Organizational Structures that enable Knowledge Flow with Stuart French

With a broad background in the Oil, Water, Healthcare, Finance and Emergency Management industries, Stuart French is author of the www.DeltaKnowledge.net blog, and currently the Head of Knowledge Management at Country Fire Authority in Melbourne, Australia and Chair of the AFAC Knowledge, Innovation & Research Utilisation Network (KIRUN).  Stuart combines 25 years of professional experience with a Masters of Knowledge Management (KM) to help companies with expertise identification & management, collaboration, organizational learning and knowledge systems to improve their performance and resilience to change. His research on wikis and knowledge cultures led to a fascination with complexity theory which he now enjoys teaching to various organizations and universities so they can bridge the gap between corporate strategy and service excellence. He continues to serve the KM community as co-host of the Knowledge Management Leadership forum in Melbourne Victoria and is honored to be the Australia delegate at the KM Global Network.

Episode Transcript

(00:08):
This is Edwin k Morris,
and you are about to embark on thenext Pioneer Knowledge Services
because you need to know a digitalresource for you to listen to folks
share their experience and knowledgearound the field of knowledge management
and nonprofit work.
Hi, my name's Stuart French.I'm a knowledge manager from Melbourne, Australia.

(00:32):
The most interesting thing nearme is the Danny No Rangers.
I actually live right atthe base of the Rangers.
It's the most beautiful place here,just on the outskirts of Melbourne,
like an hour from town. And it's gotall these little English style villages,
beautiful driving roads,
a and this amazing rainforest walkright across the road from our house.

(00:52):
So even though I abandoned my family andmoved to the city as a, as a young man,
I'm actually closer to the bush and tolizards and kangaroos and everything and
dear that I've ever lived inmy life, which is awesome.
I come from the country and cut my teethwith oil and gas As a young apprentice
30 years ago,
I fell in love with expertise withpeople who really know what they're

(01:16):
doing. And so over my career Ikind of took an interest in that.
I started in computers and radioand moved across into how does
stuff work, how do people getso good? When you watch them,
you're just transfixed by how wellthey do it. To be good at that,
to do that expertise style,
knowledge management requires me toconstantly work on my expertise. So I,

(01:40):
I play the game of go. Ilearned to paint and sketch and,
um,
I love driving fast cars around racetracksjust because it scares the heck outta
me,
and I'm constantly pushing myself intothat learning mode because the people I
work with, they're in that working mode.
I need to have the empathy for the fear,

(02:02):
for the change, for the worry that theyhave as they're doing this new thing,
as they're learning from others,
and then get them to a point where they'reso confident that they want to share
with others. And that's a huge partof knowledge management for me.
Very cool that you're coming at thiswhole km thing in a people forward
kind of momentum, but you know,

(02:24):
people like tend to getcaught up on definitions.
Can you walk me through what knowledgeis versus information for you?
Uh, absolutely. In fact,
it was that definition that gotme into knowledge management.
I was working at Yara Valley Waterback, it was in the nineties,
and there was this old guy, John, uh,

(02:44):
and I'd sort of picked him out asthe guy to go to. You know, he,
he knew everything and we hadthis massive fire happen north of
Melbourne, huge, uh, fireat a recycling plant.
You know how they had these big balesof recycled paper and cardboard and
everything? Oh, yeah. Acouple of them had gone up.
There's massive water cannons thatthey were using to manage that,

(03:04):
but they ran outta water. They had acouple of firetrucks there and there,
there just wasn't enough water. So Johnjumps in his car, lights and sirens,
flies across the city manages tofind this thing called a shutoff
valve. So with water,
they have different water levels withdifferent pressure levels. Mm-hmm.
.
So what he did is he cracked this shutoffvalve and let the high level pressure

(03:25):
into the low level main, which helpedthem get the fire out. Right. Right.
The next day it's hisretirement party ,
and he's telling the story ofhow he found this man. Right.
And I heard him mention the fact thatthey dug through four inches of beammen
to find the main head. The problem withshutoff valves is they're shutoff. Yeah.
You never use them. So they slowlyget buried and lost over the years.

(03:47):
I was doing the mapping atthe time and I said, John,
how did you find that valve? Andhe goes, oh, have you got the map?
And it turned out I did. I,
so I went and got this big a zero map andwe laid it down on the table. He says,
right, here's the main, here's the highlevel area and here's the shutoff valve.
So I just went there, uh,
and I found this tree and I went 45degrees out from the tree with the metal

(04:10):
detector, and we found the main,and I did it and I said, John,
how did you know aboutthe tree? He says, well,
that tree was a sapling when I put thevalve in 40 years ago. Oh my. And I said,
John, that tree is not onour map. Right. And he says,
no, we wrote it on thefield cards, but you,

(04:31):
it guys decided that wasn't important. And I realized, yeah. That I,
I just had that moment whereyou realized, oh my gosh,
knowledge and information arenot the same thing. Right.
That's a classic story of,
of how knowledge is most dangerouswhen the period is long. You know,
this is why people, you know,
I really have huge respect for what theEuropean Atomic Energy Agency does in

(04:55):
Cayan because they're buildinga reactor that has to be
disassembled by the same type ofengineers. In a hundred years time,
no one's gonna be still alive. Oh yeah.Right, right, right. And in between,
you have engineers, a totallydifferent sort of engineer,
totally different experience,totally different expertise.
They run nuclear power plants. Theydon't build them and disassemble them.

