start a blog post series in our office on lessons learned. And so what you want to do is go all the way back to the beginning and you're going to dig and find that business problem or opportunity, refine it with the key stakeholders for a business goal and identify the metrics and then take that KM goal, define that and make it smart and then look at the tactic. Is it still the right thing? Like, you've learned a lot more about this problem since you first got the request. You know a lot more about what's really happening. So it might be that you're gonna have to go back and revise the tactics. Right. And it might take you somewhere else. Okay, so those three are kind of the meatiest, the kind of hardest parts. The next one in terms of a 12 month roadmap is something that we heard working with you guys. We kind of started workshopping some of these ideas in the fall. Is that a like writing formal long 15 page strategies? Like it's kind of boring and it takes some time. And what people really wanted was something more agile and more lean. Right. Something that you could just take and start creating business value with right away. And so we are using this time horizon of 12 months. What that lets you do also is make sure that those three to five business priorities are always the most important ones. So if you're revisiting those every 12 months, you'll know you're working on the most important things. If you write a KM strategy that looks out five years, there's the danger that it becomes KM island. Right. And the two things get divorced over time. Cause you're on different vectors, right? Because the business is changing, but the KM strategy hasn't. So the goal here is to keep you as aligned as possible to where the business is heading. So that's simple. You take those priorities, I'm gonna use three and you just plot them out over 12 months. So maybe priority one's gonna take about six months and you can start right away. Priority two is gonna take 10 months and then priority three, it's the same people that were working on priority one. So you can't get started yet. So you can start mid year and that'll take you through the end. And finally the thing that you're gonna wanna do is measure success quarterly, right? So you're gonna want to 90 days in three months in get those stakeholders together. Is this still the most important thing for us to be working on? Do we still have the right people in the room? Did one of our key stakeholders leave? If so, do we have a replacement? Or does this thing get shelved because we don't have the right people to work on it? Are we on plan? And you do this and you get back together every 90 days and you check in, you see that you're on track in terms of the metrics and then you finish. It's just like that. So the idea is, right, you can create strategic value without an ideal business strategy. If you go out and you dig and you ask the questions, right? Here are some tools to help you do that. I think it's important to separate perhaps the word strategy from the word strategic because I think you can start being strategic tomorrow, right? You can start connecting the program to the business strategy or to the business priorities right away to write a formal strategy, kind of more of a noun. I'm not saying you should never do it, I'm just saying it's maybe not where you get started. And I don't know that you have to. I think if you take this approach, you, you can stay more lean and agile and stay relevant. Okay, so this is the five step process. It's kind of a circle. And so year one, for each of those priorities, stakeholders metrics, a 12 month plan and measuring success. So the key is then year two comes and you start all over again at the beginning of the cycle. So you find the three to five most important things for year two, priority one, priority two, priority three. You find the stakeholders for each of those priorities, you establish success metrics and then you create a 12 month roadmap and you measure success quarterly and you do the same thing for year three. Right. Find the priorities, identify the key stakeholders from the business, establish metrics, measure over 12 month roadmap, and that's what you're going to do for the rest of your careers. Just keep doing that little loop. Sounds fun, right? I think it sounds fun. It's nice because you never have to worry about what's going to happen in eight years. It's like, I don't know. How could I possibly know what the most important thing to the company will be? All I know is I'm going to be working on the most important thing to the company. It's kind of exciting, it's kind of zen. You might like it. Okay, so this is our spirit animal, the badger. We've learned a lot from him. I hope, I hope that you guys think about him in terms of connecting what you're doing with KM to the business. Thank you.