Sharing Hidden Know-How: How Managers Solve Thorny Problems With the Knowledge Jam [Hardcover]

Katrina Pugh (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 12, 2011 | ISBN-10: 0470876816 | ISBN-13: 978-0470876817 | Edition: 1

To manage business operations – let alone innovate – amid frequent restructurings, outsourcings and retirements, leaders must quickly capitalize on hidden know-how (knowledge). That is, know-how that lives inside their organizations or networks – in the teams, processes and experts that comprise them.

Yet, many organizations are coming up short in this race. Knowledge sharing and transfer have been reduced to reports, e-mails and tweets replacing vital personal interaction. The lack of meaningful conversation coupled with intense fragmentation across organizations and networks has left leaders floating in a sea of information and ideas without a map to channel insight into action.

Sharing Hidden Know-How starts the conversation that allows organizations to take what they know to the bank. The “how-to”/“how-act” guidebook unveils Knowledge Jam, a facilitated collaborative method for helping organizations rediscover the fundamental discipline of knowledge transfer – the conversation.

Developed by Katrina Pugh, president of AlignConsulting, the proven process uses human interaction to capture unwritten insights, and more importantly to put them to work. Offering a step-by-step process and practical tools, Sharing Hidden Know-How will help any organization harness untapped knowledge to solve today’s thorny problems:

• Accelerating New Product Development and Market and Segment Innovations
• Maximizing Combined Knowledge in Mergers Integrations, Restructurings, Off-shoring and Outsourcing
• Overcoming Information Overload (Focus on Social Media)
• Smoothing Executive Transitions and Succession Planning
• Smoothing Team Transitions
• Spreading Insight across Geographies and Network Partners
• Tapping into Sales Insights

The next generation of leadership effectiveness is about conversation and reflective facilitation, not just texts and tweets. Sharing Hidden Know-How makes the case for intentional, conversation-based leadership, and provides the practice model to pull it off.  Viewed from above, this important book is itself a conversation between Kate Pugh’s basic propositions and those of a diverse group of other thinkers, all woven into a unified whole. Viewed on the ground, it is an intellectual joyride, coherent, insightful, promisingly pragmatic, and with just the right measure of the personal to fully reveal a fruitful mind in motion.
— David Kantor, director, Kantor Institute; author, Reading the Room (Jossey-Bass, 2012)

“[This] book addresses one of the time-honored problems in organizations: ‘How do you get people with experience, solutions and knowledge to share them effectively with those who need those valuable assets?’ Technology, we now know, is not the answer—human discus­sion is. [Pugh] tells you how to structure and facilitate these important conversations.”
—Thomas H. Davenport, President’s distinguished professor of IT and Management, Babson College; author of Analytics at Work and Thinking for a Living.

“In this innovative and useful book Kate Pugh shows how you can be a far better knowledge practitioner just by releasing the power of talking in your organization. A fine example of the new generation of knowledge books.”
—Larry Prusak, author, Working Knowledge; visiting scholar, Marshall School of Business, University of Southern California; and senior knowledge advisor to World Bank and NASA

“[This book] meets an urgent need within leadership practices: an effective conversational process for capturing and transferring deep smarts.”
—Stephen Denning, author, The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management and The Secret Language of Leadership

“Leaders have long known that the ‘know-how’ of experienced teams is key to their orga­nizations’ ability to achieve strategic goals. The challenge has always been to distill this wisdom and deploy it in a way that maximizes and accelerates its impact on organizational effectiveness. [This book] provides a practical approach to addressing this challenge, and, in so doing, improves competitiveness.”
—Paul Lucidi, chief information officer, Insulet Corporation

“A fantastic replacement for the long dormant and never used lessons-learned repository! This book provides well documented and effective tools for really learning from your orga­nization. As our business continues to go through transformational change, I hope to make good use of the Knowledge Jam to make that transformation efficient.”
—Sheryl Skifstad, senior director, Supply Chain IT at a Fortune 100 company

Editorial Reviews

From the Inside Flap

One of the great management ideas of the last fifteen years has been to make use of the knowledge that an organization has already learned. However, most businesses find that the knowledge transfer process is rarely effective, as more often than not shared ideas fail to get put to work where they can have the biggest impact.

