Exit interviews, knowledge databases and other attempts to trap sun rays in a glass jar

This month, I was asked how organizations could introduce a standard process by which all colleagues leaving their job will be requested to document their knowledge, including tools and documents they developed, in a database, so it can be accessed and researched by all colleagues for further reference.

I feel the notion of “capturing knowledge in databases” keeps coming up from time to time like a haunting ghost that you never really get rid of. It important to take it seriously, because it is often a reflection of a deeper misconception in organizations of how knowledge sharing dynamics work, and therefore what knowledge management can (and cannot) achieve.

The truth is that exit interviews and so-called “knowledge databases” are probably among the worst tools one can turn to when choosing a knowledge management approach. To me they are akin to the attempt of trapping sun rays in a glass jar. Let’s look a bit closer at the dynamics that are at play:

1. While exit interviews and handover notes are indeed established items in the canon of known KM tools, their track record in KM practice has been rather poor. The reason for this, I believe, is that any attempt to “record” knowledge in documents in case someone else might need it in the future, is bound to fail on two fronts:
     
• There is no incentive for the person tasked with recording to do so. People are most motivated to share knowledge if
• they get feedback that helps them to learn more, if they receive recognition for
• their expertise and suport, and
• if they see a direct impact of what their knowledge contributes to.
  
  None of these incentives are present in the “end of job“ situation. Hence, the maximum we usually get out of leaving staff is a brief handover note that gives an overview over the most critical follow up items and ongoing processes along with necessary next steps, contacts, and maybe an archive folder with all important documents (and getting that is already a success).
    
• Any knowledge captured in documents and databases is just a snapshot, and will both lack context and become increasingly irrelevant with every month that goes by. Databases work well for historical statistical records of past transactions or for policies which don’t change much over time. But for contextual knowledge on how to do things best in different situations, databases don’t work. Because first, they lack the context of the situation a particular experience was made in, and second, they are detached from the actual person making the experience (databases in their nature focus on data and records, not on the people that collect them and have the actual knowledge).
   
2. It is for the reasons above that KM in the last 12 years has moved away from attempts to record explicit knowledge in databases for potential future occasions. Instead, the goal has shifted towards fostering continuous interactions between people, as a way to enable just-in-time and in-context interactions. KM’s good track record in facilitating Communities of Practices in which individuals ask questions when they occur, and receive responses from individuals just-in-time and adapted to a given context, is a reflection of this approach. The social media wave since 2006 has taken this even a step further by putting social interactions among colleagues at the center of the knowledge sharing and capturing process. What public and corporate social media platforms (even though they are technically also a databases) are capturing are not mere data records that were uploaded just in case someone needs them, but records of people’s interactions where someone shared something because it was important at that particular time. That record is then indeed searchable and can become a knowledge archive over time. But this cannot be achieved by mandating a staff member to sit down at the end of their assignment and document all they know. Instead, this only works if the staff member engaged throughout his/her assignment in a process of sharing, exchanging and discussion knowledge with peers throughout the assignment.
     
3. The situation where knowledge capture does indeed make sense is in context of specific projects or initiatives. There are several standard KM processes to do this, two of which stand out for me:
    
• After Action Review: This well-known KM method is applied at certain milestones during and at the end of a project or activity. Participants are being asked four questions: “What was supposed to happen?”, “What did actually happen?”, “Why was there a difference?” and “What can we learn from this for the next project?” It’s a rather informal and brief exercise (anything between 20 min and ½ day) that allows people involved in an activity to step back, reflect, and adjust their action for the next step.
   
• Knowledge Systematization: This is a more elaborate process (which can sometimes be a project in itself) in which a key project is selected that suitable to serve as a template for how to do similar projects. Through a series of facilitated workshops and reflection exercises, the end goal of this process is to produce a number products that capture the best practices, lessons, tools and template that can be derived from the project, and that can be used to inform similar projects in the future.
  
  It is important to note that both these processes for knowledge capture focus not on a particular staff member, but rather on a specific project/initiative/activity, and the entire team involved in it. They rely on action to be taken during and at the end of a project, not at the end of an individual staff member’s assignment. However, if you have a key project that the leaving staff member was involved with, it might be a good idea to arrange for a knowledge systematization process while that staff member is still in the organization, as s/he will obviously be able to contribute a lot of insights that might otherwise be lost forever.

