Knowledge Management in a Time of Rapid Change & Uncertainty | Cindy Hubert & Dr. Carla O'Dell, APQC

Alright.

Welcome. People are starting to trickle in. As you do, I'm going to suggest a question to you in the chat, which is, what book are you currently reading? We're going to give 1 minute for everyone to roll in. Secondhand, all the places to go, great. Power BI Quickstart Guide. The Lorax, man, all over the place. 1776. Philip K. Dick. How to Win a Pitch. Owning Up. I got a comment, "I'd like to see your actual background." This actually is my actual background. We were in the process of moving, Jason, right before COVID hit and shelter-in-place hit here in San Francisco. So this is the new place which I'm working from, and we're still living in our old place. So that's therefore no furniture. We've got basically a desk, flowers, et cetera. All right, so welcome everybody to this deep dive on knowledge management. In a Time of Rapid Change and Uncertainty, featuring Carlo Dell and Cindy Hubert of APQC. I'm Christopher Parsons, founder and CEO of Knowledge Architecture, and this is our second online K-Connect event in the conference's 11-year history. So many of you on this webinar have been to a K-Connect event in the past, but for those of you that haven't, K-Connect is our annual knowledge management conference for the AEC industry. We have run 10 of them. Starting in 2010. This is the first year we've missed, but we have pivoted like many of your organizations have, and we're learning a bunch of new things and having a lot of fun taking our, our programming virtual. Regardless of whether we're virtual or in person, K-Connect has always been driven by two things, which is sharing ideas and connecting people. So we try and get ideas that are useful out into the community, whether they come from inside the AEC industry or outside. And then we've always focused on helping you to learn from and with your peers and build your network. And so our goal with this deep dive series we started last week is to do both of those things, is to interview really interesting people on a topic that matters, and then provide an optional Hangout afterwards for you to connect in small groups and talk about your experiences and challenges. So today, we'll have about 35 minutes of discussion with me and Carla and Cindy. And then we'll have a dedicated Q&A time at the end for you to ask questions. A little tip based on last week's webinar that we did: go ahead and use the Q&A panel down at the bottom of Zoom to log questions as they come up in your head throughout the webinar, so you don't have to remember them at the end. So just, you can add those in at any point, and then we're going to come back to them toward the end of the session. For those of you who signed up for the 60-minute hangout afterwards, we'll be leaving this webinar and heading over to a separate Zoom meeting so that we can use their breakout features. If you didn't sign up for the Hangout, but that all of a sudden sounds interesting to you, don't worry. You're invited. You can still join us. You'll just click on the link that I share at the end. Um, the deep dive portion, the first hour, is being recorded and will be available on our website shortly. Okay, and the last note there is, um, collaborative notes. So we started doing this thing on the deep dive last week called collaborative notes. Susan Strom, our Director of Client Success, who many of you know, will be taking notes during the session in a Google Doc. So please feel free to jump in and take notes alongside her. You can capture quotes, you can capture links, resources, books, etc., and just go ahead and add that to the notes, and we'll share this final document later on in the week. So I'm about to paste that link to the Google Doc into the chat, and it should be open to anyone on the web to edit, so Have fun. Okay, that's it for logistics. I want to introduce you to our featured guests. So let me tell you actually first a little bit about APQC. So APQC is the world's foremost authority on benchmarking, best practices, process and performance improvement, and knowledge management. It was founded in 1977 by business leader and innovator Jack Grayson. APQC provides the information, data, and insights organizations need to work smarter, faster, and with greater confidence. So Carla O'Dell is considered the— one of the world's leading experts in using knowledge to drive productivity and competitiveness. She leads the Board of Directors in its governance and oversight responsibilities. Often dubbed a practical visionary, she plays a strong role in APQC's game-changing research daily. She works to inspire the next generation of ideas, research, and people so that APQC remains true to its mission, which is to research and embrace advances that make us more productive and enrich our work life. As an Executive Director of Client Solutions, Cindy Hubert brings both a strategic and pragmatic approach to designing solutions for APQC clients by bringing together all aspects of APQC's capabilities to solve real problems. Cindy supports both sales and delivery teams with her industry knowledge, valuable experience, and analytical skills to address APQC's clients' most important challenges. Just kind of what I'm trying to think about, how I can characterize my relationship with APQC. I mean, this organization is honestly one of the reasons I I got into knowledge management in the first place about 15 years ago. APQC has been, you know, kind of like a mentor firm to me and to knowledge architecture. And we've had the pleasure of attending the conference multiple times. We had the pleasure of having Carla come out to KA Connect 2016 to keynote. And I'm just so excited that Carla and Cindy are here with us. You know, when it became clear that we were number one, going to be taking KA Connect virtual, and that number two, this community had a lot of questions about what do we do now in terms of knowledge management, Carla and Cindy were literally my first call. So please join me in welcoming Carla and Cindy to K Connect. Carla and Cindy, will you please turn your cameras on and unmute yourselves?

Oh, what a great introduction. Thank you so much.

Oh, you're welcome. It is so good to have you on the show. I just wanted to say that. I've never had a show, so I wanted to say thanks for coming on the show.

It's got a ring, Chris, the Christopher Parsons.

It's got a ring. Yeah, yeah. All right, we're going to take that offline. I think there's something there. Um, I just want to start just big picture, like, what is— you guys have been doing this for a long time— what is knowledge management and how does it help organizations achieve their goals?

