Communication or knowledge management?

It's Time to Wake Up and Smell the Koffee

Dear Communicator:

This is an open letter from Jane and Joe Workforce. You know...we're the forklift operators, health care providers, hotel reservationist, potato chip and computer chip makers, and all the rest doing the day-to-day work about which you're communication. It's time to wake up and smell the koffee. We'd like to give you our views on why the communicators in our organizations need to focus a lot more on the k-phrase, knowledge management.

The article's author is just scribing our thoughts from five years spent walking among us during the Jensen Group/Northern Illinois University study, "Changing How We Work: The Search for a Simpler Way."

But you too could've written this article. You've interviewed us, listened to us in focus groups and town meetings. You already "know" much of what you're about to read. Your challenge, like ours, is to use it to embrace change more quickly; to get beyond what you're communicating, to the tougher behavioral, focus and skill changes.

(All quotes and stats in this article, unless otherwise noted, come from the study mentioned above. If you'd like to learn more, check out http://www.simplerwork.com)

Communication: The Challenge

Everybody talks about communication and its importance. From leaders such as Jack Welch of GE (in "Control Your Own Destiny'): "Real communication takes countless hours of eyeball to eyeball, back and forth. It means listening more than talking....It is human beings coming to see and accept things through a constant interactive process."

* To August Busch III of Anheuser-Busch (when asked by strategist Gary Hamel about the "one or two most important things you can do as a corporate leader to ensure that new, innovative strategies emerge in your organization."): "You're going to laugh at this - it sounds so simple - but the key is to communicate, communicate, communicate at every level in the organization, and to start at the lowest level."

* To all of us Janes and Joes like this manager at the U.S. Customs Service: "I'm dealing with eight or nine major change efforts right now. Communication is intertwined with all of them. None of them will succeed without effective communication."

Yet all of us view c-o-m-m-u-n-i-c-a-t-i-o-n differently. Almost all of you (91 percent of all communicators) define your roles as messengers in the pipeline - the ability to get those change announcements and newsletters out with skillfully managed messages, videos produced, management to show up at town meetings saying the right things. (This finding should be of real concern to you...especially after so many authors in this magazine and so many speakers at IABC conferences have called for a shift away from "deliverables" toward what we really need.)

We're sorry, but what we need is beyond context. "Hello? Is anybody listening? Enough with the 'why we're changing' crap," was one of our responses during a study interview. "I want solid information I can use to make real decisions. Not just 'context setting.'"

Context is nice, and if done well, greatly helps us understand the changing world around us. But mostly (over 80 percent) what we're looking for is clear, effective, useful, day-to-day information and sense-making. Think of the majority of our communication needs as organizing and delivering what we need to make 24-hour to 90-day decisions. Far too much "key message" communication is out there. If the communication isn't tied to a specific decision we need to make, we'll just hit our mental "delete" button. How many things do you have to do today? Gazillions, right? If the communication isn't linked to a time-bound decision, we'll file it (also known as "forget about it") until you re-communicate.

The need for a day-to-day information approach is becoming dire. As you read this article, the amount of information inside your company (and ours) is increasing 2 percent per month. That means every 1,100 days, because there will be twice as much info, every Jane and Joe's ability to transform information into work becomes twice as important, twice as complicated, twice as critical.

Unfortunately, you are also bound to context stuff by how our leaders define communication. Only 9 percent believe it's delivering, adapting and using local work area, performance-based information. "That's management - not communication!" said one leader. This lack of connection to real work often leaves leaders with the challenge "that they must communicate a million complicated things when they've failed to communicate a few simple, profound ones," says Boyd Clarke, CEO of the Tom Peters Group/Learning Systems.

At the top of the list of key barriers in today's communication: Most of you (but not all...see following for a sampling of some important exceptions) either want to, or are stuck with, focusing on key messages instead of performance information. Most of us are looking for help in making sense of using and leveraging the information around us. We're seeking the ability to navigate through change for ourselves, but just too much information is buzzing past us to do so. This includes the vision-thing that's important to all of us. Our connection to corporate direction occurs not with your vision-communication sessions. It comes when ideas about the future are tied to concrete day-to-day decisions we must make.