Sharing Hidden Know-How outlines a proven process aimed directly at this thorny problem. The book shows how to scope topics, foster the correct tone, conduct a knowledge capture event, and integrate found knowledge into the organization. Developed by Katrina Pugh (an expert in business planning and knowledge-based transformation) the Knowledge Jam method is unique among innovation processes in that it uses conversation (not simply databases, tweets or threads) to capture information and context. Context improves our ability to apply knowledge toward projects that improve productivity, competitiveness and innovation.

The Knowledge Jam process is built around the disciplines of facilitation, conversation, and translation. These bring into balance the coordination, expansion, and pragmatic "pull" of knowledge into its future uses around the organization. Knowledge Jam moves things along efficiently, with a shared sense of responsibility for helping last month's or last year's insights to transform into today's innovative products, functions or regional strategies.

A practical hands-on resource, Sharing Hidden Know-How clearly shows how to define, sell, staff, launch, and evaluate a successful Knowledge Jam program. Pugh also makes a case for using Knowledge Jam as culture—of intention, openness, and stewardship—underpinning such tools of change as collaborative planning and social technology adoption.

Rich with case studies, how-to templates, and adaptations, Sharing Hidden Know-How gives leaders, facilitators and consultants a toolkit for handling today's thorny knowledge problems, and the disciplines to "jam" productively among the manager-musicians of our changing world.

From the Back Cover

"Sharing Hidden Know-How addresses one of the time-honored problems in organiztions: 'How do you get people with experience, solutions, and knowledge to share them effectively with those who need those valuable assets?' Technology, we now know, is not the answer—human discussion is. Pugh tells you how to structure and facilitate these important conversations."
—Thomas H. Davenport, President's Distinguished Professor of IT and Management, Babson College; author of Analytics at Work and Thinking for a Living

"In this innovative and useful book Kate Pugh shows how you can be a far better knowledge practitioner just by releasing the power of talking in your organization. A fine example of the new generation of knowledge books."
—Larry Prusak, author, Working Knowledge; visiting scholar, Marshall School of Business, University of Southern California; and senior knowledge advisor to World Bank and NASA

"Sharing Hidden Know-How meets an urgent need within leadership practices: an effective conversational process for capturing and transferring deep smarts."
—Stephen Denning, author, The Leader's Guide to Radical Management and The Secret Language of Leadership

"Leaders have long known that the 'know-how' of experienced teams is key to their organizations' ability to achieve strategic goals. The challenge has always been to distill this wisdom and deploy it in a way that maximizes and accelerates its impact on organizational effectiveness. Sharing Hidden Know-How provides a practical approach to addressing this challenge, and, in so doing, improves competitiveness."
—Paul Lucidi, chief information officer, Insulet Corporation

"A fantastic replacement for the long dormant and never used lessons-learned repository! This book provides well documented and effective tools for really learning from your organization. As our business continues to go through transformational change, I hope to make good use of the Knowledge Jam to make that transformation efficient."
—Sheryl Skifstad, senior director, Supply Chain IT at a Fortune 100 company

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Jossey-Bass; 1 edition (April 12, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0470876816
• ISBN-13: 978-0470876817
• Product Dimensions: 6.4 x 1 x 9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #917,171 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Katrina (Kate) Pugh is a consultant, author, lecturer and the president of AlignConsulting, a firm that helps organizations harness untapped knowledge and channel insight into action. She is also the interim academic director for the Columbia University Information and Knowledge Strategy Masters Program.

Drawing from more than 20 years of combined consulting and industry experience in the healthcare, energy, information technology and financial service sectors, Kate consults and lectures widely. She is also a lead benchmarker with the Intranet Benchmarking Forum, and a senior consultant with Earley and Associates.