In addition to the two methodologies above the following action points might be a way forward for someone posing the original question raised in the beginning:

1. Rather than asking, “What do we need to extract from the departing staff member that the successor needs to know?” we can just ask “What do newly joining team members with a particular function need to know?”. We can create a briefing packages that help with onboarding new staff members, to which all team members add important pieces, standards, templates, tools, processes and resources. This could be the first piece that anyone joining a team should read.
2. We can try nurturing a blogging culture in our offices, encouraging senior as well as junior staff to formulate their current work, their thoughts on a topic or a recap of a recent event/workshop/training in the form of short and informal blog posts. A group of practitioners on a particular topic can be encouraged to “work out loud”, and in the process will create an environment of discussion, opportunities, learning and innovation.
3. Back-to-office-reports and debriefings can be done in the form of easy-to-read blog posts, rather than dry and cumbersome forms and reports.
4. We can introduce regular brown-bag lunches for learning, in which staff present an issue/project/training/process/skill they know about to their peers.
5. We can virtual spaces for peer-to-peer teams and larger communities on specific issues important to your office (and beyond). Those usually need someone to lead and facilitate them, to support the participants with resources and follow up for discussions. This is also a great opportunity to keep former staff engaged, by giving them access to these dedicated spaces beyond their assignment.
6. We can try hooking staff in our office up with staff of other offices who have similar issues. This can happen through mentoring approaches at any point in an assignment, and by cultivating staff’s participation in regional and global networks where they can get help on their questions from peers in the organization.

What’s important to keep in mind is that whatever knowledge management mechanism we try to apply, we need to be able to answer the question “what’s in it for me” for those who are supposed to use the mechanism. Policies themselves don’t work. Staff need to have a reason to participate voluntarily (seeing leaders championing an approach, receiving recognition for oneself, getting access to learning opportunities, etc.).

A nice list to find myself on: The world's top 100 global influencers in knowledge management

Very happy to find my name as #75 on the list of the world's top 100 global influencers in knowledge management! Even nicer to see that I am joined (and in most cases precluded) by a lot of dear fellow colleagues from the international development sector, in particular from the KM4Dev network (the Twitter account of which is itself at position #27). Waving in particular to my UN colleagues @ithorpe (#12), @gaurisalokhe (#15), @rsamii (#40) and @johanlammers (#45), as well as other friends in the development community who feature prominently on the list and from the professional insights and colleagueship of which I benefit tremendously.

The list has been compiled and published by the Mindtouch Blog, which frequently features lists of top influencers of different business areas based on a particular Twitter hashtag (in this case #KM). You can access the full list of the top 100 influencers for #KM here.

Ten PowerPoint Slides on Knowledge Management that Have Influenced Me (Part 2)

To get to Part 1 of this blog post, click here.

Do you hate PowerPoint presentations? Well, you probably have endured a lot of gruesome slides throughout the course of your professional life. But despite the usual wisdom that PowerPoint slides for presentations should be avoided whenever possible, I actually think that some well-crafted slides presented in the right context can be a very good thing. In fact, there are a number of slides that had a very positive impact on me in my knowledge management career. I treasure them because they manage to bring complex concepts to the point and often communicate an entire lesson’s worth of insight just with one diagram, graph or image. Here’s a list of ten powerful slides on knowledge management that have influenced me, which I am posting in two parts (for Part 1 click here). See for yourself whether you can get some inspiration from them.

6. The Innovation Adoption Curve

The innovation adoption curve by sociology professor Everett Rogers is a model that distinguishes between different types of adopters of innovations, based on the idea that certain individuals are more open to adaptation than others. Rogers innovation adoption curve is useful to acknowledge that trying to quickly convince all members of an organization of a new controversial idea is useless. Instead it makes more sense to start with winning over innovators and early adopters first. Also the categories and percentages can be used as a basis for setting expectations with senior management and estimating target groups for communication messages. Needless to say that when we introduced corporate social networking in our organization, the adoption pattern looked exactly like the above.

7. Managing Complex Change

This was part of a presentation given by Linda Stoddart from  Haute Ecole de Gestion in Geneva during UNSSC’s Knowledge Management course “Think UN, Act Smart”. It’s like a light bulb being switched on when you suddenly realize why you always felt in a certain way when trying to promote KM in your organization, and what conditions need to come together to make complex change happen.

