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.
The first four phases of knowledge management are all about identifying and creating meaning and then making that meaning usable. Knowledge management is a set of epistemic actions, creating knowledge through interaction. This interaction is a way of creating a partnership between what happens in the head with everything in the world – Work-as-Imagined and Work-as-Done.
There are really four themes to a set of epistemic actions:
These epistemic actions are all about moving from Work-as-Imagined through Work-as-Prescribed to enable Work-as-Done.
Knowledge Management is really about the embodiment of information, knowledge, and even wisdom through these epistemic actions to apply change upon the world.
|
Theme |
Epistemic Interaction |
Means |
|
Foraging Locating resources that will lead to understanding |
Searching
|
Searching happens when you need information and believe it exists somewhere. Searching depends on how we articulate or information needs. |
|
Probing
|
“Tell me more.” Probing happens when the information you have isn’t quite enough. You are probing when you take the next step, move to the next level, and obtain more salient specifics. Probing is about drilling down and saying “show, explain, and reveal more about this.” We can probe to reveal new patterns, structures and relationships. It brings to light new information that helps us to reconsider what we already know. |
|
|
Animating
|
Animating is when we initiate and control motion in an information source. It includes learning-by-doing. |
|
|
Collecting |
Collecting is how we gather foraged information and tuck it away for future use. |
|
|
Tuning Adjusting resources to align with desired understanding |
Collecting
|
|
|
Cloning
|
Cloning lets us take information from one situation and use it in another. |
|
|
Cutting
|
Cutting is the way we say “this matters”, that “I need this part, but not the rest.” |
|
|
Filtering |
Filtering reduces complexity by reducing clutter to expose salient details. |
|
|
Externalizing Moving resources out of the head and into the world |
Annotating
|
Annotating is how we add context to information. How we adapt and modify the information to the needed context. |
|
Linking |
Connecting bits of information together. Forming conceptual maps. |
|
|
Generating |
Introducing new knowledge into the world. |
|
|
Chunking |
Grouping idenpendent yet related information together. |
|
|
Constructing Forming new knowledge structures in the world |
Chunking
|
|
|
Composing |
Producing a new, separate structure from the information that has its own meaning and purpose. |
|
|
Fragmenting |
Taking information and breaking it apart into usable components. |
|
|
Rearranging |
The art of creating meaningful order. |
|
|
Repicturing |
Changing the way the information is represented to create understanding. |
Work-as-Prescribed – how we translate the desired activities into a set of process and procedure – relies on an understanding of how people think and process information.
The format is pivotal. The difficulties we have in quality are really not much different from elsewhere in society in that we are surrounded by confusing documentation and poorly presented explanations everywhere we look, that provide information but not understanding. Oftentimes we rely on canards of “this is what is expected,” “this is what works” – but rarely is that based on anything more than anecdotal. And as the high incidence of issues and the high cost of training shows, less than adequate.
There is a huge body-of-knowledge out there on cognitive-friendly design of visuals, including documentation. This is an area we as a quality profession need to get comfortable with. Most important, we need to give ourselves permission to adapt, modify and transform the information we need into a shape that aids understanding and makes everyone a better thinker.
Work-as-Prescribed (and work-as-instructed) is the creation of tools and technologies to help us think better, understand more and perform at our peak.
Looking at the process at the right level is key. Think of Work-as-Prescribed as a lens. Sometimes you need a high-powered lens so that you can zoom in on a single task. Other times, you need to zoom out to see a set of tasks, a whole process, or how systems interact.
This is the locus of understanding, where understanding happens. When we take this position, we see how understanding is created. Adopting the locus of understanding means going to the right level for the problem at hand. When we apply it to Work-as-Prescribed we are applying the same principles as we do in problem-solving to developing the right tools to govern the work.
We are conducting knowledge management as part of our continuous improvement.
An important way to look is distributed cognitive resources, which means anything that contributes to the cognitive work being done. Adjusting the locus of understanding means that you can, and should, treat an SOP as a cognitive resource. Some of the memory is in your head and some is in the SOP. Work-as-prescribed is a cognitive resource that we distribute, routinely and casually across the brain and our quality system in the form of documents and other execution aids.
