collaborate now

Af Jesper Hundebøl — Morten Hansen (MH) of Harvard Business School writes on knowledge management in today's Financial Times Summer School, the business journals four-week management guide: Turning the lone star into a real team player:

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Electronic tools and other initiatives designed to enhance the sharing of information are useless unless the company acknowledges a fundamental need: fostering a culture of collaboration between units and employees.
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More and more often you see that experts turn their thumbs down on technology, stressing the need for real organisational change: Technology alone won't do it.

four obstacles

MH outlines four obstacles to KM:

• employees' unwillingness to seek advice and learn from others
• inability to find expertise (going beyond corporate yellow pages)
• unwillingness to help
• inability to work together.

Clearly these four problems are mostly related to the strategies, the organisation and the management of the organisation rather than the IT-infrastructure. There is no easy solution to these challenges.

a few simple techniques :o

Collaboration across and between units, peer assistance and peer challenge, performance management (measuring team performance rather than individual performance), setting-up of a transparent benchmarking systems, or through recruitment criteria, seem to offer some be some of the answers - i.e., according to MH.

As I see it, much of these are the traditional ingredients in the literature on the learning organisation, e-learning and knowledge management. It only proves the point: technology alone can't do it, and those who might (still) believe in a corporate quick fix in terms of another "IT-Solution" may face hard times. ROI will not be justified if the solution is not properly implemented across the organisation. It may take hours or days of training (e.g. on team building), management involvement to foster an environment of transparency and openness with a feel for sharing and learning, and perhaps most important, a review of the promotion and reward system to ensure that employees and management take the time to share knowledge and learn from each other.

According to MH "most managers acknowledge the value of a collaborative culture", but "few know how to build one". He claims that "a few simple techniques can create the right behaviour", however, one should seriously doubt that. In claiming that he himself is subject to over-simplification and the apparent power of corporate quick fixes. Real organisational change - needed to foster organisational learning - is never easily implemented.

management fashions

Past experiences with management fashions such as e.g. Total Quality Management should be enough to demonstrate that changes are not done overnight. That is not the claim of Morten Hansen, however, a few simple techniques won't do. Even ambitious initiatives to reform the organisation run into problems, be it from senior managers feeling they cannot cope with the changes, unwillingness to decentralise or a feeling of giving away power, union resistance to pay and performance reform, or pure inertia.

What it really takes is difficult if not impossible to say; no organisation is the same. Certainly organisations will have to fundamentally change employee and management attitudes to sharing knowledge and to learning, be it through introducing peer groups or e.g. by creating a culture of bloggers. All that, and we know it, can also be overdone, and the summer school stresses that:

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Before you know it, people participate in meetings without getting anything done, leading to ineffective collaboration that undermines overall performance.
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centralisation vs. decentralisation

The answer lies in the delicate cut between centralisation and decentralisation of the organisation. According to Morten Hansen the promise of the collaborative organisation lies in the gains of the decentralised business units working together with managers who "transcend parochial interests", thus seeing "the whole while delivering their part".

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