Remixing 2 articles: Wikileaks' US embassy cables and organisational design

On 28 November 2010 I read two articles. At first glance, these 2 articles were not related to each other. But by remixing them in these weblog, they now are!

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I just read an article in the Guardian about the leaked US embassy cables. This article is a terrifying account of current global relationships. However, it also includes an interesting passage which can be linked to the ability of organisations to share knowledge.

Many reports on how the 9/11 attacks could be avoided were emphasising on better information and knowledge sharing among the different intelligence agencies. Therefore, information and knowledge sharing became key in counter-terrorism. More than 5 years after these reports were being published, we can see how intelligent agencies try to become better in information and knowledge sharing, but completely dismiss the interwoven complexities of an environment that promotes information and knowledge sharing. One of these complexities is the culture. And it is obviously that the US intelligent agencies thought they could continue their Cold War culture in a interconnected global world where information and knowledge sharing are so important. The article describes this as follow:

Asked why such sensitive material (the US embassy cables) was posted on a network accessible to thousands of government employees, the state department spokesman told the Guardian: "The 9/11 attacks and their aftermath revealed gaps in intra-governmental information sharing. Since the attacks of 9/11, the US government has taken significant steps to facilitate information sharing. These efforts were focused on giving diplomatic, military, law enforcement and intelligence specialists quicker and easier access to more data to more effectively do their jobs". He added: "We have been taking aggressive action in recent weeks and months to enhance the security of our systems and to prevent the leak of information".

So, this example of leaking information and knowledge is massive failure from the US (which hopefully will not have any international consequences). It shows that it is not an easy task to just say: and now we will embrace better information and knowledge sharing. In many cases - and probably especially in the case of US governmental agencies - existing systems need to be rebooted first. These Cold War systems cannot embrace the structure and culture of an interconnected and co-evolving system. But from this article it becomes clear that the US intelligent agencies did not want to reboote their way of thinking about organisations. They continue their old thinking by programming ways to 'enhance the security of our systems' rather than that they approach their organisation as a complex system

This brings me to my final comment. At the same day I also read Dave Snowden's latest weblog post of chickens and eggs. In this post he writes:

People make bad systems work by working around them, the problem is that this disguises failure for too long. So when the system does fail, it fails catastrophically ... (and)... Systems that evolve are more successful in managing people than ones that are designed in the abstract.

I think that Dave Snowden perfectly outlines the catastrophically failure of the US intelligent agencies. Furthermore, he also writes that 'at all cost massive and complete re-organisations should be avoided in all cases other than those of catastrophic failure'. So, now that the US government made a catastrophic failure: where will the re-organisation occur?

What are knowledge workers in a knowledge society?

One of the recurring themes when talking about the discipline knowledge management is the knowledge society. This type of society marks a difference between its predecessors 'the industrialised society' and 'the information society'. I refer to it as predecessor, but have we already passed the information society? I believe we have not. So are we talking about an information society when talking about a knowledge society, and vice versa? Perhaps we do. And perhaps also something to blog about at a later stage. Right now, I just want to emphasise on a part of a knowledge society and that is its knowledge workers.

As factories move away from Europe, because labour is becoming too expensive, European organisations are focusing (or in some instances 'should be focusing') on innovation. Becoming innovative means opening new doors and entering new territories. To understand these new territories you should have the latest knowledge and therefore organisation should consist of knowledge workers. And this is where among other things knowledge management kicks in. In order to shift the paradigm within organisations to knowledge workers, there should be a good guidance on both the organisational structure and culture to create a space where knowledge workers can work, because these workers need to assimilate themselves to new abilities.

Some of the abilities that are required as knowledge workers are:

• they should be flexible in adapting to change
• open to multiple tolerated failure or in other words the apprentice model (because over time you develop better by making lots of small mistakes) - Thanks to Dave Snowden's latest keynote at KMWorld
• adaptive capacity

These abilities will assist organisations to becoming more innovative on the basis of emphasizing on knowledge workers. Dave Snowden highlights this in a great anecdote between a chef and the recipe book user. He states that "how many knowledge management programmes are being run on the basis of making recipes, rather than on the basis of creating chefs". And a chef is a knowledge worker, because out of deeply generated experience over time, he or she can adapt to any situation and still prepare the best dish, where a recipe book user should have the requirements mentioned in the book before getting close to prepare a recipe successful. 

Link this with best practice and good practice programmes, and you know why most of the time knowledge management programmes failed to show its value

An evaluation of democracy: how it can help you to think about knowledge governance

Knowledge management is interdisciplinary! Knowledge management is cultural! Knowledge management is implicit!

These are the issues which are relevant to me when talking about knowledge management. It is a very complex discipline which should be threatened with care when developing and implementing such initiatives in businesses. Nonetheless, it is essential in a competitive and fast-changing environment to have access to the latest knowledge in order to make innovative decisions and one way to have access to it is that the holders of critical knowledge should have the abilities and skills to exchange it. Can we do this by 'just' launching a Wiki, a SharePoint application, or other social media tools? No, these are just temporary means of doing the job. On a long term, businesses should focus on a way more complex issue in order to survive on a long term and that is governance.

For a while now I am closely following the discussions about governance, and I am particularly interested in a governance model that is increasingly showing signs of failure. It is difficult to know exactly why and how, because we have been a part of that governance system for such a long time - and over time it changed in different forms. I am talking about democracy. The following video is a documentary about why it is failing and there are some issues which could be very useful when thinking about 'knowledge' governance model for businesses, because in order to dare to share, people need to have comfort in it and this comfort can, among other things, come out of being transparent. More about these issues in this video