8. Towards a Knowledge Age

Now this is the only slide among this selection that I have created myself. For all its flaws (e.g. that it looks at history from a Western perspective) it is particularly important to me because it illustrates the massive challenge that we face with regards to managing the amount of knowledge that humankind is producing. In addition, it also acknowledges the fact that one of the main drivers underlying this monumental change towards a knowledge society is technology. This is important, as in particular in the KM for Development sphere there is often a dismissive view of technology as mere "tools” that should just follow user needs, while disregarding the fact that it is often technology itself that is creating user needs in the first place and therefore is triggering and reinforcing culture change.

 9. RSS in Plain English

These slides are part of a PowerPoint adaption of the video “RSS in Plain English”, and I’m featuring them here as a tribute to the fantastic work that the CommonCraft blog does in producing simple and easily understandable instructional videos on different topics (of which it is the ‘technology’ and ‘social media’ videos that I benefited from the most). Anyone struggling with communicating difficult topics in a presentation can learn a lot from the methodology of the “In Plain English” video series. And it also illustrates that the main key to success in doing a presentation (yes, you can do something similar even with PowerPoint) is telling a convincing story.

10. Shift Happens – Did you know?
  

This is a quite a famous presentation that has been floating around since 2007 in different versions. It originated from a presentation that Karl Fisch gave to a group of education professionals, and since then has been revised and turned into a video (still based on PowerPoint slides) by Scott McLeod and the company XPLANE. Despite its somewhat sensational tone it serves as an excellent teaser to discuss the changes we are going through as a society and the implications this has for our learning. I usually use a few selected lines and numbers of the presentation when I do training on knowledge management, to set the stage for explaining why we need to deal with KM in the first place. The latest version of the presentation can be viewed as Youtube video here, and older versions are available in the ShiftHappens Wiki.


  

Ten PowerPoint Slides on Knowledge Management that Have Influenced Me (Part 1)

Do you hate PowerPoint presentations? Well, you probably have endured a lot of gruesome slides throughout the course of your professional life. But despite the usual wisdom that PowerPoint slides for presentations should be avoided whenever possible, I actually think that some well-crafted slides presented in the right context can be a very good thing. In fact, there are a number of slides that had a very positive impact on me in my knowledge management career. I treasure them because they manage to bring complex concepts to the point and often communicate an entire lesson’s worth of insight just with one diagram, graph or image. Here’s a list of ten powerful slides on knowledge management that have influenced me, which I am posting in two parts (for Part 2 click here). See for yourself whether you can get some inspiration from them.

1. From KM incompetence to competence

© by Chris Collison and Geoff Parcell

This graphic is taken from Chris Collison’s and Geoff Parcell’s book “Learning to Fly”, considered by many to be the bible for KM practitioners. They use it to describe the process of how we learn, e.g. driving a car, which starts with the state of “ignorance is bliss”, over realizing that you want to drive a car but can’t, to consciously applying every step necessary to get a car moving, until you finally arrive at a state where you don’t even think anymore about how you drive – you just do it.

After I spent already one year in my very first KM job trying to promote KM with senior management, it was this one slide during a meeting with my superiors that suddenly made the managers understand where we were with KM, and which resulted in the go-ahead for a real KM action plan backed by management and the development of a strategy for the organization.

2. Organizations yesterday and today

This slide was presented to me by a fellow participant of the KM Institute’s “Certified Knowledge Manager” training in 2007. It captures the essence of how organizations and therefore our work environments have changed over the past decades: away from a modern, hierarchical, intransparent and tightly controlled environment that sees infrastructure and money as its main assets, towards a post-modern organization with flat hierarchies and open and networked information flows that sees people and their knowledge as its main assets. The point is of course not that all are organizations resemble the right column today, but that 50 years ago, nobody questions the left column, while today these characteristics would be seen as obstacles to productive work. The table is inspired by the research of Philip Kotler, and is an excellent teaser to discuss our role as knowledge workers.