Hopeless? No. But most of the innovations delivering what we need carry another label besides "communication."

Communication and Knowledge Management: Separated at Birth, yet Joined at the Hip

Knowledge management (KM) and communication, as we define them, are very similar.

Paraphrasing a definition from Knowledge Management Review, knowledge management is the capturing, transferring and leveraging what everybody in the organization knows.

KM Review: "Studies have shown that tacit knowledge [what we know but not yet 'captured' in script- or database-format] is still best transferred during...communication. It's estimated that 50 percent to 95 percent of transferred knowledge...occurs during oral communication."

So communication and KM are linked. The difference is KM - or knowledge ecologies, in the more politically correct and in-vogue vernacular - is a lot more disciplined about capturing, organizing and tracking what we need to make decisions. While communication seems to be more focused on the exchange, both are necessary. But we're being overloaded with key messages and under-supplied with meaningful, well-organized, easily accessible information with which to make decisions. We're struggling with the gap between the two.

Dear Communicators: You have many of the skills to close this gap - if you can envision your role without tying it to specific "deliverables:" Capturing, organizing and tracking information so that others can easily communicate it, believe it, act upon it...without the need to "own" the "vehicle."

We know that this is not a foreign concept to you. Communicators such as D'Aprix, Larkin, Schaefer and many others have already written in this publication:

* Help front-line supervisors organize and communicate the information we need to make decisions.

* Help organize and deliver the information we need to change our behaviors.

* Help connect people to people and ideas, making knowledge visible in the business.

What all of these calls to action require is thinking of your role as a roving Internal Information Architect and Facilitator for Hire. Vehicle free, but with the skills to organize and make sense of any information for anyone in the organization.

Envision your role without initially thinking about newsletters, meetings or web sites. Radical idea from Jane and Joe Workforce, eh? Yet, this is exactly what came out of the study, "The Search for a Simpler Way."

How? Two Basic Disciplines

Setting aside the tools (some of which, but not all, are digital), knowledge management is made up of two basic disciplines:

Facilitating dialogues

Organizing data for operations use and "aha's"

Neither of which has enough focus from the majority of today's communicators.

Facilitating Dialogues

The ever-changing work environment has created an ever-increasing need for facilitated dialogue. Among those that have discovered this is Linda Stone, an HR research manager at Intel. Her job is to provide ongoing data gathering and analysis of human resource trends among 65,000 people at 40 sites worldwide. (Which takes her into "knowledge management" vs. "communication.")

In a recent online forum among knowledge managers around. the globe, Stone shared, "[Our] key challenge now is to find a way to link all of...our collaborators together in a way that creates an opportunity for dialogue and collaboration, for knowledge capture and knowledge creation, for sharing aspirations and finding support."

Stone then described several successes Intel has had, closing with, "I believe that now more than ever...we have...a business imperative creating momentum for more broad connections.

"I have seen the process start and fail many times within my own organization [and elsewhere] for several reasons [including]: The spark of excitement that gets created on the outset starts to diminish as people are caught up in their daily routines...There is no long-term infrastructure in place to provide the 'glue' for the community."

Knowledge managers such as Stone at companies such as Intel - and most of us Janes and Joes - are seeking more than occasional town meetings and "workouts." We're looking for pioneers in facilitated dialogue.

Among them are managers like Rick Bradley of NationsBank's management development team. Bradley was charged with "engaging over 90,000 associates in a year-long conversation with the goal of completely changing our customers' experience."

Audacious goal! How? "For the first time," says Bradley, "we're bringing together training, corporate affairs, management development, personnel, corporate communications, marketing and the leaders of our business strategies to change how we work together - by changing how we organize and share what we know."

Then there's Boeing, whose 777 model was launched faster than anyone thought possible. One of the primary tools was "future searches" - massive face-to-face sessions with hundreds of people with lots of flipchart paper - all focused through facilitated dialogue.

Then there's Richard Saul Wurman's TED conferences - the "dinner party he always wished he had." Every year, key leaders in technology, entertainment, education and design come together with no orchestration of what they'll say. Yet huge attention to detail is given to the "negative space" - speaker selection, who follows whom on which day of the conference, and greater emphasis on networking/community time than on presentation topics.

