The State of KM with Nick Milton

Nick Milton is director and co-founder of Knoco Ltd ( www.knoco.com ) with over 30 years’ experience in Knowledge Management. Working with Knoco Ltd, Nick has helped develop and deliver KM strategies, implementation plans and services in a wide range of different organizations around the globe. He has a particular interest in Lessons Learned programs, Communities of Practice, Knowledge Retention, KM Strategy, KM assessment and KM implementation. He has worked with KM teams in multiple sectors and in more than 40 countries. Prior to founding Knoco, Nick spent two years at the center of the team that made BP the leading KM company in the world at the time; acting as the team Knowledge Manager, developing and implementing BP's knowledge of "how to manage knowledge", and coordinating the BP KM Community of Practice.  Nick is a widely recognized coach and trainer, and has given keynote speeches at most of the leading international Knowledge Management conferences, such as KM World, KM Europe, KMUK, KM Russia, KM Egypt, IAPG Argentina, IKM Jakarta, KM Singapore and KM Brazil. In 2007 he was awarded “Lecturer of the year” from Chalmers University. He was a member of the international working group which developed ISO 30401, the management systems standard for KM, and a co-author of BSI 34401, the guide to use of the ISO standard.Nick blogs most weeks (www.nickmilton.com) and can be found on Twitter (@nickknoco). He is based in the UK, near the city of Bath. Nick is the author/co-author of the following books: The Knowledge Manager’s handbook Designing a Successful KM Strategy The Lessons Learned handbook Knowledge Management for Teams and Projects Knowledge Management for Sales and Marketing Performance through Learning – knowledge management in practice

Episode Transcript

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(01:17):
Hi, my name's Nick Milton. I'm a knowledgemanagement consultant and author.
Uh, I live in the uk. I live in alittle village between Bath and Bristol.
For those of you who knowthe uk little tiny places,
only 20 houses in the village.
And I have my own knowledgemanagement company.
We've been going since 1999 nowwith representatives around the

(01:41):
world. We do KM strategy, we do KMservice work, we do assessments,
and um, I'm the director of the company.
I've written several books onthe topic. I've written six now,
either on my own or with co-authors.
You may know the knowledge managementhandbook Patrick Lamm and I published

(02:03):
a couple of years ago. That seems tobe pretty well received. Actually.
That was us writing the book that wewished we'd had when we started in the
knowledge management field 30 yearsago. We're actually starting a,
a follow up to that one, theknowledge manager's field book. Uh,
we've written about half adozen chapters of that so far,

(02:24):
which is going to be looking more athow knowledge management is expressed in
different contexts andin different settings.
'cause we all know thatwith knowledge management,
there is no one size fits all. So, uh,
the topic I can talk aboutfor hours, actually, you know,
the subtopic within KM isprobably either lesson learning

(02:45):
or communities of practice. Yeah.
And then probably I can talk equallylong about governance aspects.
It's a big, big topic. It's an areaI've worked in now for 30 years.
My first mentor was theguy who led the KM program
at bp. His name's Kent Greenes.He was brilliant, Kent.

(03:07):
He was very insightful.He was a fantastic leader.
I took much of my inspiration fromhim in the workspace. I love to,
I love to get into a company that'sreally just kicking off with KM and see
where they're going and what they needand how to tailor a solution that will
fit their needs.

(03:28):
And I am inspired when theypick it up and run with it.
I mean, sometimes as a consultant,you go in, you, you speak to people,
you give them lots of goodstuff, you go away and you think,
will I ever hear from themagain? . But when you do,
and when they're really making adifference, that is inspirational.
So I stay connected to people likeeverybody does online nowadays.

(03:51):
I blog on a weekly basis.I've got my website. Um,
I'm on Twitter. That's myway of staying connected.
And if I was stranded on an island and my top three must-haves,
am I allowed to choose a boat? ?I mean, that's the obvious one. .
I was gonna say a boat, an outboardmotor, and a jerry can of fuel, please.

(04:13):
.
Mind you, I quite like islands .
The alternative would be a swimmingpool, my wife and a cold beer.
What else can I share?
Oh, that's awesome. Nick Milton,
what is the most significantthing in your history that led you
to km? Uh.

(04:34):
Well, I think like many ofthe early KM practitioners,
I fell into it by accident.
I'd already been working 18years in industry as a geologist,
looking at rocks, tryingto find oil fields.
I was lucky enough to be seconded.
I was working for BritishPetroleum at the time. Mm.
And I was lucky enough to be secondedto the Norway office for five years. Uh,

(04:57):
the role they gave me, theycalled it quality advisor, uh,
sort of accountable for the quality ofthe work that was being done out there.
And the quality of geologicalwork is all about knowledge.
It's all about knowing your rocks,knowing what they're trying to tell you,
what messages they give you.
And they always say that the bestgeologist is the one that's seen the most

(05:20):
rocks.
. But.
You know, you can't seethem all. It's very true.
One of the things we lookedat was the whole concept of,
of learning as an organization,particularly sharing,
learning between the teams and collectinglessons and sharing those lessons.
So I used to spend probablyabout a third of my time

(05:44):
doing straight geology,
about a third of my time mentoring people.
And the remaining third wason knowledge management.
We didn't call it knowledge managementin those days. 'cause that this was,
we're talking about, uh, 1992.
I think the term wasjust beginning to emerge.
When I came back from Norway in 97,

