Day 2–Knowledge is Power: Managing the Lifeblood of a Design Org

km1

— Excited to be here and part of amazing group of speakers, here to talk about how knowledge management (KM) is power and the importance of disseminating knowledge
  • Zooming out to focus on KM at higher-level

km2

— A bit of info about myself
  • Been in UX field for 25+ years and co-owned consultancy since 2003
— KM is what I think about and have vested interest in

 

km3

— The agenda will be as follows:
  • A brief into to topic
  • A background on knowledge management
  • 6 practices
  • 5 tips

 

km4

— I’ll paint a picture you can relate to, and place it in the context of KM

 

— To do well in this role, you need to learn a lot about how the org works, how to deliver value, and do it fast

 

km5

— To go back to our example of a new hire, as a member of the e-commerce team you are given access to requirements, UX briefs, UI library, Slack channels, team directory

 

— UXOps team gives you playbook templates, design system process documentation tool profiel
  • Mentor to help you acclimate
— Org wide you have clear org charts and company vision, glossary of org and industry specific terms

 

— This makes you feel you have evertyhing
  • But most of us work at orgs, that are not at this ideal

 

km6

— So why KM?
  1. Drives innovation
  2. Increases efficiency and effectiveness
  3. Supports better and faster decision making and problem solving
  4. Improves collaboration and communication
  5. Facilitates a culture of continuous learning
  6. Supports quicker reaction to changing dynamics
— The more you know, the more you can make informed decisions, and have the ability to create controlled events
  • This leads to measurable impact, and that is the  power of knowledge management

 

km7

— McKinsey and Forbes have the following quotes on importance of Knowledge Management.
  • Forbes: Companies lose $315 billion per year by failing to share knwoeldge
  • McKinsey: Effective KM can boost worker productivity by 20-25%
— Quotes show impact of KM on bottom-line

 

km8

— We seem to be in state of perma-crisis and this year requires us to do a lot of job shifting
  • Function to enable design excellence despite landscape
  • Managing UX knowledge is key for this
  • To help our profession weather the storm, need more comprehensive grasp of KM
    • More to understand and do, to be better KM

 

km9

— Hope you will walk away with following:
  • Deeper understanding
  • Best practices and consideration
  • Tips to get started

 

km10

— So let’s level set on what knowledge is and isn’t
  • Skills you have an understanding, which you can build  up on with further knowledge

 

km11

— Two types of knowledge exist:
  • Explicit: Expressed in words and numbers, and written down and stored
    • Playbooks, research repositories, examples of this
    • Only 20% of institutional knowledge is explicit
  • Tacit: Implied without being stated, and are abilities or skills that people know from personal experience
    • Ideas, competencies, mental models, instincts, attitudes, are tacit
  • Tacit is bulk knowledge for providing a sustainable advantage
    • Need way to share and document as much as possible

 

km12

— So what is KM?
  • Definition:  The process of identifying, organizing, storing, and disseminating information within an organization
— Feels focused on explicit knowledge, but any KM solution does need to address tacit and explicit knowledge.

 

km13

— Some useful best practices are in relation to people, processes, tools, and artifacts for DesignOps solutions

 

km14

— First, engage right people and know who is involved. Common roles include:
  1. Knowledge Managers: Process owners and documenters (DesignOps would be design system lead)
  2. Knowledge Contributors: SMEs that produce knowledge (anyone with UX title or leading UX folks, doing the work with knowledge to share)
  3. Champions: Members of executive team that values UX and UX knowledge
— These already exist, but give existing knowledge managers responsibilities and have them think of themselves as stewards

 

km15

— Also support both explicit and tacit knowledge
  • Explicit: Finding knowledge gap and what isn’t documented
  • Capture: Document key info
  • Process: Clean-up for repeat and re-use
  • Share: Disseminate out the knowledge
  • Use: Ritualizing the knowledge
— Variations of diagram and part of common components
  • I feel comfortable with Steps 1-4 as being most understood steps
  • Steps 4-6 are the biggest hurdle

 

km16

— Tacit knowledge is shared person to person, instead of artifact to person
  • Tacit requires a place to share info like a mentorship program, and needs foster engagement and communication
  • Encourage thought leadership and holding knowledge for selves and making it more findable and searchable
— Tacit gets harder as you move through steps

 

km17

— Four factors for distributing tacit knowledge
  1. Trust:  Without it, people unwilling to share. People need to feel comfortable giving knowledge power to others
  2. Self-Efficacy:  Confidence in ability to achieve goals. High self-efficacy, more likely to share knowledge with others
  3. IT Support: Making sure  there is infrastructure for frictionless collaboration
  4. Knowledge Tacitness: There are degrees of tacitness, and the more tacit, the harder knowledge is to articulate