So Chris, I'm going to start. Carla and I've tap danced together a very long time, so she's going to let me start out with this because you know what, I don't think you can really have a great discussion around knowledge management if people who are talking to you about it don't give you a context for how they think about it. So, APQC, for 25 years, we've thought about it in this— we've tried to keep it really simple because it's not. But our definition is very simple. Let me share that with you. It's just systematic efforts to help knowledge grow, flow, and create value. Now, it's about getting the right people, the right knowledge to the right people at the right time, right, to help them share, to help them use knowledge. You don't have to remember all of that, but the crux of knowledge management centers around employees. Does each person in your organization have access to what they need to make a decision, complete a project, answer a client's question? You know, can they share what they know to help someone else be the very best that they can? And how does knowledge really flow to and from that individual?

Support.

And for me, the essence of knowledge management has always been that it's focused on the outcome, right? Because the outcome is different for all of us. You get to create your own playbook for this. Um, but, and because you know what you want to achieve, whether it's meeting project schedules, accelerating learning for your staff, um, selling more work, whatever that looks like, that's what you want to achieve. And you look at it through a knowledge lens. Right? Okay, so one more fundamental I just want to—

Sure.

If you don't mind, because I'm going to bring Carla in on this in a second. I must show your audience a slide, if you guys will just forgive me. I promise it's just one. It's worth your time to look at this while I talk it through. So years ago, Dr. Carla O'Dell was— is everybody seeing my screen? Chris, you're seeing it?

Looks good.

So Dr. Carla O'Dell, I think it's been two decades, and I was with her two decades ago too when she quoted this. She said knowledge is sticky, right? Think about it. It's not like water. It gets like honey sometimes, and it gets stuck in things. It gets stuck in documents. It gets stuck in people's heads. It gets stuck in processes and grows old because there's new ways to do it. And so when fundamental for people who are even interested just in the knowledge of your organization. Forget the management. You need those processes to help flow, to keep, create value. And that's what you see on the left-hand of your screen. It's APQC's 7-step. Our members love it so much they reduce it to 4 immediately. So it's much more memorable, but you get the gist of it, right? It's these processes that you put in the flow of how people work and you help that, that wheel spins like the Wheel of Fortune. What you have around it are people, processes, content, and technology with the strategy to support all of that. And then the right-hand side of the screen is the dynamic that puzzles us all and will keep us as knowledge managers in business for the rest of my existence, which is how behavioral this is. Because people don't want to jump into that flow on the left to say, oh, you want me to identify what I know and write it down and capture it? No, they want to ask and say, what do we know about this client that I'm getting ready to go visit to talk about a project? And they want to get to that knowledge, they want to learn something, they want to make a decision, and then if everything works out, they have a goal to share back to the the system. So I know there's problems with all of this, but this is what knowledge management is all about.

You know, Cindy, I just pick up on the use portion of the cycle because that, you know, the two things people complain about the most in the knowledge management, three really, but the first two is the time that it takes to do things. And the third one is the resources. Where's my budget? But the other thing is that, well, I made it available. They're just not using it. Right. We've got lessons learned, et cetera. And the— we have documents, we've got Flow, we, you know, and so one of the biggest challenges and opportunities in knowledge management is put things in the flow of people's work so they don't have to do something different to enable the use. A second point on the use is that sometimes the use is just all I need is a piece of information. But if what I need is the ability to execute something and it's skill-based, um, the very first research we ever did in knowledge management would— it was what are the barriers to the transfer of best practices? And it turned out that one of the major barriers was that you didn't have a coach or mentor by the, by the source of the best practice, the person or unit who knew how to do it. And you need direct access to the recipient, needs direct access to them in order to move through the process of learning how to do something. So it's back to where Cindy was talking about knowledge management is, is the way organizations learn and remember, but in the same way that human beings do, they need to be able to be coached and mentored and feedback.

And Chris, I'm going to build on what she said. I think I want to talk about some pitfalls every few years or few months now. Something happens to kind of countermand what you think, you know, knowledge naturally flows. People naturally share. So, you know, they want the best of Facebook inside the office. They want to work out loud. All of these things are great because they reenergize, they get excited. Digital tools are going to help us do all these things. They're going to help us collaborate. Well, that's true. They will, but not without really great processes. Along the way. That's one of the pitfalls we've seen over the last couple of months. People have got all these great cool tools. Carla just said to me a few days ago, do you realize everything digital that we've been talking about for 8 years now is accelerated? And I went, oops, yeah, it is.

Yeah.

But what I think I'm hearing is back to your water and honey thing, right? Just because you have new technologies doesn't mean it's going to flow. And as someone who used to use that metaphor a lot, right, it being like water, when I heard you guys start talking about honey and it being sticky, it totally resonates. You know, with my experience. So what does that look— what is the process like of getting knowledge to flow that's sticky? What does that look like?

Carla, you want to take that or you want me? You go.

Well, I think that the— there are two things. One, the knowledge management is a discipline, and after 20 years, it really is. It is 25 years. Oh my gosh. It really is a discipline because it has fundamentals, principles that you need to execute against, and it's also got approaches and techniques. And so those— you have— it's back to what Cindy said, and she'll talk a little bit more about this later. Systematic processes. Communities may— that was your point earlier, Cindy, about the pitfall. Communities may blossom, but they don't— they're not necessarily going to overcome corporate amnesia just because they exist. So there have to be approaches that manage content, that manage flow, make sure questions get answered, experts don't— Sucked dry, all of that sort of thing. And that's what knowledge management as a discipline— if you call yourself a knowledge manager, which I hope many, many of you do, and I'm glad to be back with this group, by the way— that it's, it's because you know those approaches a little bit. I'm going to share with you when we have time some what I think some of the core competencies are. Okay, sure. It's systematic and yeah, and specific. It's not You know, don't do this at home. It's not just an amateur event.

