5 Knowledge Workers at the Café Revolution

Chapter Objectives

• Understand the roles of the knowledge workers at the café

• Discover what creates apathy to knowledge exchange and why the spirit of sharing creates the proper environment for knowledge management

• See why the spirit of sharing and giving is a predominant culture at the café

5.1. KNOWLEDGE WORKERS AT THE CAFÉ

In the digital age, you need to make knowledge workers out of every employee possible.

—Bill Gates

Knowledge workers are neither farmers nor labor nor business; they are employees of organizations.

—Peter Drucker

Knowledge workers are the creators and users of knowledge. Every employee and everyone who uses knowledge to do their work is a knowledge worker. While there are a variety of reasons to converge at a physical café, the purpose is to engage in knowledge exchange. Every knowledge worker depends on the free flow of information to do his or her work. Let’s café. It means let’s begin the discussion. Let’s talk about it. Let’s share what we know. Let’s brainstorm. Let’s get caffeinated. Let’s analyze what we have around a saucer. Let’s bring all this information into context. Can we bring the human element into it? Can we apply the knowledge we have acquired for discussion-making? The minder of the café is synonymous with sharing.

Several years ago, I managed a project and needed to organize project assets, processes, and policies; I searched the intranet of lessons learned repositories. I realized that every team had its repository for lessons learned and new knowledge from the café. I then searched our organization’s intranet for a project template. Believe it or not, the result was fantastic, probably more than 10,000 results of everything but a project charter! Sometimes, it’s like we are all swimming in a directionless swamp or pond. This is a perfect definition of what knowledge management should not be to the knowledge worker. We need an intentional and clear-flowing river that has a direction and clarity of perception. Could it be that we had documented knowledge scattered across many repositories without managing the knowledge within the documents? It was not tagged, curated, filtered, rated, prioritized, synthesized, or combined into new documents such as guidance, best practices, or Wiki content.

Why isn’t consumerization of information and knowledge the KM way as simple as the three-step process listing your book on Amazon that lasts for minutes or the simplicity offered through most online banking? project, program, and operations information needs to be appropriately analyzed and contextualized to help knowledge workers find what they need to make decisions faster and smarter. In search of project templates for my projects, I went to PMI.org and found some great templates, but they were too broad for my project. Someone out there in my organization already had a charter template that I could customize for my project. I didn’t need the frustration of looking for information. I needed to do my job as part of my project. This extra task of combing through multiple repositories for lessons learned, tools, and templates is outside the project scope and may not be part of my project’s requirements. A living, easy-to-access central repository is like a café, where every knowledge agent or user converges for knowledge exchange.

When knowledge workers live in the mindset of the café, their information will also café. We create a KM environment. “In this environment, organizations have evolved to become decision factories, operated mostly by knowledge workers. Yet few enterprises organize these knowledge workers to enable quick, efficient decisions amidst rapid, ongoing change” (Martin, 2019). Knowledge workers create the space for the future of work in our ever-increasing project delivery landscape and in the project economy.

When I finally created templates for project management, I realized weeks later that other knowledge users in my organization had created similar templates. Knowledge workers work best with a free flow of information. This helped to ignite my passion for a paradigm shift in the way knowledge users use information. There was a need for a café for different repositories, content, organization, curation, and indexing in hindsight. A café relational mindset will make the information available one or two clicks away.

This experience led me to ask why there is little or no flow of knowledge and information across the organization. Accurate data are the indisputable foundation for the right information; the correct information is essential for knowledge that enables an organization’s right decision. Knowledge and information need to flow freely in an organization. In an age of Big Data and information overload, retrievability of the right information has become a hard-hitting task. Many employees waste an enormous amount of time looking for and retrieving information and accessing the knowledge they need to do their jobs. Café is finding what you need to do your work. Everyone gives and receives at the café.

The Forrester Consulting study commissioned by Microsoft, “Extending the Value of AI to Knowledge Workers,” revealed that “knowledge workers depend on the free flow of information. When they can’t find the information they need, knowledge workers often make subpar decisions that affect the business as a whole. When graph information is properly analyzed and contextualized, it can help knowledge workers find the information needed to make decisions faster, find relevant expertise more easily, and make decisions more confidently” (Microsoft Corporation, 2019). It’s fair to say that Microsoft is specifically addressing the value of AI in supporting decision-making and contextualization and how AI can help knowledge workers, not strictly about knowledge sharing.