3. The Cynefin framework

The Cynefin framework (pronounced “key-nevin”) is a typology that describes in what contexts and problem situations a certain sort of explanations and/or solutions may apply, ranging from simple, to complicated, complex and chaotic problem situations. The framework was originally developed in 1999 in the context of knowledge management and organizational strategy by Dave Snowden, and provides a powerful way of assessing what kind of KM initiative may be right within a specific organizational context. It does e.g. away with the myth that “good practices” are generally a good KM tool for organizations in any kind of situation, as according to Cynefin they really only apply to a “complicated” setting.

4. Enterprise 2.0 Knowledge Management – A Revolution of Knowledge in Three Parts

    © http://www.besser20.de/english                                                                      

This entire slide set is surely one of the most fabulous PowerPoints I’ve ever seen (the screenshot just shows four exemplary slides). They are a perfect example of slides that work as a resource by themselves without anyone presenting, because they actually tell a story. The entire slide set consists of a presentation in three parts, which was developed and is being used as a marketing pitch by the German consultancy company Besser 2.0 for their Enterprise 2.0 services. In the presentation they demystify in a perfect way what Web 2.0 means and how it changes the game for knowledge management inside organizations. Whenever I need to explain to someone why corporate social networking important I refer to this slide show, and it has never failed to leave an impression and provide ground for a fruitful discussion.

5. Tacit and explicit knowledge

This one is of course a classic, and should be part of any basic introduction to Knowledge Management. I like it because you can start with just asking the question and showing the iceberg picture, which will make the participants think and often discover themselves the key point behind this slide. I don’t know who came up with the iceberg analogy first, but evidently it is out there as common reference when you do a simple Google search. This particular iceberg image that I use in my presentations was taken from the blog ArtTech 101, although it is not clear with whom the copyright of the image resides.

To get to Part 2 of this blog post, click here.


  

The pitfalls of crowd-sourcing: We might not like what the crowd tells us

I am excited to see more and more initiatives that tap into the wisdom of corporate or public crowds to shape priorities for specific policy agendas.

Just recently, different units in my organization called on staff to submit ideas how to improve their business processes, and let all colleagues vote on them to determine which idea would get most traction and support. This is a great way to improve organizational efficiency while involving those affected by change in an actual change process.

At the same time, the success of the Rio Dialogues showed how crowdsourcing policy recommendations and public voting on them can increase legitimacy of inter-governmental negotiations. This new model of public engagement during a United Nations summit received praise from participants as the “the most inclusive process in the history of global summits” (Josette Sheeran, VP of the World Economic Forum), and opened the door for similar approaches in defining the successors of the Milliennium Development in the Post-2015 process (see also Jamie Drummonds TED talk on crowdsourcing the Post-2015 agenda).

I find this new momentum towards open government and democratization of political as well as organizational processes extremely encouraging. However, while embarking on this journey towards bottom-up participation and openness, it is important that we understand exactly the conditions under which this can work - and under which it might not.

Why is it a good thing to open up agenda setting to crowd-sourced suggestions and voting?

Let me highlight a few aspects that are of importance in particular when using approaches that involve crowdsourced suggestions and a system of voting on those suggestions  in order to identify priorities.

First, why is it a good thing to open up agenda setting to crowdsourced suggestions and voting? Here are what I consider the most important benefits:

1. Participation: By giving people a voice, they get engaged in the process, reflect on issues and contribute to them, rather than being on the mere recipient end of a process.
2. Innovation: By providing an open space for any kind of contribution, the crowd often comes up with out-of-the box ideas that an expert group might otherwise have never thought of.
3. Prioritization: By giving people a vote, we are finding out what is most important to them, vs. what might be most important to those who have the task of setting an agenda.
4. Buy-in: By appreciating the vote of the crowd on following up on suggestions that most people identify with, we create buy-in for the process and increase the likelihood of successful implementation.

The benefits of point 1 and 2 are relatively easy to achieve. The 1.3 million public votes that were received on the recommendations of the Rio Dialogues clearly showed that the public was willing to provide their opinion, and also the call for ideas among staff receives ample attention. People usually really like to be asked for their opinion.