(06:06):
KM was becoming a, arather more hot topic.
And British Petroleum had started theirown internal knowledge management team.
And they looked at the work thatI'd been doing in Norway on the,
particularly on the lesson learning,organizational learning side, and said,
would you like to come and join the team?So I jumped at it. I thought that was,

(06:26):
and much as I love geology, thatthis KM thing goes far broader,
far wider. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. So how did you know thatthat was, that had that capability?
I mean, what,
what was the one thing that made itso shiny you just couldn't look away?
Well, a couple of things. One ofthem, going back to the mid nineties,

(06:47):
you know, this, we were onlyjust getting desktop computers.
We were only just getting email.
And one of the things that BP did atthe time that the chief executive,
Lord Brown, was very farsighted.He was, he was great.
He said the whole of BP must goon a common operating platform.
And people kicked and screamedabout this. There was the,
the Mac supporters there were thePC supporters, but he said, no,

(07:10):
we've gotta be on a common systemso we can talk to each other.
And they set up a, among other things,
a discussion forum forgeologists around the world. Ah,
we had something going on inNorway that completely puzzled us.
We were seeing these strangethings on the, the seismic data.
So I took a screenshot of this and Iput it up on the geologist's forum and I
said, has anybody else seen this? Andwe got answers from around the world.

(07:35):
The chief geologist came on andsaid, look, this is just fantastic.
This is how we, this, this ishow we will use new technology.
This is us tapping into the,the brains of the organization.
And that was a penny droppingfor me. You know? Yeah. You,
you don't need to be isolatedin your own country office.
There's a great world out therewho can help you. That was one.

(07:55):
And then the second was when wewent through a license round,
now a license round. I,
I don't know what they call them inthe us maybe a lease sale or something.
It's where you buy therights to explore for oil on
packages of land, except in Norway.
They're all packages of seaof seabed. We did a good job.

(08:16):
We did a really good job.And then afterwards we collected our lessons learned.
We wrote up our lessons learned. Weactually, from those lessons we built,
won't necessarily call it best practice,
but an effective practicein working a license route.
About two months after we finished that,we got a call from Australia saying,
we are starting a license round.Can we see your best practice?

(08:39):
We sent that down to them actually withone of the guys who'd been working on
license route.
He went down with all of this bestpractice and passed it on to them.
And that was the second penny.
Dropping this idea of packaging yourexperience, packaging what you know,
and then passing it on as astarter for the next people.

(09:00):
Did you see that the,
there was an advantage of havinga person come with the data? It's,
it's one of those things that I think alot of organizations don't recognize is
that having a socialsherpa, you know, my term,
somebody that can help bridge thatlack of knowledge to knowledge.
Was that helpful? I mean, was thatsomething that iconic, that they're like,

(09:23):
you know, we should always havesomebody go with a package, so to speak.
Yeah, definitely. And even if theydon't go with the package, you know,
their contact detailsare there in the package.
You can never write downeverything. You know,
if you write down details for somebody,
they'll come back to you withquestions and that's great. Exactly.
.
But at the same, at the same time. Ifyou don't write it down, you forget it.

(09:46):
The human brain is a, is a lousyknowledge store. It really is. .
So I think, oh, wait a.
Minute.
I thought they were building all theartificial intelligence to mimic us.
What are they.
Mimicking? They're mimickingwhat we write. Yeah.
Okay.
We can, and you never writeit all down. So it takes,
it takes the people and ittakes the documents. Um,
and the two have to live side by side.They have to go hand in hand. TAs tacit,

(10:09):
explicit. It's the, the twochambers of the heart of km.
Oh, say that again.
Tacit and explicit is the twochambers of the beating heart.
Bring up that point of having the socialbridge maker to go with the content,
because it just facilitateslearnings so much faster. Mm.
The absorption of just raw information,raw data takes a certain amount of time.

(10:32):
First you have to get associated withit. Then you have to comprehend it,
and then, then you have tochew it up and understand it.
And if you've got a social connector,a bridge maker to go along with that,
that can help facilitate thatquicker. It's almost like the,
the paradigm of learning that has shiftedin the last 50 years of going from
the professor centric or teachercentric to the learner centric model

(10:57):
to where content isdeveloped to best suit the,
the consumer of learning,the consumer of content.
There's an ability here,
I think a lot of organizationsjust don't inspire to,
I'll say, because there seems to be atechnological shelf that they sit on,
and then the social part just,they just wait for it to happen.

(11:20):
Do you see that at all? Imean, how do you fix that?
Yes. I see that Larry Prussackused to say, you know,
if you believe that you can transferknowledge through documents,
presumably you don't sendyour child to school,
you just give them booksto read. Yeah. .
So I think that's just Larrysort of calling people's bluff.

