One Minute HR Consultant

In implementing or improving a knowledge management (KM) strategy, the question that fails to be asked or sufficiently answered is “Can our KM strategy withstand chaos?” In answering this simple yet complex question, an organization provides a core premise on which to build its KM strategy and better define key objectives (Nonaka, Konno, & Toyama, 2002). In simple terms, your KM strategy, processes, and systems must mean something more than just an ancillary add-on to your supporting organizational initiatives. Having a repository of information and data for employee access to routine operations and administration in itself does not justify or support a KM system. 

Well-managed chaos and organizational redundancy are both core components of a KM system and both are empirically verified to create sustainable and superior performance and advantage (Kloviene & Gimzauskiene, 2008; Zairi & Al-Mashari, 2005; Nonaka & Nishiguchi, 2001).  As it relates to creating new knowledge and utilizing existing knowledge, creative chaos contributes to an organization’s ability to achieve peak performance demonstrated through increased innovation in the form of products, services, and customer-client delivery. A key follow-on question to ask during the strategy formulation phase is “Is our system designed to exploit opportunities within our market in the form of enhanced products, services, or delivery?  This is an exhaustive question to be asked of all key stakeholders and is not confined within the C-level suite.  The input should be robust and measurable accompanied by defined expectations.  As an example, do you expect to reduce R&D time-to-market, increase patents, develop proprietary systems or products, and create strategic alliances and joint ventures?  Will leadership support a “fail-to-success” philosophy or is the margin for error slim?  How will internalization of processes be expedited?  How will you reward success and transparency?  What processes are in place – embedded within your KM infrastructure that rewards the sharing of knowledge?  Here are 4 key ways in which you can stretch your KM strategy and create intentional chaos:

1. Implement chaos with pre-determined objectives.  The opportunities are only confined by your objectives.  For example, how will you leverage your KM infrastructure in response to competitor entering the market with identical product or service delivered more efficiently than you?  What about new legislation recently enacted that has a direct impact on cost of service or product?  

2. Look for requisite variety.  Requisite variety is nothing more than implementing processes that can be quickly learned and duplicated.  Here is where you look for efficiencies from your workforce so that response to threats are addressed quickly with minimial impact on quality, service support, and customer experience – as a matter of fact, it may ideally be enhanced.  Here, you will evaluate your organization’s existing knowledge base and perhaps develop new bodies of knowledge.  This step tests your organizational culture and if you consider yourself a learning organization, it will test just how effective your organizational “university” can teach and implement skills when it counts most.

3. Evaluate organizational and individual performance.  At the conclusion of your “chaos event,” an assessment of learning, and individual and organizational feedback should be provided.  Don’t let your organization and your workforce guess at the outcome.  Develop a well-orchestrated communications plan with a key goal of allowing your team to recognize the connection between effort and benefit.  Each organization will do this differently.  If you are a young firm, you may want to project savings, revenue growth, and on-going capital requirements.  For more stable, mature companies, the chaos may actually be carried out until a defined point in your financial reporting to allow for quantifiable data and sound conclusions to be formulated.  However, it is important to remember that the shorter the measurement and time frame of your implemented chaos, the more likely you will not adequately capture any sufficient return on investments.  Avoid the trap of trying to measure ROI to quickly while balancing a realistic time for payback consistent with your organizational capacity.

4. Capture and implement new knowledge created.  The feedback cycle loop is where the chaos really counts.  The point of learning is to either discard existing knowledge or to create a unique body/subset of knowledge that did not previously exist.  In the case of organizational learning, your knowledge capture processes and supporting systems ideally capture knowledge that links to service, product, and customer-experience for the better, creating an advantage over your competitors or having a measurable impact on your organization’s readiness level.

Ever since Senge’s The Fifth Discipline was introduced, the concept of knowledge management and more specifically, the learning organization has fluctuated between passing organizational fancy to bona fide organizational practice.  Organizations that view KM as a bona fide organizational practice continually ask themselves, “Knowledge for what?”  The detailed answer is specific to your organization, but the short answer is this: Knowledge to improve product and service innovation while enhancing customer-client delivery.  You have to carry this point with you in order to elevate your KM strategy to its rightful place, which I argue is dead-center of your long-standing organizational initiatives.   So go out and create some chaos and clarify the confusion.  It may be just what your organization needs to survive and thrive.

Additional Reading/References:

Austin, M. J. (2008). Strategies for transforming human service organizations into     learning organizations: Knowledge management and the transfer of learning.  Journal of Evidence-Based Social Work, Vol. 5(3-4).

Kloviene, L., & Gimzauskiene, E. (2008). The role of institutional factors on changes of performance measurement system.  Economics & Management, 49.

Nonaka, I., & Nishiguchi, T. (Eds.). (2001). Knowledge emergence: Social, technical, 
and evolutionary dimensions of knowledge creation. Oxford: Oxford University 
Press.

Zairi, M., & Al-Mashari, M. (2005). Developing a sustainable culture of innovation management: A prescriptive approach.  Knowledge & Process Management, 12(3), 190-202. doi:10.1002/kpm.229.

If you are confused about the business case and justification for workplace diversity don’t worry; you are not alone.  The fact of the matter is that workplace diversity when viewed from an ethical-moral “lens” has pros and cons.  Furthermore, when workplace diversity viewed from an empirical basis to justify the business case, there again is both pro and con. 

