Peter: Can you give an example? Can you give an example perhaps of an organization that's using technology to facilitate their collaborative processes - whether it's here within the Government or examples that you've seen in the private sector. Paul: Communities of Practice software in communities of practice is an approach and a toolset that a lot of organizations are trying to take advantage of. There's an expression that suggests that Communities of Practices is the “killer app” of knowledge management, knowledge exchange, knowledge mobilization and I believe that's true because it really is about getting people to talk in open conversation. This Canada School has a Centre of Excellence on Communities of Practice in Montreal in our Quebec region and this group will go into departments, across Canada – they have a national mandate – they'll go into departments across Canada and help the department set up communities of practice with some roles and responsibilities laid out – the experience shared and they will customize the application; the technology application towards that set of parameters and that purpose for that community of practice. And from what I can see and what I have heard, they have been very successful in doing that.
Peter: Okay. When do you know that you are getting the value from implementing something like that? Is there a turning point or is it incremental?
Paul: There will be an AHA moment I think in most cases. It can be in the form of finding something that was thought lost. It can be in the form of creating something very new using that community and it can be in the form of continuing to show improvement in the organization – in its productivity, in its employee satisfaction levels and in all of the result indicators such as sick days etc., etc.
There will be an AHA moment. Why is this the case…in all cases? But the AHA moment will be very different I think. I worked in…I was involved in one community of practice in an organization and we were around project management and the organization was a member of the Conference Board's Project Management Council and at one point the Conference Board decided it wanted to develop a model for good project management skills and competencies and so it invited it's customers to put forward their models…their respective models and it would choose the best one or amalgamate. And we as a community or an informal community of practice on project management in this organization, there were 6 of us got together and said, “Let's put something in to this request for a model.” We didn't have a model that we were working with explicitly but we all had, because of our community of practice, we had some shared understanding about how we would work best as a project manager. And we were simply able, over the course of a couple of hours to articulate that – to make that explicit, that tacit knowledge to make it explicit. We shared that model then with the Conference Board and they chose that model over the model put forward by large private sector research firms, large banks and number of other organizations – 20 some organizations and they chose that model.
That was an AHA moment because there was a legitimacy to the value of the community and the consensus that it was building, the capacity that it was building within the organization. But the AHA moment has occurred very differently – in that case we produced something that had external validity assigned to it. In other organizations – in the Treasury Board, we were launching…we launched a community of practice for individuals who had a certain type of client – Crown Corporations as a client - and they were at the staff levels and during a weekly meeting of the Directors General, which I attended all the time, there was a discussion around a certain topic and in spite of the fact of this community of practice that I had launched, was an informal community of practice – no terms of reference, no charter, no meeting minutes or anything of that nature, it was simply a group of people getting together who need to know about what each other is doing and find out what's coming up and contribute to it. These Directors General – EX-02s/EX-03s had a discussion at their meeting and they said, “There's…why don't we give this issue…” - that they were discussing at their table – “why don't we give this issue to the Crown Corporation Analysts Network because they need to resolve this issue?” So they immediately…they, through that, they recognized and validated the role of this community of practice – not as a formal working group, a formal community, a formal committee… Peter: …but as a form of collective intelligence? Paul: …as a form of collective intelligence – exactly. And there was an AHA moment there.
Peter: Those are really interesting value building examples. So why is it so hard to implement good knowledge exchange, knowledge management processes? What are the principle barriers for knowing how to do this - if it builds value?
Paul: There are quite a number of barriers – in the Federal Government there are a number of systemic barriers. One of which I mentioned is the Deputy Minister rotation and the rotation of succeeding levels so at the ADM rotation – it's about the same duration; 2 to 3 years and there's a lot of mobility across the Government and while mobility has benefits, it has the effect of destabilizing the organization. So instability is a barrier to sustained organizational change and that's one of our systemic issues. There's also an issue about… It's more that just silos but the HR community only talks to the HR community and the Planning community only talks to the Planning community and the IT community only talks to the IT community and yet they need to talk to each other. Peter: So does the concept in health care - the concept of knowledge brokers is emerging – do you see a time when the concept of knowledge brokers might be implemented in the Federal Government or in other large, complex organizations like this?
Paul: I think there is a huge role for…I hate to use the word integration but some sort of relationship building so that we can leverage the depth of experience of individual, vertical functions and groups such as these communities…functional communities. Leverage that in a collective process.
I know that the Federal Government is trying to build a process of integrated planning between the human resources management function and the business planning function and there's a huge challenge around that. That has been going on now for a number of years but that's why, through the one…with one domain. Not the information management domain, the information technology domain, the communications domain, the…a number of other domains…the policy domains, the research domain, the stakeholder domain, etc., etc. So there's a huge need for relationship management, relationship building, and achieving a level of value far in excess of the value that anyone of those individual functions can achieve. Peter: Okay. Well that's a value statement and I think that's one of the rewards for engaging in this movement…in this work. What are some of the other rewards from having good knowledge management, knowledge exchange, knowledge mobilization put in place.
Paul: I think it's important for organizations, for Federal Government organizations to understand, frequently – certainly they need to be reminded of the purpose…the real value for their existence. And that's individuals on the street, individuals who receive cheques, individuals who receive health care services, individuals who need assistance in their home environment. The Canadian Federal Government…it should be focused very heavily on the outcome, not from a policy perspective, not from a research perspective, not from a political perspective, but from a client perspective. And I believe that's the outcome that we should really be striving for to be reminded of the faces of some of the people who benefit from what we do and that's why we do it. Peter: This is an impossible question and I get groans when I ask it. If you had a crystal ball and you could look 10 years into the future, what does it look like?
Paul: Gartner Group has said that in the future we won't call this thing knowledge management – we'll call it management. Peter: I've heard that before. Paul: Yep, I've used that one frequently. In fact what they said was in 1998 they said that in 5 years, we'll call it management and here we are 9 years later and there's still a dearth of understanding about what KM is - knowledge exchange, knowledge mobilization. So what we're looking at is generational change and I think that 10 years on, we will have moved further towards that and unfortunately we will have been forced into moving closer to it because of the demographic changes that will be upon us. We will have no choice but to do it. We have had a choice over the last 10 years and the leadership has decided that there are other priorities to focus on – the “tyranny of the urgent” rather than sustained long-term change with that vision. So we have a short-term horizon in most cases in organizations – they're looking 3 years out and I think we need to start really thinking 5 to 10 years out. I think that's very much the case. So I think we will be closer to a world where we have no question but to work together more effectively because there will be less individuals around, the knowledge will be gone, we will have to think about how to recapture, regain, redevelop the knowledge and that will become the priority I believe and so that will drive I think, some…the change happening faster.
Peter: Okay, so the urgency becomes the urgency?
Paul: The urgency will finally become the important.
Peter: Okay. I sent you a list of questions before and we've gone through most of those and one of the things I've learned through doing these interviews is to just open up the floor. Is there something that is burning that we haven't discussed? Some…you know an issue that you would like to bring up that we just haven't touched on yet? Paul: That's a very good question. I guess what I struggle with is we live in a world that is still focused on the short-term, the immediate and very much the self-centered needs and desires of the key leaders. And I realize that that's broad-brushing but I think that the role of leadership is one that really has been under…misunderstood, undervalued, and is needing a huge re-engineering if you will – we need to re-engineer the concept of leadership for the modern world. Peter: Paul, it's always a pleasure. Thank you very much.
Paul: My pleasure.
