know what you don’t know

How Collective-We Firms Eat Exclusive-We Competitors for Lunch

Poorly managed organizations are likely to function – or, I should say malfunction – with frequent use of a divisive verbal tactic called the exclusive “we” (sometimes called the royal “we”). When someone uses the pronoun “we” to refer to everyone – except the person being spoken to – they are using the exclusive we, typically to single out that person and stifle communication.

collective-we-cartoonFor example, I’m willing to bet most people have heard a so-called “leader” make a cutting remark like this:

“We don’t do things that way here.”
“Will you stop asking so many questions? We don’t tolerate ‘fishing expeditions’ around here!”

This kind of behavior is also a sign of a dysfunctional company culture, in which information sharing is discouraged in favor of information hoarding. Hardly a recipe for business success. 

Successful companies use the word “we” a lot too – but in a much better way:

“What should we be doing that we aren’t doing now?”
“These questions are important. We need to be able to answer them.”

Now that’s more like it! This time the speaker is invoking the collective “we” to equally include everyone in the room to foster open communication.

True leaders are builders of a collective-we culture, actively encouraging and supporting information sharing and collaboration. A collective-we organization is therefore much more likely to utilize knowledge management (KM)/enterprise information management (EIM) tools effectively. Doing so enables the organization to not only solve problems more quickly, but also proactively find problems before they turn into a crisis.

Know What You Don't Know by Michael RobertoIn his excellent book Know What You Don’t Know, business school professor Michael Roberto urged organizations to develop problem finding skills.

Michael Roberto recently discussed three key ways KM/EIM solutions can enable the collective knowledge, the collective-we, of your organization:

1. Organizations must answer, “Why did we fail?”

Take a hard look at a failure that took place in the organization. Ask yourself… How could we have seen this coming? Were there some telltale signals we missed? Why did we miss them?

Such an unflinching self-assessment after a business failure will often reveal misinformed decisions caused by incomplete information that did not include critical business signals. These signals usually do not reside within structured data sources such as data warehouses; rather, they are often found within unstructured content: text-based information buried within documents, customer notes, wikis, email, news and websites.

A modern KM platform will integrate and harmonize disparate enterprise data sources – structured and unstructured, internal and external – for fast, on-demand access by knowledge workers. This capability is a key prerequisite to becoming a collective-we organization capable of effective problem finding.

2. Boil large quantities of information down to what really matters.

If you write a 100-page report, no one is going to read it. The answer is not a big report… The most important thing is boiling it down into key bullets… and technology can play a role to effectively share those key takeaways.

A unified KM/EIM system will index, find and present the key takeaways from every “100-page report no one is going to read” on demand, so users can utilize them whenever they are needed to help directly address any given matter at hand.

In a real world example, a level 1 IT support rep for a leading financial services firm resolved, in the first call, a critical stop enterprise application failure incident with no known workaround. The rep used the company’s KM system to search for a possible resolution. Success! The system found the answer, extracted from a 100-plus page application development transitional document written by one of the original programmers.

Few people had probably ever read that entire document, or even knew it existed; and yet, the company’s unified KM/EIM platform empowered the company’s collective-we from halfway around the world to solve a serious problem, by finding and presenting the key points from that document precisely when it was needed.

3. You can’t chase down every piece of information yourself… so ask for help! 

Part of the job of the leader is to recognize that you have talent around you that can help you. But you have to actively seek out that help.

The most effective companies, particularly global companies with people spread out around the world, are using new tools to get people sharing their expertise and information across different silos.

The same financial services firm mentioned above also added to their KM system useful information about their own employees, including each worker’s areas of subject matter expertise. Through such “expert finder” capabilities, a worker within a global organization can find and seek help from co-workers, whether they’re down the hall or anywhere else in the world – once again, empowering the organization’s collective-we to cross international boundaries.

Collective-we organizations fully leverage the power of KM/EIM to fully leverage the collective intelligence of the entire organization. They find business problems well before they become serious issues, as well as seize new business opportunities before the competition even knows they exist. How about you?