(05:16):
That's what got me into km I,that that idea that, oh my gosh,
you can't just write everything down.
A little bit of interpretation. Also,in that story, he basically said,
you guys didn't interpret theknowledge I gave you. But then again,
they didn't ask either.They didn't say, Hey,
is that tree important or Why'd you putit on? Or would you just like the tree?

(05:36):
Is that why you put it on her?
How do you future proof anorganization to where that
gap doesn't happen?
That's a great question. Ifind story is really important.
I've always said context is moreimportant than content. Right. Okay.
It's how you join the dots, not thedots themselves. Actually, there's a,
let me tell you a quick story. Myuncle passed away a, a few years ago,

(05:57):
and I was sitting at the funeral talkingto an old friend of hiss who was a
farmer. He'd had this massivefarm just up the road from us.
And I love talking to him becausehe just had so much experience.
And his son, unlike me, who was thebad farmer's son who went to the city,
his son had actually taken over thereser and, and doing a great job,
massive farm, reallysuccessful, which is great.

(06:19):
But he mentioned in the conversationthat his son had just lost
several hay sheds, several hundredthousand dollars worth of hay to fires.
I said, how did that happen?Like, you're an amazing farmer.
Surely you passed on to him how tostop that happening? He said, well,
we kind of got tricked. Right? So backin the old day, we used to have bales,

(06:39):
you know, bales of hay. I'm sureyou guys have them in. They're,
they're about the size of, of alarge suitcase. And you certain Yeah.
You grab 'em by the strings,you can carry 'em on your knee.
And that's how they did it. Yep.And then he'd stack 'em up in,
in hay sheds about the timethat he was about to retire.
They switched to roundbales, which are much larger.
They're a lot easier to handle, andyou don't really need to stack 'em,

(07:02):
you just leave 'em in the paddock orthe field, I think you call it mm-hmm.
. And you don't need toworry so much about the grass curing,
which is drying the grass out before youbale it, because they're not stacked.
If the grass is a bit wet, it'll warm up,
but it won't get so hot that it catcheson fire. Right? Mm-hmm. .
So as a result,
he didn't really pass on that knowledgeof how to cure the hay because it

(07:25):
was lost knowledge. You don't need toknow that anymore. You've got round bales.
Mm-hmm. .
So fast forward 25 years and wehave a new technology come out,
which is now a largerectangular bale, just,
it almost identical to the old ones. Yeah.
Except now they're thesize of a VW beetle, and so they're massive these things.
And the beauty is you can stackthem mm-hmm. .

(07:47):
So somewhere we lost the, theability to cure the grass. Right.
And I remember my dad showingme, he would actually, uh,
we'd have to rake it and thenleave it a few days mm-hmm.
and rakeit again. I remember him,
I have this really clear memory of himpicking up some of the grass and twisting
it in his hands as he listenedto it and then biting it.
And I said to him at the time, how didyou know how to do that? And he said,

(08:11):
ah, this old farmer down the road, he,
he showed us how to do it becausehis father had passed away.
And my grandfather diedwhen my dad was 17. So,
so these older farmers had sortof taken 'em under their wing and,
and this was the sort ofknowledge they passed on.
So capturing that for an organization isreally important because you never know
what's gonna be done. When Ifirst started my master's degree,

(08:32):
we started talking about nakaand seci and, and all this,
these ideas of writing stuff down. AndI'm like, that's not my experience.
There's manuals and things, but theynever gave you the experience you need.
It's always some old bloke or old girlthat's helping you saying, right. No, no,
no, no. You know, don't do that. Ihave the recipe to my mum's scones.

(08:52):
I have the explicit knowledge,the written down knowledge. Yep.
Do you think I can makethose things? It's no,
they're like little rocks when Imake them . And I, and I,
I worked out one, I sat with herone time and she showed me, yeah.
One of the tricks is you don't spinthe cutter as you cut the dough. Right.
And so that's not writtendown anyway. Yeah, exactly.
You gotta be with the expert.

(09:14):
So there's that demonstration and thencopying and trying and then correction.
There, there's an element you're nottalking about. And in both those examples,
it was a person to person connectionto transfer the knowledge.
But there's gotta be an inkling ofthe, and I hate to say it like this,
but you like the person,so you're gonna tell 'em,
there's some social connectionthere where, oh, you know,

(09:37):
I'm gonna tell you this. Andnot everybody gets the same.
So not everybody gets the hidden secret.And it's not really a hidden secret,
it's just, cuz I haverecipes too for my mom.
It's like a pi dash a pitch of this.
It is like the British Bakeoff showwhere they give 'em the recipe to,
to follow, but they don'ttell 'em how to do it.
The expertise to know the intuition is

(09:59):
there in the expert,
but it's not always easily transferredbecause it's easily forgotten.
You know, in your own head. You justlike, oh, everybody knows that I, oh,
I guess I, I guess youdon't know how to do that.
So it's hard to elicit if theprovider is filling it out
because there's a lot of connected dotsthat's happening in their brain that

(10:21):
isn't making it to the paper.
So what's the best way to getthat outta somebody's head?
Yeah. So for me.
Conversation like this or Yeah,yeah. Well, or mentorship, like, uh.
Look, we've had a coupleconversations about this because the,
the modern way of thinking of thingsis that we want to be efficient.
So we want to write stuff down. We wantto have everyone working the same way.

