In collaboration with AEShareNet, I am co-hosting a seminar in Sydney on Monday 6 March, Creative Practices for a Connected World, with guest presenter Euan Semple.

Euan is a UK digital innovation expert and ex-Director of Knowledge Management Solutions at the BBC.

For more information see: http://www.aesharenet.com.au/Semple_seminar.asp

If you want to improve your work practices, your organisation and your service delivery in a connected world, this is the event to attend in 2006. The seminar will cover key issues for managers, teachers and support staff in education and training including:

• Using collaborative tools for innovation, networking and knowledge management
• Developing advanced capabilities in social computing, using blogs and wikis, RSS and folksomonies (no previous experience required!)
• Performing new roles and forming new relationships with learners and partners in a digital environment.
  

Australia’s economy depends on fostering the creativity and innovation of its workforce, and education and training is a key to achieving this high-skilled workforce. The Euan Semple Seminar will provide you with concepts, practices, strategies and tools to help transform education and training.

Early bookings are strong and the forum will definitely go ahead, so be quick to book to ensure a seat.

Over the last three months I assisted a State-wide educational organisation to develop a strategy for knowledge management. Today we held the final workshop for the project, at which I tabled for consideration the final draft of the strategy.

It was an inspiring workshop as it contained all the elements of high-level professionalism: passion, commitment, debate, determination and the shared value of assisting students to learn.

I mention these cultural issues because developing a KM strategy is much more than a mechanistic or technological undertaking, as it requires participants involved in the development of the strategy to consider what might be, for them, new practices, such as:

• examining one’s own tacit knowledge and attempting to make it explicit
• sharing, not withholding, knowledge
• generating new knowledge in concert with others
• trusting that the new knowledge will be treated with respect, not exploited
• accepting the uncertain outcomes of developing new knowledge
• networking with others, not running a solo race.

Some lessons I draw from this particular group of professionals are as follows:

• knowledge management, involving systems for generating, sharing and storing knowledge, is first and foremost a human activity
• knowledge management as a human activity is more about emotions, thoughts and relationships than about technological systems
• as a human activity, knowledge management will be approached differently by each group of people
• and as human knowledge is fluid, changing over time and in different people’s hands, knowledge management needs to be a continuous activity, and energy and commitment are required to sustain it.

This analysis will frustrate those who hope to find simple keys to knowledge management or the five easy steps to knowledge management. But this analysis will encourage those who see in the individuals and groups in an organisation the potential for managed knowledge to drive innovation and the continuous improvement of service provision.

Today I spent four hours in conversation with a good friend visiting from the UK who is the head of staff development in a very large international organisation. I had the pleasure of recently undertaking an assignment for his organisation in London, so I was keen for an update.

What struck me about this conversation was its similarity with a conversation I had yesterday with a Melbourne-based Australian in a similar role to him – a conversation which I summarized in my last weblog. This similarity indicates a number of things:

• that industries are becoming increasingly similar around the globe, so challenges in London are challenges in Melbourne or Sydney;
• that Australia is very much part of a global economy, so our work skills and quality levels and work outputs need to be world class, or we will fall behind. 

The conversation was invaluable for checking with him on the pressures on his organisation and the implications for learning and development. He indicated that the pressures on the creative industry in which he works are multiple and include the following:

• increasing competition from other suppliers
• increasing expectations from the government and other stakeholders
• increasing demand from customers
• increasing options made possible by new technologies.

A number of other points he made included:

• if his organisation stops innovating it will quickly become redundant
• creating new knowledge is critical to innovation
• to be innovative, organisations need to be driven by values and vision
• skill development is not a luxury in his organisation and in his creative industry: it is a necessity
• leadership continues to be a critical issue in his organisation, for without it the shared corporate vision will flounder
• change management that has 'heart' is essential in a vibrant organisation
• creating a coaching culture amongst managers is one of the most powerful ways of exchanging knowledge down the line.

He also commented on the value and success of coaching within his organisation – a major organisational focus over the last year. While he values mentoring and provides mentoring for a number of mentees, he sees a difference between coaching and mentoring:

“Coaching is non-directive, asking the person I am coaching to describe his or her goals, realities, options and likely responses and therefore owning the goals and targets by allowing the coachees to work it out for themselves. Mentoring is more about using your experience and knowledge as a mentor to help the mentee see the way forward and giving him or her the confidence to make different decisions or the breadth to see a more rounded context for work.“

The overall message from this conversation is that Australian organisations need to continue to improve both their skill levels and creativity, to ensure a viable future. Indeed skill development and creativity should go together: one is an indispensable adjunct to the other.