(11:43):
I think you're right. Thereis a, a huge interest in,
at the moment in written knowledge, thewritten words as a source of knowledge.
But it, it never is. It's neverthe sole source of knowledge.
And, and you've gottahave the tat with it. Uh,
how do you explain that to people?I think you demonstrate it. Hmm.
One of the ways that I demonstrate it,

(12:04):
we've got a really goodpractical exercise where we,
we divide people into teams. We givethem a challenge. They try the challenge,
they do pretty poorly. Thenthey do an after action review,
then they do a peer assist. And thenyou show them best practice. Yeah.
Not only show them, buttalk them through it.
And when we do the debriefafterwards, I always ask,
what was the benefit of having me talkyou through that best practice? Ah,

(12:26):
and they always say, oh, itwouldn't have worked without you.
'cause you give emphasis. You explainwhy you do things the way you do.
You say, this is the onething you mustn't fiddle with.
You fiddle with therest. I think it's very,
very hard to divorce thehuman from the knowledge.
From my experience, whatyou just talked about there,
there is an ability to bringa sympathetic or empathetic,

(12:50):
emotional based connection, uh,
just a contextual connectionto the content mm-hmm.
That the human can represent and sometimesrepresent really well and sometimes
represent very poorly, as we all know,
not everybody's built for public speakingor teaching or that sort of thing.
The conveyance is really anoratory skill in order to

(13:13):
help facilitate the learning. Buthow do you build that practice?
How does an organizationbuild that practice?
I don't know that it isnecessarily an oratory skill.
I think the more important component isto have people talking with their peers.
And I'll give you an example of that.
We were working after I left bpafter I set up my own company,

(13:35):
one of our clients wasDeBeers, the diamond miners.
And we had a peer assistin a diamond mine in
Kimberly, I think it was, no, itwas Botswana. That's where Botswana,
and we brought in a whole lot of peoplefrom the other diamond mines to share
their practice. And there would, themanagers would stand up and speak,

(13:56):
and everybody would sort of sit backlike this with their arms crossed.
Then the,
the mining engineers would get up andspeak and everyone was leaning forwards.
They were listening. They were, becausethis was somebody just like them.
This was another mining engineer whospoke their language, knew their context.
They weren't the best speakers,but there was a bond there.

(14:17):
Okay. So there's gotta be a,
a social trust mechanism thathelps bridge that content.
So you're saying that's more of anattribute of good transfer than it is just
being able to speak? Well.
Yes, I think that's right. And it's noteven necessarily a social trust. It,
there's a sort of professional trust.Hmm. The, the big communities of practice,
if you go to somewhere like Shell,

(14:38):
where they've had tremendous successwith their huge communities of practice.
There may be a thousand members in acommunity. They don't know each other,
they don't have any socialbond with each other,
but they have a professional trust.They know that they are, you know,
geologists like me, or they'remining engineers like me,
or they're lighting electricianslike me. And there's, that's the,

(15:02):
the professional bond,
which I think in a way is even moreimportant than the social Well.
But don't they go hand inhand? Is it that separated?
Maybe it's not. Maybe professionalis a shortcut to social.
Ooh, I like that. Yeah, becauseyou're right, because it,
it establishes a commonframework initially,
and that's what's needed to help buildthe social context, right? So if you're,

(15:24):
if you're trying to transfer data or, uh,
experience knowledge from X to Y,
and those two have no mm-hmm. previous shared reality, no,
they didn't. They, they don'thave the same schooling,
they don't have the same paradigms.They, that makes transfer kind of rough.
It, it builds in some naturalfriction. But sometimes in this,

(15:46):
as you're describing, if you'vegot parallels that make sense,
that connect in some other way, thenit makes everything else flow a little,
a little easier.
Absolutely. Interesting. Anda common language as well.
A common jargon that'salso important. Well, how.
Many, how many, this is my petquestion. This is my pet peeve question.
How many organizationsdon't have a glossary?

(16:08):
You mean actually a defined glossary?'cause they've all got a glossary.
Yes.
Oh, do they?
But have they as a focus otomy?Yeah. Is it, is it formal?
It's probably not formal.
Don't you think that would help? Don't,
don't You just think that wouldhelp to have a formal glossary, I.
Think really helps ina couple of situations.
One is when you've got the newbiecoming in and they've got to build their

(16:30):
technical language and they've gotto learn all the acronyms. Oh, yes.
And the other is when you mergetwo organizations and then Yeah.
Then you need to be very careful aboutthe words you use or even going across
sectors in the same organization.I remember talking with Steve Winy about, oh,
where was he working? General Motors,wasn't it? They were trying to look at,

(16:52):
they were trying to define theparameters for different car parts.
And one of the first things they hadto do is actually get to a common
vocabulary and what the car partswere. Because the designers, you know,
they might call them a door pillar andthe manufacturers might call 'em a roof
strap. , they're talking aboutthe same thing, but in different names.
Yeah. Very confusing.

(17:12):
Well, you need to share knowledge. Youneed a shared language, obviously. Yeah.
But that could stay internal tothat particular group of people.
Does it need to be fullydefined? I don't know.
It depends on the, the enterpriserequirements, right? Uh,
it depends on who's gonna see thedate or who's gonna have contact.
That gets back to that concept that Iwas floating around with how the learner

(17:34):
centric model has shifted mostof learning environments in that
there's more emphasis producedon how the person consumes best
the data. Is it audio? Is it video? Isit text? Is it, you know, how, however,
that engagement is,
becomes just as important as thesubject matter expert standing up behind

(17:54):
the podium lecturing. Mm-hmm., what I'm saying is,
is that organizations that havethat ability to build better
pathways, I guess it's just as simpleas that. It's, it's not just behaviors.
It's not just software.It's not just hardware, uh,
or procedures.
It's a lot of things that allowflow to be less restricted.