(10:42):
Everyone at the optimal, whatwe're missing there is community.
There's this ongoing dynamic plan.There's one thing I noticed early on,
I part of a company that was 5.6million turnover when I joined it.
And last year it turned overclose to half a billion dollars.
When I left, it was closeto 200 million. And it,
it's just been an amazing success story.

(11:04):
Fantastic local business that spreadaround the world. Mm. Trust me. Mm-hmm.
, there was no right way.
Everyone was making everything up as we bought that business.
It was a mess.
And there was a part of me thatwanted that efficiency that was like,
can we please just automate this? Right.
This is mad that we're doing thismanually. You know, this is crazy.
But the CEO was kind of a genius.

(11:24):
He had this feel for when it wastime to lock something down and
when it was time to let somethingplay, because the beauty of,
of transferring expertise ratherthan skill that it can mold
and adapt to the new situation. Hmm.
A lot of people talk about knowledgetransfer, I talk about knowledge creation.
If you tell me something, Edwin,about running a podcast and,

(11:47):
and how you do the audio and how youmanage the speaker and stop them going off
train like I do, then you are notactually transferring knowledge to me.
I'm not making mental notes in my head.
What you are telling me ismodifying my knowledge. Oh yeah.
I've had an experience like that and,
and I did this thing and and I'mlinking it all together. Right.
I'm creating new knowledge. But the beautyof that is yes, it's not a computer,

(12:11):
it's not a direct copy, butI'm adapting it to what I know.
So number one, I can nowimprove on it. And number two,
I didn't live the same lifeas you. Right. I have a,
a slightly military background,
but I The stuff that that you are sharingthat I've never experienced before
Yeah. That I now adapt and go, oh mygosh, in this domain I could do this.

(12:32):
And so that creates organizationalevolution of practice.
We really downplay that. We think No,no, no. There's the scientist over there.
They do the research, they create.
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And.
Then we.
Copy it. I wanna bring up the,
the definition of co-create whatyou're talking about is an effort,
a genuine effort tonot only tell my story,

(12:54):
you tell your story. It'snot like competition,
but it is a amalgamation of thought,
creativity ideas that is co-created.
So the definition by MiriamWebster is co-created,
is to create something byworking with one or more others.
The effort in the intent toco-create new knowledge internet.

(13:14):
It doesn't even have to be newknowledge, but modified knowledge.
Just like you're an example, if Iplant one seed and you're like, oh,
and it pops up somewhere elsein your lifespan than success.
Woo-hoo, I did it. How heavy is thatas of a lift? Why is it so difficult?
And why don't more organizationslook at that soft skill,

(13:34):
contextual connecting ability,
and don't worry so muchabout the databases.
So there's this sexy,
sexy thing in evaluation called Quantize
Statistics. , you couldjust measure it with a number,
then it's gotta be better. Right.
Don't worry about people learning stuffas long as they've been on the training

(13:56):
course and we can tick thatsucker off, then we're just fine.
And at least we won'tbe sued. I'll tell you,
I I currently work for theCountry Fire Authority and uh,
I think we're gonna do anotherpodcast and talk a bit about that.
It's a really exciting place to work. And,
but one of the things there is you,
you talk to a crusty old captain and theydon't really care what courses you've

(14:19):
done. Mm-hmm. ,we are, they want to know you.
They can trust you on the fire groundbecause if something goes wrong,
we all die. Right. This is non-trivialstuff. They're serious. They,
you really do need to knowand, and you gotta practice it.
And we share the stories. I, we had ameeting last night at my local brigade.
I'm a volunteer as well, and wehad the meeting, it's all official,
and then afterwards everyone's standingaround eating scones and cream and jam

(14:40):
and things.
And I just sat back as the knowledgemanager watching all the storytelling
happening.
And one group was talking about somenew technologies it's coming through and
some experience.
One of them of them had had withthat sort of thing in their job.
Another group was talking about a striketeam that they'd gone on three years
ago in the big 20 19, 20 20 firesthat you may have heard of the

(15:01):
6.7 million hectares burnt and,and their experience there.
So they're all sharing, you know,
so we've got new firefighters cominginto the brigade, they're doing this.
My job at CFA is a little bit harder.
I've got the time and distanceproblem that you just talked about.
So I've got all the brigades learningoff each other inside the brigades,
but I've got 1200 of them.And if something is learned at one end of the state,

(15:24):
I need to transfer that to the other.Now you can do that with story,
but you can also do that with lessonsafter action reviews and debriefs.
You can do that through analysisand, and research. Yeah.
And you can do that by putting theworkload where it should be, you know,
up at the top mm-hmm.
rather than on the poorpeople down below expected to read 160

(15:44):
documents a year about everything becausethey're gonna remember that really,
they're go really, they're gonnaremember that. Not in my experience.
So what we have to do is take thosereally important lessons and then think,
well, what are the structuresthat are causing that to happen?
Now, we've already kindof hinted around this.
What are the barriers to knowledgetransfer, uh, or knowledge sharing?

