Engaging with knowledge and Knowledge Management are critical parts of development. The ability to navigate the flood of available data to find accurate information is tied directly to individuals’ existing knowledge and their skills at distinguishing credible information from misleading content.
There is ample evidence that many individuals lack the ability to accurately judge their understanding or the quality and accuracy of their performance (i.e., calibration). To truly develop our knowledge, we need to be engaged in deliberative practice. But to truly calibrate requires feedback, guidance, and coaching that you may not have access to within our organizations. This requires effort and deliberate building of a system and processes.
Information can be found with little mental effort but without critical analysis of its legitimacy or validity, the ease of information can actually work against the development of deeper-processing strategies. It is really easy to go-online and get an answer, but unless learners put themselves in positions to struggle cognitively with an issue, and unless they have occasions to transform or reframe problems, their likelihood of progressing into competence is jeopardized.
The more learners forge principled knowledge in a professional domain, the greater their reported interest in and identity with that field. Therefore, without the active pursuit of knowledge, these individuals’ interest in professional development may wane and their progress toward expertise may stall. This is why I find professional societies so critical, and why I am always pushing people to step up.
My constant goal as a mentor is to help people do the following:
Refuse to be lulled into accepting a role as passive consumers of information, striving instead to be active producers of knowledge
Probe and critically analyze the information they encounter, rather than accepting quick, simple answers
Forge a meaningful interest in the profession and personal connections to members of professional communities, instead of relying on moment-by-moment stimulation and superficial relationships
If we are going to step up to the challenges ahead of us, to address the skill gaps we are seeing, we each need to be deliberate in how we develop and deliberate in how we build our organizations to support development.
Risk management is a crucial aspect of any organization or project. However, it is often subject to human errors in subjective risk judgments. This is because most risk assessment methods rely on subjective inputs from experts. Without certain precautions, experts can make consistent errors in judgment about uncertainty and risk.
There are methods that can correct the systemic errors that people make, but very few organizations implement them. As a result, there is often an almost universal understatement of risk. We need to keep in mind a few rules about experience and expertise.
Experience is a nonrandom, nonscientific sample of events throughout our lifetime.
Experience is memory-based and we are very selective regarding what we choose to remember,
What we conclude from our experience can be full of logical errors
Unless we get reliable feedback on past decisions, there is no reason to believe our experience will tell us much.
No matter how much experience we accumulate, we seem to be very inconsistent in its application.
Experts have unconscious heuristics and biases that impact their judgment, some important ones include:
Misconceptions of chance: If you flip a coin six times, which result is more likely (H= heads, T= tails): HHHTTT or HTHTTH? They are both equal, but many people assume that because the first series looks “less random” than the second, it must be less likely. This is an example of representativeness bias. We appear to judge odds based on what we assume to be representative scenarios. Human beings easily confuse patterns and randomness.
The conjunction fallacy: We often see specific events as more likely than broader categories of events.
Irrational belief in small samples
Disregarding variance in small samples. Small samples have more random variance that large samples is considered less than it should be.
Insensitivity to prior probabilities: People tend to ignore the past and focus on new information when making subjective estimates.
This is all about overconfidence as an expert, which will consistently underestimate risks.
What are some ways to overcome this? I recommend the following be built into your risk management system.
Pretend you are in the future looking back at failure. Start with the assumption that a major disaster did happen and describe how it happened.
Look to risks from others. Gather a list of related failures, for example, regulatory agency observations, and think of risks in relation to those.
Include Everyone. Your organization has numerous experts on all sorts of specific risks. Make the effort to survey representatives of just about every job level.
Do peer reviews. Check assumptions by showing them to peers who are not immersed in the assessment.
Implement metrics for performance. The Brier score is a way to evaluate the result of predictions both by how often the team was right and by the probability the estimated for getting a correct answer.
Further Reading
Here are some sources that discuss the topic of human errors and subjective judgments in risk management:
Knowledge management is a key enabler for quality, and should firmly be part of our standards of practice and competencies. There is a host of practices, and one tool that should be in our toolboxes as quality professionals is the Community of Practice (COP).
What is a Community of Practice?
Wenger, Trayner, and de Laat (2011) defined a Community of Practice as a “learning partnership among people who find it useful to learn from and with each other about a particular domain. They use each other’s experience of practice as a learning resource.” Etienne Wagner is the theoretical origin of the idea of a Community of Practice, as well as a great deal of the subsequent development of the concept.
Communities of practice are groups of people who share a passion for something that they know how to do, and who interact regularly in order to learn how to do it better. As such, they are a great tool for continuous improvement.
These communities can be defined by disciplines, by problems, or by situations. They can be internal or external. A group of deviation investigators who want to perform better investigations, contamination control experts sharing across sites, the list is probably endless for whenever there is a shared problem to be solved.
The idea is to enable practitioners to manage knowledge. Practitioners have a special connection with each other because they share actual experiences. They understand each other’s stories, difficulties, and insights. This allows them to learn from each other and build on each other’s expertise.
There are three fundamental characteristics of communities:
Domain: the area of knowledge that brings the community together, gives it its identity, and defines the key issues that members need to address. A community of practice is not just a personal network: it is about something. Its identity is defined not just by a task, as it would be for a team, but by an “area” of knowledge that needs to be explored and developed.
Community: the group of people for whom the domain is relevant, the quality of the relationships among members, and the definition of the boundary between the inside and the outside. A community of practice is not just a Web site or a library; it involves people who interact and who develop relationships that enable them to address problems and share knowledge.