(18:17):
Yep, yep. That's right. There'sanother, um, dimension to this,
which is supply and demand.Oh, and this is something that,
another thing that I couldtalk for a long time about.
Sounds like economics to me.
Absolutely.
Oh, all.
Right. Now we're talking aboutknowledge economics. Okay.
There's a lot of emphasisin many organizations about the supply of knowledge.

(18:38):
You will create and share bestpractice. You will narrate your work,
you will blog, you willpush stuff out there.
There's a lot less emphasis onactually creating the demand.
.
That just struck me as funny,because You're right. Yeah.
There was a really interestingarticle by McKinsey about,

(19:01):
I think five years ago,
how they were lookingat how help and advice
flows around an organization.And they reckoned,
I think it was about 80% of theexamples where somebody helped somebody
else. The trigger was a question,the trigger was a request.
Just like going backto my story in Norway.

(19:22):
Just like the Australiansaying, Hey, can you help us?
Have you got some good practice?
I think if go economics, if if you'vegot oversupply mm-hmm. ,
you depress the value.
People who are being bombardedwith knowledge treat it as trivial.
If you've got undersupply,but a lively demand,

(19:43):
you create value. Mm-hmm. people saying, Hey, we need your help.
Can you give this? Thenpeople will say, yeah,
I think that's really worthwriting something down. Yeah. Coming to talk to you.
Sending somebody to Australia with abooklet. That's one thing that I've found,
I think over my 23 years as a consultant,
that we have to payattention to the demand,

(20:04):
and then the supply will follow.
At least it gives you a governor or abuffer system in order to understand what
you should be doing. If youdon't understand how the consumer values anything,
then it's a failed proposition.Hmm. So you have to go to the,
the user experience and understand thisis, I'm summing it up in different ways,

(20:25):
but it, it, what you're saying is,
is that if you don't rely onhow consumers define value,
maybe you have to restructurethat training and awareness and building cultural
awareness around whatthat should look like.
And not all cultures know whatthey should do with knowledge.
I think you're bringing up a conceptI've not heard presented in that,
because you're right.I, I think there's a,

(20:46):
there's a heavy emphasis onjust production, produce, produce, produce, produce,
produce. Well in the world ofvolumes of data. That's not helpful.
Let me give you an example. WhenYammer was first introduced,
Yammer had you opened up thepage, there was a box to type in,
and there was a prompt above the box. Theprompt said, what are you doing today?

(21:07):
Oh.
Interesting. So you wouldtype in what you're doing.
What if that prompt had said, whatdo you need to know right now?
And you actually gotpeople to put in questions.
I think that would'vebeen far more powerful.
That becomes a very liquid interfacefor a frequently asked question.
Uhhuh set up in, in that framework towhere, but in order for that to work,

(21:29):
you gotta have participationon the other side. Uh,
instead of just people watching theticker tape go by and not engaging the
knowledge flow.
Let me give you anotherexample. You're in a city,
you see a car driving by. The driver ofthe car is obviously completely lost,
doesn't know where they're going.People on the sidewalk know the city.

(21:50):
What stops the knowledge flowing fromthe sidewalk to the car? Is it A,
they won't tell him, or B, he won'task. And it's usually a he. Yeah.
, it's, he won't ask. If heasks, they'll be delighted to answer.
Mm-hmm. .But there's this wall.
There is.
A wall. So I suppose you could say thatthe city is already pushing all of that

(22:11):
information. 'cause there's all,
there's signposts saying this way tothe opera house and this way to the
Washington Monument. Yep.
But you always need something whichhasn't got the sign. And there,
that's where the questions come from.
Do you see a cultural approach towhat you just described as the wall?
Do you see any difference based onculture or region and or nationality?

(22:35):
Is there a culture out there that justdoes that pretty damn well and it's not a
big deal versus,
I'm gonna guess the United Stateswhere we don't ask directions? .
So just curious.
, um, I mean, I've done quitea lot of investigation on culture,
especially national culture andkm but not along that dimension.

(22:56):
I would probably point to, uh,the Netherlands as being a very,
very open country. Very, veryopen and open to challenge,
but also open to it, to asking,you want a flat hierarchy? Really?
You don't want too much power distance.
People have to be happyto say, I don't know. Mm.

(23:17):
And I think that's the culture that youwant to, to put into the organization.
And going back to bp, going back toLord Brown, the chief executive of bp,
he was such an insightful man.
He said that every time we dosomething as an organization,
my expectation is we'll do itbetter than the last time. .

(23:39):
Which means ,
that you have to go and ask how itwas done last time and what the.
Success, how did it go?Exactly. Yeah. You know.
I learn, and he was pressingthe button that made people ask.
And he would also press the button bycutting the budget every time. Of course,
, he would say, yeah, we,
that was done for 500 million lasttime. I'm gotta give you 450. Yeah.

(24:03):
Make it work. Every time we do it, weshould do it better, cheaper, faster.
Oh my good gravy. That'san awesome, that's awesome.
That is just powerful stuff rightthere. Mm-hmm. ,
most organizations grow fat becausenobody challenges that. Mm-hmm.
that it's right.
Absolutely. Ah.
Good gosh. It's like having a personaltrainer for your business operations.

