These elements of knowledge flow management are especially important to make an initiative successful for an extended time. The effort to start and especially to embed an initiative into the organization is rather high, so you want it to survive and be around longer term to give you a return on your investment for some time. This does not mean that you should try to keep the initiative alive artificially, but as long as there is a chance it will still provide value, you should do everything to keep going. This type of ongoing survival often is harder to ensure than it is to get it started.

The one key success factor for a knowledge flow management initiative that is above all the others is passionate support. Passion will be the key driver for ongoing value if paired with skills to run those initiatives. It also builds the basis for an initiative to survive the bootstrap phase.

A person can be passionate at doing something stupid or wrong as well, so I would not go as far as saying it is enough to have passion. It has to be paired with competencies, skills, and experiences. As mentioned in the discussion on knowledge intermediaries, this could include some very specific new specialist skills. These skills will not give you full success if they are not combined with some extraordinary drive.

Some years back I tried to explain this factor to a high-level executive; he could relate to it but what he mostly saw in it was ownership. Ownership is definitely a big part of it, but I think it is even more than that.

Merriam-Webster defines passion (as it applies here) in these ways:¹

The type of passion in the relationship to driving a knowledge flow management initiative that I am talking about is the one that is defined under 4 (b) and 5 (b). Key elements are enthusiasm and the desire to make it work no matter what challenges are encountered on the way. Sometimes it means you will have to go to the limit. Some people might even experience this determination as a little too much. It takes extra energy to develop the kind of determination and ongoing self-motivation that is needed for sustainable drivership.

But where does the passion come from? Do you hire or build your passionate drivers? To some degree you will need to hire the right people who have a combination of these skills:

However, those skills by themselves will not be enough. Those playing a driver role will have to be capable of building a clear understanding of the value of knowledge; they must believe that for every stream they are creating, the resulting knowledge flow will not only be of value to the organization but can also support their own development and career in the long run.

They will also need to be capable of communicating successfully with executive sponsors, as passion alone will not result in the necessary buy-in and funding.

Apart from getting the right people, you can also build some of the attitude needed to fulfill the driver role. The right leadership is an important factor as well as an ability to inspire some passion in people. There is obviously no way to demand or mandate passion. It is something that develops under certain conditions. You might be able to create some of those conditions to make it more likely that passion develops, but even that is not a guarantee.³

As a leader who is responsible for building and sustaining the support team, a lot depends on you and your actions. Some of the methods that can have a positive impact include:

Some of these points are important for any type of leadership, of course, but they are especially important if you want to lead those who need to develop a passion for knowledge-related initiatives. They are working in a field where it might be harder for them to prove their value to the organization than if they were in a production or sales role, for example. Trying to get others to share their knowledge takes special effort. A strong leader is needed to show the intermediaries on your team ongoing and repeatedly to what extent they actually help the organization.

One other element that can build passion is identification. Identification starts with ownership, and those driving the initiatives will have to feel that ownership. This is also one of the reasons why smaller focused initiatives work better than very large ones. But identification can also be built using a brand for your initiative.⁴

Using a brand will not only make it easier to sell the initiative to the participants and other stakeholders in your organization, but you also raise the chances that those supporting the initiative will identify with it more closely. By using an appealing brand, you can raise chances that all participants can understand the benefits and relate to the initiative from their day-to-day point of view, which is easier than labeling it a “knowledge flow management initiative.”

In Chapter 5 I cover the effects of internal marketing and go more into detail on how you might be able to build a better brand for your initiative.

Knowledge flows are usually influenced by multiple cultures. In a distributed organization like SAS (with over 400 offices in more than 60 countries), the local culture that people grew up in plays a significant definitive role. This influence of culture could be on a country-by-country basis, but as we also have more and more employees moving around the organization, it is actually a little bit more fine grain. There is a typical culture in Australia, but we might have Dutch, German, or American people working there. How much are they influenced in their behavior and attitude by the culture they grew up in, and how much does the culture they now live in play a role? Depending on the amount of time they have been living in the foreign environment, the influence will be some type of mixture, as I have experienced personally by living as a German citizen in the United States and Switzerland for almost 10 years combined.

