Defer judgement – never drive your brain with the brakes on.

One of the ten key elements of an Organisational Learning culture is Openness, and part of the key to openness is deferral of judgement.

We see this in processes such as After Action Review and Retrospect, where the facilitator ensures that the meeting does not leap to judgement until all voices have been heard and all root causes explored.

We see this also in innovation processes, where all ideas must be examined, as sometimes the wildest ideas hold the most promise.

In the video below, Dr Min Basadur, the creativity guru, explains how we much even defer judgement on our OWN ideas, if we are to be truly innovative.

In his book “The myths of creativity” , David Burkus demystifies the creative process, and explodes what he calls the top ten myths about creativity, based on his research with highly creative individuals and firms.

His top myths are as follows:

• The Eureka myth – that creativity strikes (as Terry Pratchett says) like particles of inspiration sleeting through the universe
• The Breed myth – that some people are just more creative than others
• The Originality myth – that creative ideas are original (as opposed to a combination of existing ideas)
• The Expert myth – that creativity comes from creative experts
• The Incentive myth – that you can incentivise people to be creative
• The Lone Expert myth – that creativity comes from inidividuals working alone
• The Brainstorming myth – that you can brainstorm creativity
• The Cohesive myth – that you have to suspend conflict to be able to innovate
• The Constraints myth – that creativity must be unconstrained
• The Mousetrap myth – that once you have the creative idea, the world will beat a path to your door. It won’t

Organisations need to unlearn these myths, and to see creativity not as an individual attribute, but as a team process ,ideally one that mixes many viewpoints and personality types, one that starts from a problem rather than an idea (usually a big out-of-the-box problem), that remixes existing knowledge,  defers judgement, and operates under stress and time pressure. Like this process, for example

You can learn more about these myths in David’s hour-long talk at Google, below.

In this video, Ed Hoffman (ex-CKO of NASA) talks about some of the challenges facing a new CKO trying to introduce a new KM program. He concludes

• The KM program has to “fit” the organisation, and how people work
• The KM program should address pain points for people and for the organisation

In a 2015 video reprise from Edward Rogers, CKO of NASA Goddard, he explains what he sees as the 5 most common mistakes in implementing KM.

All of these stem from one reason, which is that KM people too often fail to learn from the experience of the past. Edward’s 5 reasons for failure are these;

1. Attempting to implement a KM system in a hurry, by “buying a KM program”. KM at NASA has been a 10 year proposition.
2. “Gaming” KM; trying to manipulate people though tricks and incentives
3. Applying a KM framework “off the shelf” rather than tailoring it to your own context
4. Selling KM with an unrealistic revenue target (but also see his video on quantifying the value of KM pilot projects)
5. Letting IT and the CIO handle KM, which ends up with a data and information system, not a KM system

Compare these with our list of the most common reasons KM programs fail

The video below by Jeff Walker, the Sales guru, illustrates this cognitive bias in more detail. As the YouTube caption says –

Ever have an “expert” try to explain something to you, only to be left more confused than when you started? They’d forgotten how to be a beginner… and lost most of the ability to teach along the way… here’s how to not make the same mistake yourself.

The video is aimed at sales staff, for whom the curse of knowledge is just as much a barrier to communication as it is in Knowledge Management, but the message is the same –

You cannot communicate knowledge properly unless you account for the Curse of Knowledge. 

David makes some interesting points, such as

• the need to dedicate individuals for lessons capture (although NASA allows engineers to submit lessons themselves, he says he has never seen this happen in 25 years)
• lessons need verification and quality control – particularly verifying the facts of what happened
• lessons recommendations need to be “infused” into procedures and training to ensure closed-loop learning. The key documents are the JPL design principles and the JPL flight project practices, which are built up over time from the combined and synthesised lessons
• weekly meetings of the lessons learned committee, for the past 35 years

“With our global network of experts, INTERPOL is ideally placed to serve as a centralized hub for research, design, planning, coordination and training to help meet this challenge, within a structure that assures high standards and quality. 

By bringing together good practices, successes and lessons learnt from member countries that have successfully hosted major international events, Project Stadia can help future hosts strengthen their own preparations with the latest knowledge and expertise”.

Overview

More details of the expert networks

Michael Roberts, INTERPOL Project Stadia describes a knowledge sharing meeting in Doha

Produced by KM4 Health, the video below is a really good basic introduction to KM in healthcare

The video talks about a knowledge base, or collection of publications, that was created through the project for use by medical and health practitioners. You can read more about Vriddhi here.