(24:25):
Yeah. Other CEOs have said that.Elon Musk said to the people,
he sent an email to everybodyin, in Tesla saying,
if you don't know, you havea responsibility to ask.
You should ask anyone to get ananswer to your problem. It's not,
if you want to, you areresponsible for asking.

(24:46):
That's the real about change in culture.
We've talked around a lot ofthings in a very global way,
but I want to get tothese surveys. Can we,
can we kinda work into the globalsurveys and what that all means and what
you've seen? Yeah.
Okay. Let me give you a bit of backgroundto the surveys. In, in the mid 2010s,
I was getting more and more broadlyeducated as you like, if you like,

(25:10):
as a consultant, by working inmore and more different places,
being involved with differentcultures, different industries,
different settings. And I thought,
what is this knowledge management thing?
Lots of people stand up and sharewhat they think it is based on their
experiences. But whatif we asked the world,
what is knowledge management and howdoes it work? I wonder what they'd say.

(25:34):
So I put a survey together. It's abig survey. It's about 80 questions.
It covers everything from the KM team,
the technologies you use, theprocesses, the roles you have,
the money you spend, how your communitieswork, how your lessons learning work.
It's exhaustive. It's a good twocups of coffee, , that survey.

(25:56):
And it was really interesting.
I got about 400 replies from knowledgemanagers around the world in 2014.
That was the first one. So I thoughtI'd run it again three years later,
see if there were any changes. Thatwas 2017 and I ran it again in 2020
and I think I'll do itagain this year. Mm.
It takes a lot of time on my part,

(26:20):
because I've got lotsof LinkedIn connections.
I've got about 5,000 LinkedIn connections,most of whom are knowledge managers.
And I send them all a message in LinkedIn.
Then I follow it up againwith a personalized message,
follow it up again with areminder a bit later. In fact,
last time I sent the survey out, Iwas banned from LinkedIn three times.

(26:41):
'cause they thought I was a bot. I was sending so many messages.
But we've now got over a thousandreplies to those three surveys,
and I'll give you some, some ofthe headlines if you like. Please.
There's such a variety of organizationsaround the world. You could have,
you know,
you could have something like the USmilitary with a a million members.

(27:03):
You could have 10 people working outof a garage somewhere in Vermont.
You could have public sector,private sector, health sector,
military sector. They've all gottheir own little angles on km.
So part of the interestingthing is balancing all that.
The first thing I will say, overthose six years in 2014 to 17 to 20,

(27:28):
there has been no major changes in km.
Nothing significant. The importantthings have remained important.
The things that are less importanthave remained less important.
Even AI seems to be a niche player.
Maybe we do it again, 2023. Maybeit's less of a niche. Who knows?

(27:49):
Everybody wants to know what's new. And the answer to that,
according to a thousand people aroundthe world, is not much. Of course,
the technology changes. MS.
Teams now is probably top of thelist for what people use for km
Knowledge management is at itsmost embedded and has been most

(28:09):
successful in large organizationsheadquartered into the U S A Canada,
Western Europe. That's where thebulk of success has come from.
India also potentially,
but I've not recentlygot much back from India.
Those big organizations, they'vebeen doing it for decades.
They focus on seven different things.

(28:31):
And these seven different thingsare almost equal slices of the pie,
connecting people throughcommunities and or networks.
Improved access to documents creationand provision of best practices.
Learning from experience, knowledge,retention, and innovation.
That's six things, not seven.
Those six things, they'rebeginning to shift a little bit.

(28:56):
Um,
communities of practice used to be thenumber one focus area for most people.
That's dropped to number four recently.
Do you think that the term haskind of changed? I, I mean,
a community of practice 10 years agowas different than what we think of now
with all the social platforms. That maybe an informal community of practice.
I don't know. I mean, I,
I did ask about communitiesfor practice or networks,

(29:20):
so I was hoping that it wasn't justthe term community of practice.
I don't know why there hasbeen less attention now.
It could just be that data setI'm tapping into is shifting
slightly. Maybe the big engineeringfirms, the big oil companies,
maybe there were more of thosein 2014 than there are now

(29:42):
answering the survey. Idon't think that's the case.
I think there is a little shiftaway from communities. Mm-hmm.
And I wonder if it is partly atechnology thing that at 10 years
ago, there were lots ofcommunity dedicated platforms with threaded discussion,
topic led. You could search,you could interrogate,

(30:03):
they would build up ahistory of conversation.
You don't see that sort oftechnology around nowadays.
People are on the MicrosoftSuite, they're using Yammer,
Yammer's a much more instant thing.The knowledge is here and then gone.
You try and find something that wasdiscussed last week in a Yammer thread,
you'll never find it. Mm.
So I think that that old style communityjust doesn't have the technology

(30:25):
base anymore. Yeah. SharePointused to have a community, you know,
community in a box,
and they've dropped that also withthe people I've been speaking to more
recently about their communities.They seem to be smaller, possibly.
That is also a technology thing. Youknow, Microsoft teams works great for a,
a team of, you know, 20, 30 people,but for a community of a thousand,

(30:48):
it's clumsy. It's, it's not happy.
So out of the total survey,
how much would you percent wiseput non-profit to pro for profit
as your respondents?
Um, I don't know off the topof my head. I mean, there's,
it's probably about 20%no profit, I would think.
Depends what you call no profit. I mean,you, you're presumably that's, that's.

