Category: Organization

This has been lurking in my RSS aggregator for the last couple of months, patiently waiting for me to get around to reading it (one of the core benefits of using RSS feeds).  David Gurteen provides a nice starting point for discussion around attributes of effective knowledge workers.

While I would certainly want people with these attributes working for me and around me, I am less certain that these are uniquely related to knowledge work. Nor, for that matter, am I certain that that matters. Your thoughts?

What makes an effective knowledge worker?

By David Gurteen

At the Osney Media European Knowledge Management Thought Leaders Forum last week In London we broke into several “discussion pods” to discuss topics of interest. Earlier, I had proposed a theme of “What are the habits of effective knowledge workers?” and was pleased that this was one of the topics selected.

There were about five of us at our table and we started by getting into a discussion about what were we talking about: habits; skills; attitudes; behaviors; values; mindsets or what? We decided quite quickly that we would run out of time if we focused on these differences and decided just to brainstorm everything without attempting to categorize them. This is the list we came up with. As the others carried on a conversation – I just scribbled down the key attributes – here they are – pretty much in the order they arose and unedited.

connect people with people connect people with ideas are good networkers do not follow the rules have strong communication skills like people feel good about themselves motivate others are catalysts ask for help demonstrate integrity are self reliant open to share are not afraid are goal oriented are able to identify critical knowledge add value to the organization have strong subject expertise in a specific area network for results

trustworthy – can be trusted and trusts others make decisions are not insular do not conform push the boundaries assume authority – ask for forgiveness, not permission strong belief in the value of knowledge sharing are informal active leaders take a holistic view are catalysts, facilitators and triggers good listeners – they listen first do not need praise see the wider picture work well with others do not have a ‘knowledge is power’ attitude walk the talk prepared to experiment with technology playful take calculated risks

An interesting set of attributes but by no means exhaustive. Will be interesting now to analyze them and pull them into some sort of structure and order. Seems to me though that many of these attributes are ‘soft’ in nature and difficult to teach or learn. How does someone learn ‘not to need praise’ for example and just how important an attribute is it?

Case examples of organizations employing information technology in strategic ways that are relevant to Enterprise 2.0 can be difficult to find. I know of an example from the late 1990s that nonetheless offers relevant lessons for today.

Black and Veatch is an engineering management and design firm that builds large-scale projects such as power plants. I first learned of them as the reviewer who vetted their ultimately successful application for an Enterprise Value Award from CIO Magazine.

What makes the lessons from Black and Veatch so relevant are the careful effort to marry technology to the core knowledge work process and the investment in organizational learning over time. Instead of simply deploying off-the-shelf CAD software, Black & Veatch developed software that supported a design process that was redesigned to leverage detailed data about past projects and the current project. Further, over time, Black & Veatch’s design engineers learned to make more effective and productive use of the software, and the software itself was updated to exploit that learning. Take some time to read about their effort to “reengineer the engineering process.”

If the set of technologies loosely identified at Enterprise 2.0 are to have any hope of real success, we need to take a closer look at how they are introduced into organizations. I see two basic patterns for technology introduction in general use and neither holds much promise.

The first pattern is embodied in the massive ERP rollout. Here, a highly structured set of technologies and corresponding processes are imposed on the organization. People in these systems have equally structured roles that are imposed on them in order for the overall system (organizational and technological) to perform as a designed mechanism.

In the second pattern, some fundamentally individual technology sneaks into the organization at the hands of discrete individuals. Spreadsheets, word processors, web browsers all infiltrated the organization. Even email and networking followed a fundamentally organic diffusion process.

Enterprise 2.0 technologies, of course, are social tools. Their promise and their challenge is that they exist at the boundary between organic and mechanical. Real success depends on blending aspects of both deftly.

Organizations deploying technology tend to view process too mechanically. They can put technologies in place, but aren’t adept at helping individuals and work groups learn how to put the technology to use effectively.

