Synopses & Reviews
To manage business operations – let alone innovate – amid frequent restructurings, outsourcings and retirements, leaders must
quickly capitalize on hidden know-how (knowledge). That is, know-how that lives inside their organizations or networks – in the teams, processes and experts that comprise them.
Yet, many organizations are coming up short in this race. Knowledge sharing and transfer have been reduced to reports, e-mails and tweets replacing vital personal interaction. The lack of meaningful conversation coupled with intense fragmentation across organizations and networks has left leaders floating in a sea of information and ideas without a map to channel insight into action.
Sharing Hidden Know-How starts the conversation that allows organizations to take what they know to the bank. The “how-to”/“how-act” guidebook unveils Knowledge Jam, a facilitated collaborative method for helping organizations rediscover the fundamental discipline of knowledge transfer – the conversation.
Developed by Katrina Pugh, president of AlignConsulting, the proven process uses human interaction to capture unwritten insights, and more importantly to put them to work. Offering a step-by-step process and practical tools, Sharing Hidden Know-How will help any organization harness untapped knowledge to solve today’s thorny problems:
- Accelerating New Product Development and Market and Segment Innovations
- Maximizing Combined Knowledge in Mergers Integrations, Restructurings, Off-shoring and Outsourcing
- Overcoming Information Overload (Focus on Social Media)
- Smoothing Executive Transitions and Succession Planning
- Smoothing Team Transitions
- Spreading Insight across Geographies and Network Partners
- Tapping into Sales Insights
The next generation of leadership effectiveness is about conversation and reflective facilitation, not just texts and tweets. Sharing Hidden Know-How makes the case for intentional, conversation-based leadership, and provides the practice model to pull it off. Viewed from above, this important book is itself a conversation between Kate Pugh’s basic propositions and those of a diverse group of other thinkers, all woven into a unified whole. Viewed on the ground, it is an intellectual joyride, coherent, insightful, promisingly pragmatic, and with just the right measure of the personal to fully reveal a fruitful mind in motion.
— David Kantor, director, Kantor Institute; author, Reading the Room (Jossey-Bass, 2012)
“[This] book addresses one of the time-honored problems in organizations: ‘How do you get people with experience, solutions and knowledge to share them effectively with those who need those valuable assets?’ Technology, we now know, is not the answer—human discussion is. [Pugh] tells you how to structure and facilitate these important conversations.”
—Thomas H. Davenport, President’s distinguished professor of IT and Management, Babson College; author of Analytics at Work and Thinking for a Living.
“In this innovative and useful book Kate Pugh shows how you can be a far better knowledge practitioner just by releasing the power of talking in your organization. A fine example of the new generation of knowledge books.”
—Larry Prusak, author, Working Knowledge; visiting scholar, Marshall School of Business, University of Southern California; and senior knowledge advisor to World Bank and NASA
“[This book] meets an urgent need within leadership practices: an effective conversational process for capturing and transferring deep smarts.”
—Stephen Denning, author, The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management and The Secret Language of Leadership
“Leaders have long known that the ‘know-how’ of experienced teams is key to their organizations’ ability to achieve strategic goals. The challenge has always been to distill this wisdom and deploy it in a way that maximizes and accelerates its impact on organizational effectiveness. [This book] provides a practical approach to addressing this challenge, and, in so doing, improves competitiveness.”
—Paul Lucidi, chief information officer, Insulet Corporation
“A fantastic replacement for the long dormant and never used lessons-learned repository! This book provides well documented and effective tools for really learning from your organization. As our business continues to go through transformational change, I hope to make good use of the Knowledge Jam to make that transformation efficient.”
—Sheryl Skifstad, senior director, Supply Chain IT at a Fortune 100 company
Synopsis
Using knowledge that an organization already has is one of the great management ideas of the last fifteen years. Putting Knowledge to Work provides external consultants, internal facilitators, and leaders with a five-step process that will help them achieve their knowledge management goals. The five steps, Knowledge Jams, show how to set the direction, foster the correct tone, conduct knowledge capture event, and integrate this knowledge into the organization. In addition, the author introduces conversation practices for participants to effectively co-create knowledge and discover context.
Synopsis
One of the great management ideas of the last fifteen years has been to make use of the knowledge that an organization has already learned. However, most businesses find that the knowledge transfer process is rarely effective, as more often than not shared ideas fail to get put to work where they can have the biggest impact.
Sharing Hidden Know-How outlines a proven process aimed directly at this thorny problem. The book shows how to scope topics, foster the correct tone, conduct a knowledge capture event, and integrate found knowledge into the organization. Developed by Katrina Pugh (an expert in business planning and knowledge-based transformation) the Knowledge Jam method is unique among innovation processes in that it uses conversation (not simply databases, tweets or threads) to capture information and context. Context improves our ability to apply knowledge toward projects that improve productivity, competitiveness and innovation.
The Knowledge Jam process is built around the disciplines of facilitation, conversation, and translation. These bring into balance the coordination, expansion, and pragmatic "pull" of knowledge into its future uses around the organization. Knowledge Jam moves things along efficiently, with a shared sense of responsibility for helping last month's or last year's insights to transform into today's innovative products, functions or regional strategies.