(31:11):
Encouraging.
Yeah. I mean there's, you'vegot the public sector, you've got the governmental,
you've got the military, you'vegot the NGOs. Actually, the, the,
the biggest set of respondents I got onthe latest surveys were public sector.
Oh, my. I think there is an, an,an interest there, particularly in,
in South Africa,
particularly in areas in Southeast Asiawhere the government is beginning to say

(31:35):
to all its governmental bodies, you needto be managing knowledge. Yeah. Yeah.
Same with, uh, the Middle East.You're seeing that quite a lot.
What do you see as the biggest gap? I,I know it's business sectors, one piece,
but between non-profit ornot-for-profit and for-profit.
Is there similar painpoints that are just equal?
Or does one reflectsomething differently? No.

(31:56):
They do reflect differently. Theytake different, different focuses.
If you were to look at thelegal sector, for example,
the legal sector is very focusedon the management of documents.
If you were to look at, atthe other end of the scale,
an organization that works in projects,
then they're not particularlyinterested in documents.
They're interested inexperience and practice. And there you've got oil and gas,

(32:19):
you've got military, you've gotconstruction, you've got engineering.
They would be very interestedin communities of practice and lesson learning.
The legal people would not be interestedin them at all. Mm-hmm. ,
they would be interested in searchand retrieve curation of documents.
There you see a difference. The otherdifference is in size. Of course,

(32:40):
knowledge management for a 10 peopleorganization is very different from
knowledge management for a thousand peopleor 10,000 or even a hundred thousand.
So.
Who's doing it best?
Uh, full , I have to definebest, best in their own context.
Sure. Has to be best in theirown context. I, I can't,
I can't answer that question. I wasn't,I didn't even ask that question.

(33:02):
I did ask people though to, to sayhow much value they delivered mm-hmm.
to guesstimatehow much value they delivered.
And also if they couldn't attempt valueto give a sort of a marks out of five.
Now the marks out of five,
I don't really trust very much becauselots of people don't know what good looks
like. Exactly. This isa big challenge in km.

(33:23):
Lots of people don't knowwhat good KM looks like,
so they don't know whether thereare a five or a three. However,
there were,
there are so few people actuallyputting a value figure on it that I
couldn't really say what drivesthe most value apart from
size and the number of years you'vebeen doing it. As you might expect,

(33:45):
the bigger organizationsdeliver the most value,
and the longer they've been at it,
the better they get at it and the morethey deliver overall and per year.
Does the I s o,
the international standard forknowledge management drive any value
for any of these respondents? Wasthat something that you looked at?
That is something I looked at. I askedthat question in the last survey,

(34:08):
the 2020 survey.
80% of the respondents have heardof it just over half planned
to use it.
But only 4% had actually conducted anysort of internal or external audit.
Interesting. Against it. So it's,um, too early to say. I think. Do.
You think the I s O could be convertedto be a metric to evaluate instead of
making a subjective, uh, evaluationof how you think you're doing?

(34:33):
That is its purpose. It's the,
the ISO standard has got57 occurrences of the word
shall you shall do this,or you shall do that.
You shall create a knowledge managementpolicy and your policy shall contain
the following items. Andif you meet all 57 shalls,

(34:54):
then you are compliant withthe standard. So you could say,
how many of those shalls could youactually hand on heart agree with?
And that will give you a 57point scale from zero to 57.
But I think part of the problem isthat if it becomes a self-assessment,
it's like one of these questionnairesyou fill in in men's monthly about how

(35:16):
fit are you . And we're allincredibly fit. Of course we are when we,
we tick all the boxes, but you get a,
a personal trainer come to your houseand they shake your, shake their head.
So self-assessment is adifficult thing to do.
Okay. There's.
A, before we leave the survey,
I think there are a couple of thingsthat I do want to pull out on. I mean,

(35:38):
there is a lot of valuedelivered from km and there,
when you look at it as world asa whole, you can see how that,
where that value comes from. Andyou can see, I think the average,
let me see,
average mean value fromall three surveys was
65 million delivered fromknowledge management.

(36:02):
That's down a bit from 2014,but up a bit from 2017.
But one thing that I did notice,if you look at the budget mm-hmm.
that people have theannual budget that has dropped year
on year, the annualbudget on the last survey,
the average annual budget was abouta third of a million. And of course,

(36:22):
you know, you've got organizationsat both ends of the scale.
So I'm just taking an average,
it was two thirds of1,000,003 years before,
six years before it was nearly a million.
The budget is dropping if youbelieve those three figures.
There's a lot of caveats there.

(36:43):
I'm not surprised that it doesseem to be a harder sell nowadays.
Let's define knowledge management.
How does Nick Milton puta label on defining km?
I go with the definition in ISO 3 0 4 0 1,
partly because I was on theteam that wrote that definition.
And I fought hard for the definition.I liked my original definition.

(37:06):
It's been softened since.
But my definition of knowledgemanagement is management with a focus on
knowledge. So I turn it around.It's not management of knowledge.
It is how you manage when youunderstand the value of knowledge. Hmm.
And there's your challenge.And there's your opportunity.