Every stakeholder is a knowledge user. project managers and, indeed, all knowledge workers are the users of the project information and knowledge. That’s why we need to get people thinking in a café way. Dr. Ed Hoffman, a strategic advisor to the project Management Institute and senior lecturer at the Columbia University School of Professional Studies, has a motto: “People, People, People.” People are the most crucial leg of your KM program.

Knowledge users are participants in the knowledge economy and knowledge society. Knowledge Café provides the right environment for these assets to exchange and barter knowledge and ideas. They fill the dual role of applying knowledge in their work tasks and contributing their expertise and insight to the enterprise’s knowledge content (Gartner, n.d.). Knowledge users are impacted by identifying, capturing, using, reusing, acquiring, organizing, communicating, sharing, exhilarating, and creating new knowledge.

According to a Global Deloitte survey, over 80 percent of Deloitte Knowledge users indicate that sharing knowledge leads to competitive advantage and adds a real client value to the organization (Alithya, 2020). Also, “Knowledge management remains one of the top three issues affecting company success and has become even more essential with the COVID-19 pandemic’s scattering of staff among homes and work sites. However only nine per cent of business leaders feel ready to address it” (Weiss et al., 2021). For instance, “sustainable competitive advantage is a function of knowledge management infrastructure, knowledge quality, knowledge management systems properties, organization environment, task environment and general environment” (Halawi et al., 2005). When you share knowledge, you unleash creativity and value. Knowledge sharing is infectious! Knowledge workers are part of the precious assets of the organization. The most critical knowledge assets of an organization are human capital.

More than 80% of a company’s information exists on individual hard drives and in personal files.

—Gartner (n.d.)

Some employees believe that sharing knowledge is additional work for them. Therefore, they think that it is a waste of time to make information available to other knowledge users or transfer their knowledge to others. Some think that the information or knowledge is their advantage and superiority over others or control and manipulative tool. Experience resides in people—employees, customers, suppliers, other stakeholders, and in technology. Your workforce, databases, documents, guides, policies and procedures, software, and patents are repositories of your organization’s knowledge assets (Baldrige, n.d.).

Retaining and reusing the knowledge in the products or services we provide—and the ones provided by consultants—adds value. Knowledge exists in relationships among the stakeholders on projects or operations. The richness and depth of this café and the shared knowledge determine the strength of the team. Organizational memory and process assets, along with knowledge in the processes, answer the questions, “Do we know what we know?” and “Do we know what we need to know?”

Knowledge management epitomizes building a knowledge competency for a high-performing organization. Knowledge competency is the emerging desired capability to cultivate, share, and transfer the organization’s know-how; this happens in the middle of laissez-faire and structure. The café is an agile KM. Imagine a Knowledge Café atmosphere.

5.2. CASE STUDY: EMPATHY, ENGAGEMENT, AND KNOWLEDGE EXCHANGE AT THE CAFÉ—MONTE LUEHLFING, DHA, PMP

This case study is written by Dr. Monte Luehlfing, DHA, PMP, a senior IT project manager at the University of Mississippi Medical Center. Here’s his experience:

Knowledge transfer is critical in today’s environment of multiple generations in the workplace, a move towards project-based roles, a hyper-competitive global economy, and the incredibly fast pace of technology change. Using straightforward processes and interactions is important to help less experienced team members understand the nuances of corporate culture and “why we do the things we do here.” This should not be in the toxic “we’ve always done it that way” standpoint, but the “here’s what we have learned along the way, and we want to continue leveraging these best practices to continue to improve.”

Managing projects and change management, in general, must incorporate the “three-legged stool” of “people, process, and technology.” The tendency to focus on technology causes us to miss the important perspectives of how our way of working will change and how we need to adapt to benefit from those changes. As most of our natural states are to fear change, change leaders must work with team members to ease those fears and create an environment in which change will be embraced. Being empathetic with those affected by the change and those who are part of the knowledge-transfer process helps our “targets” of the knowledge transfer to understand the “What’s in it for me?” better and more effectively. Modeling empathy before, during, and after the café also helps develop a growth mindset and a mindset of abundance. In this mindset of abundance, knowledge sharing freely occurs without the concerns that the person sharing is not giving away some of their perceived power. Manage people-knowledge before you manage people-process.

Dr. Luehlfing summed it up: project, KM, and change management processes start with people. So, start with a café, and engage people before you can manage knowledge. Simple processes and interactions are critical to knowledge exchange. Managing knowledge involves modeling empathy, which helps in developing a growth mindset and a mindset of abundance. Before the café space, there must be a café mindset.