Tomorrow I am conducting a workshop on developing a knowledge management (KM) strategy. In any such workshop the organisational barriers to KM need to be discussed.

Some common barriers are as follows:

• a lack of practice in sharing information systematically across the organisation
• a preference for gossip
• a reliance on a few individuals for information
• inconsistent approaches to managing information from one section to the next
• irregular dissemination of news within the organization
• different definitions of good practice
• tensions between sections within the organisation
• a long-standing distrust of head office.

Patently, the major obstacles to  the development of KM strategies are cultural.

Currently I am assisting a statewide educational service provider to develop a knowledge management (KM) strategy.

One of the fascinating challenges in a KM project is to balance those staff who prefer to focus on tacit knowledge with those who prefer to focus on explicit knowledge.

Some practitioners prefer to consider the nature and benefits of tacit knowledge. These personnel believe strongly in developing processes to nurture the processes of social communication. They value conversation, networking and sharing and only place a secondary emphasis on the use of IT.

Other practitioners prefer to focus on explicit knowledge. These personnel believe strongly in developing processes to capture, order, store and retrieve knowledge, by using IT systems. They value knowledge that can be documented and they like to develop systems that use databases. 

Both perspectives are valuable and necessary in developing and implementing a KM strategy.

Today I am constructing a knowledge management (KM) survey for distribution to staff within an educational organisation.

The survey questions are customised to accommodate the following factors:

• this is a newly created organisation within a long-standing educational institution
• the organisation is a resource for the wider institution, so the creation and storage and dissemination of knowledge is core business
• the organisation undertaking the survey is about to commence a structured project to develop a knowledge management strategy
• the organisation has an imperative to develop a KM strategy – it is meant to be a leader in this field within the larger institution.

In preparing the survey, I believe that the questions will serve a range of purposes:

• the questions will provoke responses which I will collate and feed back to the whole group, to provide them with a summary profile of current attitudes and practices about KM
• the questions will also assist individuals to realise that their work is predominantly knowledge work and that they are actively involved in knowledge management, without using the term
• the questions will encourage respondents to not only reflect more about themselves and their organization in terms of knowledge management, but will also enable each respondent to construct their own map about KM, to guide their future KM activities.
  

Today, Thursday 16 September, I met with a client to commence planning the development of a knowledge management (KM) strategy for a multi-sector educational organisation.

Planning to develop a KM strategy requires considerable care, as I find that knowledge management polarizes people. It is one of those terms that can induce disparaging comments, set heads spinning and cause heart palpitations. For some people, KM represents all that is woolly, trendy and imprecise. For others, KM symbolises innovation, contemporary work practices and valuing of all staff as knowledge workers.

To develop a KM strategy, my preference as a consultant and facilitator is to take – as will happen with this current project – sufficient time, that is, around two-three months, to guide staff through a learning experience. As with all quality learning experiences, there will be adequate opportunities during the project for staff with a range of different learning styles to engage with the project, to learn at a pace that suits them, and to find ways to enter the discourse that will be generated.

This learning approach is essential if the KM strategy is to become embedded in ongoing business processes within the organization. A goal of this KM project is to enable all staff participants to identify ways they can contribute in future to a continuously improved KM strategy.

I find that this learning approach to the development of a KM strategy also creates an appropriate environment for staff to share their implicit as well as their explicit knowledge – one of the highest goals of a KM project. We will use a number of techniques in this project to ensure that informal learning occurs and that implicit knowledge is identified and acknowledged. We will ensure that KM only produces positive heart palpitations.

Today I met with a group of VET professionals to plan a knowledge management project. At the meeting I stressed that cultural issues precede technology solutions when designing knowledge management activities.

Research (e.g. McDermott, 2000; Cohen & Prusak, 2001) shows that knowledge management, while taking advantage of technology such as databases, is dependent on cultural issues within an organisation, such as the creative use of knowledge by practitioners within the organisation. For instance, McDermott (2000) argues that ‘the art of professional practice is to turn information into solutions’ (p.24). He shows that professionals face a stream of problems:

…when to run a product promotion, how to estimate the size of an oil field, how to reduce the weight and cost of a structure. To solve these problems, professionals piece information together, reflect on their experience, generate insights, and use those insights to solve problems (p.24).

McDermott (2000) concludes that thinking is at the heart of professional practice and knowledge is the residue of thinking: knowledge comes from experience. (pp.24-25) VET practitioners can be reconceptualised as professionals who piece information together, reflect on their experience, generate insights, and use those insights to solve problems.

