Understand how knowledge gets created, shared and used in your organisation. Improve cross-team and cross-silo working. Develop and support effective communities of best practice.

Knowledge Management

“Companies...have a hard time distinguishing between the cost of paying people and the value of investing in them” (T. A. Stewart, Intellectual Capital (1997))

It’s a cliché to say “people are our greatest asset”, but we believe that this is completely true – that’s why Think focuses on people and organisational development. But, however much an organisation develops the knowledge, skills and behaviour of its employees, how much of that knowledge is actually used each day for the benefit of the business? Probably the most famous quote in this area is from Lew Platt, former Chief Executive of Hewlett Packard: “If HP knew what HP knows, we would be three times more profitable”.

If any of the following statements ring true to you, then you may have a knowledge management challenge:

• “I worry about what we’d do if one of our key employees left”
• “Our team meetings are spent providing information to each other, rather than discussing and creating solutions”
• “In discussions, the person with the most qualifications gets most attention, rather than the person with the best ideas”
• “Different parts of our organisation don’t share information with each other”
• “We’re slow to make decisions”
• "I don’t feel like my organisation understands, or makes the best of, the things that I know”

At Think Associates, with our partners Agile Tribe we take a new approach to knowledge management.

The original response to the knowledge management challenge was to try to write down everything that employees knew, that was or might one day be important to the organisation. This “database approach” was fine in theory, but impossible in practice. Imagine trying to write down everything you knew: some things are impossible to put into words (tacit knowledge), and even if you could explain them, you’d spend your whole life writing, rather than creating or doing! So our approach to knowledge management is different – rather than encouraging people to submit everything they know, to the organisation, we encourage organisations to build a set of maps and signposts. All that organisations and employees really need to know and track is “who knows what I need to know”. This is the social networking approach to knowledge management. We’re all familiar, now, with social networking – the “Facebook generation”. Knowledge networking is the application of social networking to organisational development.

We have online tools and consultancy models to help you to:

• Understand the difference between people’s job descriptions, and what their peers actually value them for
• Understand and improve the knowledge flows across the organisation, improving organisational agility and effectiveness
• Use social networks to manage the organisation as a society of individuals, rather than a set of boxes and lines on an organisation chart
• Implement a knowledge-sharing culture and increase the proportion of an individual’s knowledge that it actually used and valued in the workplace.