Right.

Okay, well, let's pick up there. Let's say there are people on this call who are long-term knowledge managers and are very familiar with the processes and the practice, and then there are people who are brand new to knowledge management on this call. So let's talk about those folks for a minute. For organizations and individuals who are new to knowledge management, what do they need to know?

Cindy, you take this one.

Yeah, so Chris, I think there's 3 things that you, you need to know. Number 1 is you do need some type of strategy. You do You do not have to spend more than a week getting it together, but you want it approved. Because what a strategy helps you do— you bring in a value proposition, you start bringing your leaders together, your business leaders. The minute your business leaders start getting worried about the management part of knowledge, you're in trouble. Their, their job is to focus on critical knowledge, what's important to the organization to get work done, to get your business job to be done is, and to really, you know, direct that. That's what's at risk. What do we need to know? The management side is what the KM component is, and you guys who are leaders know this. You're responsible for the processes, the tools, getting people accountable, engaged as part of a governance structure that makes that happen above the flow and in the flow of work. That's where KM is. And then the third part of that, Chris, I'll go back to, are the processes to make sure that— and I'm gonna give you a great one about honey and water. People for years, I bet a lot of your audience have always wanted to capture lessons after a project, after a sale, whatever it is. You're doing engineering, does it work well, does it not?

We ran a whole one of those K Connect conferences just on this topic. You're right.

The first thing people say new to, and if you're new, pay attention, you'll say, let's capture all of our lessons and put them in one common repository and we'll all go there.

Mm.

Not a great idea. Been there, done that. More than once. You don't do that. Where does knowledge flow? It flows when people are working. And so what you want to try to do is get as close as you can to how business flows. That's called a process, a business process. We have hundreds of them in our organizations. The important thing is to think about how that's integrated. So you go back to lessons and say, Gosh, at what point of this lifecycle of designing, you know, something for a large building, where do we need to cap? What knowledge do we need? What are we learning and how do we embed that in people coming behind in a project? So you want to put it in a project workflow so that you can find that lesson easily, opposed to saying, God, do we have a database? Now, you may keep it in a database, but you want to make sure—

Yeah.

—get to it easily. So I think—

can I paraphrase a little bit of that? Like, what I think I'm hearing you're saying is if you want to get going with knowledge management, don't make it about knowledge management, right? Make it about the business and a specific process. And to some degree, I think I'm also hearing try— knowledge management can be invisible as long as it creates value. Everyone, all of the users and the stakeholders and the executives don't need to know the mechanics necessarily. They just need to see value. Is that Fair statement.

Absolutely. And they want to see your budget, right? So you will need a budget for those processes and tools and approaches. Carla just said communities— that isn't just, you know, laissez-faire people coming together. You want them structured and organized so that they're working. That does cost resources. And are they adding value? And Carla, that really gets into what you always ask the question, what business are you in? And what's driving that business, right? Yeah, yeah.

And that changes, as we all know, in this time of COVID Yeah, yeah.

What makes for a good knowledge manager? And you're— I mean, you've met probably thousands of them at this point, like the ones that are really good. What makes a good knowledge manager?

Well, I'll take this one, Cindy. Okay, can I wax philosophical for a minute and then get practical? Yes. Okay. So I think the greatest human being superpower there is is our adaptability. I mean, we occupy every habitable niche on the planet. We can flex and move and, you know, I mean, we under terrible circumstances, we can survive under great circumstances, we can thrive. And that superpower is probably also knowledge management superpower. That it's our ability to adapt. I mean, even under the COVID-19 crisis, within a couple of weeks, you know, we may have— we figured out a way to manage this, to get our food, to keep our kids occupied, to be safe, to get work done. That didn't happen much the first couple of weeks, but it did after that. So having said that, I'd say that the most important thing when you design a knowledge management program and the skills that a knowledge management group needs to have, because it's rarely one person, is that their ability to— well, I'm going to give you 5 skills and then I'm going to talk about what— how you know whether you've got good ones or not. So first one is what I call X-ray silo vision. So that's ability— one of the, one of the things that KM people can do is they typically look across the organization and across the silos, and they can see connections between problems and people working on the same issue. And what that does when executives see it is it makes them very annoyed. Oh my God, we got all this redundant activity going on. What a knowledge manager sees is, yeah, I got an opportunity. Yeah, extra silo vision, I call it. There's probably a better way to call it. The second thing that makes a good knowledge manager is that they are aware of what robust knowledge management approaches there are. And doesn't mean we shouldn't try new things, but communities of practice, you know, over the years, they are— they can— they're very robust. And, you know, you— I mean, knowledge architecture is, you know, that kind of platform is really important. Lessons learned methodologies, the retention of valuable knowledge, the transfer of best practices, these are specific approaches. So robust knowledge management approaches is a second skill or attribute that I think KM program needs. The third goes back to last week with Jennifer Chapman's talk, which is change management skills. And this may be the one that leads to the greatest adaptability. Well, I mean, actually they all do, because if you've got a community methodology, you can apply to any problem, right? KM loves problems. KM thrives on problems. Give me one. Yeah, it's fuel, right? Yeah, right. The change management skills of communication, Interviewing, listening, I mean, you got to have that to figure out what the business problem is and to figure out how to structure a solution to it. And then, of course, the facilitation skills. A lot of organizations are too small or too strained in resources to have a separate department for organizational development or change management. The closest thing they're going to get is knowledge management, and they turn to knowledge management for that. And boy, is that a good thing to have, because if you talk about— these are 3 characteristics of a great core competency and adaptability is, is the skill portable to other locations? Is it scalable to bigger issues, bigger problems, and bigger organizations? And is it repeatable? Is it robust? Can we continue to do it? So change management skills are probably the most adaptive kind of skill you could acquire. And just like knowledge management, they are a specific set of techniques and skills. You don't get born with it. You learn how to do it. The fourth thing that I think is a core competency for knowledge management is even if you don't own the IT component of it, you have to have enough technical savvy to know how to use the technology, what it'll do and not do, and what other techniques might be out there that maybe you should apply to a problem. So I think that is a key component of it. And finally, this is where Cindy is the queen. Is the intersection of knowledge management and process management. Because knowledge flows in a process, knowledge enables processes. So what the heck is the process? And if there's one thing we discovered in the COVID-19 lockdown is how many of our processes were fragile and we didn't understand them.