Information technology can assist such knowledge management by providing cues for identifying what information to capture, constructing taxonomies for organising information, and determining access (McDermott, 2000, p.22), but the human processes that occur within an organisation, such as enquiring, discussing, reflecting and sharing, are more critical to the growth of knowledge. 

This finding about the fundamental human aspects of knowledge management is significant for VET. The research suggests that the key to knowledge development and application within organisations is to support professionals and their communities. Technology is simply one of the enabling mechanisms available. McDermott (2000) suggests that primary attention not be given to technology but that managers do the following:

Identify the community that cares about a topic and then enhance their ability to think together, stay in touch with each other, share ideas with each other, and connect with other communities (p.28).

Interestingly, McDermott (2000) cautions about the limitations of relying on documentation and electronic linkages for leveraging knowledge in an organisation:

It is not surprising that documenting procedures, linking people electronically, or creating websites is often not enough to get people to think together, share insights they didn’t know they had, or generate new knowledge (p.28).

These ideas are extended in Knowledge Management and the National Training Framework: Core Ideas available at http://reframingthefuture.net (click on Publications and then on General Publications).

I often mentor groups who attempt to form communities of practice but, for reasons often beyond their control, they do not achieve a fundamental purpose of such communities – the sharing of practice. Instead, members hold back, happy to share general information, but reluctant to disclose and interrogate aspects of their practice, such as how their beliefs about learners and teaching.

With such groups, I suggest they value what they are achieving and not see themselves as failures. In many cases, the group is operating like a network, not a community of practice, and networks are also to be valued. A network is not inferior to a community of practice – it is just different. Let’s look at the definitions of both.

To clarify the unique features of networks, Wenger and Snyder (2000) distinguish between networks and three other work structures, as follows:

• work teams deliver a product or service;
• project teams seek to accomplish a specific task;
• communities of practice develop members’ capabilities and exchange knowledge;
• networks collect and pass on knowledge.

The above definition of networks is too narrow, according to Cohen and Prusak (2001, p.56), who find that both networks and communities of practice are groups of people brought together by common interests, experiences, goals, or tasks; and both imply regular communication and bonds characterised by some degree of trust and altruism.

However, Cohen and Prusak (2001 p.56) believe that networks are different to communities of practice in a number of ways:

• communities of practice are harder to organise, maintain and sustain, and are often intense, high-effort and short-term
• networks are simpler to organise, rely mostly on mutual needs and are often long-lasting.

Networks are also different to communities of practice in other ways:

• communities of practice enforce norms but networks are often too diffuse to do so;
• communities of practice have a type of closed membership while networks are open;
• and communities of practice have a shared domain of knowledge while networks are less concentrated in their focus (Cohen and Prusak 2001, p.56).

While networks are different to communities of practice, they are of value to both the individual and organisations:

Though network building mainly happens between individuals, it contributes to an organisation’s social capital. Many of the benefits individuals derive from networks and communities – a sense of membership and purpose, recognition, learning and knowledge – can also pay huge benefits to the organisation (Cohen and Prusak 2001, pp.60-61).

Networks are not inferior to communities of practice. Both have high value. Both are needed in VET.

Earlier this week I had a meeting with a VET professional about a raft of organisational development issues at her large TAFE Institute. Just one of the topics we discussed was how to foster communities of practice.

But first a definition is required. There are many definitions of communities of practice in the literature but a simple and useful one provided by Lesser & Storck (2001, p.831) is that they are ‘a group whose members regularly engage in sharing and learning, based on their common interests’.

Although they recognise that each community is unique in the type of support it requires from the organisation, Lesser and Everest (2001) provide some general guidelines for communities of practice that can be applied in many situations: 

1. Focus resources on communities that have strategic implications for the organisation
2. Provide the community with the time and space to interact
3. Designate roles and responsibilities to support the community
4. Market the community and its success stories. 

Wenger, McDermott and Snyder (2002) suggest seven principles for cultivating communities of practice:

1. Design for evolution, so that the community can grow and change, for instance when new members bring new interests to the group
2. Open a dialogue between the inside and outside perspective, with insiders providing deep understanding of the community issues and outsiders helping members to see wider possibilities
3. Invite different levels of participation, allowing members to participate in ways that suit their level of interest
4. Develop both public and private community spaces, so that all levels of relationships can flourish. Public spaces are meetings and using an online forum; private spaces are one-on-one encounters, either face-to-face or electronically.
5. Focus on value, because communities thrive when they deliver value to the organisation and to the members
6. Combine familiarity and excitement, satisfying members’ needs for both comfort and divergent thinking
7. Create a rhythm for the community, through regular meetings, teleconferences, online interactions and informal events, mixing idea-sharing forums and tool-building projects (pp.49-64).