Innovative individuals can experiment with new tools and techniques and can encourage their peers to take up some technologies simply by example. But they generally lack experience and authority to craft the small group learning and experimentation to discover the joint ways of using technology to support more productive and effective processes that exploit the full potential of the technology.

The challenge is to find a third way. My own prediction is that the best path for introducing Enterprise 2.0 technologies is from well-positioned individuals up to selected work groups rather than down from the technology organization. By well-positioned, I mean individuals who have enough power and influence to persuade a work group to “run the experiment,” and whose work group is responsible for a consequential enough deliverable that the results of the experiment can carry some weight in the organizational hierarchy.

Successful experiments will have little or nothing to do with technology specifics. Instead, they will be characterized by how effectively they mesh with and advance specific processes within the organization. Or, by how they transform a loose set of existing practices into a process that can be managed and improved.

I recently pointed to Bob Sutton’s new blog as a good source of insight into the world of effective organizations.  One of his recent posts, Crappy People versus Crappy Systems, offers an excellent case in point. The entire post is well worth your time, but here is the essence:

 The worst part about focusing on keeping out crappy people, however, is that it reflects a belief system that “the people make the place.” The implication is that, once you hire great people and get rid of the bad ones, your work is pretty much done. Yet if you look at large scale studies in everything from automobile industry to the airline industry, or look at Diane Vaughn’s fantastic book on the space shuttle Challenger explosion and the well-crafted report written by the Columbia Accident Investigation Board , the evidence is clear: The “rule of law crappy systems” trumps the “rule of crappy people.”

Sure, people matter a lot, but as my colleague Jeff Pfeffer puts it, some systems are so badly designed that when smart people with a great track record join them, it seems as if a “brain vacuum” is applied, and they turn incompetent. Jeff often jokes that this is what happens to many business school deans, and indeed, these jobs have so many competing and conflicting demands that they are often impossible to do well.

Bob Sutton: Crappy People versus Crappy Systems.

I’ve worked in a number of organizations that do an excellent job of hiring great people, including successful startups. Sutton’s post finally puts a finger on my central frustration in these organizations; they too often tolerate crappy systems that pull down the performance and potential of the great people they manage to attract.

I suspect this is partly a function of the wrong design emphasis. When you know in advance that your organizational systems must work regardless of your ability to attract the best and the brightest, you invest the time and energy to make those systems robust. If you go down the “hire the best” path, you give yourself license to under-invest in systems. Perhaps more harmfully, you don’t take the time to design the organizational systems that might actually amplify the quality and capabilities of a superior workforce.

In one of my columns at Enterprise Systems Journal, I started to explore a nagging concern about why organizations have realized less of the potential of technology to support knowledge work than they could. In a nutshell, my hypothesis is that most organizations have not thought through what organizational roles need to be created to best leverage the technology. In my column I made the argument that we need the knowledge economy equivalent of tool-and-die makers. You can find the full column at ESJ:

Tool-and-Die Makers in a Knowledge Economy

The full potential of tools to support knowledge work remains unrealized

Given the near total independence that most knowledge workers have in organizations, they have been largely left to their own devices in figuring out how to take best advantage of the technology tools we have made available.  That leads to a great deal of wasted potential. Here’s the way I described it in the column:

Applying the tool-and-die maker strategy, knowledge organizations should identify individuals particularly adept at applying tool and technology features to simplifying their own work and give them a new goal of improving the productivity and effectiveness of their knowledge-work colleagues. The knowledge work of these “toolsmiths” would be to understand the knowledge work of others and apply Taylor’s principles of scientific management; to observe how knowledge workers currently worked and to identify, design, and deploy new tools and techniques to make it possible to perform the same work with less effort or produce better-quality deliverables on demand

Essentially, we are missing an opportunity for knowledge work productivity by not taking full advantage of designing organizational roles to take full advantage of the strengths and weaknesses of individual knowledge workers.