If you ask people for their opinion, you have to mean it

Points 3 and 4 are much more difficult to manage, because - as with any democratic mechanism - asking for a vote does not always mean we are fond of what receives the most votes. And arguably, neither an organization that seeks for input on its own agenda, nor the heads of state within an inter-governmental process are technically obliged to follow the vote of the constituencies they asked for their opinions. However, if one has chosen to go down the path of asking people for their input, there is a certain responsibility that comes with it. And once we go into prioritization of specific suggestions over others, there are a few things we have to keep in mind:

1. Communicate how suggestions are selected. It is important to communicate very clearly to the users how the final selected suggestions (the winners) will be selected. Otherwise everyone is expecting that the whole process works like an election in which automatically the suggestions with the most votes will be honored, and users will be put off once they find out that this is not the case. The selection process needs to be formulated and presented in a transparent way (e.g. by explaining who is in the selection panel, by what criteria are proposals selected, what are no-go conditions, etc.).
    
2. Avoid cherry-picking. The more the picked winners deviate from actual results of the vote, the less buy-in we will get on those picked suggestions. It might be tempting for governments or managers of organizations to pick suggestions that match most what they want to do anyway, no matter how many votes the suggestions received. However, it cannot be overstated that picking a suggestion as a winner that nobody identifies with will have no positive change management effect. In fact, it is likely to increase the perception that those in charge of formulating the agenda are just cherry-picking what they like for themselves, which creates a sense of disempowerment we need to avoid in any participative process.
    
3. Don’t distort suggestions when clustering. Often we will have to aggregate different suggestions into one in order to capture a cluster of submissions. When doing so we need to be very careful not to distort the original meaning of a suggestion. Otherwise we can face a situation in which e.g. a suggestion that receives a lot of votes is stripped off the very points that made it a popular suggestion in the first place, just so it can fit within a bigger cluster of suggestions. Even when idea is acknowledge, for the person submitting the original popular suggestion, seeing one’s own idea promoted in a distorted manner can be disempowering as well.
    
4. You have to follow up. No excuses.. No matter how great the participation was, and how well the final prioritized agenda reflects what the crowd wanted, if we don’t actually commit to following up on this agenda, we can destroy all the work we’ve done. If we open up a process that promises to take the views of the people we asked to contribute seriously (no matter if it is staff in an organization or the public in a process like the Rio Dialogues), we have to mean it and follow through. Otherwise the group in charge of the agenda loses all legitimacy, as well as the trust it needs to engage its constituency for implementing any changes in the future. The result will be resignation and reluctance to contribute to any similar exercises next time around: We’ve been asked for our opinion in the past, but nothing was done, so why should I care now?

Now, it is understandable that neither governments nor organizations might be able to pick all ideas with the most popular votes as they are because implementing them might have far reaching implications (in terms of cost, feasibility, collateral effects, discrimination of minority groups, etc). There are often good reasons why good ideas cannot be implemented (or at least not right now), but then this needs to be explained to those who were involved in the process. Otherwise people participating in the call for suggestions and the call to vote on them will feel their voice is not heard and feel disenfranchised.

Keep the conversation going

Finally, when presenting the winning proposals, it is important to maintain a follow-up discussion on those results and the process in general, where users can raise their concerns and also make further suggestions on how the proposals can be implemented down the road. Presenting a prioritized agenda based on crowdsourced suggestions is only the starting point of a participative change process. Whatever happens after that should happen with full participation of the crowd as well.

"New Synthesis" - A framework for generating solutions with citizens, rather than for them

This is the most terribly written book that every public administration practitioner should read. Well, I should rephrase that :-) This is a must-read for people working in public administration, but it takes a bit of suffering to get through it. Luckily I was helped by the fact that 340-pager was made available to our business unit for free, combined with a strong incentive by my boss to get familiar with its concepts as our unit prepares for aligning itself with its main message:

That we as public administration practitioners “are called upon to serve the public good and the collective interest in the face of increasing complexity, uncertainty and volatility”. And only by shifting our strategies, systems and minds towards a framework that balances public policy with civic engagement as well as government authority with openness and collective power, are we able to face the challenges of public administration in the 21^st century.