Prior to forming AlignConsulting, Kate held leadership positions with Intel Corporation, JPMorgan and Fidelity. Kate consulted with Monitor Group, Oliver Wyman (formerly Mercer Management Consulting), PwC Consulting/IBM and Dialogos, Inc. An accomplished leader in knowledge management (KM) strategy initiatives, she also co-founded and launched PwC/IBM's KM strategy practice. She has designed and launched dozens of social media, document management and collaboration platforms, and helped plan and facilitate more than ten communities of practice.

Her book, "Sharing Hidden Know-How: How Managers Solve Thorny Problems with the Knowledge Jam," (Jossey-Bass, 2011) serves as a practical guidebook for solving common business problems. Kate demonstrates how the conversation-based method of the Knowledge Jam helps organizations and networks to use their collective know-how to improve business practices. Kate has also written articles published in the Harvard Business Review, Ivey Business Journal, NASA Ask Magazine, The European American Business Journal and Journal of Digital Media Management. A sought after speaker, she has lectured or workshopped at NASA, MIT Sloan School of Management, Babson University the Center for Business Intelligence and CPSquare.

Kate has a BA from Williams College and an MS/MBA from MIT Sloan School of Management. Her key areas of expertise include: accelerating innovation, maximizing combined knowledge in merger integrations, off-shoring and outsourcing, smoothing executive transitions and succession planning, and finding ways to make social media initiatives more productive.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Taking the art of facilitation to a new level of mastery June 21, 2011

By Gil Yehuda

Format:Hardcover

Kate Pugh has been dealing with hard Enterprise Collaboration issues for years. She uses proven methodologies of "old school" Knowledge Management and Systems Analysis to solve real-world problems. And she recently captured her signature methodology in a book Sharing Hidden Know-How: How managers solve thorny problems with the knowledge jam. This review highlights some of the valuable gems in the book, and why you should read this book too. (Note: Books cost less than a tank of gas and take you farther.)

Why read Sharing Hidden Know-How? It deals with an old problem that will not go away any time soon. Organizations have people who need to know something that other people there already know. They need to get it together. As simple as it sounds - getting knowledge seekers to find knowledge originators is a huge problem in a large and dynamic organization. Getting knowledge originators to convey knowledge to seekers in a useful manner is yet another huge problem. The Enterprise 2.0 fantasy is that new social business tools solve these problems. Yes, they help. But they alone are not the solution. It is the myth of becoming athletic by owning an expensive treadmill. Reality tells me that you need more than gear. Sometimes you need an expert personal trainer, maybe a physical therapist too, to get you to peak function. So let's talk about reality. This is where the Knowledge Jam comes in.

Kate's clients reach the critical realization they need results and help. Hope is not a business plan. As you'll see in her book, she is all about business and process. She takes the best theory from the experts and lessons she learned at the school of reality and blends them to make the Jam. The "Jam" methodology is inspired by the larger "IBM innovation jam" events. It's an event that brings people together, a focus that makes the event purposeful, and a good amount of preparation and post-processing. A Knowledge Jam is not a fancy name for a well-facilitated meeting - it is the game plan for something more like a full-scale intervention.

Kate describes the methodology via detailed explanations and examples. For every concept shared, she provides insight that is one step deeper than you might have expected. And she includes personal anecdotes too. She does not negate the online-social tools, but rather helps you focus on the strategy of their usage, along with the reality of the high-touch process for those targeted situations.

The book begins, as many do, with context setting stories and descriptions of the problems as well as the limitations of existing solutions. It's all good stuff. But then it gets really good when Kate gets into the thought-preparation behind the methodology. This is the part that everyone can use to be a more effective professional.

Chapter 4 is probably my favorite of the book. Kate gets take the word "conversation" and turns it into an art form - based on guidance and insight from Harvard Professor Chris Argyris and MIT/Dialogos' William Isaacs, Kate's words go very deep into the fundamentals of engaging in a purposeful conversation - both from the perspective of organizational culture as well as personal behavior. She describes the process of inquiry, how specifically to prepare yourself to listen, how to receive information in a manner that helps you create a mental model that can be preserved as knowledge heritage, without losing details by over-abstracting. She breaks down the art of dialogue into 4 component steps, and shows you how to identify when you veer off these steps into areas that limit the success of the conversation.

