In Learning to Fly p 231 we refer to Albert Mehrabian “Silent Messages”. 7% of the message is in the words, 38% is in the tone of voice, and 55% is body language. CreativityWorks challenges how we interpret this with the following animation http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dboA8cag1M. What do you think? And how will you communicate the response?
I have just attended my first school reunion, something I have studiously ignored for a number of years. My fear was it would be a contest to see who had made the best of their life and those that hadn’t wouldn’t participate.
In the event those fears were unfounded and I had a very pleasant evening catching up with people I have not seen since our teenage years. It was nothing grand – a spacious private venue, a bar, and a table of buffet food. Much of the buffet was left untouched and the bar staff were underemployed. People were far more interested in catching up and reconnecting.
As I approached the venue – a couple of people stared at me strangely. They were trying to relate the ‘me now’ to the one they remembered all those years ago. I couldn’t place them, so I stared harder. A nickname was mentioned and suddenly it came back to me. Within minutes I was remembering them as they are today not the photo image I remembered as they were then. And amazingly the events, the jokes, the scrapes we were in came back by association. And I suddenly remembered more names.
I went in and as I moved around the room reconnecting, the thing that hit me most was that it was the facial expressions, the mannerisms, the nervous laughter that had remained most unchanged. The body had aged but the spirit of the person was no different.
At the end of the evening there were a few people whose name I knew and remembered but the person was not the same as the one I remembered from way back.
It struck me that knowledge is like this. Once we learn and know something then it is a photo image and it is real and even though time has moved on, and the world has moved on, we are stuck with the frozen image of that knowledge. And by association we assume all related knowledge remains the same. Sometimes it takes a ‘reunion’ to reframe that knowledge, and there will be some that is so etched in our brain that we cannot let go of the knowledge that was. When we stop learning, stop being receptive, then we risk being stuck with outdated knowledge that is not relevant.
Someone shared a simple example of this at a recent meeting at Henley KM Forum.
Which of these two lines is longer?
<—————————————>
or >——————————————<
It’s a familiar trick and we respond automatically ‘They are both the same.’
But they are not. It is a different context and actually they lower line is longer. Because knowledge is familiar we shouldn’t stop seeing it afresh.
It was great to see everyone again!
At 10.06am on July 22 2005, Jean Charles de Menezes was shot seven times in the head and once in the shoulder by police officers who had followed him on to a tube train at Stockwell, south London.
It was Scotland Yard’s first use of a shoot-to-kill policy designed to tackle suicide bombers, and came the day after four unsuccessful attempts to detonate devices on London’s transport system. Let’s remind ourselves of the context. Two weeks earlier there were a series of coordinated bomb blasts that hit London’s public transport system during the morning rush hour. The bombings killed 52 commuters and the four suicide bombers, injured 700, and caused disruption of the city’s transport system and creating fear and panic amongst those who lived and worked in London, and beyond.
Just two weeks later with the security forces on high alert, four attempted bomb attacks again disrupted part of London’s public transport system. Fortunately only the detonators of the bombs exploded and the bombers escaped. There followed an intense manhunt for the bombers believing them capable of striking again at any moment.
Police were hunting the four men, and they thought they may have found one of them. They were stalking a block of flats because the address was written on a piece of paper found in one of the rucksacks holding a failed bomb. Menezes happened to live in another flat in the block and was followed as soon as he left the building that morning.
It is horrific that someone innocent died, a tragedy for the family and traumatic for the policemen involved. It is a pity that we cannot focus on the lessons to learn in preparation for when it might happen again rather than trying to assign blame. The current inquest is designed to get at what happened, but the press seemed more concerned with witch-hunts and forcing resignations. I am sure the intent that day was to protect the lives of the public and the police were very conscious their own lives were at risk.
But have we learned the lessons of past experiences? Unfortunately it is not the first time that an innocent man has been killed by the police. Malcolm Gladwell author of The Tipping Point had months earlier published another book called “Blink.”
In it he explores moments when we know something without knowing why, when we make snap judgements by blocking out the irrelevant and focusing on narrow slices of experience. It can be powerful when it works but it can be disastrous when it goes awry. When stress levels rise we narrow our focus, time slows down and in Gladwell’s view we become temporarily autistic.
Chapter 6 is entitled “Seven Seconds in the Bronx.” In it he recounts a real incident in which four police officers end up killing an innocent man, Amaddou Diallo, who was an immigrant from Guinea. He had stepped outside his apartment at half past midnight to get some air. The cops, on patrol in a Street Crime Unit were travelling together in one vehicle, decided he looked suspicious as they drove past. They backed the car up for another look. He stayed where he was, a behaviour the police decided was brazen. He was simply curious. When two of the cops got out of the car and moved towards him he turned slightly to his side and went for something in his pocket. They decided he was dangerous. He was not. He was reaching for his wallet to show ID. The cops between them fired 41 bullets into him, killing him instantly.