(16:07):
And is it just the skillsetof listening and conversation?
Is that the biggest barrier?
I think a lot of the barriersthat we deal with are structural.
Let me lemme explain whatI mean by that. Okay.
In my experience as anapprentice, back 35 years ago,
there was no concept of knowledgenot being shared. Yeah. Interesting.
Why wouldn't you tell someonesomething they need to know.

(16:29):
I was blown away when Ivisited the Middle East, uh,
at the knowledge sharing there.It's absolutely incredible.
And I was talking to one of theheads of the army and he said, oh,
you don't understand in Muslimculture if I know something
that you need to know and I don'ttell you that's a sin. And I was like,
can we borrow that for Westernsociety because we really need that.

(16:53):
That's amazing.
What an incredible culture to have thatit's a sin if you don't help someone
with the knowledge you have. And that'sthe experience I had as an apprentice.
You stand around one ofthese old guys. Yeah.
Just through the love of the expertisethey have or because they wanna show off
or because they wanna laude it over you.
It doesn't matter why they wantto tell you stuff. Right. They're,
let me tell you, young fella,and sometimes they're fun,

(17:15):
sometimes they're bad because you'restuffed up. But they want to tell. For me,
when I came in, uh, and starteddoing my master's degree,
I'm reading all this stuff about, oh,
people don't wanna share and there'sknowledge hoarding and there's all this
stuff going on. And I'mlike, why does that happen?
So I started looking into that.Why do people not share knowledge?
That's not my experience. Of course,a lot of those are structural. I had,

(17:37):
I had a sales team up.
In define for me structural, structuralfirst, are we talking hardware,
software, design of thecompany? Orchestration, what?
So, so all of the above. Sostructural means Okay. Uh,
how things are put in place.Got it. And that may be,
may be the hierarchy ofthe command structure.
It could be communications rules and,and standard operating procedures.

(18:00):
It could be corporate policyor it could be some really,
really explicit cultural stuff. And,uh, and we have some of that around cfa.
There are ways we do it and why we.
Don't.
One thing I wanted to bring up thatmy dad used to tell me as a young guy,
my dad was a timber guy, uh, cuttimber, sawmills, lumber, logging,
all that sort of thing. And so hewas a hands-on teacher and he said,

(18:22):
the best thing you can do is when youthink you're gonna tell somebody, oh,
I know how to do that.
Don't say it because they're gonnashow you or tell you something could,
and if it duplicates whatyou already know, oh, well,
but pretty much it's not gonna duplicatewhat you think, you know, say, uh,
show me.
So there's a pride thing there toothat seems to be a barrier Very much to

(18:44):
transfer.
Very much. Yeah. I mean, beingteachable is, is the highest compliment.
I think , I could be.
Paid. I'm working on it.I'm working on .
Yeah. Yeah. And, and I usedto think I was not teacher,
I was bad because I would,
I would tell stories and I'd bereflecting back to them. Yeah.
That reflective listening, whichwould stop them talking. Of course.

(19:05):
But what I found was I remember a lotmore because when people are telling
me things,
I'm relating it and I'm locking itinto what I know and I'm walking away a
different person.
And the way I do that is by reflectingback and integrating that on the spot.
Right. Some people do that by usingthe, the name Edwin. Thank you Edwin.

(19:26):
I appreciate you. You're tellingme that Edwin, for some reason,
that helps them, whatever works foryou. Right. But you're exactly right.
You want to be teachable and you wantto have a culture of being teachable and
listening to others. Yeah. Uh,that's, that's really important. Yeah.
And so I love SOPs. I love,
I love it when you get a systemworking well and efficient,
but I don't like it when it creates tabbooze and when it stops people learning,

(19:50):
uh, legislated mediocrity. Itdrives me nuts. Um, I'm very much,
let's do innovation. Let's improve.
Let's go to the structure of the cfa.
Can you give us a brief overviewof what that is, how big it is,
what's its mission?
Yeah, sure. So the C FFA is, um, theCountry Fire Authority in Victoria.

(20:11):
Victoria is the third worstfire state in the world.
So the south of Spain is the worst.Then California and then Victoria,
that may sound weird, butit's got to do with fuel load.
So you need a climate that is wetenough to grow plants through the winter
and build that vegetation, you know,
and then dry enough in the summer thatthat all dries out and turns into fuel.

(20:33):
If it's dry all the time and youdon't have that much on the ground,
it's never that bad. And if it's likeTasmania and it's wet all the time,
it never dries out andbecomes fuel. In Australia,
we always have droughts and floods andmm-hmm. everything. And so,
so that's, uh, fires arisk all over Australia.
But Victoria is just thatperfect zone of really green

(20:54):
winters, really dry summers, bigfuel load. And to deal with that,
we've traditionally done that withvolunteers. C FFA is, uh, was built in,
I think 1947, a CFA came intoexistence as a legal body.
But we've got individual brigadesthat have been around over 150 years
and they are amazing.These are small towns,

(21:17):
medium towns out in the country.For those of you don't know,
Melbourne would be probably in thetop 10 cities in America in terms of
size. But unlike America,
we just don't have theBaltimore Annapolis type cities.
We just don't have them.
You're either in Melbourne withfive and a half million people,
or you're in a country townwith a couple of hundred there.