Yeah. Hmm. So, yeah, so Cindy, Queen of Process. Yeah, yeah, I'll follow up with that. You guys, because in addition to the knowledge management conference and body of expertise and knowledge you have, you also do the same thing on a process management lens. So in your mind, what's the relationship between KM and process, and how do they learn from each other?

So Chris, you know what, so I'm going to really— I'm going to bridge what Carla just said because I think, um, there, there are 3 things that I kind of put under change management. I think empathy and vulnerability are huge for KMers, change management. And what that leads to is my bridge is the ability to partner. I think KM learned how to really partner because we've had to, right? If we can't get anywhere, you've got to have people to help you. That was my big differentiator, saying don't let your leadership say you, KM leader, are going to do this all because you are not. You're there to provide things. People have to participate, right? It's the engine that people keep it running. But so when you start looking at your process, that understanding of how your business works and how your workflows, what the outputs are from the inputs, that's a huge component of how knowledge management begins to infiltrate or to integrate with the process, business process. So when you begin to understand that, you can understand it. And I'll tell you the best technique I've seen by far for 25 years to help you do this is the technique called, we call it knowledge mapping. Chris, and it's just— we think it's helping you identify what critical knowledge you have sitting in the organization. Who has it? Where is it? How do you get it? What— where's the location of it? It's all— that's all things. And I'm going to send your group a follow-up on that because I'm— it's such a powerful— but with that said, what it will force you to do, you can look at it across anything. You can look at it across functions. You can look at it across knowledge domains. You can look— do a knowledge map across all types of things. People do it at big level enterprise, small, narrow knowledge base. But to really understand the process, you can do a knowledge map across a process map, and it brings those two disciplines together. So because people will say, well, we know how it works, great. Tell me what information or expertise you need to perform that step of the process. Right. Something like, you know, design, engineering design, where you are designing. Right. You can look at what kind of knowledge is needed, and it makes you start realizing what, how, especially for the industry you, that we have on here, the industries we have represented, how much expertise you rely on, on a daily basis. That was in people's heads. Yeah, all the way from your relationships of your clients to just how you pull those designs together or how you conduct, how you lead a program of building, you know, structural engineering. And so that's where you start recognizing, uh-oh, we've got 4 key knowledge that only a few people know. And can we get by in Crisis? Probably. But look what's happened. We've had a lot of our members have called us and said, you know what, they're smaller firms, global in reach, smaller firms that service a lot of clients. And they've said, we're caught. We've realized that if 10 to 12 people go get this, heaven forbid, we got a problem, you know, because they know so much. And so I think it really— going back to what Carla says, what we realized is our processes are not virtually capable. They don't translate well, right? Especially, I keep coming back to development. To your audience, I do a lot of that. But, you know, it's that knowledge that you have to have and those relationships that just make it really hard. So, you know, it's a— I would say it's both a symbiotic relationship. It's also a partnership relationship. So when you have improvements going on, knowledge management should always go run to look at those improvements because they look at them through the lens of knowledge.

They can help. Yeah. What are your thoughts about just right now, this moment we're in, knowledge management? Like, is now a good time to get into knowledge management for an organization that hasn't had a formal approach before? What should they be focused on? Kind of pivot to kind of like Knowledge Management 101 to like, what now for knowledge management?

Oh yeah, Carla, you want me to start and you pick? We both have. Sure. Yeah. Can you imagine him asking us this, audience? Can you imagine him asking? Okay, so look, here, and Chris, I'm going to share some data with you all. I've got a list of all these promises I'm making. I'm notorious that I promise you information, I'll send it. So we did some great research with Lauren Treese, who leads our knowledge management research at APQC. We had a great survey going out just looking at the disruption that was going on from just typical change, right, that everybody was going through. So all the way from internal leadership changes, shifts in the workplace, to external acquisitions— mergers and acquisitions, sometimes huge— um, to just how your client base is shifting, clients' needs. When we did that, 60% of the almost 300 people that took our survey said that they were in the level 4, level 5. We had 5 levels of no change at all, minimal change, moderate, all the way up. 60% said they were in the high to immediate change in January and February without this pandemic. So now add the pandemic on top of it, right? What we've seen in terms— we've heard some phenomenal stories. It's interesting, the word— I said separate the two, knowledge and management. They separated naturally. If you have a formal knowledge management program, oh wow, were you on the front lines of response. Because they're doing all the way from just how do you make these collaborative tools work, giving people help. We got a great quote from General Semonite from USAE, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. He said, you got to blow through the red tape and all. This, that was one of the recent quotes he said. And so just being able to help with the collaboration, a lot of our knowledge teams started heavy on curation and getting knowledge in a centralized place that everybody needed. I mean, people, Army Corps of Engineers, Mercer Professional Services, the AREP design. Yeah. People were doing that and putting it where you needed it. To respond to all the things that were going on. So that was just one very easy thing. And that's one of the things you can look at. Don't think you have to just start— oh, Cindy said to start with the strategy. Figure it out. Your strategy could be, we're going to solve problems right now. We're going to make digital tools work and put in knowledge flow process. We're going to connect people and create those informal communities that need to be sharing real-time knowledge and stand-ups every day, capturing lessons. Jump on those, make them work, and then you can formalize your strategy as you go, Chris. That's my advice for right now.

