10 Café Interfaces with Other KM Methods and Techniques

Chapter Objectives

• Describe the interfaces of the Knowledge Café with other KM methods like CoPs, lessons learning, oral history, after-action review, etc.

• Explain the practical application of some KM techniques

10.1. THE CAFÉ FOR COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICE (COP)

TWO METHODS OF KM

Generally, there are two methods of knowledge management:

• Knowledge capture (codification). This involves capturing a technical expert’s enduring wisdom, a summary of important lessons, and techniques they have learned to do their work. This will, in turn, be made available to others in the knowledge community.

• Knowledge transfer (person to person). Here, knowledge transfer can be through social interaction like CoP or the use of KM technology enablers.

Most of the knowledge in an individual’s mind cannot be captured or transferred except through social interactions like mentoring, job shadowing, coaching, observations, brainstorming, or collaborative opportunities offered in a fair or café. There are several techniques I’ve encountered that include communities of practice, knowledge fair and café, storytelling, wikithon, appreciative inquiry, knowledge retention interviews and exit interviews, positive deviance, yellow pages, project lesson capture meeting (large scale), enterprise content management, new media, after-action (small scale), knowledge-sharing roundtable, peer assist, coaching and mentoring, action learning, innovation deep dive, crowdsourcing, open space, and so on.

The CoP construct tries to bring people together with mutual interests and who want to collaborate and share knowledge. The space—the venue for the convergence of CoPs, the mindset, and the environment—is the café. Where do we meet? At the café. What do we do there? Talk, listen, think, learn, make sense of what we know, and maybe, build knowledge-driven relationships.

Differences between the Café and CoP

• Different CoPs converge in a place for a Knowledge Café, but CoPs can connect without meeting in one place.

• A café or a series of cafés does not necessarily constitute a CoP.

• A CoP will adopt many ways of interacting rather than just the café format (e.g., less structured conversations, open space technology sessions, and online discussion forums).

• A Knowledge Café is a powerful conversational tool that can be employed by a CoP, but it is not the same as a CoP.

• A café is unstructured, informal, fun, relaxing, creative, social, collaborative, nonthreatening, and time-bounded; a CoP can be structured and is not necessarily time-bound.

• Cafés cover one purpose, like best practices among CoPs; the CoP covers a community or communities of practice.

Communities of practice can be a KM tool, technique, element, or activity or practice. The concept of communities of practice most likely originated with Lave and Wenger (1991), based on their study of situated learning in the context of five apprenticeships: Yucatec midwives, Vai and Gola tailors, naval quartermasters, meat cutters, and non-drinking alcoholics. Others contend that the idea of communities of practice has a long history in community-based and mental health and other learning-based communities. They defined CoP as “a system of relationships between people, activities, and the world; developing with time, and in relation to other tangential and overlapping communities of practice” (Lave & Wenger, 1991, p. 98). The community of practice is a consortium of knowledge and shared culture, scalable learning, shared repertoire, common problem-solving, and free flow of information.

How Do You Know When You Need a Community of Practice?

I worked for a project-driven organization. I was about to manage a complex project that could not afford to fail. The project Management Office (PMO) was a young one. PMBOK® Guide, sixth edition (2017) calls this a supportive PMO, a repository, with low control—a PMO that provides a consultative role to projects and provides support in the form of on-demand expertise, templates, best practices, access to information, and expertise from other projects. I called our PMO for project management templates, including risk, communication, stakeholder, management plans, RACI, risk register, status report templates, and so on. The PMO didn’t have these templates. I visited PMI.org, adapted some templates, and customized my templates.

Before long, I realized that other project managers were developing their own templates. If there were a connected community of project managers, there would have been one true source for all project management templates. CoP brings professionals who are encountering similar challenges in a community to learn from and support each other. There would not be a reason to duplicate our efforts if we had a CoP. We could have shared the same organizational process assets, saved time, and leveraged each other’s strengths. There was no community to inform us of what others were doing or the challenges they were facing.

