KM World 2010, Day 1

Learning From Failure, Nancy Dixon, KM World, Nov. 15,  2010

Finally met Nancy Dixon in person. Nancy is one of the first authors of knowledge management. Her book Common Knowledge was one of the first books on KM that I read. Also met and sat next to Jay Liebowitz the author of Knowledge Retention. Among others in the workshop was also Lesley Shneier of the World Bank and Neo Kim Hai of the SAF.

Failure is defined as any deviation from expected behaviour.
Literature says if we learn from the small failures we could avoid - head off catastrophic failure.
FAA of the US learnt from near misses. Pilots benefited through lesson via simulation - successful
Healthcare industry took the FAA lessons and try to talk about their ‘failures’
Nuclear industry also learned from any deviation in their systems

We should learned from failed policy and near misses in our projects and policy works as well as dealing with our stakeholders at large. People issue is that no one want to talk about failures

Collecting lessons learned but  not learning from them is just a checklist
Need to break silos and get people to ‘talk’. Donna mentioned that her organization uses ‘fail often, fail fast’ strategy.

Surprisingly despite the development in KM and awareness most are still talking about the same old issues and problems - silos, not collaborating, not sharing, etc

Chris quoted ‘Failure is the mother of invention’

KM @ World Bank - ups and downs - new knowledge strategy - KM competency - core for everyone and specific for the KM group - Facebook linked  - ‘iCollaborate’ -
New mantra ‘Open Data, Open Knowledge, Open Bank’ - you have to have a Champion and people passionate about the initiatives to be successful.

Nancy proposed 3-Step Process

1. Identify small failures and make them visible. Kim Hai - Commander to blog, mine the data and connecting the dot. Is it possible for us to include in our knowledge mapping, CoPs, exercise to explore and discover. Would someone willing for someone else to make visible their ‘failures’. You need, as Nancy suggested, connectors to connect knowledge (information) to the right people.  
2. Identify ways to make sense of failures (common and frequent failures). Someone make sense every possible issues to a problem across systems and processes; and get a group to converse and discuss about it to identify gaps and new meaning to the issue. Could be a World Cafe topic. The role of analysis, connectors and facilitators is important to make this successful. Candidates to do this possibly are the Analysis and Repackaging group or CoPs. One possibility is to link and embed the practice into the work process of line departments. The discussion on where KM group should be located structurally cropped up and I believe our model is still applicable. No mater where KM policy and thought leadership need to be central.
3. Experimentation. Experiment the ‘failure’ findings into new environment or possibility. SAF Weak signal dashboard

The best examples of when the three steps being used, consciously or otherwise,  successfully are the discovery of Post-It Notes and Viagra.


Organizational Network Analysis, Patti Anklam

I attended this workshop because I would like to learn on how we could benefit and do the SNA. It is as what we read about and our biggest obstacle is more in mastering the SN software. Organizational Network Analysis (ONA) would be useful for us in identifying the networks of potential retirees for knowledge retention. Listening to Patti we could think of also use ONA as part of measurement tools
Before presenting the result (patterns) of the ONA we must seek to understand the network and seek clarification.