(highlight:: Continually Engage in "Scary" Learning to Empathize With Your Knowledge Management Clients
Transcript:
Speaker 1
To be good at that, to do that expertise, style knowledge management requires me to constantly work on my expertise. So I play the game of Go. I learn to paint and sketch and I love driving fast cars around racetracks just because it scares the heck out of me. And I'm constantly pushing myself into that learning mode because the people I work with, they're in that working mode. I need to have the empathy for the fear, for the change, for the worry that they have as they're doing this new thing, as they're learning from others and then get them to a point where they're So confident that they want to share with others. And that's a huge part of knowledge management for me.)
- Time 0:01:32
- beginners_mindset, empathy, learning, 1socialdont-post,

(highlight:: The Factors That Hinder Knowledge Transfer Are Often Structural
Transcript:
Speaker 1
And if something is learnt at one end of the state, I need to transfer that to the other. Now you can do that with story, but you can also do that with lessons without direction reviews and debriefs. You can do that through analysis and research. And you can do that by putting the workload where it should be, you know, up at the top, rather than on the poor people down below expected to read 160 documents a year about everything Because they're going to remember that really, they're going to remember that, not in my experience. So what we have to do is take those really important lessons and then think, well, what are the structures that are causing that to happen?
Speaker 2
And now we've already kind of hindered around this. What are the barriers to knowledge transfer or knowledge sharing? And is it just the skill set of listening and conversation? Is that the biggest barrier?
Speaker 1
I think a lot of the barriers that we deal with are structural.)
- Time 0:15:22
- incentives, knowledge_transfer, organizational_knowledge, organizational_structure, 1socialpost-queue,

(highlight:: Bad Norms and Policies Produce "Legislatice Mediocrity" in Organizations
Transcript:
Speaker 1
You want to be teachable and you want to have a culture of being teachable and listening to others. Yeah. That's that's really important. And so I love SOPs. I love I love it when you get a system working well and efficient. But I don't like it when it creates taboos and when it stops people learning. Legislative mediocrity. It drives me nuts. I'm very much let's do innovation. Let's improve.)
- Time 0:19:31
- incentives, knowledge_transfer, legislative_mediocrity, norms, organizational_knowledge, policies, 1socialpost-queue,

(highlight:: Mixing People from Different Geographies for Serendipitous Knowledge Transfer
Transcript:
Speaker 1
They'd work on what's called sectors. They sectorize the fire. And you'll have people from all over the state working on one sector. In fact, we've got this great practice that when you show up, you'll take one person from each truck in the strike team and put them in the local truck. And then the local brigade fills one seat in each of the visiting trucks. Yeah. But that local knowledge gets transferred while you're working together. And I love that. That's a great way to do it. It's in these things. And then you make those friendships. And then it's like, oh, actually, in the Alpine fire, I work with Joe. He was from like, Chilton somewhere. He was talking about that at dinner. He was saying that they do that with the, you know, whatever. I'll give him a call so the next minute away it goes.)
- Time 0:22:31
- knowledge_transfer, organizational_knowledge,

(highlight:: David Snowden's Cynefin Framework: A Swimming Analogy
Transcript:
Speaker 1
So when I first got into knowledge management, one of the first things I came across was David Snowden's Canavan framework, which is a simple, complicated, complex and chaos. I think that he's changed that to clear now. I heard somebody talk about explaining the differences and how you explain that to a layperson. And he used swimming to clear the bottom right hand. That's like the baby's toddler's pool. Right. Slashing around. You see this, you do that. It works every time you're done. Complicated is like Olympic swimming. And that's where efficiency comes in. Right. You want to get those everyone doing the same thing and really organized and just even the position of your fingers as you pull your hand through the water can add one tenth of your time And that sort of stuff. That's complicated. Chaos is like being at sea in a storm. They're coming at you from every direction. There's waves and swell and the combination of the two can tip your boat, get to land as quick as possible. And then complexity is like surfing and surfing with a couple of strong strokes at the right time. You can go four, five times the speed of an Olympic swimmer with one tenth the energy output because you're harnessing the energy of the wave. And when I see the way people work in practice, for me, that's a wave. Why would I be sitting there paddling along with all my effort when I can jump on that wave and let it do 90% of the work for me and all I'm worrying about is steering and paddling like crazy To get on it. Right. So that's kind of how I do a lot of my work.)
- Time 0:23:59
- cynefin_framework, issue_management, problem_solving, problems, complexity, frameworks,