What do you think, Carla? What— for somebody thinking about getting into this, what now? What should they be focused on? Well, I think there's—

there— the classic question still holds. So the technique that I'm about to describe still holds, which is you ask the right people and a whole lot of people One, what is the issue that's facing you right now? What is the barrier that's keeping you from being productive right now? What's facing your business? And as Cindy said, 60% of the people pre-COVID were in a panic. So what matters to the business right now? And that's always changing. In fact, I'm going to— I'll come back to that. The second is what knowledge then matters. If this matters to the business, number two is what knowledge matters to that process or that solution? And who has it or where is it? And that's where all the content management comes in, which is still a very important part. Somebody's got to do it. If it isn't KM, somebody else got to do it because KM can't survive without it. So where is the knowledge or information now or who has it? And then who needs it? And then the question of this, the KM approach question is how do we close that gap in a way that it'll actually get used? And that's the last question. I mean, that's the question. That's the final mile as they like to say in telecom and— Right. Of getting that content or knowledge from the source all the way to the people who can really use it and giving it to them a way they can use it. Yeah. Which is pretty—

You guys have mentioned the phrase critical knowledge a few times, and I'm realizing that for people that are new to knowledge management, I think they're probably inferring what critical knowledge means. But for— bring us into that world of why you use that phrase and what it means.

Cindy? So our organizations are filled with knowledge. And what we realized after trying for many years You can't be at the point that people's teachable moment and understand it all of the time. You just can't. And so the leaders— you're going back to your leaders. What's driving your business? Is it winning work? Is it organ— is it efficiency, operational efficiencies that need to happen? What is driving your work and what knowledge do we need that's critical to that? That's the question. Your leaders and your managers and your sponsors answer, right? Here's what we need. Then KM can step in and say, okay, let's talk about it. My first question is, is it at risk? So again, Chris, this is all types of things, but content-driven where it's explicit or explicit where it's sitting in your head, you know, right?

You have one expert in one location who's the only person that knows this thing, so that's critical knowledge, right?

We're not careful our operation there is not going to run like it should. We're going to have people hanging around or being less than productive could be part of it. So that's— the organizations that are really good at this, Chris, and I will tell you all this, everybody goes, oh my God, Kraft Foods is very good at this. They have dimensions, they have criteria that they look at to assess their knowledge of their business. So all the way from the rarity of the knowledge, how hard it is to replicate, is it, you know, are we worried that it's going to leave? So knowledge retention tends to be part of that. So the people who really are looking at this looks at knowledge at risk. And that's not just in the human stuff. It can be across humans. It can be across your resources. But that we're, as Carlos said, we're going to get amnesia and forget about it. That we already know how to do this. So that's when you begin that assessment to just do a knowledge risk assessment. Can we— does this support business continuity? And what's going to happen if we don't have this anymore? That's right. Pre-mortem.

Cindy, while you were talking, I wrote down what you said, the criteria for critical knowledge. There's others, but the rarity starts with an R, the replicate starts with an R, and the risk starts the risk of—

Oh, boy, here we go. Yeah. So the triple—

the 3 Rs, you know. What are they? Reading, writing, and arithmetic? Oh, never mind.

Yeah. That's a big deal right now. That's the other gotcha that this pandemic has caught us in is that people— I know one of our professional services actually did— they have an ongoing survey. Every day they survey. It's out to their clients. It's everything. To figure out what's going on, what are you focused on, what's important to you. I think for professional services or human capital management, that's really important how they bring their services to their clients and all of this. And they created a heat map from this to say, what top knowledge things are really important and where is our knowledge in all of that? And they update that every day so people on their globe, 'cause they're global, can see where they have, you know, high-impact nodes and where they may need to have their services people calling on clients and making sure, okay, making sure the project's okay. So it has, it's really, it's been an interesting, it's our time, KMers.

Woo! Right, for sure. I've definitely been seeing that. It seems like in our community, knowledge management's right at the heart of the response and the adaptation. And I think maybe looking forward a little bit in terms of where we go from here? You know, because part of it, at least my view, is like the critical knowledge is part of it's at risk, but then also what opportunities are there? What is knowledge that we don't have today that if we had, right, we could take our business to the next level, our organization to the next level?

Yeah, what are the gaps? What are the gaps?

Yeah, it is. You know what, I'll add to that gap. It's not just gaps, it's islands. So they sit in silos, right? One, so we can't get to it. It's that the gaps are always big. I just think when you recognize all the barriers, you know, there's barriers all the way from, I have my knowledge and I'm not going to give it. I'd like to think we're over that, but we're not. But, you know, just people contributing to the system when they learn something new and better, to put it back into the ecosystem you've created. To help, you know, build on, because knowledge shared is very powerful.

Chris, Chris and Cindy, can I jump in on something live if I happen to be watching the chat?

Yeah, sure. No, please.