Another culture that plays a large role is the organizational culture. SAS is the largest privately held software vendor in the world. Being a private organization with over 11,000 employees and more than $2.3 billion in revenue is unique. The private status has helped over the years to provide an unusually smooth growth curve, with not much diversion from a straight line, even in economic downturns. This consistency has also led to a certain type of attitude and ability to trust one another, something that not every organization might have been able to offer over more than 33 years.

Another element influencing the organizational culture is the business model. SAS has a license model for its software. It starts with a certain first-year fee followed by customers renewing in the following years based on their satisfaction. This model supports a culture where any type of good customer support actually drives a large part of the revenues directly, because if customers are not satisfied, they can cancel the licenses for the next year. The result of this business model is a big focus on ensuring that customers are really happy. For the company culture, it also means that people are more likely to support each other whenever possible. Together with a relatively flat hierarchy and a lot of autonomy for individuals, this is a very good foundation level for building knowledge sharing on top. Of course, like any other organization, there are some people who are less likely to be open for sharing than others, but the standard is considerably higher than elsewhere, as people entering the organization are often surprised to learn.⁵

Admittedly this organizational culture gave us better chances to grow and sustain our knowledge-sharing initiatives over the years. It also made it easier to experiment with different ways of dealing with the initiatives. The principles developed form the underlying framework for the book you are reading now. But you should be careful to not put it all down to organizational culture. Most of those principles work in any type of organizational culture. You might be starting at a somewhat different base level, but the key is to drive constant improvement of your knowledge flow.

Are there ways to change organizational culture? I am not going to dive deeper into change management; there are some excellent books on that topic out there.⁶ When it comes to change in knowledge-sharing behavior, a lot of the culture is driven from the top. There is a good example regarding the use of blogs within SAS. In 2007, a few high-level executives considered blogging a waste of time, something they definitely did not want everybody to dive into. By 2009, most top executives in the organization blog internally. More and more of them even have external blogs. By setting these examples and employing new social media tools under some well-defined and carefully constructed guidelines, company culture changed. Gradually more and more people are exploring the effects and benefits of using these media, and a big shift has happened. There are millions of reads on internal SAS blogs every year. The blogs have become a major area of information exchange and lead people to answers or experts. Combined with podcasts and videocasts, blogs are the reason that over 90 percent of global SAS staff feel properly informed about what is going on in the company. What also helped to drive the change process were the stories told either online within the blogs or in traditional ways from person to person.

As this example shows, top management buy-in and leading by example can influence a culture. But it can influence it in both good and bad senses. An example of a behavior that might have a very negative impact would be a manager criticizing somebody on a mailing list. Even if the criticized person might have posted a “stupid” question, there are better ways to handle the situation. Contacting the person directly and finding out what has been driving the behavior is a great way to learn; criticizing a person in the open will kill all the trust of everyone on the mailing list. By carefully educating all stakeholders about the extremely negative effects this type of criticism might have on the general culture, you can remove potential inhibiting factors for a better knowledge flow.

In general, culture can be infectious. As Malcolm Gladwell described in his book The Tipping Point,⁷ you might be able to change things on a larger scale if you just get over the tipping point. To do so, you will need some key influencers driving a change or have some really compelling events and stories that influence a large enough group. This type of influence is not driven only from the top. Influencers actually could be lower in the organization, but they have an influence on a significant number of others. Sometimes the influ-encers are visible; sometimes they are somewhat hidden and operate below the surface.

There are a number of different types of trust. The two major types that play a role in knowledge flow management are personal trust and trust in another person’s skills and knowledge, or topical, trust. While I might not trust a coworker on a personal level, I still might trust in his skills and knowledge. If that is all that is needed, I could still engage with that person and trust his professional judgment. But often personal and topical trust are somewhat related. Most people prefer to work with those they have positive feelings about. As trust is something that usually develops over time, it is more likely that you trust somebody on a topical level if there is at least a certain degree of trust on a personal level.

Trust is one element of interaction that is asymmetric in the sense that it might take years to develop, but a single incident or behavior could destroy it. A lot of the trust that develops between members of an organization is based on the culture and the collection of behaviors that those members experience. Just as an organizational culture is often driven by top management behavior, the same can be said about trust.