CREATING THE MINDSET OF SHARING

To create this mindset of sharing, knowledge workers must understand three simple points:

1. Empathy. Bring empathy in the knowledge-exchange café and thinking process

2. Process. Simplify the process to incorporate all knowledge agents and users; have a goal and action plan before the café

3. Interaction. Make your café a productive knowledge interaction

5.3. SHARE A CUP OF COFFEE OR TEA OR DRINK IT ALONE. SHARE IT OR LOSE IT!

Café mindset is all about creating a shared space for sharing knowledge transfer. Undoubtedly, there are two critical thrusts when we share experiential knowledge from project, program, or operations:

Sharing Existing Knowledge: “Knowing What You Know”

Existing knowledge is the precondition for future knowledge. So, we share what we know at the café. Even machines learn from existing knowledge assets. Humans need machines to access, retrieve, manipulate, and add to the body of knowledge. According to Dr. Ismail Serageldin (2013), the founding director of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina (BA), the new Library of Alexandria will no longer be able to add or interact with the cumulative knowledge without the enablement of the machines. You’ll be amazed to know how much the project team knows when you converge at the café. You’ll be amazed to know how much we know that we don’t know that we know. We share existing knowledge.

Knowledge for Innovation: “Creating and Converting”

Existing knowledge is the foundation for conversion and creation of innovation. The convergence of what we know sparks off new knowledge. Imagine the outcome of putting together pieces of knowledge from different members of the team. You will identify gaps, missing links, and new thoughts. What we do with existing knowledge determines the germaneness of creativity and innovation.

It’s not enough to know what you know. Creating and converting existing knowledge is not an end, but it preserves what we know as we share and observe and prepares us for future disruptions. Knowledge Café provides us the right environment for knowledge sharing and connects us to the future.

Knowledge Café is the connection between the past and the future of knowledge management. Today’s knowledge may be out of date in five years. Therefore, it stands to reason that if we don’t learn to capture and retain enduring wisdom, the end results will be like swimming as fast as you can in a pool of new technologies only to stay in the same place! Enduring wisdom can never be obsolete. The concept of a Knowledge Café, a relational knowledge sharing mindset, is a current, cross-generational, social ecosystem designed to retain and manage relevant knowledge.

5.4. KNOWLEDGE REVOLUTION: KNOWLEDGE SHARING IS THE NEW SUPERPOWER!

According to Dr. Ismail Serageldin (2013), the digital revolution is one of the most extraordinary things that has happened to humanity. However, we live in the most profound revolution in the structure of knowledge since the invention of writing, not just in terms of communication.

The most important contribution management needs to make in the 21st Century is to increase the productivity of knowledge work and the knowledge worker.

—Peter Drucker (Wartzman, 2014)

Knowledge work and knowledge workers are the best assets of an organization. Organizations that are leading in innovation and market share are leading because they have increased knowledge work and knowledge workers. Knowledge workers create new knowledge—the formula for innovation.

Is knowledge power? If it is locked up in people’s minds and not shared, knowledge is useless, irrelevant, and anything but compelling! For the past 20 years, I have been exploring managing project knowledge and other institutional knowledge—our collective responses to their identification, capturing, sharing, retaining, leveraging, adapting, transferring, reusing, and creating new knowledge and being rejuvenated by it. I’ve observed the massive brain drain of skilled workers because of generational retirements and unstable and volatile job mobility. I’ve come to realize that knowledge that is not shared is encrypted; it goes to the grave with the owner—and means nothing to humanity—a trifle, good-for-nothing! Knowledge needs to revolve! Knowledge should orbit and not fly! This evolution and revolution of knowledge sharing are what I call the knowledge revolution.

Sir Francis Bacon, referring to the central importance of knowledge, said, “Knowledge is Power” (Bohn, 1994).

Knowledge is power, but how powerful is the knowledge in a pigeon hole, unshared, untransferred, unrejuvenated, and dead? There are people whose existence and success depend on the tacit and implicit knowledge locked inside of them. Any knowledge that cannot induce change is trivia and meaningless. Waiting for it to be perfected? It cannot be perfect until you let it out! Write it! Share it. Share your knowledge today! “Indeed, knowledge is of limited organizational value if it is not shared” (Alavi & Leidner, 1999).

FACTS ABOUT KM

A knowledge revolution fuels the productivity and throughput of knowledge work and the knowledge worker. Experts, researchers, and industry leaders believe:

• Knowledge capture, sharing, and retention are the most significant challenges facing organizations today.

