Sharing Hidden Know-How: How Managers Solve Thorny Problems With the Knowledge Jam
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  • Wiley

More About This Title Sharing Hidden Know-How: How Managers Solve Thorny Problems With the Knowledge Jam

English

To manage business operations – let alone innovate – amid frequent restructurings, outsourcings and retirements, leaders must quickly capitalize on hidden know-how (knowledge). That is, know-how that lives inside their organizations or networks – in the teams, processes and experts that comprise them.

Yet, many organizations are coming up short in this race. Knowledge sharing and transfer have been reduced to reports, e-mails and tweets replacing vital personal interaction. The lack of meaningful conversation coupled with intense fragmentation across organizations and networks has left leaders floating in a sea of information and ideas without a map to channel insight into action.

Sharing Hidden Know-How starts the conversation that allows organizations to take what they know to the bank. The “how-to”/“how-act” guidebook unveils Knowledge Jam, a facilitated collaborative method for helping organizations rediscover the fundamental discipline of knowledge transfer – the conversation.

Developed by Katrina Pugh, president of AlignConsulting, the proven process uses human interaction to capture unwritten insights, and more importantly to put them to work. Offering a step-by-step process and practical tools, Sharing Hidden Know-How will help any organization harness untapped knowledge to solve today’s thorny problems:

  • Accelerating New Product Development and Market and Segment Innovations
  • Maximizing Combined Knowledge in Mergers Integrations, Restructurings, Off-shoring and Outsourcing
  • Overcoming Information Overload (Focus on Social Media)
  • Smoothing Executive Transitions and Succession Planning
  • Smoothing Team Transitions
  • Spreading Insight across Geographies and Network Partners
  • Tapping into Sales Insights

The next generation of leadership effectiveness is about conversation and reflective facilitation, not just texts and tweets. Sharing Hidden Know-How makes the case for intentional, conversation-based leadership, and provides the practice model to pull it off.  Viewed from above, this important book is itself a conversation between Kate Pugh’s basic propositions and those of a diverse group of other thinkers, all woven into a unified whole. Viewed on the ground, it is an intellectual joyride, coherent, insightful, promisingly pragmatic, and with just the right measure of the personal to fully reveal a fruitful mind in motion.
David Kantor, director, Kantor Institute; author, Reading the Room (Jossey-Bass, 2012)

“[This] book addresses one of the time-honored problems in organizations: ‘How do you get people with experience, solutions and knowledge to share them effectively with those who need those valuable assets?’ Technology, we now know, is not the answer—human discus­sion is. [Pugh] tells you how to structure and facilitate these important conversations.”
Thomas H. Davenport, President’s distinguished professor of IT and Management, Babson College; author of Analytics at Work and Thinking for a Living.

“In this innovative and useful book Kate Pugh shows how you can be a far better knowledge practitioner just by releasing the power of talking in your organization. A fine example of the new generation of knowledge books.”
Larry Prusak, author, Working Knowledge; visiting scholar, Marshall School of Business, University of Southern California; and senior knowledge advisor to World Bank and NASA

“[This book] meets an urgent need within leadership practices: an effective conversational process for capturing and transferring deep smarts.”
Stephen Denning, author, The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management and The Secret Language of Leadership

“Leaders have long known that the ‘know-how’ of experienced teams is key to their orga­nizations’ ability to achieve strategic goals. The challenge has always been to distill this wisdom and deploy it in a way that maximizes and accelerates its impact on organizational effectiveness. [This book] provides a practical approach to addressing this challenge, and, in so doing, improves competitiveness.”
Paul Lucidi, chief information officer, Insulet Corporation

“A fantastic replacement for the long dormant and never used lessons-learned repository! This book provides well documented and effective tools for really learning from your orga­nization. As our business continues to go through transformational change, I hope to make good use of the Knowledge Jam to make that transformation efficient.”
Sheryl Skifstad, senior director, Supply Chain IT at a Fortune 100 company

English

Katrina Pugh is president of AlignConsulting, a firm that specializes in helping organizations channel insight into action. Kate held leadership positions with PwC Consulting/IBM, JPMorgan, Intel Corporation and Fidelity Investments.

English

Foreword by Nancy M. Dixon ix

Introduction xiii

Chapter One: Knowledge Jam Rationale: Solving Thorny Problems 1

What’s Not Working? 3

Blind Spots 6

Mismatches 9

Knowledge Jails 11

Sidebar: Contrasting the Effects of Non-Participative Versus Collective Capture 14

Chapter Two: Knowledge Jam Basics 19

Step 1: Select 22

Step 2: Plan 24

Step 3: Discover/Capture 25

Step 4: Broker 27

Step 5: Reuse 29

Chapter Three: Discipline 1: Facilitation 31

The Facilitator’s Mandate 33

1. Facilitating the Select Step 34

2. Facilitating the Plan Step 38

3. Facilitating the Discover/Capture Step 49

4. Facilitating the Broker Step 64

5. Facilitating the Reuse Step 65

Chapter Four: Discipline 2: Conversation 67

Posture of Openness 69

Pursuit of Diversity 74

Practices of Dialogue 80

Chapter Five: Discipline 3: Translation 89

Brokers’ Motivators 91

Brokering Basics 94

Chapter Six: Bespeckled, Married, and Emancipated 107

Boundary-Spanning 108

Surfacing Usable Insight 109

Putting Knowledge to Work 111

Chapter Seven: Knowledge Jam Heritage: Prequel to the Three Disciplines 115

Intelligence Acquisition 116

Organizational Learning 121

Sidebar: Structural Dynamics: Strategically Simulating Diversity 128

Collaboration Technology 135

Chapter Eight: Comparing Knowledge Jam to Other Knowledge-Capture Methods 141

A Facilitation-Conversation-Translation Scale 142

Chapter Nine: Building a Knowledge Jam Practice 157

Building a Business Case and Selling Knowledge Jam 159

Sidebar: The Price is Right! 174

Cultivating Knowledge Jam Facilitators 177

Measuring and Promoting Success 180

Chapter Ten: Knowledge Jam for Leading Change and Leveraging Social Media 183

Using Knowledge Jam for Leading Change 185

Sidebar: Jamming in the Boardroom—Shared Insight in Action 188

Knowledge Jam for Business Transformation and Social Media 190

Chapter Eleven: An Invitation 199

Why Knowledge Jam (and Other Forms of Knowledge Elicitation) Will Take Off 200

You Have Your Toolkit 201

More Than a Business Tool 203

Appendices 205

A: Knowledge Types 205

B: Knowledge Jam Templates 209

C: Glossary of Terms 215

D: Case Studies 219

Institute for Healthcare Improvement (Healthcare Quality Improvement Non-Profit) 219

Forest Bioproducts Research Institute (New Energy Institute) 222

E: Knowledge Jam Practice FAQs 225

Notes 233

Acknowledgments 239

The Author 241

Index 243

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