And listening deeply to what you said, Cindy. But one of the things I'm noticing— I pause— one thing I'm noticing is how excited people are about the facilitation technique of mind mapping and doing it in real time. So many people commented on that, and we could not agree with you more. Cindy, when you send them some follow-up information, would you share with people, if you have them, the pictures? Or just go outside this Challenger Room where you're sitting now and take a picture of our mind maps that came out of our first knowledge management conference 25 years ago. And they were done in real time, and I swear to you, they may have been the foundation of the whole discipline. It's true. Just, just, I couldn't resist. I'm sorry, I couldn't resist.

No, no, no, please. That's what we're, that's what we're here for. I mean, maybe I'll give you guys one last question, then speaking of the community, we'll bring them in. As you look over the horizon towards, you know, where knowledge management goes from here, what is APQCC?

Hmm, Carla, you want to go first or you want me to?

Uh, well, a couple of things. One, the, uh, I will and then I'll turn it back to you because you're A good closer. You're in development. The— as Cindy mentioned earlier, this crisis has accelerated trends that were already underway. So, the movement toward virtual work, the movement toward communities that also share customers' knowledge, sharing with customers in a way that works, the digitization of virtually every process that we have. Will it just accelerate. And what will also accelerate is the value of the rare knowledge that Cindy was talking about earlier. That human— it's still the best combination, the best team is a man-machine or human-machine combination. And that I think is becoming— going to be more apparent, partly for a dark side reason, which is organizations are worried about being dependent on, you know, wetware, human beings, when they might— when in this kind of globally connected disease-prone world. So those are things, the acceleration of the trends, whatever they were, try to see where the puck's going, you know. Right. And there will be, one, windows of opportunity, and two, how do you respond to that. I would like to make one point about the digital transformation before I turn it back over to Cindy. We— she pointed out to me one time that we were— I was so excited because I've been talking about it for years, AI and machine learning, and I'm just like, "Ooh, I love that stuff." Yeah, way, way ahead of the reality, but that's me. So, a lot of organizations put their knowledge management people on the digital transformation team and took it away from its department or homeroom or wherever it might have been. And then when they made it part of an initiative as opposed to a discipline and a function, or, you know, formalized it, and it was— it got lost in the digital transformation. And as soon as they either ran into problems because the hype over, you know, it got ahead of the reality, or they were done with whatever done means, then there was no homeroom for knowledge management anymore. So yeah, just, just a caution about that. Maintain identity while you partner the heck out of stuff. Yeah, that's great. Cindy, you want to move to what you think you see?

You know, I do, Chris. It's interesting, Chris, I just did a blog and it was about— it was a few weeks ago, a couple of weeks ago or so. It was about reentry. And the whole thing was I said, KM, you need an exit strategy from this pandemic work, kind of what Carla was saying, because you have to be careful. Knowledge management is It's so adaptable. It can report to a lot of different places. Our data shows that. It's very flexible. It partners. So you have to be careful to keep your own personality because you're about knowledge. You're— I hate to say this, and I don't want— I'm very respectful. I don't want to sound egotistical, but knowledge is bigger than just learning and development. It's bigger than human capital management. It's all part of that. And it's not to put knowledge management on a pedestal. It's to show the discipline and the connectedness it has to have to the business. And so when I was doing this, when I was writing my piece, I thought, okay, what does reentry look like? And I think this works if you are new. There's 3 things I think you need to do, whether you're new and you've been doing some of these things, or you're a seasoned KM veteran and you've got it going on for your organization. I think number 1, you need to be able to tell your stories. Now, for those of you who have been in the KM world, you know, what did you do to help? How did you help move this? How did you help people collaborate? They can be very simple, but for those of you who have had the program, you need to make sure you quantify some of that and talk about the value of those skills.

It was to the business.

Value is huge, important. Don't forget that. The second one is take your lessons and do something with them. If you are new and you've learned something about this whole knowledge flow or collaboration, So you know what, our strategy is to make this better, and every strategy you build should have a customer focus on it. It's that whole customer journey mapping, customer experience. Now, if your story and your lesson supports that, you're going to be in a winning position. And then the third thing is— and we kick this tire down the road one more time— your focus on knowledge, just what is important in all of this, because everybody talks about collaboration. Years ago, Larry Prusak Christopher Parsons, great, great philosopher and thought leader in our— my early days, that he said, you know, when people say the word collaborate, think about what that is. It's to co-labor. And it's not to give it that position of, oh, it's easy and you can just do it and people get together. No, it's about really doing deep work with these tools. And we've got such— look at this. Meeting. I mean, you know, you can do it so much easier in CPEL. So, that's my 3 things: story, lessons, and focus.

So, thank you. I see that we've had some questions come in, and what I want to do for folks that are new to the deep dive, which is anyone that wasn't on it last week, take a minute and put your questions there, but you can also vote in the questions panel, and just take a minute to vote up the questions that you want us to take, because we have more in there than we can cover. So this is— Do I get to vote? You get to vote.

Do I get to vote?

Sure, absolutely. Cindy, you can vote as well. You can only vote once. It's that kind of situation. So again, in the Q&A—

I'm not going to, Chris, because Carl always accuses me of going to the dark side. I'm always saying, okay, so what if though?

What if this happens? Yeah. Yeah. And so we've got one that's kind of at the top already. So Kayla, I'm going to go ahead and unmute you so you can ask your question.

Hey guys, how are you doing? Um, yeah, so I was just wondering, how do you create space for coaching and mentoring to take place without enforcing it? Because I feel like it's kind of like a natural thing that happens, and you know, some folks connect better with others, and it's hard to kind of foster that mentor-mentee culture, if you will. Um, and then what about those people who can't find a connection with a specific mentor? What do you guys think about that?

Carla, you want to go first?