Practice: the body of knowledge, methods, tools, stories, cases, documents, which members share and develop together. A community of practice is not merely a community of interest. It brings together practitioners who are involved in doing something. Over time, they accumulate practical knowledge in their domain, which makes a difference to their ability to act individually and collectively.
The combination of domain, community, and practice is what enables communities of practice to manage knowledge. Domain provides a common focus; community builds relationships that enable collective learning; and practice anchors the learning in what people do. Cultivating communities of practice requires paying attention to all three elements.
Communities of Practice are different than workgroups or project teams.
What’s the purpose?
Who belongs?
What holds it together?
How long does it last?
Community of Practice
To develop members’ capabilities. To build and exchange knowledge
Members who share domain and community
Commitment from the organization. Identification with the group’s expertise. Passion
As long as there is interest in maintaining the group
Formal work group
To deliver a product or service
Everyone who reports to the group’s manager
Job requirements and common goals
Until the next reorganization
Project team
To accomplish a specific task
Employee’s assigned by management
The project’s milestones and goals
Until the project has been completed
Informal network
To collect and pass on business information
Friends and business acquantainces
Mutual needs
As long as people have a reason to connect
Types of organizing blocks
Establishing a Community of Practice
Sponsorship
For a Community of Practice to thrive it is crucial for the organization to provide adequate sponsorship. Sponsorship are those leaders who sees that a community can deliver value and therefore makes sure that the community has the resources it needs to function and that its ideas and proposals find their way into the organization. While there is often one specific sponsor, it is more useful to think about the sponsorship structure that enables the communities to thrive and have an impact on the performance of the organization. This includes high-level executive sponsorship as well as the sponsorship of line managers who control the time usage of employees. The role of sponsorship includes:
Translating strategic imperatives into a knowledge-centric vision of the organization
Legitimizing the work of communities in terms of strategic priorities
Channeling appropriate resources to ensure sustained success
Giving a voice to the insights and proposals of communities so they affect the way business is conducted
Negotiating accountability between line operations and communities (e.g., who decides which “best practices” to adopt)
Support Structure
Communities of Practice need organizational support to function. This support includes:
A few explicit roles, some of which are recognized by the formal organization and resourced with dedicated time
Direct resources for the nurturing of the community infrastructure including meeting places, travel funds, and money for specific projects
Technological infrastructure that enables members to communicate regularly and to accumulate documents
It pays when you use communities of practice in a systematic way to put together a small “support team” of internal consultants who provide logistic and process advice for communities, including coaching community leaders, educational activities to raise awareness and skills, facilitation services, communication with management, and coordination across the various community of practices. But this is certainly not needed.
Process Owners and Communities of Practice go hand-in-hand. Often it is either the Process Owner in a governance or organizing role; or the community of practice is made up of process owners across the network.
Recognition Structure
Communities of Practice allows its participants to build reputation, a crucial asset in the knowledge economy. Such reputation building depends on both peer and organizational recognition.
Peer recognition: community-based feedback and acknowledgement mechanisms that celebrate community participation
Organizational recognition: rubric in performance appraisal for community contributions and career paths for people who take on community leadership
A SME is engaged in knowledge management activities, what we want is for those activities to be a explicit and systematic management of the processes of creating, gathering, validating, categorizing, archiving, disseminating, leveraging, and using knowledge – whether for improving the organization and the individuals in it or the broader profession.
The thing is, this is another skill set for most SMEs. There will be SMEs out there who can do this from practice, but we need to be more deliberate in providing the skills. To provide the skills we must understand what we need to teach, which is where a competency model is valuable.
Basic: Possesses general, conceptual knowledge or awareness of this concept OR a limited ability to perform this skill. Needs reference materials to complete tasks related to this concept.
Intermediate: Able to apply knowledge of this concept in work OR can perform this skill consistently with minimal guidance.
Advanced: Provides expert advice and make sound judgments using knowledge of this concept OR provides consultation and leadership to others using this skill. Can foster greater understanding of this concept among colleagues and stakeholders.
Competency
Level to build towards
Knowledge of principles of knowledge management, for example conceptualizing, managing, preserving, and/or maintaining organizational knowledge.
Knowledge of methods and techniques for disseminating and/or sharing knowledge across individuals, groups, and organizations.
Advanced
Skill in designing and implementing knowledge management strategy.
Intermediate
Skill in identifying the quality, authenticity, accuracy, impartiality, and/or relevance of information from various sources, for example databases, print and online media, speeches and presentations, and observations.
Advanced
Skill in organizing and synthesizing information from multiple sources, for example databases, print and online media, speeches and presentations, and observations.
Advanced
Skill in curating instructional content, tools, and resources, for example researching, evaluating, selecting, and/or assembling publicly available online courseware.
Basic
Skill in identifying the type and amount of information needed to support the development of others in the topic.
Advanced
Skill in developing, managing, facilitating, and/or supporting knowledge networks and communities of practice.
Advanced
We need to recognize that not every SME will get to this level, or have the time to consistently apply it. This is why it is important to have knowledge management experts to support, nurture and step in where needed to assist.
A question I ponder a lot – “Is the Process Owner supposed to be wise?” This is followed closely by “What is wisdom even supposed to be?” followed by “Darn that pyramid.” Honestly, I more and more think “darn that pyramid.”
No answers here, I really just wanted to share a comic I like.
Investigations of a Dog 