Collaboration is natural in the knowledge culture. If the organization’s knowledge culture has developed from a knowledge services strategic framework designed to support the organization’s knowledge strategy, collaboration will be fixed in the organizational management structure.
With collaboration, the knowledge strategist – the management employee recognized as the organization’s knowledge services leader – now moves forward to develop the organizational knowledge services strategic framework. With that strategy in place, enterprise leaders (including the organization’s knowledge strat-egist) are able to position the organization for excellence in knowledge sharing, and specifically for moving to the four achievements we identify as the benefits of excellence in knowledge services management: enhanced contextual decision making, accelerated innovation, strengthened knowledge asset management, and – if the organization is research-focused in any of its activities – higher-level research. As knowledge services enables knowledge development, knowledge sharing, and knowledge utilization (KD/KS/KU), collaboration stands out as the operational driver for success. It provides managers with a straightforward frame of reference for ensuring that knowledge services supports and makes possible the results the larger enterprise is seeking. In this section we give attention to col-laboration as a management methodology, to collaborative leadership (including shared ownership), to the collaborative workplace, and to their combined effect on the development of the knowledge services strategic framework.
The Collaborative Workplace. From what I’ve observed in my work and my interactions with others in our field, I can affirm that the collaborative impulse is alive and well and understood by most people. Indeed, collaboration is recog-nized as a critical and fundamental component of knowledge services and our planning and administrative efforts with knowledge services in the workplace.
On a larger scale, however, as human beings, we collaborate all the time, usually not even thinking about the act as a “collaborative” one. And as far as collabora-tion in the workplace is concerned, there, too, we have a long history. When we speak about collaborative methods in organization development and their effect on the management of the organization we are recognizing that this basic human activity can be encouraged, supported, and even manipulated to support the achievement of organizational goals. In doing so, we bring this most fundamen-tal of knowledge services attributes into the management picture, ensuring that the processes, behaviors, and conversations that take place between individuals
and in groups result in an approach to problem solving that benefits all work-place stakeholders.
The KD/KS/KU collaboration pulls from three approaches to human interaction:
1. Horizontal. Involving interactions among employees at the same manage-ment level within the organization.
2. Vertical. Involving employees at different levels, though this has the inherent problem of deference to those at higher levels, even when such deference may not best serve the collaborative effort.
3. Random. Involving collaborative efforts that arise on an “as needed” basis, and may end as soon as the specific need is met.
As we know from both experience in the wider society and uniquely from work in knowledge services, collaboration is a constantly shifting mix, and may involve combinations of the above. Any or all of these forms of collaboration work best if one brings into the process as many people as possible. The goal is to get to a collaboration that recognizes and benefits from the fact that, in the most popular phraseology associated with the experience, “none of us is as smart as all of us.”
It is a subject James Surowiecki, financial columnist for The New Yorker and the author of The Wisdom of Crowds, has taken up on several occasions.
Surowiecki, introduced earlier, has very clear ideas about how the value of diversity and the commonalities of the people involved affect the relationships between the organization’s knowledge workers and those with management and delivery responsibility for knowledge services are worth thinking about.
Surowiecki writes:
You want diversity among the entrepreneurs who are coming up with ideas, so you end up with meaningful differences among those ideas rather than minor variations on the same concept. . . . [In studies,] a group made up of some smart agents and some not-so-smart agents almost always did better than a group made up of just smart agents . . . so putting together only people who all do the same thing [e.g., information/knowledge managers in this case] means that as a whole the group knows less than it otherwise might. Adding in a few people who know less but have different skills actually improves the group’s perfor-mance. (Surowiecki, 2005)
Surowiecki is talking about “the difference difference makes,” as he puts it, and we can adapt his insights to make a strong case that knowledge strategists make use of the “role” of differences as they seek to move the cooperative cross- functional knowledge services strategic framework to the collaborative stage. To his way of thinking (and I agree with Surowiecki) grouping together only people who are alike does not always work because the people who are alike tend to resemble each other in what they can do and how they think about – in this case – the role
of knowledge in the larger organization. Adding a few people who know less – or, to put it another way, who know “else” – improves the collaborative performance.