(highlight:: Knowledge Management is Culture Engineering at Its Core
Transcript:
Speaker 1
Even though I have a background in IT, I don't see myself as a database export or as a librarian or anything like that. I'm a culture engineer. I'm creating social systems. For me, concepts like nudge, concepts like the rabbit trap, don't run around trying to spear a rabbit, lay it out your breadcrumbs and have you trapped there waiting for them. Ever been out with a Native American tracker. Their ability to see that little hole in the underbrush where the rabbits go through. And that's where he sets his trap, right? Well, you've got to look before he starts setting traps, right? And I see so many knowledge managers rushing in and starting rolling out confluence or SharePoint or something. They haven't talked to anyone. They don't understand how stuff gets done in the organization. You know, six months after I joined the CFA, I signed up as a volunteer because how could I manage the knowledge of 55,000 people when I didn't even know what knowledge was important to Them? Good point.
Speaker 2
Good point. You got to get your feet wet. Absolutely. In the military, we call that ground truth.)
- Time 0:25:30
- culture_engineering, knowledge_management,

(highlight:: There is No Perfect System: KM Requires Co-Evolution to Get to Best Adjacent Possible
Transcript:
Speaker 2
I want you to talk about how the technology now overlaps into the habit and the behavior of your organization. Yeah, I love it. So that, for me, is the critical part. So how do you, and we talked about co-creation before, a more important term is co-evolution.
Speaker 1
How do you co-evolve the decision-making culture in the organization and the technologies that support that decision-making? Yeah. They literally have to evolve. For me, there is never a magic bullet. There's no perfect software. It's what's the next adjacent possible that we can get the most value out of. And that will not stop us, not create a barrier to moving forward.)
- Time 0:27:19
- adjacent_possible, co-creation, knowledge_management, 1socialdont-post,

(highlight:: Having Impact as a KM: Teach Executives How Not to Create Knowledge Barriers
Transcript:
Speaker 2
I kind of feel I could do more as a knowledge manager for the world just by teaching a couple of executives how not to create the knowledge barriers than I could ever do plugging all the Holes, right?)
- Time 0:30:29
- impact, knowledge_management, organizational_knowledge,

(highlight:: Operational Discretion: Data and Information Are Prequisites to Create Local Knowledge
Transcript:
Speaker 1
This gets to my definition of knowledge a little bit, which we can talk about in a minute. But for me, data and information pay a key part in the local generation of knowledge. And so if you stop seeing information as I'm telling you what needs to be done and start seeing it as what data and information do the people need to create the knowledge so that they can Respond the best possible way in that situation. And that may or may not be the exact way that we have written down the manual. The UK really handles this well where they have a thing called operational discretion. It's really nice. I won't go into it, but if you want to Google operational discretion and Jessup, jump in, have a read because the UK guys are really leading the way there.)
- Time 0:33:31
- data, information, knowledge_creation, knowledge_transfer, local_knowledge, operational_discretion, knowledge,

(highlight:: Discretionary Decision-Making v.s. Non-Discretionary Decision-Making
Transcript:
Speaker 1
So the key thing for us is we have two types of decisions. We have discretionary decision-making. We have non-discretionary decision-making. So if you're standing in front of a house that's on fire and you've just been told there's a couple of kids inside, that's non-discretionary. You are not pulling out your phone and googling stuff at that point. You're following what you know, your prime recognition action. Action go. Right? Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. That's your platoon commander. You make it happen. So you need to prepare for that. And some of that's training, some of that's heads up just being alert, right? And we do that. Our team, our lessons team, actually puts out those types of things. We just put one out the other day on their hand brakes.)
- Time 0:38:26
- decision-making, discretionary_decision-making, non-discretionary_decision-making, 1todo evernote,

(highlight:: Information Saturation/Overload is a Threat to Effective Knowledge Flow
Transcript:
Speaker 1
So we don't need to be overloading people with information overload. And I see information overload as the biggest threat to good knowledge management. And this idea that we've got to publish more, tell more, get people to read more. We don't live in 1970 anymore. We're not in an information scarcity. They get more information from their school each year from their kids than they did in a whole year as a farmer back in the 70s, you know. So just respect people's time and they're just they're bandwidth, the intellectual bandwidth.)
- Time 0:39:56
- information_overload, knowledge_flow, knowledge_transfer, organizational_knowledge,

(highlight:: What is "Knowledge"?
Transcript:
Speaker 1
For me, knowledge is it's an emergent, subjective phenomena that describes the collective memorizing and sense making and all that decision making aspects of the brain, right? But who's going to listen to a description like that? So the one I've sort of settled on is that it's the capability of a team or individual to process the available data and information and make decisions and take actions that create value. So that's the definition of knowledge for me, right? It's not memorized information. It's a capability to make good decisions and to take right action. Makes sense of the data you have available to you.)
- Time 0:40:46
- knowledge,

