Which comes first – Knowledge Management or culture change?

It’s the ultimate chicken and egg situation. KM requires a supportive culture, yet how do you develop the culture without doing KM?

However Knowledge Management is also a culture change agent. The graph below, also from the Knoco surveys shows how the number of cultural barriers decreases the more Knowledge Management becomes embedded.

• First we perform a KM culture audit, so we understand the barriers.

• Then we look for small areas of the business where the cultural barriers are weakest and/or the need for knowledge and KM is strongest, so that the balance is tipped in our favour, and we make these our KM pilot areas. 

• We introduce KM in the pilot areas, deliver success, deliver value, than use these success examples in our communication and change program as “social proof”. These pilots are our cultural “first followers” or “thin threads“; the equivalent of the first wave of penguins off the ice floe (see video here). 

• Then you repeat the last step as many times as it takes for the new culture to catch hold, recruiting your second followers, third followers and so on.   

• At the same time, you lobby your sponsor and steering team to begin to remove the institutional barriers to the new culture such as the recognition and reward scheme, the internal security barriers, and so on.