When teams within the organization are defined by location, job function, process area, or other factors, there will be natural silos, and these are functional silos. However, these natural barriers create independent cultures by the group. CoP enriches the organizational learning process and knowledge exchange. I called for a project management CoP.

Communities of Practice Can Create a Single Source of the Truth with a CoP Café

CoP invites knowledge brokers who encounter similar challenges to come to a conversation and learn from each other. The CoP is a rendezvous of colleagues doing similar projects from different functional silos; these birds of a feather usually flock together due to what they do. In a CoP café, practitioners build leverage, share common problems, and reinvigorate knowledge. New ideas and solutions emerge at the CoP café. The more excellent knowledge belongs to the community, and no one is left behind. It’s like a “you scratch my back, I scratch your back” mentality. We all give and take. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel.

In terms of digital transformation, CoP connects the digital workplace and other knowledge-sharing tools and approaches. It provides a single source of truth for all digital collaboration, from one central Wiki to new media interactions—a one-stop shop for all digital content and connection for all knowledge creators and users.

Here’s a CoP example from General Electric (GE). Its 180 communities of practice with more than 130,000 engaged members have generated 31,000 discussion posts, 39,000 Wiki articles, 16,000 taxonomic topics, and $35 million in savings. GE communities are linked to and enabled by all of GE’s other KM approaches (APQC, 2019).

At Shell, community coordinators often conduct interviews to collect these stories and then publish them in newsletters and reports. AMS organizes a yearly competition to identify the best stories. An analysis of a sample of stories revealed that the communities had saved the company $2 million to $5 million and increased revenue by more than $13 million in one year.

—Wenger & Snyder (2000)

The KM framework involves communities of practice, best practices, practice owners, and practice improvement. A CoP can be an internal, local, or global forum for exchanging best practices, technology, and business solutions, time-tested or golden standards, customer challenges, and feedback.

In a CoP, we move from “owned knowledge” to “shared knowledge,” which is community knowledge. So, knowledge workers and learning organizations are driven to enhance learning across organizational units and empower people in their work. A CoP is a convincing way of doing so. “CoP meetings should be considered legitimate business functions, as opposed to extracurricular activities” (NCHRP, 2014).

If you need evolution in your organization, you may need a café to introduce CoP across your enterprise. Evolution means from individual knowledge → group knowledge → business-critical institutional knowledge → institutional resilience. Connect the right people to align with initiatives. Remember that a CoP shouldn’t be an additional burden to your workload but is fun! It’s colleagues connecting to build synergy, sharing what they know to solve common projects, programs, or operational problems—thereby creating new knowledge.

CoPs are easy to start. Use Knowledge Café space to begin a conversation with your professional community members or people who manage similar projects in your organization or other knowledge workers. I have templates for CoP charter and formation steps on my website, BenjaminAnyacho.com, and there are templates on the Internet.

SOME LESSONS LEARNED FROM MY EXPERIENCE WITH COPS

• Have a clear purpose enshrined in a charter.

• The purpose should match the culture and strategy of the organization. Their mission alights with the organizational mission and KM strategy.

• Deliver real benefits to the community members.

• Have identifiable leaders.

• Practitioners should agree on ways of working amongst the community.

• Even if they operate mostly virtually, use face-to-face meetings at some point.

• CoPs are designed for learning, knowledge-sharing, fun, and engagement and are not a “burnout” tool.