These people may, in fact, know more, but about something else. As Surowiecki puts it:
It seems like an eccentric conclusion, and it is. It just happens to be true. The legendary organizational theorist James G. March, in fact, put it like this: “The development of knowl-edge may depend on maintaining an influx of the naïve and the ignorant, and . . . competi-tive victory does not reliably go to the properly educated.” The reason, March suggested, is that groups that are too much alike find it harder to keep learning, because each member is bringing less and less new information to the table. Homogeneous groups are great at doing what they do well, but they become progressively less able to investigate alternatives. Or, as March has famously argued, they spend too much time exploiting and not enough time exploring. Bringing new members into the organization, even if they’re less experienced and less capable, actually makes the group smarter simply because what little the new members do know is not redundant with what everyone else knows. As March wrote, “[The]
effect does not come from the superior knowledge of the average new recruit. Recruits are, on average, less knowledgeable than the individuals they replace. The gains come from their diversity.”
Surowiecki continues his argument and I’m not sure I could say it any better:
But if you can assemble a diverse group of people who possess varying degrees of knowl-edge and insight, you’re better off entrusting it with major decisions rather than leaving them in the hands of one or two people no matter how smart those people are. This doesn’t mean that well-informed, sophisticated analysts are of no use in making good decisions.
(And it certainly doesn’t mean that you want crowds of amateurs trying to collectively perform surgery or fly planes.) It does mean that however well-informed and sophisticated an expert is, his advice and predictions should be pooled with those of others to get the most out of him. The larger the group, the more reliable its judgment will be.
The specifics of this level of success with knowledge services are provided by Geert van der Linden, Vice-President for Knowledge Management and Sustain-able Development at the Asian Development Bank, who provides a useful par-adigm as he describes his goal for transforming organizational knowledge into organizational effectiveness. He notes that the bank’s efforts to put knowledge to work and to create value from knowledge for ADB’s member countries an effort that requires significant changes and attention to change management and in fact demands nothing less than “a change in corporate culture.” To this end, the focus is on making the connection between technology and knowledge, to ensure that the collaboration between technology and KM/knowledge services works.
Since, as van der Linden puts it, the knowledge economy is about “grasping the opportunities and capitalizing on the access technology provides,” it is also
about “understanding and accepting the proposition that ‘none of us is as smart as all of us’” (van der Linden, 2004).
That the collaborative environment is one in which all stakeholders partici-pate as equal peers and in which diverse points of view are built into the collabo-rative process is a point of view now accepted as a desirable general management structure for knowledge services, particularly emphasized with the management and delivery of knowledge services and of particular value to the knowledge services strategic framework development team. If the knowledge stakeholders are clever, they will give attention to one of the best examples, coming from the United States Army in its “Knowledge Management Principles”:
Principle 1 – Train and educate KM leaders, managers, and champions.
Principle 2 – Reward knowledge sharing and make a knowledge management career rewarding.
Principle 3 – Establish a doctrine of collaboration.
Principle 4 – Use every interaction whether face-to-face or virtual as an opportu-nity to acquire and share knowledge.
Principle 5 – Prevent knowledge loss.
Principle 6 – Protect and secure information and knowledge assets.
Principle 7 – Embed knowledge assets (links, podcasts, videos, documents, simu-lations, wikis . . .) in standard business processes and provide access to those who need to know.
Principle 8 – Use legal and standard business rules and processes across the enterprise.
Principle 9 – Use standardized collaborative tool sets.
Principle 10 – Use Open Architectures to permit access and searching across boundaries.
Principle 11 – Use a robust search capability to access contextual knowledge and store content for discovery.