Yeah, I'll give you some thoughts. I have a hunch that the other 170 people on this call probably have some good answers too. So, you know, type them in and give them to Kayla and share with us. That's where the formal approaches come in. You may not need it, Kayla, as a mentoring program because then you've got to stand up a lot of a lot around that. But when you identify who experts are and nex-perts, to use Dorothy Leonard's phrase, you can connect the experts and the nex-perts to the projects that the experts are on so that it's a natural thing to work with them and see them. So it's moving people into the space where they're likely to learn naturally, changing. And so it's, it's a lot of times it consists of reassigning people. To projects and so on, more so than giving it the look and feel kind of artificial to people, which is, I'm a mentor to so-and-so, especially in STEM organizations, scientific, technical, engineering organizations. They love to share what they know and solve problems together. But doing something soft like a mentor, ah, I don't know. Hmm.

Kayla, you know, I have— I'm asked this a lot over the years. It's a common question. And my— one of my very first questions I usually ask back, and I won't do this to you, but it is the question I ask back to organizations. I say, do you have a formal mentoring mentee program? Number one, you know, do you have that? And is it just not working? Because that would be a space to step into and really help. And I hate to— guys, I'm beating the knowledge mapping to death, but that's a great mentor mentee thing to do together, and you can actually do it in a large group setting. Because what our research shows and experience shows is that the younger, you know, your new hires or your people who are in the early stages of their career, they love to sit and listen to the experts talk and debate and go into deep problem solving, whether they understand it or not, depending on where they are in their career. So that would be the first thing. I also think that community can serve— centers of expertise can serve in that mentor-mentee relationship, and you can create that camaraderie because it builds the relationship, right? That's what mentoring mentee is all about, a great relationship that you can share all and go deeper. So those are just some top-of-the-mind thoughts. I think what I'm hearing there—

oh, go ahead. Sorry, Carla.

I was just going to build on— remember you mentioned work out loud earlier. You know, what's— there's another question about what's in it for the experts. If they— right? So the answer is part of it is that Cindy just revealed it, which is let experts work together with each other and let the rest of us sit around the big circle while they work out loud and learn. And they're going to have a fabulous time. We're going to have a learning opportunity. And that's where your facilitation skills come in, is to set that up.

Right, because Carla, I think part of what you're both speaking to, right, is we don't know the exact person who's going to have the knowledge I need at that moment, right? So part of this working out loud and community work is allowing mentoring by many people all at once. It's just in time, depending on what your knowledge need is at a given moment.

That's right. That's exactly right.

Well, Cindy, you went to knowledge mapping. Our next question from Jim Armour is about knowledge mapping.

Jim Armour. Yes, what is that? Is he gonna—

is he gonna say I'm here?

How are you doing? Uh, boy, thanks, this is super fantastic. So, uh, new to KM, um, my firm is fully committed to going down this path, and I'm tasked at leading us, uh, down this journey, and it's been pretty incredible to this point. But, uh, there are numerous activities that you could move forward with, and many are working in parallel. But as we take a step back and kind of reset, and I've thought about it, the knowledge mapping activity and mapping critical knowledge has really like risen to the top for, for me. Um, introduced it to my knowledge management team that we've created that's diverse, that covers a lot of things. But as we kickstart this Boy, it sounds like and it feels like a heck of an endeavor. It can be complex. But the main thing is, how do you avoid the trap of doing it kind of one and done when you put in all this effort?

That's such a great question. Yeah. So knowledge map obviously is a living, breathing document that somebody has to own, just like you would have a process owner, a content owner. A lot of times we see knowledge maps owned by communities or SMEs or centers of experts, just depending. But the thing I think that people think about doing a knowledge map, and you're right, we've done it. No, you never do. It's never just done because you, you analyze it, you take action out of it because you're analyzing, you know, not only what knowledge do you have and where do you need it, but the flow of it. The relevancy, is it really solving a problem and going to add value? I will tell you this, you're going to hear Cindy Hubert's bias come out. I'm not a big fan of mapping all the knowledge across the organization. We've done it with organizations, there's been a purpose, but I think you're better to go with what is driving our business right now. What knowledge should go? So go back and you can do a knowledge risk. Without doing the knowledge map first and get a little bit closer and more focused, and then let it be part of that bigger strategy. Knowledge mapping will be something you do to support every strategic initiative that you take on, you know, whether it's eliciting knowledge from senior people, getting it into communities or workflows, It'll be part of everything you do. So let the strategy, the strategic effort, drive that in your objective that aligns to the business, and let knowledge mapping support all of that. That's probably—

Cindy, I'd just like to build on that if I could. Like, for an AEC firm, right, there's only a handful of moving parts at the very high level where you want to start, right? We're winning new business, we're delivering that work, We're at a high quality that we're proud of. We're recruiting and retaining people and developing them. We're operating our business. So like, what, Jim, like what's the most important thing to the company? Which one of those things is keeping you from going where you need to go or where your company is trying to invest? And then I like where Cindy, you work backwards to processes that aren't working, knowledge that's missing. It's just that I think that's been the theme I've taken out of our conversation is it's not about necessarily knowledge management. Right? It's about the business and it's a lot largely profit process driven. And one of the things that I've heard all of us say at different points in the time is there isn't like a good answer that you can give any one firm on where to start, right? Because it just depends on where that business is in the moment. And I think Carla, your point about like attributes of good knowledge managers is they're very good at staying close to the business and watching it evolve. Grow and change and understanding where the opportunities and the challenges are. Not on an island, right?

Right. And Chris, you're talking about, well, so what now, KM? So think about where we are, right, where we all are right now. It's about assessing and managing risk. So you're going to look at it— Jim, going back to you— just look at that, the risk to the business, just look at it with a knowledge lens, and it will very close to where you— where that business opportunity is. I just think that's the way you go, opposed to letting KM lead. Let the business lead and just look at it differently.