CHARACTERISTICS OF A COP

According to Wenger (1998, pp. 125–126), these are the critical characteristics of a CoP:

• Sustained mutual relationships—harmonious or conflictual

• Shared ways of engaging in doing things together

• The rapid flow of information and the propagation of innovation

• Absence of introductory preambles, as if conversations and interactions were merely the continuation of an ongoing process

• Rapid setup of a problem to be discussed

• The substantial overlap in participants’ descriptions of who belongs

• Knowing what others know, what they can do, and how they can contribute to an enterprise

• Mutually defining identities

• The ability to assess the appropriateness of actions and products

• Specific tools, representations, and other artifacts

• Local lore, shared stories, inside jokes, knowing laughter

• Jargon and shortcuts to communication as well as the ease of producing new ones

• Certain styles recognized as displaying membership

• A shared discourse reflecting a particular perspective on the world

10.2. THE CAFÉ FOR LESSONS LEARNING

A survey by Ernst & Young (2007) of PMI members and guests at a PMI meeting revealed that although 91 percent of PMs believe lessons learned reviews on projects were necessary, only 13 percent said their organizations performed them on all projects. Only 8 percent believed the primary benefits of lessons learned reviews (Ernst & Young, 2007).

Organizations like the Control System Integrators Association (CSIA) and the project Management Institute (PMI) cite lessons learned as best practices. The PMBOK® Guide, sixth edition (2017) defines lessons learned as “the learning gained from performing the project. Lessons learned may be identified at any point.” The question is whether we are learning for the project or just checking off the box. How to assess long-term learning is typically considered a problem across all corporate learning and development. Several years ago, I realized that lessons learned are one of the closing activities during a project.

LEGACY LESSONS TO LEARN MODEL

• Sessions held during project close-out

• Documented as a project-specific deliverable

SUSTAINABLE KET LESSON LEARNED MODEL

• An ongoing activity conducted throughout the life cycle of the project

• Does not point fingers at anyone

• Analyzed and validated by subject matter experts (SMEs)

• Focuses on both the successes and the opportunities

• Aligns with project management processes and knowledge areas, institutionalized

• Must perennially become an organizational process asset and part of the processes and procedures for future projects

The fundamental question is not if there was a lesson, but if the lesson was actually learned. There should be lessons in learning, according to Dr. Moses Adoko. The most important aspect of the lessons learning is institutionalizing the lessons and capturing new knowledge that arises from the execution of the project.

The “learning” part only comes when the lesson has been institutionalized (e.g., changing a policy, writing a procedure, revising a standard, issuing a new specification, improving a work process, etc.)

—Mark Marlin, PMP, Sr. Vice President of
Westney Consulting Group

One of the communities of practice in my organization, Financial Management CoP, gets this right. During their normal execution of a project or normal operations, if new lessons emerge or they identify a new knowledge or best practice, they apply the new lesson, update their standard operating procedures, communicate to all stakeholders about the new lessons, and demand that every member of the community follows or implements the new learning.

Agile is a mindset; Knowledge Café is a mindset. Lessons learned should be a mindset, too. Well-defined, planned, executed, and institutionalized lessons learning could be a great tool to implement knowledge transfer in an organization. The truth is that new knowledge is created every day as we manage our projects and programs. This includes Agile retrospectives, lessons learned during project product backlog, Agile project sprint backlog, daily stand-ups, and stakeholder reviews. We can turn the lessons learned mindset into a powerful KET tool.

CHALLENGES OF IMPLEMENTING “LESSONS LEARNING”

Here are some of the challenges of implementing lessons learned as a knowledge exchange and transfer technique and the reasons why lessons learned are ignored in projects and programs.

• No time for extra chores! Just like any other KET activities, many PMs work from project to project, activity to activity, task to task, and job to job, and build no time into the process for KET. KET is an intentional process. Lessons learned must be deliberate and planned into the KM strategy.

• We were playing the blame game. Lessons learned are not about everything that went well. It is not about who did something wrong. It’s all about what we learned to do better or what we did better than we can institutionalize.

• KM is not part of the culture. Lessons learned fail because it’s not part of the organizational culture or a lip-service.

• Lack of the lessons learned value-add. Just like the entire KM program, many overlook the tangible and intangible benefits of KET.

• Not a priority and, hence, no management reinforcement.

• No leadership. As I’ll explore later, things happen or don’t because of the right leadership. I’ve led my teams to develop the lessons learned template that makes it easy to arrange and organize lessons learned content and make it searchable and findable.