(21:39):
There's nothing in between. Right.Outside of Melbourne, the CFA rules,
we have the MetropolitanBrigade, which is now the F R V,
they look after all the city area.
We have the urban interfaceand in the country,
and it's very much aboutlife and asset protection.
And these volunteers as1,219 brigades are 55,000
volunteers. Some of them beenvolunteers for over 60 years. Uh,

(22:03):
just incredible amazing people embeddedin our communities right across
the state.
And I'm gonna assume that the olderbrigades that were there before the
organization was legal or formal,
they had their own method ofbuilding and transferring knowledge.
Was it all oratory? Wasit just telling stories?
Some of it was, yeah. But,

(22:24):
but also they would cometogether when you had a fire.
People would come from all around tocome in and they'd work together. Mm-hmm.
, they'd work on what'scalled sectors. They sectorize the fire.
And you'll have people from all overthe state working on one sector. We,
in fact, we've got this greatpractice that when you show up,
you'll take one person from each truckin the strike team and put them in the

(22:46):
local truck,
and then the local brigade fills oneseat in each of the visiting trucks.
Yeah.
So that local knowledge gets transferredin while you're working together.
Right. And I love that. That's agreat, that's a great way to do it.
It's in these things and then you makethose friendships and then it's like, ah,
actually, you know, in theAlpine fire I work with Joe,

(23:07):
he was from like Chiltonsomewhere . They,
he was talking about that at dinner. Hewas saying that they do that with the,
you know, whatever, I'll givehim a call. So the next minute,
you know where it goes. And we have thesephone trees where we just call around,
you know,
it's very common to make 12 or 14 phonecalls to find that one person who knows,
we've done some work withenterprise search at C F a radically

(23:29):
successful, not because I did a good job,
but because we chose to implementthe technology in a way that kind of
mirrored how they workedinterpersonally. That phone tree,
that caller friend type style.
You, you might be the first guy that said,
we're gonna take the technologyand try to match it up to what is,
how the users are already doing it,

(23:51):
versus we're gonna throw technology onsomething and make 'em learn a whole new
method. Right. I mean, well.
So who does that? Yeah. So when we, whenI first got into knowledge management,
one of the first things I came acrosswas David Snowden's Can Evan framework,
which is a simple, complicated,complex and chaos. Right.
I think that he's changedthat to clear. Now I,
I heard somebody talk about explainingthe differences and how you explain that

(24:15):
to a, a layperson and heused swimming clear. The,
the bottom right hand that's likethe baby's toddler's pool, right.
Slushing around is you see this, you dothat, it works every time you're done.
Complicated is like Olympic swimmingand that's where efficiency comes in,
right? You want to get those,
everyone doing the same thing andreally organized and you know,

(24:36):
just even the position of your fingersas you pull your hand through the water
can add one-tenth off your time andthat sort of stuff. That's complicated.
Chaos is like being at sea in a storm.
They're coming at youfrom every direction.
There's waves and swell and thecombination of the two can tip your boat,
get to land as quick as possible.
And then complexity is likesurfing and surfing with

(25:00):
a couple of strong strokes atthe right time. You can go four,
five times the speed of an Olympicswimmer with one 10th the energy output
because you're harnessingthe energy of the wave.
And when I see the way people workin practice, for me that's a wave.
Why would I be sitting there paddlingalong with all my effort when I can jump

(25:20):
on that wave and let itdo 90% of the work for me?
And all I'm worrying about is steeringand paddling like crazy to get on it.
Right? So that's kind ofhow I do a lot of my work,
even though I have a backgroundin it, I don't see myself as a,
as a database export or as alibrarian or anything like that.
I'm a a culture engineer. Mm. I'mcreating social systems for me.

(25:41):
Concepts like nudge concepts,uh, like the rabbit trap.
Don't run around trying to spear a rabbit.
Lay it out your breadcrumbs and haveyou trapped there waiting for them. Yep.
Ever been out with aNative American tracker.
Their ability to see that little holein the underbrush where the rabbits go
through and that's where hesets his trap. Right? Well,
you've gotta look before youstart setting traps. Right.

(26:02):
And I see so many knowledge managersrushing in and starting rolling out
Confluence or SharePoint or something.They haven't talked to anyone.
They don't understand Yeah. How stuffgets done in the organization. You know,
six months after I joined the C F A Isigned up as a volunteer because how could
I manage the knowledge of 55,000 peoplewhen I didn't even know what knowledge
was important to them?

(26:23):
Good point. Good point. You gottaget your feet wet. Absolutely.
In the military, we call that groundtruth, that translation of what is,
it's not a foregone conclusionbecause I think you're right.
I think a lot of people step right overthat to get to some solution rollout or
some big master plan or, butit's such an easy thing to do.

(26:45):
It's almost like in a medical field,
when you go into the office to getyour appointment, most often they,
what do they do? They, they do yourvitals right? Let's take your vitals,
see how you're doing, take a snapshot.Because if you don't bother to do that,
you'll never know and you'll neverbe able to get on that surfboard and
be in harmony with what is now.