Principle 12 – Use portals that permit single sign-on and authentication across the global enterprise including partners. (U.S. Army, 2008)
These U.S. Army principles support a stated objective, “to connect those who know with those who need to know (know-why, know-what, know-who, and know-how) by leveraging knowledge transfers from one-to-many across the Global Army Enterprise.” Of the twelve principles, it is the third which resonates strongly with the management and delivery of organizational knowledge services and which can comfortably be moved over into and be adapted by organizations in the civilian workplace. This principle recognizes the value of collaboration to the extent of recommending that the knowledge services effort be built on a “doctrine of collaboration.” It is based on the rationale that “a collaborative environment fosters new ideas, understanding, and ways to execute the commander’s intent”
with the implication that leaders must “incorporate the Core Principles of Collab-oration into their business procedures and human resources practices” and those core principles, too, are clearly stated:
1. Responsibility to Provide – “need-to-share” should be replaced by “respon-sibility to provide”.
2. Empowered to Participate – Soldiers and civilians are empowered to partici-pate and share insight in virtual collaborative communities without seeking prior permission.
3. User-driven – Collaborative communities are self-defining, self creating, and adaptable. Users own the collaborative community, not IT providers.
The comprehensiveness of this group of principles and the thoroughness of the KD/KS/KU qualities that seem to be built into them indicate that they can be successfully transferred into the general organization development/organ-izational effectiveness environment. For knowledge strategists seeking to inte-grate collaboration into the development and maintenance of an enterprise-wide knowledge culture, the obvious level of respect for the individual contribution of each member of the collaborative group is of particular interest. This element in the process wisely creates an intellectual and knowledge-focused environment that connects to the very foundations of the organizational knowledge culture, whether already in place or in some stage of its initiation.
Another fruitful example comes from the U.S. Federal Government, in which a group of employees published its “Federal Knowledge Management Initiative Roadmap” (U.S. KM Working Group, 2008). There, too, the “exchange of knowl-edge and resources to better apportion effort,” as the committee defines collab-oration, opens the discussion to diverse and varied points of view. The group’s guidelines recognize that collaboration in today’s workplace not only permits but probably requires virtual (online) systems, since “we now have the capabilities of ‘virtual collaboration,’ ‘virtual communities’ and even ‘virtual organizations’”
and distributed networks which the committee describes as “a staple knowledge management interest.”
These are valuable protocols, in my opinion, and their value is considerably strengthened when we return to the lessons of Chapter 1, Section 1.2 (on manage-ment for knowledge services) and Chapter 1, Section 1.3 (on leadership) follow-ing these as rules and responsibilities for inculcatfollow-ing knowledge services into the organizational culture or – as with McKinsey – linking them to the organi-zational “personality.” From my point of view and based on what I’ve observed in the management of organizations (of any type) the best match seems to go back to what we learned from David Lilienthal’s recommendations about the manager-leader and how they apply to the development of a knowledge services strategic framework. I am aware of the great time difference between when he
was presenting his lectures at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (1967) and our present-day concerns with the management of intellectual capital; at the same time, I do not feel the need to defend his suggestions. Including an additional few paragraphs from Lilienthal’s remarks brings our attention to the collabora-tive effort in the modern organization’s quest for strengthening its knowledge culture. Lilienthal’s guidelines provide what for me is a perfect transition for working with knowledge services (and in this context I cannot paraphrase Lilien-thal’s eloquent prose and must therefore provide the full quotation):
The managerial function – whether in private business or public affairs – is too often defined and practiced as solely that of administration – that is, of unifying and weaving together the separate skills and knowledge of technicians and professionals. Only rarely is there recognition of dynamic management’s chief art – providing the understanding and the inspiration by which men are moved to action. Management’s primary skill, in my view, is human, not technical, and therefore the manager must be measured broadly in terms of human personality, the intangible qualities of leadership.