I read a fair number of books - I never see authors get to this level of insight in a way that combines business practicality with what I might best describe as "spiritual posture".

Chapters 5 and 7 take you post-conversation into the art of making knowledge into a durable asset - the often-forgotten part of the process.

In Chapter 8, Kate collects a dozen other knowledge gathering methodologies and compares them to the Knowledge Jam - highlighting their strengths. It's no surprise that she ranks the Jam as the best - and you can decide if you agree. But you get to see a very helpful review of the alternatives.

There are 5 appendices - with templates and case-studies. Content rich.

A summary of one of Kate's case studies might help bring this together for you: A medical non-profit dedicated to improving worldwide healthcare hired Kate to run a knowledge jam for some of their client hospitals. They noticed that some of the medical teams seemed to "gel" faster than others - and in environments where there are frequent re-organizations of the teams, this ability to gel faster results in far fewer medical mistakes. Learning how to make new medical teams gel faster means more lives are saved. (Whoa!) You can't put up a wiki and get a bunch of doctors and nurses to describe (or read) how to form a team. Reality does not work that way. Getting any value out of the issue requires understanding the very nature of the question, finding the right people to help, taking them on the journey to self-discovery, and creating something from the conversation that can be taken to other hospital administrators and implemented: aka. A Knowledge Jam.

This book is an excellent resource for anyone who needs to understand how to transfer know-how between people. And if you work in an organization and care about knowledge - then this means you.

Let me reveal my bias (we all have biases - I believe it's important to reveal them): I had the opportunity to work with Kate at Fidelity Investments - where she ran the KM program for one of Fidelity's largest companies. And she quoted me in her book. (cool!) She's also someone I greatly admire. So yes, I knew that her book was going to be great because I've seen the quality of her work - and it is top notch.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars If we only knew what we know - this is an answer to that problem May 24, 2011

By Jack

Format:Hardcover

"If HP only knew what HP knows." This is a classic line from knowledge management proponents everywhere. Why doesn't this work as smoothly as we'd like?

I have enjoyed reading through Sharing Hidden Know-How and connecting what Kate Pugh has to say about knowledge sharing to other work I've done. Kate's voice rings through this book loud and clear - if you haven't come across her before, this gives you a good sense of her style.

The central thesis of the book is that most modes of "knowledge sharing" in organizations are broken and that the Knowledge Jam should be able to remedy the issues that Kate sees. These issues are that there are knowledge blind spots, knowledge mismatches, and knowledge jails. The blind spots are places where one part of the organization has knowledge that could help another, but no one knows that the other exists. Mismatches are places where a successful connection might have been made, but then the conversion into the new context is not made or not made at the appropriate time. And finally, jails are knowledge stores that are created (documents, repositories) but which no one bothers to use or reference because they make no sense out of context.

The Knowledge Jam idea addresses these three problems with three specific elements: facilitation, conversation and translation. Facilitation helps overcome the blind spots by explicitly getting people talking to one another about specific topics for specific business needs. Conversation helps align the contexts of the people who are trying to learn from one another. And translation is the act of taking the conversation and making explicit plans for using what was learned: don't simply write up minutes of the discussion, but take what you have developed and commit to putting it to use. It's hard to say that any one of these are more important, but from my perspective the focus on explicit translation and re-use of the knowledge has been missing from many knowledge sharing initiatives.

The Knowledge Jam itself has a five-step process, the core of which is a 90-minute facilitated discussion between the participants: people with experience in a given area, and those who have need of guidance (or brokers to those in need). But without the other steps, the Knowledge Jam can easily devolve into any other post-mortem conversation. The planning and setup steps leading into the Jam set the stage and roles and topic for the conversation. And the wrap-up steps take this conversation, frames it for use in new areas and then has explicit calls for making use of what was learned.