(27:08):
You can easily make adjustmentsonce you're on the board.
So it's a lot easier to redirectthan to stop and change.
So I'm with you there.Before we go any farther,
I want you to talk abouthow the technology now
overlaps into the habit and thebehavior of your organization.
Yeah, I love it. So that for me isthe critical part. So how do you,

(27:31):
and we talked about co-creationbefore and more important term, 'EM,
is co-evolution.
How do you co-evolve the decision makingculture in the organization and the
technologies that supportthat decision making? Yeah.
They literally have to evolve there.For me, there is never a magic bullet.
There's no perfect software.
It's what's the next adjacentpossible that we can get the most

(27:53):
value out of. And that will not stop us,
not create a barrier tomoving forward. Right?
I was working with a group in Sydney,
a bunch of salespeople whowere not sharing their sales knowledge with the rest
of the country. And I wastold by the CEO O at the time,
you need to go up there,you need to tell these guys,
you need to find out what they'redoing to get such great sales.

(28:13):
And then you need to come back here andtrain our sales people in Melbourne.
Right? Uh, okay, you no, I'ma knowledge manager, great,
but that's not what I do. But I will solveyour problem. So I jumped on a plane,
I went up there, I actually visited thelargest customer in Sydney about a, uh,
an it, uh, a business intelligencereporting issue. Okay.
And I messaged one of thesalespeople and said, listen,

(28:35):
I'm going to see this guy. I'm fine, Ican do it. I'm talking to him about this.
But if you wanted to come along,just in case I said something wrong,
you can sort of manage it cuz Idon't wanna damage the relationship.
He was like, I'm there,
I'll have a coffee with you in the morningand then we'll go together .
And, um, I love this guy Oscar.His name is fantastic guy.
So anyway, we spent the day together,we visited a bunch of customers,

(28:56):
and then like at 11 o'clockat night on beer number eight,
I found out what the problem is.
There's $120,000 sales bonusthat's split across the
country. So if they teach other peopleto sell, they get a pay cut. Yeah.
When I say structural, that's whatI'm talking about right there.
That's structure.
So that's a barrier.
That's a landmine.

(29:17):
Created by the bonus structure. So I,
I didn't bother learning what they'redoing. A I went back to the cfo, ,
we changed to an open bonusstructure. So the more you sold,
the more you madeopen-ended. And guess what?
It took a bit to get it past the ceo,
but all of a sudden everyone's helpingeveryone. Right. So we were smart,

(29:38):
we turned structure on its head. We didtwo components of the bonus structure.
You get part of your bonus for how muchyou sell and part of your bonus for how
much the whole team sells. Yeah, yeah,yeah. So we changed the structure.
Now what do you know, people are sharingknowledge all over the place. In fact,
call each other and say, you idiot,
I just heard through the grape by why didyou say that? We don't do it that way,

(30:00):
we do it this way. Right. We've gottaconsider the structure. And so for me,
there's this great novel byNeil Gaiman, good Omens, uh,
the Demonn is laying around doingnothing. Right? And he says,
aren't you a demonn? Aren't,shouldn't you be doing evil?
Shouldn't you be causing things?He says, I learned a long time ago,
I can create far moreangst and anger with one

(30:21):
well-timed accident in peak hour London.
And I could with years of workworking one-on-one. Right. And,
and it's kind of the same.
I kind of feel I could do more as aknowledge manager for the world just by
teaching a couple of executives how notto create the knowledge barriers than I
could ever do. Pluggingall the holes. Right.

(30:41):
I am a Neil Gaiman fan. Iam a huge Neil Gaman fan.
So I think this is the first connectionI've ever heard with knowledge
management and Neil Gaiman. But I loveit. Uh, one thing I wanna pull up,
just so we get clear definition,uh, Miriam Webster says,
evolution and I like thiscumulative inherited change
in a population of organismsthrough time leading to the

(31:05):
appearance of new forms.
I like the idea of the cumulativeinherited change in a population. Mm-hmm.
that,
and then your example is premier to thatbecause not everybody would've put the
effort in the trying tounderstand what the real, real is.
Like you approached it, you gota hold of somebody local, you,
you were able to just walk through itand just observe and try to understand

(31:30):
and see all the parts. Thatsounds like an easy fix.
And it probably was in the end,
but who thought that wasa good idea to begin with?
When you start making your ownorganization compete against each other,
of course you're gonna stop theflow. You know, you got whoa, whoa,
don't talk to thoseguys. Terrible, terrible.

(31:51):
And there's probably a thousandgood examples of how not to do that.
But, so let's go towardsnow the technology that,
how does that interplay with thepersonnel you've got and how do you get
connectivity to all these volunteers?
Yeah, that's a great question. And that'sthe, the problem to be solved .

(32:12):
So, um,
we have an amazing telecommunicationsinfrastructure here compared to the US.
I've,
I've worked in the US for eight yearsand I was constantly in blackouts because
it was a Verizon and notan at and t and oh my gosh.
Whereas here we've just got Telstra,
we've got one company covers the wholecountry, and your phone always works.
Right? But that doesn't mean wedon't have massive black spots.