• Documentation is too complicated. Lessons learned is one of the knowledge capturing tools that require documentation. The template should enhance curation, indexing, and organization of documented lessons learned and make it possible to be found and used by other knowledge creators.

• Unorganized knowledge documentation process. There is no knowledge management strategy or governance.

DEVELOPING A “LESSONS LEARNING” TEMPLATE

The template I developed follows the elements of lessons learned according to the CDC Unified process Practices Guide: Lessons Learned (2006). The template includes:

• Project information and contact information for additional detail

• A clear statement of the lesson

• A background summary of how the lesson was learned

• Benefits of using the lesson and suggestion of how the lesson may be used in the future

Knowledge Leadership, as I’ll discuss in chapter 11, brings organization to lessons learned.

Level 1 is appropriate documentation, writing knowledge down, including using various knowledge-capturing techniques.

Level 2 is the organization of lessons we are learning, including analyzing them.

Level 3 is consolidation in a way to avoid repletion, including curating the captured lessons learned.

Level 4 is the dissemination of the knowledge-making process; the lessons learned available, findable, and usable.

Level 5 occurs when the knowledge from the lessons learned is applied for the benefit of the organization.

10.3. THE CAFÉ FOR AFTER-ACTION REVIEW

An after-action review is a café-style activity to discuss a project or activity that enables the project team and stakeholders involved in the project, program, or operational activity to learn for themselves what happened, why it happened, what went well, what needs improvement, and what lessons can we learn from experience. Through this activity, the team identifies new knowledge and innovations.

David Garvin (2000), in his book, Learning in Action: A Guide to Putting the Learning organization to Work, contends that, “To move ahead, one must often first look behind” (p. 106).

Looking back brings innovation into the right context. Just like a café, it brings us to a reflective mode, identifying those golden moments, things that were incorrectly done or that should’ve been done better. After-action reviews or learning lessons are not about pointing fingers or blaming those who may have dropped the ball. It’s about learning, growing, and innovating.

The U.S. Army’s After-Action Reviews (AARs) are probably the industry model for an example of a knowledge management system and a culture of learning and knowledge that is unmatched. The after-action reviews are routine and have created a culture where everyone continuously assesses themselves, their units, and their organization, looking for ways to improve and innovate. After every important activity or event, Army teams review assignments, identify successes and failures, and seek ways to perform better the next time (Garvin, 2000, p. 106). We can’t be too busy to ignore this critical KM activity. A café can be designated for AARs.

10.4. THE CAFÉ FOR STORYTELLING: ORAL HISTORY

Why I developed a knowledge preference register is because I have a preference for reviving and sharing knowledge. Everyone loves stories. In a corporate setting, people often prefer to obtain specific knowledge and information through stories. Oral history tools engage some knowledge brokers who tell their stories about process; events; methodologies; and lessons learned from a project, program, activity, or event. These stories are recorded, stored, and made available for the knowledge communities for use and reuse. The stores can be made available in multiple formats for consumption, for instance, video, audio, paper, and so on. Many users’ learning preference is listening. Oral history captures the most difficult to capture and the most critical aspect of knowledge—tacit knowledge. Oral history is an essential tool because of the decline in readership among knowledge users and creators.

Today, almost any digital text has an audio option where you can listen to rather than read the content. More knowledge workers are listening. In 2015, “18% of Americans say they listened to at least one audiobook in the past year (up from 14% in 2016) and, for the first time, over 50% of Americans report having ever listened to a podcast” (Schwanenflugel & Knapp, 2019, p. x). It’s fair to say that audiobooks aren’t strictly oral history, though it’s an interesting philosophical concept to consider all audio-based information to be part of the collective oral history.

In terms of learning and knowledge acquisition, oral history should be a significant player.

For example, in the wake of the 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake, the Bay Bridge Oral History project documented the personal and professional experiences of 258 Caltrans employees who worked to restore the State’s damaged transportation system. The interviews capture their perspectives on the Bay Bridge’s engineering achievements, the maintenance challenges, and the complex symbolism of this massive structure.

