DaChispa

It’s always interesting when you get a group of people together to talk about the issues and opportunities of major changes that they are going through.   You can bargain on specific issues always coming out and, true to form, a recent exercise I attended surfaced some of the same things.  It doesn’t make them less real though.  Things like:

• -resistance to change
• -lack of trust in what they are being told
• -danger of silos being created
• -not having the tools/technology to do the job
• -losing expertise (but, on the plus side, having access to a wider base of expertise after consolidation)

Fortuitously, I came across an article that talked about this, to some extent http://www.cio.com/article/118350?source=nlt_cioenterprise .  It covers the danger of teamwork actually causing silos as well as being needed to overcome them.  It then belies its technical origins by concentrating for a large part of the article on how to go about effective documentation.  However, this is also a serious point and I have come to realise that, in my enthusiasm for the sexier approaches such as ONA, I sometimes forget that the basics are even more important.  If you have to work with new teams across several sites, one of the keys is to have really good documentation in a common format.  Engendering trust is also necessary – but if you can see that your new colleagues are taking the trouble to create helpful documentation, and can admire its quality, that is a significant step towards creating this trust.

I am listening to some cassettes on the importance of conversation as a tool for persuasion.  Fortunately I still have an old walkman, so am able to play them.  You can almost feel the frisson of pity as I take it out on the train.  I suspect that some of the i-pod generation don’t even really know what a walkman is!    The course itself has been unexpectedly useful, and appears to be based around some of the principles of NLP so is a good reminder of some things I had forgotten – particularly round the use of questions.  Interestingly, it gave me a flashback to my Latin classes.  I remember finding it very strange that there was a specific grammatical construction in Latin if your question expects and answer yes, or no.  It was a simple suffix.  In English this is much more complicated,  but usually takes the form of ‘isn’t it?’ ‘don’t you think?’.  The point that the speaker was making was around using the positive form of this (i.e. questions expecting the answer yes) to put the listener into the right frame of mind – for example as if they have already made the decision you want them to make.    The question helps bring them into active participation in a conversation as it asks them to think, by asking a positive question, a ‘yes’ pops into their head, and they are much more likely to follow through.    Called ‘tag questions’ it seems a useful tool to help people get into a mind set more accepting of change …. doesn’t it?

Another HBR article, this time an interview with Teresa Amabile about ‘How Team Leaders Show Support–or Not’ http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/4155.html.  This struck me as interesting because there is a lot of talk in my organisation about a) how key team leaders are to getting things accepted and b) how poor they are at actually being team leaders and carrying out management tasks  I would say this latter is not an unusual criticism.  I can remember being involved in a rewards/recognition project over 20 years ago where one of the aims was to teach managers how to effectively recognise their staff by making them think about how and why they were rewarding someone.  You would think it would be automatic, but in fact few people are natural leaders and do need some help to develop into the role.  This article has some useful pointers.

I came across this HBR working paper which struck me as an interesting take on an increasingly well worn subject:  http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/5696.html 

I went to the gym tonight – the first time for a while because I have found that a personal trainer who came to my house actually was money well spent as it forced me to exercise.  I discovered tonight that it was even better value than I thought because she has managed to transfer invaluable tacit (and muscle) knowledge to me.  Previous visits to the gym have been machine based (i.e. using the weight machines rather than hand held weights and as for stomach exercises…forget it!).  This time I did the basic aerobic stuff and then went for the hand weights and floor exercises.  I realised that my body now has an instinctive understanding of the right way to do these exercises, and because I know what I am doing, I actually enjoy it more. 

Is this KM in action?  I guess you could say that whereas previously I might have read something or been given a set of exercises, I didn’t actually understand how I would use them and have the experience (gut feel) to know when I was doing it right and what were the ones that would be of most benefit.  My trainer has passed some of her expertise on to me.  However, I also know that she knows much, much more that I can learn in the future and that she also learns from things I know, so that we have a collaborative approach to my exercise regime.   

So there are a few KM lessons to learn here – the contextual transferral of expertise can be easy, but takes time – and real experts not only share, but learn from those they teach.  They never worry about sharing what they know because they see direct benefits in those they share with and it also helps them improve so that they will always be developing their knowledge and skills to the next level. 

Having said all that, I do have a very good trainer, not all experts are as good at passing on their knowledge as she is – but they could certainly learn from her approach.