Those who share usually open up and offer knowledge that they have built over a long time frame. Likely there are concerns as to what the consequences of them sharing their knowledge would be. The question is “What’s in it for me?” It is more likely that people will ask the question if the trust level is low.

With a high level of trust, people are not focusing as much on the value question or asking the what’s-in-it-for-me question. The situation is almost automatically judged as safe and valuable. This makes a knowledge-sharing situation more effective than if the people sharing feel they have to check whether it is safe to share any bit of knowledge.

However, situations where the sharing of knowledge has led to negative outcomes for the sharer will slow down trust building in the future. One such situation could be being openly criticized for sharing negative experiences, errors, or mishaps. Another situation could be someone using information largely based on another person’s knowledge without giving proper credit. This can but might not be an issue for the originator of an idea, though.

For some top organizational performers, this type of reuse of their knowledge by others is not much of an issue. They focus not so much on the knowledge they have but more on the potential knowledge they can build. The fact that their knowledge is reused again and again, helping others will also help them build their network. An additional benefit is that the act of sharing often includes learning as one will need to formulate the ideas in ones head to share them, potentially repeatedly. With these benefits the one sharing can actually move ahead of those the knowledge was shared with.

Trust has that element of reciprocity so usually it is not a one-way street. That means if I invest in people by trusting them and sharing valuable information with them, so they can in turn build knowledge that makes them more successful, I am opening up chances that I will get something back. Basically this creates a feedback loop that will benefit both of us. Feedback loops like these can enhance the overall knowledge flow.

The investment to create those feedback loops often results in positive effects in organizations that generally have a high level of trust, because interaction and sharing become more natural. The investment of time and energy might not return immediate payback but the long-term benefits outweigh the dangers.

Apart from the general culture-driven level of trust, what are ways to increase trust in your organization? Often transparency makes a big difference. If I have a good feeling about the effects of sharing my knowledge, it feels safer than if I see it going into a black box. For this reason, feedback mechanisms are one way to build trust.

As mentioned, personal trust actually can increase topical trust, so one way to raise the general trust level is to create situations where personal trust can develop. Those situations are usually face-to-face ones. With all virtual tools that we have at hand, personal interaction involving all the senses is still the strongest trust builder. In some cases, it can work rather quickly to build a core level of trust that can be built on later.

Here is an example of how trust can develop and support more effective interaction. Some years ago I got a phone call from a manager in our U.S. headquarters. I did not know him, and while he was on the phone I looked him up in our employee directory to see where he fit. He mentioned that there were certain elements where our work might overlap and that he was coming over from the United States to Heidelberg, Germany, the following week and would like to meet me. Not being 100 percent clear on where this might lead, I must admit, my trust level during that call was not really high. A week later, the situation had changed dramatically. We had met, we had long discussions over dinner and lunch, and we had a major project at our hands that would work only with very good alignment across both of our organizations. But what built trust was not so much the project, it was more the level of agreement on certain things, the openness we had developed fairly quickly. Through the following months we were put into high-stress situations and came out of them by focusing on good collaboration. We had frequent virtual interactions but also refreshed the face-to-face trust-building exercises at several meetings.

What I learned from that relationship was that trust has a lot to do with a certain degree of alignment. That does not mean that you have to have the same opinions on everything, but you do need a certain modus operandi on how to deal with situations, an aligned sense of respect. So while a lot of interaction in organizations is moving toward virtual communication, the situation that produces the biggest leaps in trust building are those that involve as many senses as possible, as a lot of the communication in a face-to-face situation is nonverbal. Some example stages (not necessarily perfectly hierarchical) that I would distinguish are:

Travel involves cost, so bringing people together on the highest level is not always feasible. An organization has to balance the value that higher trust will produce with the investment that convening certain employees in face-to-face situations brings with it. SAS has had a strong workgroup culture for many years that enabled a good number of those interactions. They are especially good at the start of a project or initiative; thereafter, it is a lot easier to build on that trust level using virtual interaction as long as there are still occasional physical refreshers.

