Coaching Knowledge Workers (not "managing knowledge")

Shawn Morrissey sent me a link to a post by Jim McGee, called A shift from managing knowledge to coaching knowledge workers.

"This shift in perspective is relevant to understanding why so many knowledge management efforts have failed and why focusing on managing knowledge work is likely to be more fruitful.

The fatal flaw in thinking in terms of knowledge management is in adopting the perspective of the organization as the relevant beneficiary. Discussions of knowledge management start from the premise that the organization is not realizing full value from the knowledge of its employees. While likely true, this fails to address the much more important question from a knowledge worker's perspective of "what's in it for me?". It attempts to squeeze the knowledge management problem into an industrial framework eliminating that which makes the deliverables of knowledge work most valuable--their uniqueness, their variability. This industrial, standardizing, perspective provokes suspicion and both overt and covert resistance. It also starts a cycle of controls, incentives, rewards, and punishments to elicit what once were natural behaviors.

Suppose, instead, that we turn our attention from the problems of the organization to the problems of the individual knowledge worker. What happens? What problems do we set out to solve and where might this lead us?

Our goal is to make it easier for a knowledge worker to create and share unique results. Instead of specifying a standard output to be created and the standardized steps to create that output, we need to start with more modest goals. I've written about this before (see Is knowledge work improvable?, Sharing knowledge with yourself, and Knowledge work as craft). In general terms, I advocate attacking friction, noise, and other barriers to doing good knowledge work.

This approach also leads you to a strategy of coaching knowledge workers toward improving their ability to perform, instead of training them to a set standard of performance. In this respect, knowledge workers are more like world class athletes than either assembly line workers or artists. There are building block skills and techniques that can be developed and the external perspective of a coach can help improve both. But it's the individual knowledge worker who deploys the skills and techniques to create a unique result."

Wow. This actually sheds some light on the "deer-in-the-headlight" look our team gets when we talk about this stuff. One of the tactics we've employed in describing what our team does is to get co-workers to talk about the pain they feel when they have to share or find information. There are too many steps to take to post stuff, and more importantly, too many places to look for relevant information or people. When we break it down to identifying the problem, and coming up with a solution that meets their individual needs, it all makes sense to them.

Nobody wants to "manage knowlege", they want to get their work done with less effort and better results.