So we have a question from Johannes. I'm going to enable you.

Johannes, you with us? Hello, you can hear me? Yes. Oh, thank you very much. Greetings from Switzerland. And hello, Cindy. See you again and talk to you again. I had a question related how to motivate, let's say, experts. I mean, I don't mean formal experts, let's say colleagues who have a lot of hands-on practical knowledge and they're often overloaded with tasks, with duties, but they don't have time or they don't see the priority to systematically document or share knowledge. And since I'm very familiar with knowledge management systems which are web-based, let's say online community platforms, I think there's a similar question from Drew, how to do knowledge management in a virtual environment. I think it's quite important to motivate such persons. And my question is how to motivate them, especially if they are not around us, if they are located in the home office or in any other part of the world. This would be interesting to discuss. Cindy, you go first.

Johannes. So, Chris, we get to stay for another 2 hours on this question, right?

2 hours on this question.

Yeah, Johannes, it's, it's because engagement, right? That's why I said it's the fuel that keeps knowledge management's engine going, is people participating and engaging in your processes and systems. And you just have to find the what's in it for them. With experts especially, a lot of time it is recognition, and it could be You know, as they're going out, your legacy to the organization, it could be easing the burden that they're answering the same question 15 times every single day. And so knowledge management efforts, that's a very simple example, Johannes. We've had these discussions before, but, but that would be one way to just make their life easy so they can work on the things that are important to them and new and innovative, opposed to just the operational side. That's a short answer to that.

It's a good one. It's a great question. Thank you very much. May I take a quick stab at it and a plug? The change is easier when you help people do what they already want to do. So, there is something that these experts would like to do to capture what they know. I forget all the time what I used to know. You know, I need somebody helping me do that. And it can also align with the mentorship piece. If you can assign somebody to them, if that's the problem they're trying to solve, help people do what they already want to do. The plug is for a book. Somebody else told me they were reading Atomic Habits, which is great. It's a book called Tiny Habits, and it's, it's Professor BJ Fogg at Stanford. It is probably the most powerful set of simple tools for change that you're going to find at the individual level. I'm serious. This stuff works. His first principle is help people do what they already want to do.

Fantastic. I think we have time for one more.

Okay, thank you very much.

Thank you, Ioannis. We have time for one more question. We got to do this one quickly, but it's from Laura Lynn. And so Laura, you should be able to ask your question now. Do we still have Laura? You might be muted.

Can you guys hear me okay?

Perfect.

I just wanted to ask, what's the difference between knowledge management and business intelligence? Are they the same thing, complementary disciplines, or integrated functions?

Hmm, I haven't had that question in a while. I, I need to think about that. I think about them as being complementary disciplines, but I haven't given— Laura, I haven't given that a whole lot of deep thought. Cindy, do you have any good ideas, or does anybody else on the call? Chris, May?

Yeah, you know, Laura, my simple answer is I think that it's— I don't want to call anything a subset of anything because it just depends on how your organization sets it up. I think it's a part of your knowledge base, right? But how you manage the data and content that's in business intelligence may look different than how you manage tacit or content-based knowledge. So I think you just have to look at those and say, what are the processes and the— you know, you may have more restrictions in terms of regulatory issues or things you have to consider, privacy around You know, business intelligence. But I think that goes into how people consume it and use it to do something with it that puts it into that knowledge management thing. That's kind of—

and I can— I'll tie those two together. So one of the things I see in our community is some of the best knowledge managers I know are beefing up their business intelligence, data visualization, whatever you want to call that skill set. And one of the things that I've always thought is, you know, if you're a really strong knowledge management program, you're You're close to them, how your company makes money and creates value. And what I'm seeing in general, pre-COVID, but during COVID is those people that have those business intelligence skills are working directly with the executive team to help, you know, run scenarios, do analysis, whether it's on growth or whether it's on managing finance. And that knowledge that's trapped up in all that data that we're generating, good knowledge managers are finding ways to make that valuable and accessible to leaders. And so That's an area I've seen a lot of growth in our community on, is people getting those skills because no— I'll try to keep this short. It's an interesting opportunity because doing it really well requires understanding how the business works. It requires being able to communicate visually very complex information in a way that folks can understand and take action on. And it requires the technical skills to actually do the data work and the analysis. And so knowledge managers are really well positioned to have all three of those things and to be the only kind of folks in the business that can do it. So I don't really know if it's knowledge management, if it's not, but I think it's a valuable skill for knowledge managers to have. Would be my take. Good partnership opportunity too. It's a good partnership opportunity as well. Cindy and Carla, we're at the top of the hour. Thank you so much for being here. I feel like we could keep going for a long time. In fact, for those of you that are sticking around for the Hangout, we are going to keep going a little bit. Whenever we get together, I just learn a ton. I'm inspired, and today was the same. So thank you, thank you all for being here. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. For the people on the call, we're going to have a recording about— of this soon. We're also going to send a link to the final Google Doc and make that available. Hangout-wise, I mentioned before, you should have a link in your email if you registered for the Hangout. I'm about to paste it into the chat. So what's going to happen once you click on that link, you're going to get a prompt and it's going to ask you, do you want to leave this webinar and go join another video call? You should say yes, and we will see you over there. If you have any trouble getting in, please email us at connect@knowledge-architecture.com. All right. See you guys on the flip side. Carla and Cindy, thank you again. Thank you. Thank you very much. Bye-bye. Bye, Johan. Bye-bye.