I have one specific recommendation for those running and participating in face-to-face events. Today it is very common to be always-on, always connected. With smart phones and laptops, it is easy to view a day at an international meeting just like one in the office, except that all the daily meetings happen with the same group and you traveled from far away. As there is cost involved in travel, you should make good use of that investment. And that starts by making sure that during meetings, people actually interact and communicate face-to-face. Ask participants if it is really necessary that they spend all their breaks, most of their lunches and evenings running their business back home. Or was the investment to travel high enough that it would be more important to invest in trust building and networking and delegate daily business at home as one might do when going on vacation to the middle of the Sahara? I am not saying that people should not be online during meetings, but personal interaction time should be used for that purpose, not end in groups of folks standing in the break room shouting over one another’s phone conversations.

You must fully understand that the knowledge is in people’s heads and that you cannot succeed by trying to get it out of their heads and store it in some database. This type of understanding has top executives invest in people and the environment they operate in. In an environment where people feel appreciated and have a high level of trust in one another, it is easier to get knowledge flowing.

Even in economically challenging times, there are ways to provide a better and more trust-enhancing environment than your competition. This high-level support is the framework for certain initiatives to thrive. It is also the trust shown by senior management that will give you the opportunity to test and try out innovative concepts aimed at enhancing the knowledge flow. The same trust that lets SAS invest about 22 percent of its revenue into research and development also exists for initiatives that aim at better leveraging of knowledge. It could be internal training initiatives, efforts to enhance communication, or programs that value field knowledge and field solutions as an important component of the overall development efforts.

This type of executive support does not mean a blind belief in anything that has the “knowledge” label on it. There needs to be a good business case for the investments. With the right executive or general leadership support, it is easier to follow a longer-term strategy and stay in the project portfolio over time instead of an initiative being constantly endangered just because there are no immediate measurable results. In the end, however,, the business case has to prove itself. To be supported ongoing, an initiative must bring back a multiple of the investment.

This point speaks to the type of initiatives that start small and grow iteratively as well. The risk of investment is smaller, and by going about it in a focused way, it is easier to produce visible, real-life positive results.

Apart from the trust in knowledge flow initiatives, executives can undertake a number of more concrete support activities to show their support. Involvement shows their support very strongly. In the ToolPool case, we actually managed to get a top-level executive to send in a technical contribution. It was an extreme example of walking the talk. Another example is the support of our recent social media activities internally and externally through blogging activities. Almost all senior executives are writing internal blogs now. The way they are written, they not only enhance readers’ trust with those executives, but they also give a message that spending time on this type of quick knowledge sharing is okay. Combined with the framework given by some well-thought-through social media guidelines, they offer an environment that encourages a growing number of people to share their thoughts, ideas, and knowledge. This could have not developed without a clear drivership from a team of people introducing those technologies with the right processes and the right culture developing around them.

It was an iterative approach. As soon it became clear that the value produced outweighed the risks and costs by far, executive support was not such a hard sell.

Another way of support that is more common with most current knowledge management initiatives is direct endorsement, which often occurs during launch or milestone presentations. An executive stating that she wants full participation from a certain group to solve a business problem, speed up innovation, or reduce reinventing the wheel can send a strong signal that is hard to ignore. One prerequisite is that the executive herself is trusted and respected. In the best case, a longer-term knowledge flow initiative becomes embedded into standard business processes.

The message is supporting the effort, but it will not lead to change if it is not followed up with ongoing drivership by dedicated knowledge flow management team members. The executive message can be used as a reference, but it is only one element out of many. If participants do not believe that sharing knowledge is safe and will somehow help them personally, the executive message will not make a big difference. On the other side, if a team succeeds in convincing people of the value of an initiative and can endorse its message with a clear link to the company strategy and an executive message, the approach becomes well rounded and more complete.

One of the key tasks for the knowledge flow management drivers (and part of a position such as chief knowledge officer) is the ongoing translation and positioning of knowledge flow initiatives in relation to executive messages. How does a certain initiative relate to a strategy put out by the corporate leadership team? How does it support that strategy? How can everybody in the organization involve themselves in an initiative such that their participation will actually help in its execution? Sometimes the relationship might not be clear, or the way the initiative is viewed (perhaps just as some isolated system) does not clearly show a connection. Creating that transparency with all potential participants is just as important as building it with the leadership team, as it will also drive their buy-in and support.