There is no evidence that the police were bad people, or racists or out to get Diallo. On the other hand it was not a simple accident, because the policemen made a series of a catastrophic misjudgements, and an innocent man who was outside his home for a breath of fresh air was gunned down.
The parallels with the Stockwell shooting are apparent. What can we do to prepare our police to cope with those high stress situations and still make the correct judgements?
How do we create the right conditions to learn from mistakes, rather than identify who is to blame and make them suffer? Think about your own organisation. What can you do to encourage learning from mistakes? What do you need to do differently to enable the right conditions?
Judging from the results of the ‘Adecco Demographic Fitness Survey’, most firms don’t know where to find knowledge. The Adecco Institute is a research centre focused on the field of work and how work impacts individuals, regions and organizations. In late 2007, it conducted a survey across the UK, France, Germany, Italy and Spain to assess whether organisations are preparing for a workforce that is increasingly aging. By 2050, the population aged between 15 and 64, i.e. the share of the population considered as being of employable age, will drop by one fifth.
Adecco used a Demographic Fitness Index to measure five factors that influence a firm’s ability to leverage an ageing workforce:
• Career Management
• Lifelong Learning
• Knowledge Management
• Health Management
• Diversity Management
Career Management addresses the needs of both employers and employees, and helps develop a level of loyalty to the firm that cannot be fostered with traditional perks like pay increases. Employees who feel that their employer fails to accommodate their needs will look for opportunities elsewhere – taking their expertise with them.
Lifelong Learning is increasingly essential in a world of constant change. Both employers and employees must be committed to lifelong learning in order to keep ahead of the demands of business.
Knowledge Management is the effective management of the knowledge that employees typically carry around in their heads – whether this be business specific knowledge, vendor contacts, business processes, or even who to call to get certain problems resolved. It is essential that companies understand the risks they run when key employees depart.
Health Management addresses the needs of workers as they age – sensitivity to workers ergonomic and physical needs as well as encouraging healthy catering and providing ongoing health checks and consultations.
Diversity Management recognizes the necessity of creating a work environment that values each individual’s contribution – regardless of age or rank. Diversity management ensures that work groups include both older and younger workers.
Let’s focus on knowledge management or how well a firm tracks business-critical and company-specific knowledge. They asked those surveyed about the steps they took regarding the use, safeguarding and renewal of knowledge in their organisation. They offered a list of “tools” for consideration:
Most used were Use of external consultants, Co-operation with other companies and Targeted training. At the other end of the scale less than a third of the organisations surveyed used think tanks, “Yellow Pages” or internal online forums. However take up within these organisations was patchy (averaging 43%).
The UK performed worse than the European average: 31% of firms in the five countries claim to have conducted a full and complete analysis to identify the holders of business-critical knowledge in their firm. Only 18% of UK firms made the same claim. And only 25% of British firms have conducted an analysis of the risk of lost knowledge when individual employees leave.
When staff members leave, we lose vital expertise – explicit knowledge, such as how a product or process works, as well as implicit knowledge embedded in customer relationships, internal networks and firm culture and values. All of these can affect our ability to produce, innovate and compete.
These gaps in analysis will be critical to companies as the rate of retirement accelerates, and key business knowledge walks out the door – often, knowledge that isn’t missed until it is no longer there.
I wonder, if you now think about the knowledge assets that your company has, to what extent have you carried out an analysis of business-critical knowledge assets in your organisation?
I’ll start by suggesting that knowledge is what we use as the basis for our actions. But as I work with different organisations and different individuals what I have noticed is that people are talking about different types of knowledge and these must be managed differently.
Typically we know for one of the following reasons:
· I recognise from a previous experience as in “I know that face”, “I have travelled this way before”, “I have encountered a problem like this in my previous job”, or “I have practice of doing it.”
· I have evidence and can replicate the result; it is quantified, written in a document.
· I understand because I have studied this, I understand because I have listened to what you say and can make sense of it, I understand because I have observed what is going on; or
· I believe, I have faith, I commit to without certainty, I trust you and you won’t let me come to harm.
As an example consider the debate caused by the Carbon dating of the Turin shroud. The Turin shroud is a linen cloth bearing the hidden image of a man who appears to have been crucified. It is kept in the royal chapel of the Cathedral of Saint John the Baptist in Turin, Italy. It is believed by many to be a cloth worn by Jesus Christ at the time of his burial. In 1988 carbon dating estimated a date range of 1260 – 1390, suggesting this belief was wrong. This was convincing enough for most scientists, though caused a real dilemma for deeply religious scientists. However the evidence of science is not sufficient to convince the true believers. In fact a whole industry and science has sprung up around the Turin shroud called “Sindology.”
Why is it that each of us can see the same thing but conclude something different?
If we look at each type of knowledge in turn the mechanisms for capturing and sharing are different, some more straightforward than others.
Geoff