 

km18

— Turn artifacts, and outputs of Knowledge Management, into a KM process
  • Knowledge can’t present itself, but can be wrapped up with necessary info to be relevant and useful

 

km19

— See examples of templates, audience-specific use cases above, along with guidance and examples of use, and access to SMEs who contributed it to knowledge to make sure knowledge not stale or inaccurate
  • Also the ability to provide reviews

 

km20

— For tacit knowledge, there are still ways for wayfinding through knowledge containers like an employee profile in directory
  • Listing out communities of practice and skills and expertise, product worked on, publications put out
  • Should have good sense of what to be knowledgable about
— Offer a search profile for people to draw upon

 

km21

— Next select the tools to use:
  • Explicit
    • See the list in the slide above
  • But remember, if something is hard to find or use, great info doesn’t help anyone
    • Design storage tool is a must, and need to consider what is  the lowest barrier to entry and what people will actually use

 

km22

— Important of no one-size solution for tacit knowledge and need host of tools

 

km23

— Not just knowing more, but doing more with what you know
  • To be successful, need to go to learning enablement
  • Plenty of resources from Design For How People Learn

 

km24

— Activation of learning outcomes needs to start along the way
  • Figure out what info to capture, when needed, accepted format
  • Skills for new knowledge
    • Opportunity to practice skills
  • Motivation  for new knowledge
  • Habits are new behaviors and take advantage of that, and what to unlearn
  • Environment as supporting/hindering access knowledge
  • Communication as clear expectation for what to do with knowledge once you have it

 

 

km25

— Make sure to account for organizational context
  • Culture of learning: Are people encouraged to see themselves as stewards of knowledge, instead of just SMEs, and sharing knowledge with others
  • Operational Structure: Each org lens, might require specific artifacts, processes, and outcomes
  • Knowledge Managment Approach: Org-wide managment goal
    • Clear expectations of what gets store or pockets of org and pockets of own thing
  • Knowledge Origin: Certain info will be trusted more  from bottom-up versus top-down
    • Need to know what point of origin will bring most success

 

km26

— So now let’s talk about operationalizing the practices

 

km27

— First thing is to listen
  • Use design thinking approach to find places to listen and all roles designers collaborate with, and where knowledge is available
  • Sticking points and processes and areas where people held back

 

km28

— Use the minimum lovable product framework
  • Minimum amount of info to pull things off, and consider how it will be shared out
  • For tacit knowledge have one community of practice and have a monthly meeting series

 

km29

— Harvest existing artifacts or changes, like:
  • A chatbot for knowledge retrieval and borrowing from external knowledge repositories
  • Internal communities of practices like DesignOps assembly or Rosenfeld Media practices

 

km30

— Build trust with values and behaviors that demonstrate them
  • Trust should be core DesignOps team value
  • Define behaviors that show what values look like, and role model what trust looks like

 

km31

— Mastery experience determines self-efficacy
  • Set realistic and achievable challenges and demonstrate success to others and encourage them to try new things
  • Avoid setting yourself up for failure
    • Don’t participate in projects with high-level of failure

 

km32

— So to recap
  1. Engage the right people
  2. Support both explicit and tacit processes
  3. Select the tools people you want to use
  4. Turn artifacts into knowledge assets
  5. Activate learning outcomes
  6. Account for organizational context

 

km33

— Listen, start small, and harvest existing artifacts

 

km34

— Thank you

 

FAQ

 

  1. What about tribal knowledge as a subset of tacit knowledge? What strategies to integrate that in the KM system?
    1. Tribal can be somewhat codified and tacit
    2. For how to incorporate both, consider direct access to context
      1. Weave tacit and explicit knowledge together
      2. For communities of practice, help make knowledge there searchable
  1. Tips on culture of learning, if immature learning perspective in the firm?
    1. Look for folks in org who are helping set tone for org, and who can verablize it and what it can embody and work with that and within  DesignOPs and the team
  1. Struggled for getting people to find info within the org?
    1. More socialization of knowledge that is out there
    2. Make knowledge more easy to find and inject it into those places
  1. Tacit knowledge should exist in explicit form.  Can enterprise knowledge management reduce the gap between knowledge types? If not, why doesn’t artifact  reduce gap between explcit and implicit?
    1. Need to make link between implicit and explicit knowledge between what is documented and what isn’t
    2. Companies typically don’t think of tacit knowledge as part of knowledge management
      1. Not seen as intentionally cultivated resource
    3. Consistentcy is key, but focus on both
    4. Why doesn’t it happen? Many reasons
      1. Common issue is orgs building community, but forget to have someon to tend the knowledge and make sure it is socialized and talking about useful info
      2. Stewardship is critical
      3. If you don’t do that from the get-go, will die quickly