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Katalina Groh, Larry Prusak: Some of the world's leading thinkers |
| Storytelling: Organizational Perspective: Larry Prusak |
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Local
knowledge
Then we get to another important
issue. This is one that you don’t hear about as much. But I think it’s
key. It’s called localism. Knowledge is sticky, local and contextual. It
stays where it is, especially innovative knowledge. Innovations in general
come from the bottom up. It’s generally the interface between the worker
and the work. I’d say that’s true in schools, in consulting firms, from
the highest to the lowest, there’s a type of parallel to evolution, where
you get hybrids and genetic offshoots that just happen somewhat randomly
in nature, and if it increases adaptation, it propagates. The same thing
happens in organizations.
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| They were people who
do work and they say, “Oh, if we turn this three times, instead of four,
we get a greater yield.” No one knows it. It’s not documented. It’s nobody’s
job to take care of that. And there it is. Nobody’s job. Nobody cares.
Everyone cares but nobody cares. Whose job it is to harvest innovations
in an organization? Nobody. It’s fascinating, isn’t it. It should be everyone’s
job. Peter Drucker thinks it should be. But when something is everyone’s
job, it ends up being nobody’s job.
So one of the things that we’ve learnt is that we have to keep an eye on the local. When things become global, when they get to headquarters, they turn into polenta or mulch. I mean, no one gets excited reading memos from the top. But they do get excited hearing about innovations, peer to peer. Someone comes to you, someone you trust, someone you have a peer sense with, and says, “Hey, we’ve done this and this occurs.” Then you think, “Great!” Jack Grayson is going to talk about education. My wife was a teacher for many, many years. And she would love hearing other teachers saying, “I’ve tried this and this works.” Now you have to institutionalize that eventually, I completely agree with you. But on the other hand, that’s where the innovation comes from. She would get memos. I mean, just last month, I should have brought it for you. There was an article in the New York Times about someone who received a large grant to do research on New York city schools. Right? no surprise there. The person got close to a million dollars. He has an institute. He never set foot in a classroom. Never, never, never. He didn’t walk into a classroom in New York city. I have relatives who teach in that system. I’m a product of that system. Believe me, if you don’t go into the classroom, I don’t care how much data you manipulate, you’re not going to really get it. You’re not going to produce anything of value. The same thing happened in re-engineering. It happens in knowledge management too. The abstraction of work to the point where it becomes schematic, rather than a deep rich understanding of what’s to be done is an evil. It’s an evil perpetrated by vendors, by consultants, and journalists, I may add. And it’s taught in the business schools. But it’s all wrong. But that’s why there’s a contempt for business schools’ ideas by people who actually work. There shouldn’t be, there’s a great value in analytics, a great value. But it’s distrusted, because people don’t have a sense of the culture, of the politics, or of what really goes on in organizations. Now knowledge is local, but there’s a balance. How do you achieve local knowledge, and still institutionalize it, to use the language of the previous speaker, which is absolutely correct. It’s an art. It’s a balance. But very often in organizations, it veers towards the global, towards headquarters, towards the Chief Knowledge Officer, rather than: where are the innovations? How do we understand them without killing them? How do we get others to understand them? How do we propagate this? And believe me, it’s not putting a document in a repository. Save your money! Give it to the United Way! It’s not a way to transfer knowledge or do anything with knowledge that I’m talking about. So localism is pretty important. |
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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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