(highlight:: Wisdom v.s. Knowledge: The Key Temporal Difference
Transcript:
Speaker 1
The problem I have with wisdom, it's actually a past tense word. So you don't say, make sure you do something wise here. What you do is you look at what somebody did and you say, man, they were really wise. Does that make sense? So wisdom is a measure that they had what it took and they did it, right? Whereas knowledge is what you had before the action. So wisdom is the evidence of knowledge in action.)
- Time 0:41:26
- knowledge, wisdom,

(highlight:: The Two Sides of Knowledge Management: Collective Competencies and Information Technology
Transcript:
Speaker 2
So when you combine knowledge with management, what do you get?
Speaker 1
Two things. The generation of that capability in your people to be aware of what's going on and to look before you act and to listen and then on the other side, making the best, most validated, most On point data and information available to them and accessible by them so they can make those better decisions. So they're the two sides of KM for me. How do you generate that capability, both at the individual and team level? I know the Army, Australian Army does a lot of work on collective competence and how you actually have teams with competences and you train and you exercise for that. You don't just say a team's competence is the aggregate of all the competences inside the team. No, the team itself has a level of competence and then the IT side. But the IT side is always subservient to making knowledge. We have this fairy tale that we tell ourselves that if we just give people the right information, they'll make the right decisions. There's your evidence for that. I don't see that.
Speaker 2
It's not a given.)
- Time 0:41:51
- information_technology, knowledge_management, collective_competence,

(highlight:: Innovation, Knowledge, and Culture Are Tightly Intertwined
Transcript:
Speaker 1
That's another structural thing. If you've got a culture that sees mistakes as failures and they're to boost, we never do that. We don't make mistakes here. They're incredible in terms of their delivery now. But in terms of their revolution of practice over time, it stagnates. There's no surprise there. They're not allowed to make mistakes. They're not allowed to learn. They're not allowed to innovate. Innovation is as much about taking some of those constraints off as it is teaching people how to create and how to innovate.
Speaker 2
And so that's why for me, knowledge and innovation are so tightly intertwined. You can't do one without the other both ways.)
- Time 0:43:25
- culture, innovation, local_knowledge,

(highlight:: Continually Engage in "Scary" Learning to Empathize With Your Knowledge Management Clients
Transcript:
Speaker 1
To be good at that, to do that expertise, style knowledge management requires me to constantly work on my expertise. So I play the game of Go. I learn to paint and sketch and I love driving fast cars around racetracks just because it scares the heck out of me. And I'm constantly pushing myself into that learning mode because the people I work with, they're in that working mode. I need to have the empathy for the fear, for the change, for the worry that they have as they're doing this new thing, as they're learning from others and then get them to a point where they're So confident that they want to share with others. And that's a huge part of knowledge management for me.)
- Time 0:01:32
- beginners_mindset, empathy, learning, 1socialdont-post,

(highlight:: The Factors That Hinder Knowledge Transfer Are Often Structural
Transcript:
Speaker 1
And if something is learnt at one end of the state, I need to transfer that to the other. Now you can do that with story, but you can also do that with lessons without direction reviews and debriefs. You can do that through analysis and research. And you can do that by putting the workload where it should be, you know, up at the top, rather than on the poor people down below expected to read 160 documents a year about everything Because they're going to remember that really, they're going to remember that, not in my experience. So what we have to do is take those really important lessons and then think, well, what are the structures that are causing that to happen?
Speaker 2
And now we've already kind of hindered around this. What are the barriers to knowledge transfer or knowledge sharing? And is it just the skill set of listening and conversation? Is that the biggest barrier?
Speaker 1
I think a lot of the barriers that we deal with are structural.)
- Time 0:15:22
- incentives, knowledge_transfer, organizational_knowledge, organizational_structure, 1socialpost-queue,

(highlight:: Bad Norms and Policies Produce "Legislatice Mediocrity" in Organizations
Transcript:
Speaker 1
You want to be teachable and you want to have a culture of being teachable and listening to others. Yeah. That's that's really important. And so I love SOPs. I love I love it when you get a system working well and efficient. But I don't like it when it creates taboos and when it stops people learning. Legislative mediocrity. It drives me nuts. I'm very much let's do innovation. Let's improve.)
- Time 0:19:31
- incentives, knowledge_transfer, legislative_mediocrity, norms, organizational_knowledge, policies, 1socialpost-queue,