Other tools, like my favorite whiteboard, also serve as distributed cognitive resources.
So, as our documents and other tools are distributed cognitive resources it behooves us to ensure they are based on the best cognitive principles possible to drive the most benefit.
As an aside, there is a whole line of thought about why some physical objects are better at distributed cognitive resources than electronic. Movement actually matters.
Taking it even further (shifting the locus) we can see the entire quality system as a part of a single distributed cognitive system where cognitive work is performed via the cognitive functions of communicating, deciding, planning, and problem-solving. These cognitive functions are supported by cognitive processes such as perceiving, analyzing, exchanging, and manipulating.
The tools we develop to provide distributed cognitive activity strive to:
As we build our requirements documents, our process and procedure, there are a few principles to keep in mind to better tap into distributed cognitive resources.
Plan for the flow of information: Think about paths, relationships, seams, edges and other hand-offs. Focus on the flow of information. Remember that we learn in a spiral, and the content needed for a novice is different from that of an expert and build our documents and the information flow accordingly. This principle is called Sequencing.
Break information down into pieces: Called, Chunking, the grouping together of information into ideally sized pieces. When building Work-As-Prescribed pay close attention to which of these chunks are reusable and build accordingly.
The deeply about context: How a tool is used drives what the tool should be.
Think deeply about information structures: Not all information is the same, not every example of Work-as-Prescribed should have the same structure.
Be conscientious about the digital and physical divide: Look for opportunities to integrate or connect these two worlds. Be honest of how enmeshed they are at any point in the system.
We are building our Work-as-Prescribed through leveraging our quality culture, our framework for coordinating work. Pay attention to:
When design process, procedure and task documentation leverage this principles by build blocks, or microcontent, that is:
There is a common miscomprehension that simple means short. That just isn’t true. Simple means that it passes a test for the appropriateness of the size of a piece of content of providing sufficient details to answer a specific question for the targeted audience. The size of the content must effectively serve its intended purpose with efficiency, stripping off any unnecessary components.
We need to strive to apply cognitive thinking principles to our practice. The day of judging a requirements document by its page length is long over.
Professor Amy Edmondson in 2016 wrote “Wicked-Problem Solvers” in HBR that laid out four leadership levers for collaboration that fit nicely into quality culture and nestle nicely with Kotter’s Eight Accelerators. Together they help define the leadership behaviors necessary to build quality culture, all informed by the enabler of knowledge management.
Professor Edmondson in this article is discussing cross-industry collaboration, but the central four levers apply in any organization.
Having a vision that strives for a True North of Quality is critical. Make it align to individual needs. Remember that vision grows and adapts as you go, and as others get the opportunity to shape. Vision has six criteria:
Psychological safety is the state where employees feel that there is safety in taking risks at work setting. In this safe environment employees will engage in risk-taking actions that are inherent to creative endeavors and if they perceive safety, then they are more comfortable to voice their opinions. This safety makes them more willing to take the chances to own the vision and try to experiment with making that vision a reality which motivates them to develop, promote, and implement new ideas.
This safety will enable knowledge sharing, which can come in many different styles, including combination which creates something new.
Through inclusive, democratic leaders who value the inclusion of employees in a particular work process, employees have the chance to raise their voice for generating, promoting, and implementing useful ideas
Through leveraging vision these inclusive leaders exhibit openness attributes that communicates the importance of taking innovative actions and gives employees the guarantee that in case of negative consequences they will not be punished, experiencing greater psychological safety.
Employees experience non-defensive behavior, and feel high levels of self-worth and self-identity, motivating employees not only to generate new ideas, but also to promote and implement new ideas in the organization.
The organization that is structured to accept these ideas will continue to drive iterative cycles of improvement.
An information gap is a known unknown, a question that one is aware of but for which one is uncertain of the answer. It is a disparity between what the decision maker knows and what could be known The attention paid to such an information gap depends on two key factors: salience, and importance.
Information gaps often dwell in the land of knightian uncertainty.
A wide range of reasons for information gaps exist:
Investigations of a Dog 