The examples are many. Unfortunately, for you and for us, not enough innovators are coming from the communication field. They're currently coming from management development, industrial psychology, human resources and organizational development. And the assignments are going to "outsiders" such as Gemini, Delta, Root Learning, our group, Paradigm, Andersen, Dannemiller and many others.

But they don't have to. If you choose to drop your deliverables and focus on facilitating discussions, you, too, could fill this gap. (Some of these firms will even train you to take on portions of their role. There's more than enough dialogue work to go around!)

Organizing Data

Debbie Rood, VP of operations at Toys "R" Us, reinvented how her firm viewed communication. Prior to 1997, the primary connection to more than 30,000 full-time employees was through satellite feeds. In '97, under the umbrella initiative of "Store and Company Simplification," Reed's team brought store directors in from the field to operate a new communication department.

Their focus ensured that information was operations-driven, integrated and met core question/answer criteria. If it didn't, the communication team acted as "air traffic control," reducing the information and noise from HQ to the field.

What is compelling for us about this example, and many others like it, is that internal communication is creeping into what was solely KM's turf - organizing day-to-day work information.

Be prepared though, for difficult non-message work! We'll be focused on how well the information helps us load trucks, serve customers and take care of patients in our health-care facilities. Themes and messages are at the bottom of the list. Among examples of content-driven solutions are:

* 3M's Systems Thinking Workshops

* FedEx's GOCC (Global Operations Control and Coordination) daily teleconferences to trouble-shoot what mother nature throws at them

* Amazon.com's intelligence-gathering site where, with each purchase, they know more and more about consumers.

* The Behavioral Communication model driven by this study's findings.

* GE's Answer Center

* Jack Stack's Open Book Management

* Inferential Focus' Consumer Purchase-Pattern Maps

To us, on the front lines, organizing data for operations use, new "aha's" and connections is a wide-open field waiting for your talents.

Facilitating Connections

There's also a third approach toward filling the knowledge management/communication gap. It is a combination of data design and facilitated dialogue. So far, this solution is rare, with lots of room for communicators to pool their talents with designers, illustrators, facilitators, strategists and technicians.

Root Learning, Paradigm and Maxis simulations are but three examples. Most of their energies are spent on sifting through tons of organizational data. Yet the main "deliverable" is not the map, experience or software that presents the data, but a "Socratic" dialogue in which the participants come to new, yet well-anticipated conclusions.

Other examples are any well-designed offsite conference, Balanced Scorecard or Open Book Management rollouts or the Message Mapping process - also modeled from the study findings.

Again, most of these are being designed and delivered by teams of people outside your organization. They don't have to be. Any firm, individual or process that seamlessly combines organized human interaction and easy-to-use performance information is the ultimate in what we're seeking!

Next Steps: Changing the Lens

Sure, it's likely that there are many factors preventing you from shifting from communication deliverables to knowledge management practices. Leadership, technology, budgets, staffing or even bad hair days may be legitimate reasons you're being held back.

But, hey - Every day, every Jane, Joe and leader out there has more tools to communicate with more people. Your turf is eroding. Do you have any choice?

In this article, we've tried to change the lens through which you view communication. We hope you'll better understand how we see it.

The call to wake up and smell the KM koffee comes not just from us, but from within your own ranks. Recently, we heard about a communication conference titled something like "Communicators: Caught in the Middle [between our needs and leadership's directives]." Sue Wright, a communication pioneer at NationsBank, was applauded at the conference when she declared, "Isn't it time to stop complaining and embrace the middle? This is a great opportunity! The middle is the best place to be."

While none of this shift could exist without information technology, rethinking the rules, concepts and structures of communication and knowledge management is not about technology. When Jane and Joe Workforce can:

See new choices because the complex has been made clear...

Navigate through choices for ourselves because information is connected and organized for individual decision-making...

Make new choices because the knowledge structure is designed to help us transform information into action...

.... we will be rethinking content, not technology. We will be bridging the gap between communication and knowledge management for all of us.

Bill Jensen is CEO of The Jensen Group, New York City. [C] 1998, Bill Jensen/The Jensen Group.