(AASHTO CKC, NCHRP Problem Statement, 2019)

10.5. CASE STUDY: KNOWLEDGE TRANSFER CAN BE BOTH A CHALLENGE AND FUN—LINDA AGYAPONG, PHD, PMP

This case study is by Linda Agyapong, PhD, PMP, a project manager in Newark, Delaware. She is also an author and freelance PMP consultant and trainer for corporate institutions and higher education. She is the 2015 James R. Snyder International Student Paper of the Year Award winner, presented at the 2015 North America congress. Here is her experience:

Yes, my organization has a Knowledge Transfer (KT) program, and it is formalized. The HR team leads this as it is included in our orientation and ongoing training curriculum. Some organizations I’ve worked for allocate a specific amount for KM within our annual budget and the amount is based on forecasted revenue for the year.

Some of the transferring or sharing knowledge, pain points, and challenges include obtaining the required logistics or resources, and where applicable, the appropriate systems are necessary for simulations. Additionally, we see KT as being a double-edged sword, because in one sense, it helps you to sharpen the skills of your employees. Alternatively, once the employees identify that their marketability skills have increased, they sometimes tend to leave for greener pastures, leading to a “pseudo-brain drain” syndrome.

I don’t necessarily see it completely wrong when some knowledge-transfer technology tools don’t talk to each other. One single source of truth is great, but I think there is “a place” for those tools that don’t naturally talk to each other. There must be a reason why they are one-dimensional, and hence, if the user or the organization requires two-dimensional tools, those would preferably be sought for as well.

How long does it take for you to get the information and knowledge you need from people and technology to do your work? Does it depend on the amount and type of knowledge that is being requested? In terms of speed, agility, and accessibility, receiving information is applicable if it has to do with clicking a link and expecting the results to be displayed on the screen. However, suppose the results need to be sourced from a vast database or from third-party systems, which require specific authentications, or meetings and conferences are necessary. In that case, a longer time frame may be needed based on the turnaround (or ETA) policies for those parties.

I share my knowledge to ensure continuity of information, that is, to ensure that the knowledge does not stop with me. Knowledge transfer can be both a challenge and fun. The fun part is to see that someone else “gets” the same thing that you know and is running with it in a different direction or capacity than you are, which results in some form of diversity.

I would not necessarily call a lack of knowledge transfer painful. Still, just to reiterate the point I made earlier, the challenge is to invest so much in an individual only for the person to leave before you reap any benefit from them. Bottom line: As project managers, we need to brace ourselves with the challenge and knowledge-transfer efficacy. Tacit knowledge is the most critical type of knowledge.

Dr. Agyapong pointed out that knowledge transfer can be both a challenge and fun, which is true. In terms of conversion, tacit knowledge is the most challenging type of knowledge to transfer.

In knowledge management, training—just like any other single KM tool—is a little potato. However, some organizations see too much training or free flow and access to knowledge and information to be counterproductive. I remember when I developed a Professional project Management (PMP) certification for my organization a few years ago. At the initiation stages of the project, I remember talking with a stakeholder who argued vehemently that providing a significant certification like PMP for employees at no cost is an incentive to look for greener pastures. Is this a valid argument? Since the program was deployed about seven years ago, more than 100 project managers have become certified PMPs, and hundreds have been mentored. Yet, only a handful of credentialed PMPs have left the organization for greener pasture. While the fear of “too much learning” or too much access to knowledge and information is valid, I can honestly say that the benefit of an open free flow of knowledge and information outweighs it.

Dr. Agyapong was right when she alluded that there’s no one size fits all. Every knowledge environment is unique. Every tool is also different. Every tool may not fit into one single source of truth. Converting the knowledge to wisdom or applying knowledge remains a challenge at all levels, hence the importance of managing and stewarding knowledge and its availability to users when and where they need it.

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