In reading about how facilitation, conversation, and translation work for the Knowledge Jam, I had frequent thoughts to myself in wonder of why these things don't happen successfully in organizations today. Why aren't experts available and known? Why can't people share successes and failures in useful ways? Why doesn't HP know what HP knows? These are the classic questions of business and knowledge management. The skills of facilitation, conversation, and translation can definitely help, and they need to be part of a dedicated strategy that seeks to remove blind spots, mismatches and free knowledge from jail. In the final chapters Kate addresses the opportunity for using these ideas outside of the explicit Knowledge Jam process and embedding them into the fabric of the organization. That will create a real knowledge sharing organization.

One thing I wondered about from the outset was the connection to IBM's Innovation Jam. Kate addresses this question toward the end of the book: the focus of Innovation Jam is coming up with new ideas and involves tens of thousands of people over multiple days and then an immense effort involved in synthesis and reporting back to the community. This is very different from the focus on knowledge sharing in a 90-minute Knowledge Jam session with moderate effort made before and after.

I had other questions in the early chapters that were addressed and clarified in later chapters. One thing I find entertaining in the context of this particular book is that any book is a classic "holder of knowledge." If people don't read it or if it doesn't connect to problems people have today, a book becomes its own "jail" of knowledge. In the case of Kate Pugh's book, there are elements that can be applied right away.

Note: This text is copied from my blogged review:
Disclosure: I received a review copy of this book, and I know the author.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Don't Forget the Conversation July 6, 2011

By Gary S. Kahn

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

In Sharing Hidden Know-How (Jossey-Bass/Wiley, 2011), Kate Pugh provides a methodology for transferring knowledge from those that have it to those that need it. Most importantly, she seeks to rebalance knowledge management from its contemporary focus on codifying practices, organizing content and enabling search to one based on effective conversation.

At the core, her argument is that people are not good at absorbing new knowledge unless they engage in dialogue. This is hardly a radical notion; it traces back to Plato and more recently, to the influential educational theorist, John Dewey, a century ago. Nevertheless, it's a perspective that seems easily lost, both within business and educational organizations. Kate's illumination of the knowledge-acquisition side of knowledge transmission is a timely and welcome reminder to knowledge management practitioners.

Kate has many deep insights on what is required to effectively enable knowledge acquisition. Of critical import is the role of the facilitator. Knowledge transmission doesn't just happen. It takes preparation, and in particular, a very intentional focus on translating knowledge into terms that can be assimilated by a learner. The role of the facilitator is much greater than a session moderator. The facilitator engages throughout the knowledge transfer process, from planning through post-session follow-ups: "They play the role of process consultant, project manager, change agent, cheerleader and networker. (p.31)" Although Kate gives attention to techniques and templates, these are mere scaffolding to the facilitator's artistry - an artistry based on three key conversational elements (p.69):

1. Posture of openness
2. Pursuit of diversity
3. Practices of dialogue

"Openness sharpens our ability to see the bigger picture, diversity expands our problem-solving resources, and dialogue takes in these two ingredients and channels them into meaning and lasting relations." In short, it is the soft skills that count, but only insofar as they are wed to skillful inquiry and big picture thinking.

Kate's approach reflects a synthesis of several business management disciplines that have had a profound influence both on her personally and on general management practices over the last twenty years. These are Intelligence Acquisition, Organizational Learning, and Collaboration Technology. These provide, respectively, the intellectual grounding for the facilitation, conversation, and translation disciplines of Kate's "knowledge jam" program. Although most authors stand on the shoulders of those that have come before, few are as clear and explicit as Kate about the debts they owe.

While Sharing Hidden Know-How is a handbook on planning and executing knowledge jams, it is also much more. There is a lot here that can benefit managers and management consultants alike. This should be no surprise as at the heart of the methodology is getting engagement and buy-in to change. Learning is about behavioral change; and this is the day-to-day business of managers and consultants alike.

[...]. The author is a colleague of Kate's at Earley & Associates.