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Katalina Groh, Larry Prusak: Some of the world's leading thinkers |
| Storytelling: Organizational Perspective: Larry Prusak |
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Encouraging
positive behaviors
So the last thing in terms
of enablers that I would want to talk about is encouraging positive behavior.
I used to use the word, “incenting”. But it’s more like encouraging or
demonstrating the behaviors you want to see universalized in the organization.
Again, I’ve mentioned earlier that I’ve worked for four or five consulting
firms, all of which say that we really value knowledge and intellectual
capital. Every one of those organizations only, solely, promoted sales
people. And what message does that send? They say, “We value this. This
is why we’re hiring you. Write articles, books, develop ideas, but we’re
only going to promote sales people.”
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| But it’s very true when we
talk about the knowledge stuff. So while norms get enforced in community,
the greater institutionalization of norms comes from the top.
So if you are only going to promote sales people, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. But don’t try to say other things though. Say: you’re here to sell. So sell, and you’ll get promoted. They’d have a very different catch basin of applicants if they said that. People catch on fast. It’s a very different world. And there are knowledge behaviors that you want to encourage. But they are just the ones that most organizations can’t stand. Reflection. Imagine if you took a day. I try, and again, I can get away with it. But I’m very much aware that most people can’t. To take a day a week, to read, to reflect, to write. One day a week. It’s not as much as I would like. But it’s the minimum. Most people can’t do that. They don’t have the freedom to do that. And without that, you do the same thing tomorrow as you did yesterday. Because you have no new input to change what you’re doing. Why wouldn’t you go on doing the same thing? As long as no one kills you, you’re not destroying anything, you will do tomorrow what you did yesterday. That’s not always a bad thing. But it’s a fast moving world. The world is changing and moving quickly, for reasons of globalization, and technology, and the like. So you might want to spend some time reading, thinking, reflecting and those things are deeply time consuming. You can read on a laptop what you can read on a book. But it’s still words that you’re reading. You still have to absorb the words. It doesn’t matter about the means of delivery. It’s great that you have ways that you can get things faster I mean, I like e-mail. I like ordering books on-line. I like downloading articles. But it still takes the same amount of time to read and absorb this stuff. We are really confusing two things here. So without time for reflection, and without acknowledging and encouraging behaviors that lead towards knowledge reflection, you won’t have new knowledge and you won’t absorb the knowledge you get. You can absorb data. You can absorb information. But knowledge takes time. You know, it still takes the same amount of time to learn French as it five hundred years ago. With all the tools we have, I don’t see any change. I mean, you can learn it a more fun way than memorizing verbs on a blackboard. It might be more fun using a PC, but it takes the same amount of time. There are core irreducibilities in working with knowledge that we just can’t change. It hasn’t changed yet. So those are the leading activities of the firms who do this well. I would say about half the firms that have big knowledge projects under way, about half succeed because they have some metric for success, some milestone for success, and reach that. I would say that half fail. Now the technology doesn’t fail. And people don’t admit they’ve failed. What happens is two or three years later, people ask, “Whatever happened to this knowledge management project?” And people say, “Oh, it went this way or that.” It’s mulch. It’s polenta. No one got excited. It didn’t transform the organization. Unlike the Navy, which is being transformed by some of the policies. Unlike the World Bank. I mean we could start naming groups that are being transformed, with really exciting, lively, interesting things are going on, around knowledge. And that’s really a win. It may be hard to measure it in a pointillist fashion. But it’s a win |
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| Books and videos on storytelling *** In Good Company : How Social Capital Makes Organizations Work by Don Cohen, Laurence Prusak (February 2001) Harvard Business School Press *** The Social Life of Information, by John Seely Brown, Paul Duguid (February 2000) Harvard Business School Press *** The Springboard : How Storytelling Ignites Action in Knowledge-Era Organizations by Stephen Denning (October 2000) Butterworth-Heinemann *** The Art of Possibility, a video with Ben and Ros Zander : Groh Publications (February 2001) |
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