(37:26):
Because if you arelooking for a KM budget,
your leadership don't knowhow much knowledge is worth.
If they did know howmuch knowledge is worth,
they would be showering money at you.
So your challenge and your opportunityis to show them the potential value

(37:47):
of knowledge.
So sometimes that's a hard sell. And,
and you've said that andI've seen it where you, yeah.
You're trying to show value, but isit just as easy to show the risk?
We wanna talk economic terms. Yep.
Then your risk aversement is probablymore valuable than what I can show you
what you may get out of this.I had one guest say this,

(38:08):
see what you think about this.And I think it, it was, uh,
I'll have to double check, but I thinkit was, uh, Andrew Trickett from Arup.
Oh yeah.
I think he said on the show that ifyour competitive advantage can gain
1% by what KM can bring Yeah.
How can you afford not to do it?
That's, that's the risk of not doing itversus the advantage. You're doing it,

(38:30):
that's risk.
And you're presentingthe cost of not doing it.
There is a cost of lost knowledge.
You can have a go at estimatingwhat that might be by looking at
lessons not learned, mistakesrepeated clients being lost by,
for the same reason, inefficienciesthat are not being fixed.

(38:54):
You can do a little bit of diggingthrough the past projects. Hmm.
We did that in bp going back to
1996.
I think when we estimated that
$500 million a year was beinglost through a lack of knowledge
management.
I bet you that gotsomebody's attention that.

(39:14):
Did.
Yeah. .
And of course, what they said to us, thatwhat the steering team said to us is,
right, we'll give you a year.
You demonstrate a hundredmillion dollars in return.
We thought that was a tough ask, but infact it was relatively straightforward.
Oh,
low hanging fruit in knowledge managementhangs very low and is big and fat and

(39:35):
juicy .
Okay. How did you calculateall these savings for them to,
to in that first year? That just soundslike a heck of a thing to try to do.
Well,
the savings had to be reflectedin the following year's budget
request. Oh. So that wasn't just ourclaim, that was the business. Mm.

(39:58):
BP was just building a whole suite of gasstations around Europe and they held a
peer assist about how can wedo this? And somebody came up,
came to the peer assistwith a bright idea of,
you do it as a strategic partnershipwith a construction company.
Don't do it yourself. Oh. Oh. Workwith one of the big constructors.
And lo and behold, that was worth,I dunno, 50 million in itself.

(40:20):
Just that little bit of knowledge,you know. And then there was, if you,
if you do repeat lesson learningon a series of projects,
knowledge managementdelivers the most value.
Where the most money is spentbuilding big oil platforms,
drilling deep water wells.
These are all areas where you can goin and save a month here, a day there,

(40:40):
and it adds up very quickly intomillions. That's partly why.
So how does a smallorganization make it work?
We've talked about very largeenterprises mm-hmm. , uh,
multinationals, uh, global entities.
But how does a small nonprofit or a smallbusiness that's got 20 folks or less
capitalize on trying to do knowledgemanagement and make it part of their

(41:04):
culture?
I think, again, you, youasked the same question,
what is the cost of not doing it?Yeah. Say you're a small organization,
you're a startup. Your dreamis to be a big organization.
At some point you've got to startcloning yourselves and setting up offices
around the world. Howare you gonna do that?
Unless you can give those clonesknowledge. So right from the start,

(41:27):
think about capturing your knowledge sothat you can then use that to replicate
yourself in a different part ofthe world. If you don't do it,
your new market entry isgoing to take a lot longer.
It's gonna be a lot riskier.
You may not even make a profit inthose mar in those new markets.
If you do pay attention to knowledge,

(41:48):
you can be very smart and verystrategic and build up like crazy.
You brought up a point that I thinka small organizations non-profit or
for-profit,
they're so busy wrapped into the tacticalapproach of what needs to be done.
That it's hard or difficult, I'll say,
to break that day-to-daykind of forward motion

(42:11):
to start in the strategic mindsetin order to understand what the,
you know, even in the baseline,if we didn't even think about,
we're gonna scale and duplicate, we'regonna scale and duplicate. Mm-hmm.
, what if you just had acontingency for when you kicked a bucket?
Somebody can pick up the pieces, you know,
even if you just went baseline and justtry to sell 'em on a contingency effort

(42:33):
for sustainment of theorganization. That would be enough,
you would think to get peopleinterested. But I gotta tell you,
it's still a hard sell. Yeah.
I think that's a harder sellbecause it's a what if, you know,
what if you were hit by a bus? Yeah.Nobody wants to think about that.
Um, but if you say, look,
here is a prize you can gainfrom an asset you've already got.

(42:56):
You don't have to spend very much atall. Maybe one person or half a person.
I was working in BP, Norway, one thirdof my job was knowledge management,
and that was an officeof a hundred people. Wow.
If you've got a a hundred person startupYeah. Give them a knowledge manager.
Makes make somebody accountable formaking sure that knowledge is captured and
ooh.

(43:16):
Ooh, wait a minute. Youjust used the a word.
What organization makes anybodyaccountable? Come on. Where,
where does that come from? Accountablefor knowledge. For, for knowledge.
Knowledge. Oh.
Yeah, of course they do. Ofcourse they do. You see that in,
in the military all the time.
I'm just saying in a civilian population,
what organization carriesthat flag forward to say, Hey,
you're accountable and responsible foryour knowledge sharing. But you know,

(43:40):
the reason I bring that up is can'twe just have HR put that into all the
job descriptions and make sure everybody,
instead of having a a k M person own it.
Everybody's responsible. Noteverybody is accountable. Ooh. Right.
It's like safety. Everybody isresponsible for safe activities,
but you still have anaccountable safety officer. Ah.