(32:33):
You gotta remember,
we have a country the same sizeas the continental US minus
New Mexico. Right. Take New Mexicoout. That's how big Australia is.
And we have 25 million population,
so less people live here thanjust in California. Right.
So we have a similar situation to BritishColumbia where there's just not enough

(32:53):
people here to maintain that level ofinfrastructure. So yeah, we've got,
you know, repeaters and towers,
cell towers going up and down the majorfreeways and that sort of stuff. Mm-hmm.
, but you don't have togo far off the track and you're, you,
you don't have any mobileservice or maybe you do,
maybe you can make a phone call or an sms,
but you don't have interneton your phone. Right? Yeah.
So using digital systems is, isalways an issue. We all have, uh,

(33:16):
printed paper maps in our trucks becausewe work in those areas all the time.
And you can't be mucking around andsaying, oh, my phone's outta service.
I guess we just don't go, youknow, no, there's a house on fire,
there's two kids inside, we're going,we're very, very manual like that.
But the use of technology, this gets tomy definition of knowledge a little bit,
uh, which we can talk about in a minute.But for me, data and information, hey,

(33:39):
a key part in the localgeneration of knowledge.
And so if you stop seeing informationas I'm telling you what needs to be
done and start seeing it aswhat data and information do the
people need to create the knowledge sothat they can respond the best possible
way in that situation.
And that may or may not be the exact waythat we have written down the manual.

(34:01):
The UK really handles this well wherethey have a thing called operational
discretion. It's really nice. I won'tgo into it, but mm-hmm. ,
if you want to Google operationaldiscretion and, and Jessop jump in,
have a read because the UK guys arereally leading the way there. Um, for me,
what we are doing in the iccs,
the incident control centersand the state control center,

(34:21):
the way we manage intelligence and bringthat in and then send that back out is
wonderful. It's really good. Butwe use radios a lot of the time.
And so one of the things we are doingat the moment is the pocketbook project
where we're actually putting an app oneach of the firefighters phones that
gives them access to key data andthen looking at concepts like, um,

(34:42):
the morning muster.
So everyone's standing around gettingthe incident action plan in the morning
for the next 12 hours ofwork. We've got a, you know,
full control vehicle there with wifion it. Everyone pull out your phones,
jump on the wifi,
open pocketbook that will downloadall of the maps you need for the day.
Now out on the fire ground, you pullout the I a p, the printed plan,

(35:03):
you scan the QR code and it opensthat sector map and away you go.
Having those key things there wherethey don't have the knowledge.
Yeah, okay, you've got a Tesla on fire,
I've never been an electricvehicle fire. Okay,
well this is not a learning experience.
You need to be known what you'redoing around one of these things.
And by the way, there's three peopleinside it. So now we've got, you know,

(35:25):
ANCAP software that shows us the layoutand where the fuses are and where the
main power conduits go so you don'tcut through them and they'll execute
everybody. So this sort of knowledgeyou can bring up very quickly,
very detailed. You don't need to to trainthem. The, you know, the number one,
they'll never remember all that detailfor every model of car. Oh sure.
Number two, they'd probably remember itwrong. And then go in with confidence,

(35:45):
which is even worse. That's antiexpertise and that's dangerous. So,
so having that respect, uh,
and then sharing information thatthen helps people make good decisions,
high value decisions, safe decisionson the fire ground is super important.
And that's wheretechnology comes in for me.
How do we support people makingbetter sense of their environment,

(36:06):
understanding and watchingfor those things. You know,
we have mnemonics like laces and watches,
which stand for words that on the fireground we're watching out, you know,
escapes and approachesmm-hmm. , um,
exposures and all that sort of stuff.
This is kind of the sameunless it's dynamic now,
you don't need to remember just acouple of mnemonics. Sure. You can,
with a couple of taps,
you can pull up key informationyou need that makes you almost

(36:29):
indistinguishable from along-term firefighter. Right.
Well,
I want to get to a couple of terms thatcame out of this pocketbook concept
because what you're doingis you're providing access,
a point of use and atrustworthy source all in
one breath that onceused once to show value,

(36:49):
then they're sold.
And I would have to assume there mighthave been some older folks that said,
I'm not using no damn nap. Might havebeen a little pushback somewhere. Maybe.
I think we have one guy that was like.
That. Yeah. Well, one guy, oneguy was like that. Okay. You know,
when you've got something so complex, uh,
like you're talking about with a Tesla,

(37:10):
which I never even thought about untilyou just said that. I was like, oh yeah,
I guess you don't spraying wateron that. The point of use, uh,
the user interface isactively in the moment
or just about in the moment,
and they can draw upon expertiseand electronic digital way that

(37:31):
is useful and producesresults. That's success to me.
I'm what your job's done, it's justknock off go home. I mean, that's,
that's beautiful.
Yeah. Especially if we keepco-evolving the content on it. Yes.
Usage analytics is really importantto me. And so we're watching, uh,
what people are searching for,who's searching for it. I,

(37:52):
I can't tell individuals,
but I can tell what districtthey're from and what role they are.
So I can see that captains in Districtsix are really interested in safety right
now. What's going on indistrict six. Yeah. Uh,
and so we can follow these trendsand we can see what's going on and,
and there's this thing that, uh, peoplejust should know. Well, guess what?
People don't know. Right. It's,
it's our job to guidethem and make them aware.

(38:14):
And so I'm a huge fanof Facebook type things.
We're forget about teaching and training.
People give them the awarenessthat they, in this situation,
there's stuff they needto go and find out.
So the key thing for us is wehave two types of decisions.
We have discretionary decision making,
we have non-discretionary decision making.

(38:35):
So if you're standing in front of ahouse that's on fire and you've just been
told there's a couple of kidsinside that's non-discretionary,
you are not pulling out your phoneand Googling stuff at that point,
you are following what you know, yourprimed recognition action. Go action. Go.
Right. Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang.That's your platoon commander. Yep.
You're making it happen. Soyou need to prepare for that.
And some of that's training, some ofthat's heads up just being alert. Right.