Fostering and supporting communities of practice requires high-level skills. To develop these high-level skills we can tap into useful literature on communities of practice and the increasing expertise in the VET sector. But there is no escaping the subtle, sophisticated work involved.

I discuss these and related isssues in Chapter 3 of my report The Potential for Communities of Practice to Underpin the National Training Framework.

The report is available at http://reframiningthefuture.net (click on ‘Publications’ then click on ‘Sub-program 4).

Much of my work with professionals and their organisations is implicitly about knowledge management, but the term knowledge management is not easily defined. Some further explanation of the term is due.

In the mid-late 1990s, the concept of knowledge management became popular in the western world, based on the belief that a company’s strategic advantages often hinged on the knowledge of staff. Database companies were quick to suggest that the key to managing the knowledge of staff was to somehow channel all corporate knowledge into databases.

However, definitions of knowledge such as the following by McDermott and Snyder (2002, pp.8-14) stress the different types of knowledge that might exist in an organisation and which cannot be captured solely in a database:

• Knowledge lives in the human act of knowing. The knowledge of experts such as surgeons is an accumulation of experience that remains dynamic: part of their ongoing experience. Communities of Practice make knowledge an integral part of their activities and interactions, and they serve as a living repository for that knowledge.
• Knowledge is tacit as well as explicit. Not everything we know can be codified as documents or tools. In business, tacit knowledge, such as a deep understanding of the complex systems in an industry or in VET, is sometimes more valuable than explicit knowledge. Sharing tacit knowledge involves interaction and informal learning processes such as storytelling and coaching of the kind that Communities of Practice provide.
• Knowledge is social as well as individual. A body of knowledge, say about the NTF, is developed through communal involvement, not just from reading documents. 
• Knowledge is dynamic. What makes knowledge management a challenge is that knowledge is not static: it is not an object that can be stored, owned and moved around like a document. Knowledge resides in the skills, understanding and relationships of its members as well as in tools, documents and processes.

If one accepts such a multi-layered definition of knowledge, ‘managing’ such different types of knowledge requires a new response by managers. Both individuals and organisations within VET will benefit if managers encourage staff to collaborate and share their knowledge with their peers and across the organisation.

From my own research, I have found that the structure of a community of practice provides an ideal platform for such sharing of knowledge. On the other hand, communities of practice are complex, subtle and challenging undertakings, which require managers to use skills and knowledge not previously part of their conventional duties.

I discuss these concepts further in my report The Potential for Communities of Practice to Underpin the National Training Framework, available at http://reframingthefuture.net (click on ‘Publications’ then click on ‘Sub-program 4’).

I recently conducted research on networks in VET which underlined the extensive benefits of networks to both participants and organisations.

Cohen and Prusak (2001, pp.61) find that networks provide an interlocking web of connections and help people develop their identities. Additionally, they find that:

• membership of a network implies a commitment to the group and its work and to cooperation
• network membership implies connection, based around the trust, understanding, and mutuality that support collaborative, cohesive action.

My research found that:

• networks help individuals to acquire new information and resources and share with their peers their explicit and tacit knowledge about their profession
• networks encourage members to reflect on and potentially improve their own practice
• networks help people further develop their identities, in this case, as VET practitioners or collaborators
• networks enable individuals to learn more about their own organisation – which is the common focus of networks reported on in the literature
• networks also enable individuals to learn about industry, if they are a provider, or about providers if they are from industry.

Cohen and Prusak (2001, p.61) find that many of the benefits that individuals derive from networks and communities – a sense of membership and purpose, recognition, learning, and knowledge – can also provide benefits for the organisation. Networks and communities contribute to the development of social capital in organisations, defined by Cohen and Prusak (2001) as a company’s stock of human connections:

Social capital consists of the stock of active connections among people: the trust, mutual understanding, and shared values and behaviour that bind the members of human networks and communities and make cooperative action possible (p.4).

In addition to developing social capital, Alter and Hage (quoted in Fulop and Linstead 1999, p.446) find that the business benefits of organisations working together include:

• opportunities to learn and adapt and to develop competencies or products
• a gain of resources – time, money, information, raw materials, legitimacy, status
• an ability to manage uncertainty and to solve invisible and complex problems
• an ability to specialise or diversify and to fend off competitors
• rapid responses to changing market demands.