(highlight:: Mixing People from Different Geographies for Serendipitous Knowledge Transfer
Transcript:
Speaker 1
They'd work on what's called sectors. They sectorize the fire. And you'll have people from all over the state working on one sector. In fact, we've got this great practice that when you show up, you'll take one person from each truck in the strike team and put them in the local truck. And then the local brigade fills one seat in each of the visiting trucks. Yeah. But that local knowledge gets transferred while you're working together. And I love that. That's a great way to do it. It's in these things. And then you make those friendships. And then it's like, oh, actually, in the Alpine fire, I work with Joe. He was from like, Chilton somewhere. He was talking about that at dinner. He was saying that they do that with the, you know, whatever. I'll give him a call so the next minute away it goes.)
- Time 0:22:31
- knowledge_transfer, organizational_knowledge,

(highlight:: David Snowden's Cynefin Framework: A Swimming Analogy
Transcript:
Speaker 1
So when I first got into knowledge management, one of the first things I came across was David Snowden's Canavan framework, which is a simple, complicated, complex and chaos. I think that he's changed that to clear now. I heard somebody talk about explaining the differences and how you explain that to a layperson. And he used swimming to clear the bottom right hand. That's like the baby's toddler's pool. Right. Slashing around. You see this, you do that. It works every time you're done. Complicated is like Olympic swimming. And that's where efficiency comes in. Right. You want to get those everyone doing the same thing and really organized and just even the position of your fingers as you pull your hand through the water can add one tenth of your time And that sort of stuff. That's complicated. Chaos is like being at sea in a storm. They're coming at you from every direction. There's waves and swell and the combination of the two can tip your boat, get to land as quick as possible. And then complexity is like surfing and surfing with a couple of strong strokes at the right time. You can go four, five times the speed of an Olympic swimmer with one tenth the energy output because you're harnessing the energy of the wave. And when I see the way people work in practice, for me, that's a wave. Why would I be sitting there paddling along with all my effort when I can jump on that wave and let it do 90% of the work for me and all I'm worrying about is steering and paddling like crazy To get on it. Right. So that's kind of how I do a lot of my work.)
- Time 0:23:59
- cynefin_framework, issue_management, problem_solving, problems, complexity, frameworks,

(highlight:: Knowledge Management is Culture Engineering at Its Core
Transcript:
Speaker 1
Even though I have a background in IT, I don't see myself as a database export or as a librarian or anything like that. I'm a culture engineer. I'm creating social systems. For me, concepts like nudge, concepts like the rabbit trap, don't run around trying to spear a rabbit, lay it out your breadcrumbs and have you trapped there waiting for them. Ever been out with a Native American tracker. Their ability to see that little hole in the underbrush where the rabbits go through. And that's where he sets his trap, right? Well, you've got to look before he starts setting traps, right? And I see so many knowledge managers rushing in and starting rolling out confluence or SharePoint or something. They haven't talked to anyone. They don't understand how stuff gets done in the organization. You know, six months after I joined the CFA, I signed up as a volunteer because how could I manage the knowledge of 55,000 people when I didn't even know what knowledge was important to Them? Good point.
Speaker 2
Good point. You got to get your feet wet. Absolutely. In the military, we call that ground truth.)
- Time 0:25:30
- culture_engineering, knowledge_management,

(highlight:: There is No Perfect System: KM Requires Co-Evolution to Get to Best Adjacent Possible
Transcript:
Speaker 2
I want you to talk about how the technology now overlaps into the habit and the behavior of your organization. Yeah, I love it. So that, for me, is the critical part. So how do you, and we talked about co-creation before, a more important term is co-evolution.
Speaker 1
How do you co-evolve the decision-making culture in the organization and the technologies that support that decision-making? Yeah. They literally have to evolve. For me, there is never a magic bullet. There's no perfect software. It's what's the next adjacent possible that we can get the most value out of. And that will not stop us, not create a barrier to moving forward.)
- Time 0:27:19
- adjacent_possible, co-creation, knowledge_management, 1socialdont-post,

(highlight:: Having Impact as a KM: Teach Executives How Not to Create Knowledge Barriers
Transcript:
Speaker 2
I kind of feel I could do more as a knowledge manager for the world just by teaching a couple of executives how not to create the knowledge barriers than I could ever do plugging all the Holes, right?)
- Time 0:30:29
- impact, knowledge_management, organizational_knowledge,