One of the best examples I experienced comes from an employee skills database that we created and that grew to a global system with over 4,000 people registered. When we started that skills database, I discussed my plans with some external knowledge management experts. The most common reaction I got was “Yes, we tried that, it didn’t work, the data was very quickly outdated and we couldn’t get anybody to update it regularly.” I did not let myself get discouraged, though. Our skills database is up and running after eight years, and the data quality is astonishingly good.

What really helped was a portfolio approach of methods and processes created to ensure participation. The skills database is one of the key systems in the resource-sharing initiative that was introduced at the end of Chapter 2. As mentioned, the resource-sharing process is showing value and is accepted and supported on a wide basis. By making it clear that the skills database is an important component of resource sharing, the processes leading to people entering their data got an additional push from local management. Furthermore, those individuals who wanted to ensure that they have a high chance to be placed in interesting projects worldwide made sure their data were in the database and were as accurate as possible. So the resource sharing process was a key driver for the skills database.

Another key driver was the process of skills review attached to annual or semiannual reviews. The skills database as a key planning and communication instrument between employees and their managers drove the motivation. During training and personal development planning, the skills review turned out to be something that many people are very interested in.

There were also a couple of drivers that were linked to measures. Especially in the early phases, we drove some participation by adding a measure to managers’ bonus plans: one of the quality indicators they were scored on was the degree of participation in their teams. It was specifically a team and not an individual measure for those entering their data. For some managers, this was a motivator; for others, the portion of their bonus that depended on their teams’ participation was not enough for this area to take priority over other factors. But we also made performance transparent to local leaders on a comparison level (portion of team members updating their skills regularly). This sort of transparency can be a good driver as it introduces a certain level of competitiveness.

One driver actually came from a different department. The professional development teams (human resources and staff development teams) started to realize that they could use consolidated data to perform some training needs analysis on a practice level.

So instead of a single driver to push participation, there was and still is a whole range of them. You could see it as a portfolio of driving forces. Not everybody is influenced by the same driver. Some managers do not care about the relatively small bonus component, some people do not want to be involved in resource sharing, and some people are not highly interested in additional training or personal development. But the key is that if you take the overlap of drivers, the resulting set is quite large. And as that set of people participating grows toward 100 percent, you suddenly get another driver: peer pressure.

This description is a good example of multiple drivers, but I think the portfolio approach can and should be applied to any knowledge flow management initiative. You can combine drivers that are focusing on a local level with those that offer a global benefit. And as you are dealing with people, you will always have different types of people who are motivated by different things. Do not be deceived in thinking that just because you are dealing with only a certain job category (just developers, just salespeople, just lawyers), all of them can be herded into the initiative with the same driver. It is much more effective to grow the reach by simultaneously attacking on multiple fronts. The idea is to create enough coverage using different, potentially overlapping drivers to reach a considerable portion of your target audience, as shown in Exhibit 4.1.

It might be hard to find drivers for everyone, and that is fine as well. I am not proposing that a knowledge flow management initiative can be a success only if it reaches 100 percent of your target audience. But you have to strive to get a critical mass of those who are bringing high value to the initiative. Target them first and select the drivers that will get a good coverage with them. The skeptics sometimes join silently, once a high majority of their peers have joined. And their peers could be the ones doing the evangelizing one on one much better than you might be able to from a central point of view.

Another reason for having multiple drivers is the creation of a safety net for changing conditions, something that is actually likely to happen. If you are building and relying on a single driver, and it breaks away, you might need too much time to build up another one. In the meantime, you could lose a critical portion of your audience and endanger the whole initiative. A good example might be the measures in bonus plans. The organization might shift focus, and the bonus plan component related to the knowledge flow management initiative could get pushed out or down to a level that gets less attention. If you have multiple drivers, the remaining ones can catch some of those participants who would otherwise fall out of the net. Of course, it also helps if you have already embedded the initiative into the organization when those types of changes happen. Multiple drivers can make it more likely that this type of integration happens faster. Therefore, they further reduce the overall risk of an initiative failing.