• You cannot force people to share their knowledge; you just have to create an environment for knowledge workers.

• KM is a top competitive advantage for high-performing organizations.

• The brain drain of 76 million baby boomers in the next nine years is going to be disruptive.

• Knowledge management is intentional—it should be an organizational strategy.

• In this political economy of information, knowledge sharing is the new king!

• No organization is immune from the disruption of knowledge flight—private or public sector—doers, makers, sellers, or a combination.

• There is a revolution and an urgency for knowledge innovation management strategies across the globe!

• KM is like eating an elephant, one bite at a time—it is multifaceted.

Effective knowledge management is a top competitive advantage for high-performing organizations, but KM seems to be on life support in many organizations today. So, the soon-coming brain drain of baby boomers in nine years is a considerable danger to organizational knowledge infrastructure. Knowledge management is intentional. Beyond the prima facie and truism, the adage “knowledge is power” may not have overstayed its welcome. On the contrary, this knowledge economy of information and knowledge sharing is the new king! Whether your organization is in a private or public sector; if you do things, make or sell things, you are one or all of the following: innovation, growth, change, and customer knowledge focused. There is a revolution of knowledge management strategies across the globe! There’s an escalation of the importance and urgency of KM. The concept of knowledge management is massive.

There is a clarion call for knowledge project managers. Dorothy Leonard, William J. Abernathy Professor of Business Administration Emerita at Harvard Business School, opined in their research on knowledge transfer that they have seen companies significantly disadvantaged, if not crippled, by knowledge loss (Leonard et al., 2015). Indeed, some expert knowledge may be outdated or irrelevant when its possessors are eligible for retirement, but not the skills, know-how, and capabilities that underlie critical operations—both routine and innovative. This is critical! organizations cannot afford to lose these deep smarts. Some of these SMEs have worked for more than 20 years and are the exclusive custodians of specific, critical business knowledge. Many have retired and left the organization without passing on these vital skills.

On the other hand, according to Steve Jobs, “Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people” (Doepker, 2017).

Creativity, like Knowledge Café, is just connecting things. Knowledge revolution means ease and creativity, and retrievability and accessibility of knowledge. In some corners, everyone is project-driven to the detriment of process and knowledge identification, transfer, reuse, and innovation. Knowledge Café is a knowledge revolution. Knowledge revolution is the intelligent application of knowledge. Knowledge revolution cannot be discussed in isolation—there is a connection with intelligence, creativity, and wisdom in this Knowledge Café revolution. Intelligence is classically defined as “the ability to acquire and utilize knowledge” (Christensen, 2013).

So, intelligence matters; it demonstrates your ability to gather knowledge and effectively use it. Creativity is the ability to go beyond the intelligence frame and capitalize on seemingly random connections of concepts.

—Tanner Christensen (2013)

Knowledge is power, but knowledge sharing is the new superpower. It determines the evolution of knowledge, creativity, and innovation. Organizations that put high premiums on their intellectual capital or collective knowledge—people power, process, and technology—are the most powerful. They will always win. This revolution avers and insists that knowledge assets are the most ostentatiously opulent of all organizational assets, with a grandiose façade.

5.5. EVERYONE IS A KNOWLEDGE CREATOR AND CAN BE A SHARER

To be without knowledge is not to have lived at all. I’m very compassionate, but I have a powerful personality. I can hold in my emotions. I can count to a handful of times that I’ve lost it in my adult life and rarely cried after watching a video. There are probably two videos that have reduced me to tears—The Passion of the Christ and Americas Got Talent’s audition of Kodi Lee. Kodi is a blind and autistic 24-year-old singer. Rather than disabled, he is “knowledgeabled.” He has lost his sight, but his insight is still intact. He is autistic, but he is a stable and unshakable source of knowledge and inspiration to millions. When Kodi’s mother brought him to the stage, little did the world know that there remained greatness and knowledge resident within this young man. Despite his appearance, he played piano and when he opened his mouth to sing the audience shouted and cried. Physical disability is not a limitation to knowledge transfer. Those who tell me in workshops and conferences that they have nothing to share, Kodi has proved everyone wrong. We all have something to share.

If you can’t fly then run, if you can’t run then walk, if you can’t walk then crawl, but whatever you do you have to keep moving forward.

—Martin Luther King, Jr.

You are unstoppable. There’s a wealth of knowledge within you, and you cannot afford to go to the grave without releasing the deep smarts within yourself!

In fact, there are people whose existence and success depend on your knowledge; thousands of people depend on your knowledge. Don’t keep them waiting.

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