A practical hands-on resource, Sharing Hidden Know-How clearly shows how to define, sell, staff, launch, and evaluate a successful Knowledge Jam program. Pugh also makes a case for using Knowledge Jam as cultureof intention, openness, and stewardshipunderpinning such tools of change as collaborative planning and social technology adoption.
Rich with case studies, how-to templates, and adaptations, Sharing Hidden Know-How gives leaders, facilitators and consultants a toolkit for handling today's thorny knowledge problems, and the disciplines to "jam" productively among the manager-musicians of our changing world.
Synopsis
"Sharing Hidden Know-How addresses one of the time-honored problems in organiztions: 'How do you get people with experience, solutions, and knowledge to share them effectively with those who need those valuable assets?' Technology, we now know, is not the answer—human discussion is. Pugh tells you how to structure and facilitate these important conversations."
—Thomas H. Davenport, President's Distinguished Professor of IT and Management, Babson College; author of Analytics at Work and Thinking for a Living
"In this innovative and useful book Kate Pugh shows how you can be a far better knowledge practitioner just by releasing the power of talking in your organization. A fine example of the new generation of knowledge books."
—Larry Prusak, author, Working Knowledge; visiting scholar, Marshall School of Business, University of Southern California; and senior knowledge advisor to World Bank and NASA
"Sharing Hidden Know-How meets an urgent need within leadership practices: an effective conversational process for capturing and transferring deep smarts."
—Stephen Denning, author, The Leader's Guide to Radical Management and The Secret Language of Leadership
"Leaders have long known that the 'know-how' of experienced teams is key to their organizations' ability to achieve strategic goals. The challenge has always been to distill this wisdom and deploy it in a way that maximizes and accelerates its impact on organizational effectiveness. Sharing Hidden Know-How provides a practical approach to addressing this challenge, and, in so doing, improves competitiveness."
—Paul Lucidi, chief information officer, Insulet Corporation
"A fantastic replacement for the long dormant and never used lessons-learned repository! This book provides well documented and effective tools for really learning from your organization. As our business continues to go through transformational change, I hope to make good use of the Knowledge Jam to make that transformation efficient."
—Sheryl Skifstad, senior director, Supply Chain IT at a Fortune 100 company
About the Author
Katrina Pugh is president of AlignConsulting, a firm that specializes in helping organizations channel insight into action. Kate held leadership positions with PwC Consulting/IBM, JPMorgan, Intel Corporation and Fidelity Investments.
Table of Contents
Foreword by Nancy M. Dixon.
Introduction.
Chapter 1: Knowledge Jam Rationale: Solving Thorny Problems.
What's Not Working?
Blind Spots.
Mismatches.
Knowledge Jails.
Sidebar: Contrasting the Effects of Non-Participative Versus Collective Capture.
Chapter 2: Knowledge Jam Basics.
Step 1: Select.
Step 2: Plan.
Step 3: Discover/Capture.
Step 4: Broker.
Step 5: Reuse.
Chapter 3: Discipline 1: Facilitation.
The Facilitator's Mandate.
1. Facilitating the Select Step.
2. Facilitating the Plan Step.
3. Facilitating the Discover/Capture Step.
4. Facilitating the Broker Step.
5. Facilitating the Reuse Step.
Chapter 4: Discipline 2: Conversation.
Posture of Openness.
Pursuit of Diversity.
Practices of Dialogue.
Chapter 5: Discipline 3: Translation.
Brokers' Motivators.
Brokering Basics.
Chapter 6: Bespeckled, Married, and Emancipated.
Boundary-Spanning.
Surfacing Usable Insight.
Putting Knowledge to Work.
Chapter 7: Knowledge Jam Heritage: Prequel to the Three Disciplines.
Intelligence Acquisition.
Organizational Learning.
Sidebar: Structural Dynamics: Strategically Simulating Diversity.
Collaboration Technology.
Chapter 8: Comparing Knowledge Jam to Other Knowledge-Capture Methods.
A Facilitation-Conversation-Translation Scale.
Chapter 9: Building a Knowledge Jam Practice.
Building a Business Case and Selling Knowledge Jam.
Sidebar: The Price Is Right!
Cultivating Knowledge Jam Facilitators.
Measuring and Promoting Success.
Chapter 10: Knowledge Jam for Leading Change and Leveraging Social Media.
Using Knowledge Jam for Leading Change.
Sidebar: Jamming in the Boardroom—Shared Insight in Action.
Knowledge Jam for Business Transformation and Social Media.
Chapter 11: An Invitation.
Why Knowledge Jam (and other forms of Knowledge Elicitation) will take off.
You Have Your Toolkit.
More Than a Business Tool.
Appendices.
A: Knowledge Types.
B: Knowledge Jam Templates.
C: Glossary of Terms.
D: Case Studies.
Institute for Healthcare Improvement (Healthcare Quality Improvement Nonprofit).
Forest Bioproducts Research Institute (New Energy Institute).
E: Knowledge Jam Practice FAQs.
Notes.
Acknowledgments.
The Author.
Index.