(38:57):
And we do that. Our team,
our lessons team actually putsout those types of things.
We just put one out the other dayon their hand breaks. So we use a,
a thing called a slip on, whichis a, a little land cruiser,
a tray land cruiser.Yeah. With a 400 liter,
so a hundred gallon tank on the back ofit and a little pump, little Honda pump.
And we can get into all sortsof places. Really tight, small,

(39:19):
fantastic for bush firefighting,that sort of stuff.
So the hand breaks areterrible. A lot of, you know,
every season we get out there again andpeople forget to pull that hand break
on and give it a real hard yank. There'snothing wrong with the hand break it,
they work as they're designed. You'vejust gotta really give it a good yank.
We had run, roll into another and almostcrush someone. So it's like, okay,

(39:42):
let's send out another,
we call 'em safety shares rather thansafety alerts because it's about just
being aware. And that's a Facebook,right. Once you've heard that once,
all you need is the reminder, Hey,mark breaks, right? Yep. Park break.
Got it. So we don't need to be overloadingpeople with information overload.
And I see information overload asthe biggest threat to good knowledge

(40:04):
management. And this idea thatwe've gotta publish more, tell more,
get people to read more. We, wedon't live in 1970 anymore. We don't,
we're not in an information scarcity.
They get more information from theirschool each year from their kids than they
did in a whole year as a farmerback in the seventies. You know,
so just respect people's timeand their, just their bandwidth,

(40:26):
their intellectual bandwidth.
So what's your definitionof knowledge management?
The definition of knowledgeis super important for me.
I know people like D nerd and say,
forget it doesn't matter for mebecause people can make such a negative
difference to their knowledge landscapeby not knowing It's better to have a
slightly off definition to have noneat all. I mean, for me, knowledge is,

(40:46):
it's an emergent subjective phenomenathat describes the collective
memorizing and sense-making and all thatdecision-making aspects of the brain.
Right. But who's gonna listento a description like that?
So the one I've sort of settled on isthat it's the capability of a team or
individual to process the availabledata and information and make

(41:07):
decisions and takeactions that create value.
So that's the definitionof knowledge for me. Right.
It's not memorized information,
it's a capability to make gooddecisions and to take Right action.
Yeah. Make sense of thedata you have available to.
You. That sounds like wisdom.Isn't that just wisdom?
Possibly. The problem I have with wisdom,

(41:28):
it's actually a past tense word.
So you don't say make sure youdo something wise here, .
What you do is you look at whatsomebody did and you say, man,
they were really wise.Does that make sense? Yeah.
So wisdom is a measure that they hadwhat it took and they did it right.
Whereas knowledge is whatyou had before the action.

(41:48):
So wisdom is the evidence ofknowledge in action for me.
So when you combine knowledgewith management, what do.
You get? Two things.
The generation of that capabilityin your people to be aware
of what's going on and to lookbefore you act and to listen.
A and then on the otherside, making the best,

(42:10):
most validated,
most on point data and informationavailable 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 capabilityboth at the individual and team level?
I know the army,
Australian army does a lot of work oncollective competence and how you actually
have teams with competences and youtrain and you exercise for that.

(42:34):
You don't just say a team's competenceis the aggregate of all the competences
inside the team. No,
the team itself has a level ofcompetence and then the the IT side,
but the IT side is always subservientto making knowledge. You know,
we have this fairy tale that we tellourselves that if we just give people the
right information, they'll make theright decisions. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

(42:55):
Where's your evidence for that? Idon't see that. It's not a given.
It reminds me of the story calledWho Moved My Keys. .
Yeah.
Very much. And they overthought, theyoverthought, they overanalyzed and they,
they, they were, instead of justreacting to the situation and moving on,
they kept fermenting.
And so we can overanalyze the helloutta everything and to a point where

(43:17):
we're inactive or not absolutely takingaction. And that's where we don't want.
To be. Yeah. Especially ina fire context, but Yeah.
But even in a corporate context. Yeah.And that's another structural thing.
If you've got a culture that seesmistakes as failures and they're taboo,
we never do that. Wedon't make mistakes here.
And so they're incredible interms of their delivery now,

(43:39):
but in terms of their evolution ofpractice over time, it stagnates.
And there's no surprise there. They're,they're not allowed to make mistakes.
They're not allowed to learn,they're not allowed to innovate.
Innovation is as much about takingsome of those constraints off as it is
teaching people how to create and howto innovate. And so that's why for me,
knowledge innovation is sotightly entwined. Yeah. Uh,
you can't do one withoutthe other both ways.

(43:59):
Thanks for sharing yourknowledge and innovation, Stuart.
It's been an incredible journey.
My pleasure. It was lovelytalking to you. And it's,
it's nice to meet you and get to know abit about you. I really appreciated, uh,
reaching across the ditch, uh,
to meet one of the people thatsort of ties all together.
I say knowledge managementis like a shoelace.
It draws lots ofdifferent things together.

(44:20):
It doesn't touch the groundand it doesn't touch your foot.
But if you've ever tried to sprint ina pair of shoes without a shoelace,
you'll know how important it's to me,
you are kind of likethe shoelace of km. Oh.
You draw all the km people together,which is like a shoelace of shoelaces.
I love that. Thank you.

(44:42):
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