Many different types of organisations were involved in the 2003 networks I studied, from enterprises, to industry associations, to provider groups, to government agencies. The benefits of participation for these groups varied, but the benefits were many, including:

• developing a better understanding of each other’s needs
• working together on training programs
• creating a climate of trust for future collaboration.

The findings from the 2003 networks confirm research by Ford et al (2003) who found that networks are essential to viability in contemporary business:

All companies are becoming more dependent on their relationships with those around them. And all these companies and relationships must cope with pressures and capitalise on opportunities from wider afield in the network (p.xi).

My research on networks is contained in the following report for ANTA - Building Industry Training Networks - available from http://reframingthefuture.net (click on ‘Publications’ and then click on ‘sub-program 4’).

One of my professional activities involves assisting educational organisations to develop goals and strategies for knowledge management.  

I begin by tabling a range of definitions of knowledge management, such as the following:

• Knowledge management is not the mechanical organisation of knowledge; nor is knowledge management solely about content (Gamble & Blackwell, 2001, p.13).
• Knowledge management is a system and a process, not just content (Cordata, 2001, p.104). 
• Knowledge management is the systematic processes by which knowledge needed for an organisation to succeed is created, captured, shared and leveraged (Rumizen, 2002, p.9).

An alternative definition to Rumizen’s is provided by Standards Australia (2001):

Knowledge management is a multi-disciplined approach to achieving organisational objectives by making the best use of knowledge—it focuses on processes such as acquiring, creating and sharing knowledge and the cultural and technical foundations that support them. The aim of knowledge management is to align knowledge processes with organisational objectives (p.7).

Reasons why organisations commit to knowledge management include:

• to improve the quality of available knowledge within the enterprise and share it across the operating units;
• to improve responses to competitive forces;
• to reduce or control costs;
• to accelerate rates of innovation within an enterprise
• to reduce the loss of intellectual assets caused by turnover in employees (Cortada, 2001, p.110).  

All the above goals are relevant to educational organisations who are improving their businesses.

These ideas are developed further in Mitchell & Young, 'Knowledge Management and the National Training Framework: Core Ideas', available at http://reframingthefuture (click on 'Publications' and then on 'General Publications').

In my work as a strategist, I find that educational organisations are becoming increasingly aware of the nature and value of knowledge. I asssist organisations to go beyond broad-stroke definitions of knowledge and to develop strategies for managing knowledge that suit their specific context.  

Standards Australia (2001) defines knowledge as follows:

Knowledge is the body of understanding and skills that is mentally constructed by people. Knowledge is increased through interaction with information (typically from other people) (p.7).

Gamble & Blackwell (2001) suggest that there are three different types of knowledge:

• Embodied knowledge: undocumented information in human beings such as the intuition, empathy and experience that enables us to make decisions.
• Represented knowledge: knowledge mostly contained in data and documented information that is rightly the basis for much decision-making.
• Embedded knowledge: the knowledge that exists in processes, products, rules and procedures (p.13).

Standards Australia (2001) identifies five different types of knowledge, partly overlapping with Gamble and Blackwell:

• Tacit knowledge: knowledge that includes aspects of culture about ‘ways of doing things’.
• Explicit knowledge: knowledge that is recorded, e.g. in a document or other medium.
• Non-declarable knowledge: tacit knowledge which people use to do things but find difficult to articulate.
• Embedded knowledge: knowledge contained in the routines or procedures of an organisation.
• Other dimensions: e.g. individual, group or organisational knowledge (pp.7-8).

All these different types of knowledge exist within Registered Training Organisations (RTOs) and are relevant to VET organisations implementing the national training system, and all these types of knowledge need to be managed in VET.

Davenport and Prusak (1998) provide a definition of knowledge that integrates the different types of knowledge outlined above:

Knowledge is a fluid mix of framed experience, values, contextual information, expert insight and grounded intuition that provides an environment and framework for evaluating and incorporating new experiences and information. It originates and is applied in the minds of knowers. In organisations it often becomes embedded not only in documents or repositories but also in organisational routines, processes, practices and norms (p.5).

The Davenport and Prusak definition reminds us of two matters relevant to educational organisations:

• first, that knowledge is fluid, so managing it is a process that never stops;
• second, that knowledge is embedded not just in individuals, but also in organisations, so organisational processes need to be managed as well as individuals. Organisations exploit knowledge by building capabilities and competencies (Carlilse, in Little et al, 2002, p.126).

These ideas are discussed further in Mitchell & Young, 'Knowledge Management and the National Training Framework' available at http://reframingthefuture.net (click on 'Publications' and then on 'General Publications')