(44:03):
And you have an accountablesafety department for making sure that that happens.
Same with km, and thatis part of ISO 3 0 4 0 1.
The whole concept of delegatedaccountability is in there very clearly.
Section five, I think it is. Yeah. Sectionfive, the leadership section. Mm-hmm.
not only has leadershipgot to espouse knowledge management,

(44:24):
they also have to delegateit clearly downwards.
That seems to be a weak link in someorganizations, is would you agree? Mm-hmm.
. Yep. Yeah. They put outthe policy, they put out the direction,
the doctrine, the, the format,the organizational structure,
and then they're just like, okay, therewe're, we did that. We're good .
But there's . Yeah. What happens?Just it gets, everyone ignores it.

(44:45):
what? No.
Way. The, the culture is the rub. Right?So it all comes down to the culture.
If they're gonna play or not gonna play.
If you wanna make people accountableand you wanna get engagement to where
knowledge is a good asset for anorganization that's positively
moving forward,

(45:08):
can an organization just startcutting the dead weight of, you know,
around this?
What I'm getting to is that thereseems to be not a heavy enough
hand to make this accountability pieceand the participation piece and the
knowledge ecosystem a formal requirement,
a for, you know what I mean? A, aformal, like you could say, you know,

(45:30):
you have not done this. You need tomove on. You need to find a new job. Or,
you know, that.
Sort of thing. I know, I know. Noorganization would do that from day one.
The early years of knowledge managementare all about proven concept, uh,
testing the tools, building a frameworkthat works in your organization,
in your context.
And then there comes a time when you haveproven the value and you want to make

(45:54):
it stick. And that's wherethe hand gets heavier.
That's where you see thingslike the NASA knowledge policy.
If you look at that online, right atthe top of the page in red letters,
it says compliance is mandatory. Well.
That's, that's prettyspecific. That's , very.
Specific . That'swhere you, you start to,
to ask your c e o to send out the, themessages that Bob Buckman used to give.

(46:17):
He used to say,
if you are not interested incontributing to knowledge management,
the many opportunities open to in thepast will no longer be available. ,
that's late stage behavior.But if you look at how you,
in, if you look at how you embed asafety culture or a quality culture,
or even a financial managementculture mm-hmm. ,

(46:40):
if you find somebody in your organizationwho is not following the financial
rules, they got a wrap on the knuckles.
If you find somebody in your organizationwho is willfully ignoring the safety
system, they get shown the door one day,
knowledge management will reach thatlevel. If it's important enough.
I, that's the challenge. Thatis the challenge for any organ,

(47:03):
anyone listening out there,
if you're not gonna back it upwith a little bit of a stick,
you're never gonna get there.
And those comparables should makethe baseline pretty understandable.
Especially on the safety thing.
If you see somebody that is doingeverything against normal
standards, when it comes to safety,that is a huge liability and you,

(47:25):
you can't afford to keep it.
Why not have the equal amount of weighttowards knowledge handling? Yeah.
Why not? Why not?
Why not?
I'm with you. There's one reasonwhy, and that's because a, um,
safety incident is far more visiblethan a lost knowledge incident.
You can see somebody limpingoff with a broken leg.

(47:45):
It's harder to see those opportunitieswhere somebody learned a lesson and never
shared it and somebody else hada failed project as a result.
Granted, it may be harder to prove,it may be harder to have evidence,
but maybe we need to change how we'rethinking of what the evidence is.
Or maybe there's a waythat in a data sense,
in a metadata sense that mm-hmm. knowledge that is used,

(48:09):
transferred, transformedby another handler. And I,
I'm just thinking of, you know, theother person in chain of custody,
if you will, of cause andeffect and that relationship.
If there's a way we could track
and automate what touchedme, what got shared,
what I then produced fromthis knowledge or data and

(48:33):
transformed into x,
I think there's a challenge therethat could be helped greatly to help
facilitate a clearer understanding ofthat accountability and what it got
you.
Yeah. There are elements of knowledgemanagement where that's quite easily done.
The whole lesson learningpiece. For example,

(48:53):
you can set up a lesson managementsoftware where lessons are
entered, they're trackedto people for information,
they're tracked toother people for action.
You can see whether theactions have been cleared out.
You can see how long the whole thing takesand you can tighten it up and you can
speed it up.
And people within that system will havethe accountability that if a lesson

(49:17):
comes to them with an actionattached, they need to respond.
You can do that in certainsettings, and again,
you'll be well familiar of with thatsort of setting in the military.
Yeah.
You don't complete your patrol withoutdoing the after action review and the
after action report at theend of the engagement and the,
the lessons from that go out and airacted upon and you know your role in it

(49:41):
and you trust that the system works.Again, we can do that in industry as well.
And there are certain placesin the oil sector, in nasa,
in other sectors where that is done.
And those do tend to be theareas where the industries where
knowledge management failures aremost visible and most expensive.

(50:06):
We've just wrapped up thefirst segment with Nick Milton.
Make sure to stay tuned for thesecond segment where we dig into the
international standardfor knowledge management.
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(50:30):
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(50:53):
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