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“Something is not Right!” Don’t Ignore Your Gut When Analyzing Information

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Ludwig Bemelmans’ classic children’s book Madeline has been enjoyed by generations of kids — my daughters included. The story also has an important lesson on “knowing what you don’t know.”

In Madeline, Miss Clavel, the teacher and caregiver of twelve little girls in a Paris boarding school, suddenly awoke one night sensing trouble:

In the middle of the night
Miss Clavel turned on her light
and said, “Something is not right!”

Sure enough, she found little Madeline crying in her bed, in pain from appendicitis. Of course, all turns out well, thanks to Miss Clavel listening to her personal sense that something was not right.

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Having frequently read Madeline to my daughters years ago, that story came to mind while reading Know What You Don’t Know: How Great Leaders Prevent Problems Before They Happen, the first of many excellent books by business professor Michael Roberto.

Perhaps one of the most troubling causes of unseen problems mushrooming into catastrophes noted in Roberto’s book is an organizational culture that pooh-poohs intuition in favor of hard data:

Some organizations exhibit a highly analytical culture [to the point that] employees may self-censor their concerns.

In one case, a manager told me, “I was trained to rely on data that pointed in the opposite direction of my hunch that we had a problem.”

The manager’s hunch was correct; there was indeed a serious problem. And yet, the manager, “relied on the data and ignored that nagging feeling in my gut.”

Roberto drives this point home with a medical crisis spanning hospitals across the US: Troublingly high levels of cardiac arrest among admitted patients. One study found hospital personnel who observed some advance warning sign(s) of cardiac arrest alerted a doctor only 25% of the time! Why? Nurses and other staff often felt a Miss Clavel-like sense that “Something is not right” with a patient who was indeed nearing cardiac arrest, based on a personal observation, such as a change in the patient’s mental condition, or a higher level of fatigue or discomfort — but with no accompanying change in patient monitoring levels — so the concern is effectively ignored in favor of the patient’s quantifiable data.

The consequences of a hospital culture that unwittingly encourages caregivers to ignore their intuition are high. Once the window of opportunity to avert cardiac arrest closes, a life or death “Code Blue” crisis is at hand.

As Roberto’s hospital case study illustrates, a gnawing sense that “Something is not right” should not be ignored, but rather recognized as an alert that you probably do not have all the facts, but just some of the facts — that is, you don’t know what you don’t know.

Recognizing this issue, many hospitals have implemented new Rapid Response Teams that have sharply reduced Code Blue incidents. Nurses and staff are actively encouraged to report observed changes in patient affect, reported symptoms and other concerns, even if they are not supported by patient data. Once notified, the Rapid Response Team will arrive at an affected patient’s bedside within minutes and actively diagnose whether further testing or treatment to prevent a cardiac arrest is warranted. Unlike a Code Blue team that “fights the fire” of a full-on heart attack, Roberto writes, a Rapid Response Team “detects the smoke” of a potential heart attack.

Traditional data warehousing and data analytics vendors often present their solutions as a way to make decisions ‘based on objective facts’ rather than relying on ‘emotional gut feel.’ The problem is, however, the known ‘objective facts’, the known ‘hard data’, may not provide a complete — or even accurate — picture of what’s really going on. For example, structured data sources generally cannot on their own integrate vital additional business signals often buried within such text-based information sources as field reports, knowledge bases, wikis and other documents. 

So, listen to your gut, your intuition, as a signal that you need to dig deeper into the matter at hand. Actively seek out further information beyond the hard data available to you. Compare that information with your hard data and “connect the dots” for a far more complete picture, which may well yield surprising new insights.

What I find exciting is that unified information access is playing a vital role in empowering managers and leaders to connect those dots between data and other silos of information to realize those critical new insights.

Unified information access integrates, joins and presents all related information — structured data and unstructured content alike — to complete the informational picture and significantly expand what organizations “know” to determine with confidence whether “Something is not right.”