(highlight:: Operational Discretion: Data and Information Are Prequisites to Create Local Knowledge
Transcript:
Speaker 1
This gets to my definition of knowledge a little bit, which we can talk about in a minute. But for me, data and information pay a key part in the local generation of knowledge. And so if you stop seeing information as I'm telling you what needs to be done and start seeing it as what data and information do the people need to create the knowledge so that they can Respond the best possible way in that situation. And that may or may not be the exact way that we have written down the manual. The UK really handles this well where they have a thing called operational discretion. It's really nice. I won't go into it, but if you want to Google operational discretion and Jessup, jump in, have a read because the UK guys are really leading the way there.)
- Time 0:33:31
- data, information, knowledge_creation, knowledge_transfer, local_knowledge, operational_discretion, knowledge,

(highlight:: Discretionary Decision-Making v.s. Non-Discretionary Decision-Making
Transcript:
Speaker 1
So the key thing for us is we have two types of decisions. We have discretionary decision-making. We have non-discretionary decision-making. So if you're standing in front of a house that's on fire and you've just been told there's a couple of kids inside, that's non-discretionary. You are not pulling out your phone and googling stuff at that point. You're following what you know, your prime recognition action. Action go. Right? Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. That's your platoon commander. You make it happen. So you need to prepare for that. And some of that's training, some of that's heads up just being alert, right? And we do that. Our team, our lessons team, actually puts out those types of things. We just put one out the other day on their hand brakes.)
- Time 0:38:26
- decision-making, discretionary_decision-making, non-discretionary_decision-making, 1todo evernote,

(highlight:: Information Saturation/Overload is a Threat to Effective Knowledge Flow
Transcript:
Speaker 1
So we don't need to be overloading people with information overload. And I see information overload as the biggest threat to good knowledge management. And this idea that we've got to publish more, tell more, get people to read more. We don't live in 1970 anymore. We're not in an information scarcity. They get more information from their school each year from their kids than they did in a whole year as a farmer back in the 70s, you know. So just respect people's time and they're just they're bandwidth, the intellectual bandwidth.)
- Time 0:39:56
- information_overload, knowledge_flow, knowledge_transfer, organizational_knowledge,

(highlight:: What is "Knowledge"?
Transcript:
Speaker 1
For me, knowledge is it's an emergent, subjective phenomena that describes the collective memorizing and sense making and all that decision making aspects of the brain, right? But who's going to listen to a description like that? So the one I've sort of settled on is that it's the capability of a team or individual to process the available data and information and make decisions and take actions that create value. So that's the definition of knowledge for me, right? It's not memorized information. It's a capability to make good decisions and to take right action. Makes sense of the data you have available to you.)
- Time 0:40:46
- knowledge,

(highlight:: Wisdom v.s. Knowledge: The Key Temporal Difference
Transcript:
Speaker 1
The problem I have with wisdom, it's actually a past tense word. So you don't say, make sure you do something wise here. What you do is you look at what somebody did and you say, man, they were really wise. Does that make sense? So wisdom is a measure that they had what it took and they did it, right? Whereas knowledge is what you had before the action. So wisdom is the evidence of knowledge in action.)
- Time 0:41:26
- knowledge, wisdom,

(highlight:: The Two Sides of Knowledge Management: Collective Competencies and Information Technology
Transcript:
Speaker 2
So when you combine knowledge with management, what do you get?
Speaker 1
Two things. The generation of that capability in your people to be aware of what's going on and to look before you act and to listen and then on the other side, making the best, most validated, most On point data and information available to them and accessible by them so they can make those better decisions. So they're the two sides of KM for me. How do you generate that capability, both at the individual and team level? I know the Army, Australian Army does a lot of work on collective competence and how you actually have teams with competences and you train and you exercise for that. You don't just say a team's competence is the aggregate of all the competences inside the team. No, the team itself has a level of competence and then the IT side. But the IT side is always subservient to making knowledge. We have this fairy tale that we tell ourselves that if we just give people the right information, they'll make the right decisions. There's your evidence for that. I don't see that.
Speaker 2
It's not a given.)
- Time 0:41:51
- information_technology, knowledge_management, collective_competence,

(highlight:: Innovation, Knowledge, and Culture Are Tightly Intertwined
Transcript:
Speaker 1
That's another structural thing. If you've got a culture that sees mistakes as failures and they're to boost, we never do that. We don't make mistakes here. They're incredible in terms of their delivery now. But in terms of their revolution of practice over time, it stagnates. There's no surprise there. They're not allowed to make mistakes. They're not allowed to learn. They're not allowed to innovate. Innovation is as much about taking some of those constraints off as it is teaching people how to create and how to innovate.
Speaker 2
And so that's why for me, knowledge and innovation are so tightly intertwined. You can't do one without the other both ways.)
- Time 0:43:25
- culture, innovation, local_knowledge,