To put it straight-forward: Workplace diversity is a complex, contemporary organizational challenge that continues to be the source of misinformation, misguided perception, and uneven research findings (Van De Ven, Rogers, Bechara, Kangyong, 2007; Jayne & Dipboye, 2004). Business leaders, government employees, mid-level practitioners, non-profit members, and even the business start-up owner all have justified questions concerning the morale value, and business utility of workplace diversity. The question no matter how stated, simply boils down to “What is the business value and potential benefit of workplace diversity?”   

Six key points of consideration are hereby presented:   

Point 1 – There is a tendency to equate demographic diversity with federal equal opportunity and affirmative action laws.  This is done in error because of research and organizational initiatives that link the concept of diversity with federal equal opportunity and affirmative action laws.  This error leads to resistance and reinforcement of stereotypes, having a reverse, unintended consequence on justifying the business need for diversity.  

Point 2 – Most workplace diversity initiatives consider only demographic components of diversity.  In considering only the demographic aspects of diversity, organizations do not go far enough.  As a matter of fact, organizations have in many cases only increased the likelihood that any diversity business case and subsequent initiative will be met with resistance.

Point 3 – Cognitive Diversity along with the business need is the root starting point when exploring the organizational benefit of diversity.  Cognitive Diversity, as I define it, is the observed and unobserved attributes that distinguish individuals and their accompanying value and belief system.  Of course there are varying views of Cognitive Diversity; yet, the properties of this definition allow us to include both the demographic components, and beliefs and attitudes components of diversity.    

Point 4: Workplace diversity must be centered on a business need (perceived threat, rare opportunity, or a combination of the two).  The moral case as unfortunate as it may sound is not enough.  Research shows that organizations that succeed at diversity base it on sound business considerations such as entrance or expansion within a market segment, product and services aimed toward diverse segments of the marketplace, exploitation of unexpected demand (or potential for demand) in an untapped or under-performing market (Note: Under-performing in the sense that demand for product or service was not foreseen; yet is empirically proven to show consideration for increase “presence”).

Point 5: Not all organizations should pursue diversity, especially based upon demographic consideration.  Diversity should not be pursued (despite what many tell you) to correct moral wrongs or to “reflect society.”   There are laws (both passed and under consideration) and other causes that serve such purposes.  As for “reflecting society;” your market may only represent a unique, defined niche of our collective society and any efforts to “represent society” will be viewed as insincere or not justifiable if your products and services appeal only to specific segments of the marketplace. 

Point 6:  If organizational diversity initiatives are pursued, it is essential to focus more on cognitive diversity vice the demographic components of diversity.  Highlighting differences, based on research and experience of organizations that pursue diversity (successful and otherwise), show that when demographic understanding is sought, the inverse happens – more confusion and increased hostility often results (Van de Ven, Rogers, & Kangyong, 2008; Jayne & Dipboye, 2004).  Furthermore, appreciation of demographic diversity naturally results when diversity is pursued at the deeper, cognitive level.   

 So what are the benefits of diversity if the business case warrants worthy of pursuit?  There is no shortage of benefits, if your organizational business case (considering the above) is conducted with rigor.  Some of the benefits of workplace diversity may include:

Goodwill of the Community. If diverse segments of your customer base are diverse and your organization reflects this diversity, your efforts will not go unnoticed. 

Potential increase in earnings and profitability.  Directly related to the above benefit, customers show appreciation represented via “buying power” and increased sales.  Quite simply: They buy more from you and less from your competitors. 

Increase readiness.  If you are a government organization, diversity efforts are appreciated through increased contribution or increased willingness to join your organization or cause. 

Outreach into potential talent pools.  With increased outreach and appreciation of diversity, you have increased individuals looking to contribute their talents to your organization.  If competitive advantage is embedded within human capital, which I argue this is so, than deeper, richer pools of talent with unique ideas and perspectives will enable you to leverage this diversity – resulting in, ideally, innovative products and services delivered faster and better than your competitors – for the foreseeable future. 

References/Further Reading

Jayne, M., & Dipboye, R. (2004). Leveraging diversity to improve business performance: Research findings and recommendations for organizations. Human Resource Management, 43(4), 409-424.

Van de Ven, A., Rogers, R., Bechara, J., & Kangyong, S. (2008). Organizational diversity, integration and performance. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 29 (3), 335-354. doi:10.1002/job.511.

One of the most persistent mistakes made by consultants and mid-level to senior leadership professionals is an inability to link abstract theoretical organizational interventions to concrete business activity and functions.  In working as a leadership and organizational development consultant and business practitioner for six years, and an HR professional for nearly 20 years, I have witnessed this first hand on more occasion than I care to admit. 

Allow me to present a story:  Once in a history not to distant, I was a supporting initiative project team leader and change management team member working on a fairly complex change management initiative.  This robust and aggressive inititiative involved the entire organization, its business units, core business functions, staff support functions,  and information systems.  Thus, in the organizational textbook sense of change management, it met the criteria of being both complex and essential to maintaining the advantage in the industry of which it was a part. 

The concept was Appreciative Inquiry (AI) and my core role during the exploration stages was to unearth practical utility prior to  implementation stages of supporting initiative projects.  The organizational leadership, rightfully, in my opinion, did not believe in abstract concepts unless empirical evidence supported cost and effort; in other words, could a quantitative and qualatative business case be built around workforce actions built into the operational and functional actions of employees.  Continue reading »