This post replies to a comment by Professor Steve Cavaleri, my co-author in the PSP blog series, on Part Three of this NGKM series.
Steve:“. . . many people believe that First Generation KM is “KM” — ‘in its entirety’ and Second Generation approaches are not KM.”
Joe: That’s true, but the issue is not what people believe, but how we should explicate the term KM in order to develop the KM field in the most useful way. Limiting KM to its First Generation meaning is not a viable way to explicate “KM.” I’ve provided some of the reasons why it’s not viable in another place.
Steve: “Second, it is plausible that others do not see any reason or value for distinguishing between first and second generations of KM.”
Joe: Again, I agree that many think there’s no value in making that distinction, but some reasons why it’s valuable to make the distinction are also given here.
Steve: “I believe a central issue is that First Generation KM is perceived as being simpler to manage than Second Generation KM and is viewed as having a clearer, more definitive Return on Investment.”
Joe: Again, that perception is out there, but it is incorrect. The history of KM shows that a high percentage of First Generation KM projects and programs have failed. Since First Generation KM often comes down to an approach devoted to enhancing knowledge sharing, I think the criticisms of a knowledge sharing approach to KM I’ve given here show that First Generation KM doesn’t offer a more definitive return on investment at all, but only confusion of information sharing with knowledge sharing.
Steve: “As Steven Spear notes in his articles and books, ultimately, systems, such as the Toyota Production System (TPS), become more efficient than others because they are continually improved, foster innovation, redesigned, and debugged by workers who focus on problem solving. Second Generation KM is very compatible with such an approach because there are cultural supports, job designs, and knowledge processing already built into the system.
Joe: I agree. But, even more, I think that Second Generation KM is built into the TPS, and is the foundation of its Quality Management processes. See an earlier blog in the Problem Solving Pattern series we are writing together reviewing Steven Spear’s Chasing the Rabbit.
Steve: “My guess is that when you overlay a Second Generation KM system over a highly mechanical organization with a culture oriented toward supporting a Tayloristic style of doing things — you get chaos. Despite Tom Peters ideas of twenty years ago that they need to learn to thrive on chaos, in the name of competitiveness, many companies have dis-invested in adaptive capabilities and left themselves unable to handle richer approaches, such as Second Generation KM. So to wrap up, I believe that these companies are not drawn to Second Generation KM approaches, and they may be ill-equipped in terms of culture and leadership to effectively implement them. However, I believe that if organizations commit to such strategies, they can implement it incrementally and transform themselves over time. In the current economic climate, it seems that will be less likely, but as competitors, such as Toyota, perfect their use of high impact KM approaches, competitors will have few options other than to change or fail.”
Joe: Steve, I’m not sure what you mean by “overlay,” but I agree that the introduction of Second Generation KM into a Tayloristic organization is difficult, and requires an incremental approach, evolving the organization from a closed to an open Problem Solving Pattern. In my award-winning article with Mark McElroy in The Learning Organization Journal (which you edited during your time as editor of TLO), we write about the Decision Interruption Approach to KM and point to an incremental strategy using it. I also wrote more about this approach in my KMRP article available here.
Finally, most of your comment seems to be flowing from your observations about “Tayloristic” organizations in the private sector. However, your comment is directed at one of my posts on National Governmental Knowledge Management. That and other posts in the series are about the US Federal Government, and the problem of establishing a National KM Center headed by a National CKO. If we do formulate such an organization it won’t be Tayloristic, nor is there anything in the Federal environment, with its current emphasis on problem solving across a broad front, suggesting that the Obama Administration would be more favorable to the narrow and, I think, vague and ambiguous, First Generation KM orientation than to the much broader and intellectually coherent Second Generation KM orientation I’ve proposed.