A small innovative company, Sparknow, active in the field of knowledge management, was selected to help us find out more about how LRO manages its knowledge, with the intention of discovering good practice we can build on and improvements we can make. We also knew our project would potentially yield at least as much information relevant to organisational development – as indeed proved to be the case. The project group had to learn to work in what felt like a new and uncertain way (but)… developing the necessary skills to work in different ways is an essential requirement of a new and modernised LRO.
NOTE: All client quotes in italics
Situation
At two different organisational development workshops held early in 2000, staff of the London Regional Office of the NHS voiced concerns that knowledge and information was not flowing freely. In particular the more junior staff wanted to know more about what others were doing, but finding time and appropriate vehicles was difficult. A willingness to improve things had been expressed by the majority, and luckily this was in alignment with the strategic business objectives of the LRO, an organisation characterised by the large number of external organisations it communicates with, and a complex and diverse knowledge base. As an organisation they understood the business value of investing in actively managing their corporate knowledge, including not just hard and soft information, but particularly what people know.
Intervention
At around the time these events were going on, some members of the Sparknow team met the then librarian for the LRO, who participated in some workshops we were doing for CILIP (then the Libraries Association) on changing workplace library spaces. As a consequence of this, she invited us to meet with her and her line managers, who were responsible for communications strategy at the LRO at that time.
So in July 2000 Sparknow were invited to assist the NHS London Regional Office to do a ‘knowledge audit’. As the LRO project team had limited budget, the work was designed to ensure minimal intervention from Sparknow would still deliver quality results by providing the client with the skills and support they needed to do the work themselves. We chose an approach which centred on volunteers, facilitated by the LRO librarian as project manager, coming forward to engage together in designing the work, developing the skills and approaches to undertake it, and then working together to create the resulting reports and presentations. The client was clear that the style of the written record and the final presentation would be story rather than report. Sparknow would act as design guide, coach and support throughout, but most of the work would be done by LRO staff themselves. It is worth noting that, although the exigencies of limited budgets forced this approach, it is also an approach we favour.
To begin, the librarian invited a small cross-directorate group of LRO volunteers to an initiation meeting, the goal of which was to create the framework for a “Community of Purpose”. The only requirement for attendance was an interest in using knowledge better. The librarian made deliberate efforts to include staff from different levels as well as directorates. Charged with carrying out the interviewing and assessment, we knew that a mixed project group would help break down organisational barriers, moving people to a safe place where status didn’t matter and everyone had a voice.
The project sponsor knew she was taking a risk. It was counter-cultural to go out and search the organisation for good practice stories rather than doing an assessment based on number crunching. In the first instance there was a healthy amount of scepticism, coupled with a sense of uncertainty about how different this work would be from the more predictable and familiar analytical approaches. However, most volunteers had a genuine desire to look at information and knowledge management from a non IT perspective, a conviction that things could be better and curiosity about the new techniques – AI and story in particular – and therefore the group expressed a desire to continue.
At the centre of our proposal to them about how they might approach things were two suggestions. Firstly that they, as a community, consider themselves as agents who would prompt cross directorate conversations to take place, on which they would eavesdrop. Secondly that they would consider a more narrative approach to reporting, and seek to get under the cultural skin of what worked really well and what needed to work differently around the flows and stores of information and knowledge across the organisation.
Having established this as the in principal approach, it was then up to the lead on the Sparknow team to provide individual coaching and support for the LRO project lead. Sparknow then held a training session for the volunteers in using AI - a technique designed to focus on good practice - and supported the group in developing the set of questions to use in the interviewing phase. We then coached the team to ensure each member was comfortable with facilitating dialogues between two other members of their organisation, using clear and simple templates to ensure a coherent approach. Together we set a target for involving a representative selection of LRO staff.
What came next exceeded our expectations. The team became so enthused by the ideas and the project that they created a name for themselves – the Sparkles – and became a real community. In fact, we had got a bit nervous at this stage that we had lured them into taking too much risk. We offered a fallback approach to the conversations which were being set up, but by then the Sparkles had taken over, and went off with gusto and facilitated their interviews using both AI and story.
Holding a mirror up to the present, people shared impressions of culture by talking about a “typical” working day in the LRO. The pairs then discussed motivations for, or inhibitors to knowledge sharing, identified examples of good practice and made proposals about what could be done better. Finally they discussed the LRO Office Information System (OIS) - which had undergone rapid development in recent years – and their physical workspace, considering how these might better support their ambitions to become a learning organisation.
35 people participated in dialogues or interviews, about 25 % of the total number of LRO staff. This was a good result, in view of the enormous time and business constraints staff members had to deal with. In fact, we rather felt that even if nothing else had happened afterwards, the combination of a team of Sparkles who had taken this on, and the conversations that had taken place (which would otherwise not have happened) , might be cultural progress enough, without the report which followed.
The interview findings were then synthesised by the LRO project lead into a short report for the Board, outlining a vision for the future of their organisation in 5 years time, a place where knowledge and information flowed well. Following her attendance at a Sparknow storytelling workshop, and an additional visioning session, facilitated by Sparknow for the Sparkles later that year, the report changed dramatically. The LRO project lead used these concepts to re-write the strategy for the Board, turning it from a dry report-style document into a story, which made a much bigger impact when she delivered it at an open lunchtime session. After the work had been presented to the senior committee, the CEO ran into one of the people who delivered it and said “I suppose I can’t say you aren’t working now if you are chatting at the lift.”
Impact
“(The) project group members recognise ways in which the project has helped them develop skills in areas such as dealing with a high level of risk throughout a project. Participation at times amounted almost to an act of faith or membership of a secret society, a belief that benefits would emerge even if outcomes were not clearly defined. Dealing with uncertainty, fighting time pressures, accounting to managers for time spent, and responding to questions from colleagues about a project where they themselves were feeling their way was a learning experience for the team… who wondered at times if it was going to work, and wondered if the results would be worth it. Our experience has been that it has been worth it, for reasons which were not necessarily part of our original motivation. Although the work of the Project Group has ended, as individuals we remain committed to continuing to work towards better knowledge management and organisational change”
A deliberate aim of our project was to try to put people together who might not normally meet. Several participants commented that the experience had been unusually rewarding, giving them insights into what less familiar colleagues do, allowing them to discover new information which would help them in their job.
“The dialogue facilitators and participants reported many instances of learning something new, either about their partner in the dialogue, or something the other participant knew but they did not.”
There was a real richness in the storytelling aspect of the interviews. The use of narrative helped people explain complex projects in an effective and memorable way and provided the organisation with long-term assets. Individuals really had to think about their own responsibilities around the way they manage knowledge and information flows. This ensured a new way of working was embedded into people’s minds rather than by just creating a report as a deliverable.