Arthur Shelley, the Global Knowledge Director of Cadbury Schweppes, has presented a bunch of slides on using animal metaphor for understanding behavior and building relationships during the most recent SIKM call.
The good thing is that he has clearly stated that each of us is typically a mix of some of the identified characters (see also the following presentation). I’m always averse to pigeonhole somebody based on a few characteristics. Arthur’s point is that it’s in many ways easier to discuss on the impact of the behaviour of a specific “animal” than to discuss about a specific person. The metaphor helps to separate between the person and his behaviour. Thus, avoiding unnecessary confrontation. According to his experience the usage of the organizational zoo method

“creates an environment where trust can develop and stress reduced, leading to improved knowledge sharing and more interactive people.”

Another good point in his presentation (slide 11) has been the multidimensional definition of performance. I’m looking forward to Artur’s next developments; e.g. he will soon start an organizational zoo character profile (beta version).

SAP is going to introduce lean management methods and tools this year (see news in the German business magazine Manager Magazin).
So, what may I as a knowledge manager learn from companies that have applied lean management for years, e.g. Toyota? The good thing is that I came across one brief and very good introduction on strategy deployment on the SAP website. Pascal Dennis from the Lean Enterprise Institute introduces this lean management tool in a webcast with examples from Toyota.
Based on this introduction I see the following learnings from a knowledge management point of view:
1. Plan
Tell a short concise story on what you plan to do and visualize the strategy
Avoid “power point chunks” to convey your message
Go see for yourself, i.e. talk to the people in the processes
2. Do
We can’t tell people how to do. Involve them in each improvement step.
Better arrange “catch ball meetings” than “happy talk meetings”
Create simple standards and visualize them. Less is more.
Don’t ship “junks”, i.e. don’t accept poor quality contributions
3. Check
Make problems visible. “Problems are gold”.
4. Adjust
Everybody solves problem. Enable a simple, shared problem solving approach.
Create opportunities for reflection and learning points
Develop the “Book of knowledge” (i.e. best practices and lessons learned)
In one of the next posts I’ll take a closer look at KM at Toyota.

Matt Moore offers a very good white paper on “Justifying Your Knowledge Management Programme“. The power of persuasion lies in the combination of personal credibility, logical arguments, and story telling. Matt focuses his paper on developing the logical arguments. While the chapters 1 and 3 are rather generic persuasive presentation tips, the six sources of information to construct the argument (presented in chapter 2) are the good ones for KM.
One point that has surprised me is “[...] at some point, you will have to justify [...]“. Well, I can’t imagine that senior management would have started a knowledge management initiative without a solid business case since the days of the Internet bubble.
Additionally, Mary Abraham had also referenced to European Guidelines for Measuring KM, and Kelly Butler from APQC briefly outlined some effective KM measurement methods and examples.
But Matt’s paper makes the difference between measuring and persuading. Do you know any other convincing contributions?

Steven Wieneke, Technical Fellow in GM’s Global Engineering group, presented an interesting approach to lessons learned in the monthly call of the SIKM community.
Steven has rolled out a “visible learning process” at GM Global Engineering that not only includes lessons (“things gone wrong and corrected”) but even more important learnings (“things gone right and valued for reuse”). “Subject Matter Responsible Persons” drive the development of know-how and references assets in more than 60 communities and nurture the exchange of experience (complete presentation). Unfortunately the time was too short to have a look at the implementation side of the concept, e.g. how the users retrieve assets for a specific context and how they assess the value of the assets. Jack Vinson has also commented the SIKM call in his blog.
An article in InsideKnowledge describes the main knowledge management activities at GM and focusses especially on the “closed-loop learning” promoted by Steven and his group.
Another interesting article on GM and knowledge sharing is the “Wikinomics Report Card” by Ben Letalik.