What is the heart of the broad management process? I might put it in these words: man-agement requires a humanist outlook on life rather than merely mastery of technique. It is based on the capacity for understanding of individuals and their motivations, their fears, their hopes, what they love and what they hate, the ugly and the good side of human nature.
It is an ability to move these individuals, to help them define their wants, to help them discover, step by step, how to achieve them.
The art of management in these terms is a high form of leadership, for it seeks to combine the act – the getting of something done – with the meaning behind that act. The manager-leader would combine in one personality the robust, realistic quality of the man of action with the insight of the artist, the religious leader, the poet, who explains man to himself, who inspires man to great deeds and incredible stamina. The man of action alone, nor the man of contemplation alone, will not be enough in the situations we now confront; these two qualities together are required to meet the world’s need for leadership. (Lilienthal, 1967) In understanding these special considerations and connecting them to enterprise goals, the knowledge strategist finds himself or herself positioned to set up a collaborative relationship that can – with the right team and incorporating the active involvement of sponsors from senior management – lead to the highest levels of excellence in the management and delivery of knowledge services. Just how high those levels can go is demonstrated in the response of a colleague to a query about the future of research management in the knowledge culture.
With the development of sponsors and champions (and with the cooperation of managers with responsibility for other knowledge-focused functional units), the knowledge strategist can seek cross-functional programs and projects that will establish a mutually beneficial framework: “We need,” this colleague writes, “to take ownership of institutional knowledge and provide access to information
across the organization. Instead of asking departments to share, we need to manage their information for them so that it is inherently shared with those who need to have access to it. Integrating contact databases, records management, commercial databases, and library holdings will provide a rich picture of what an organization knows today, and what organizational staff need to learn for tomor-row” (St. Clair, “Prospects”).
Collaboration vs. Hierarchy. It was Edward M. Marshall who codified a new way of thinking about how people work, and especially how they work together.
In his book, Transforming the Way We Work: The Power of the Collaborative Work-place, Marshall succinctly and carefully put forward a set of guidelines for bring-ing collaboration to the workplace, particularly for companies in which collabo-ration is not established as part of the working environment (Marshall, 1995). The purpose of the guidelines is to provide managers with direction for ensuring that employees are motivated as the company achieves its organizational mission.
Designed for all organizations and any institution or enterprise in which serious attention to management principles is applied, Marshall’s thoughts and recommendations were particularly attractive to employers of knowledge workers and information professionals looking at the evolving transition from knowledge management to knowledge services. Since knowledge services, as a management methodology, is built on the foundation of the collaborative experience (and essentially is doomed to fail if the organizational environment is not a collabo-rative one), the framework Marshall proposed can be something of a manage-ment handbook for knowledge strategist, giving them a framework for achiev-ing success with the KD/KS/KU process. As this framework was incorporated into the idea of developing and sustaining the knowledge culture in the larger
Figure 2.1: Knowledge services = collaboration (Edward W. Marshall: Transforming the Way We Work).
Principle-based
The way people naturally want to work
Replaces (or challenges) hierarchy
organization, the principles and criteria presented in Marshall’s book became and continue to be recognized as essential criteria in the effort to move knowl-edge services forward in the larger enterprise.
Building on Marshall’s work, we now recognize that the attributes of the collaborative workplace are well established. Sometimes referred to as “critical factors” for establishing a collaborative environment, the list begins with trust, and moves on to include institutional and interpersonal willingness to trust one’s co-workers, one’s direct reports (as well as the senior managers “up the corporate ladder” to whom one reports), enterprise leadership, and the other stakeholders. All of these people make up the large universe of people affiliated
Building on Marshall’s work, we now recognize that the attributes of the collaborative workplace are well established. Sometimes referred to as “critical factors” for establishing a collaborative environment, the list begins with trust, and moves on to include institutional and interpersonal willingness to trust one’s co-workers, one’s direct reports (as well as the senior managers “up the corporate ladder” to whom one reports), enterprise leadership, and the other stakeholders. All of these people make up the large universe of people affiliated