Developing a framework for public administration in the 21^st century
The New Synthesis Project has been established in 2009, bringing together officials, scholars and experts from six countries (Australia, Brazil, Canada, the Netherlands, Singapore and the UK) and more than 24 organizations through five international roundtables, five post-roundtable reports, and 17 case studies. The project has generated significant insights into preparing governments to serve in the 21st century. The underlying idea was “to expand the circle of people committed to modernizing the role of government in a post-industrial era”, based on the realization that public administration as a practice and discipline is not yet aligned with the challenges of serving in the 21st century. For a brief introduction to the project, you can see this video.
The book starts with the observation that today’s crisis, challenges and opportunities are too complex to be managed by government (or one goverbment agency) alone. Public administrations which are based on the closed, top-down, one-way concept of mass public service delivery that emerged in the industrial age are poorly equipped to master the uncertainty and unpredictability of scenarios like the financial crisis, natural disasters, terrorism or pandemics. The New Synthesis acknowledges that “on its own, government has neither the power nor the tools needed to successfully address complex issues and achieve complex results”. In order to achieve complex results for society, for example education, taxes, school buildings, salaries for teachers and curricula can only get students that far. What is in fact needed is a complex interaction of policies, teachers, families, infrastructure, community support, many of which require the contribution of actors beyond government. The main realization behind this is that “issues that affect the collective can only be solved by the collective”.

Generating solutions with citizens, rather than for them
The New Synthesis therefore proposes an approach that shifts away from thinking of government as the solution provider with citizens remaining passive recipients, a view which devalues their contributions and limits options for society.  Instead, the book suggests seeing government’s role in generating solutions with citizens through means of co-creation and co-production based on openness, innovation and civic empowerment.

A cumbersome read
The author, Jocelyne Bourgon, who served many years in the Canadian administration, condenses the results from the roundtable discussions and case studies of the New Synthesis Project into a framework that tries to encompass the entirety of what public administration in a post-modern environment means. In pursuing this rather ambitious objective, she unfortunately falls prey to her dwelling in this topic on a very abstract level, and a lacking ability to communicate clearly and concisely what the essence of her argument is. This is ironic, given the fact that the vast majority of the book consists of real life case studies that exemplify on every step of the way what the ideas of the New Synthesis mean in practice. But even in doing so, her elaborations remain often vague and unspecific. By the end of Part 1 which lays out her theoretical framework, she eventually manages to get her points across, but only after one makes it through what are 125 pages of a very cumbersome read, full of unnecessarily academic language, professional jargon and fuzzy formulations that don’t lend themselves to conveying her points to an audience that hasn’t worked on this topic daily for the last few years.

Unhelpful illustrations
The book tried to mitigate this problem by providing the reader with illustrations that map the “enabling framework” of the New Synthesis in a graphical and more understandable way. However, the graphic representation of the framework around the axis of government authority and collective power, as well as public policy results and civic results, carving out the four quadrants of performance, emergence, compliance and resilience, achieve exactly the opposite. By the end of the book I was still looking at the illustration wondering how exactly I had to interpret it, and how the different parts would relate to each other. The author could have equally thrown all those rather generic keywords (some of which really don’t mean much without deeper explanation and context) randomly into one bucket and it would have meant as much to me. If the meaning of an illustration is not immediately and intuitively (or at least with just a few explanatory words) understandable and if it creates more questions than it answers, it somehow seems to fail its purpose. And the problem of the book is that it relies heavily on this illustration to explain the entire framework.

Why you still must read this book
All this aside, however, the substantive points laid out by the framework are extremely sound, well researched and of utter relevance to the topic at hand. Bourgon puts the finger on all the vulnerable spots where public administration in its usual form (it’s modern form that was shaped by the industrial age) is not equipped to handle the challenges of the 21^st century. And she is proposing a way of reform that would enable government to face those challenges.
According to the results of the New Synthesis project, in order to move towards a public administration that can do so, the following elements need to come together:

• Awareness that the multitude of issues, possible solutions and stakeholders that lead to public results are all interconnected and cannot be looked at separately from each other.
• Understanding that the purpose of public policies ultimately are to achieve civic results, and that they should be managed and measured accordingly, through better access, stronger voices and expanded choices for citizens.
• Understanding that government needs to work directly with its citizens to co-create and co-produce public results (e.g. through innovation labs as practiced already by UNDP through its innovation work in Europe & CIS), instead of seeing itself as a one-way solution provider.
• Understanding that in a dynamic, uncertain and unpredictable environment the best way to achieve results is through iteration and adaptation, and that for this reason "public organizations need to operate as public platforms for innovation, exploration and experimentation". This shows a strong link to the evolutionary development approach championed among others by Owen Barder (http://www.owen.org).
• Appreciation of the principle of emergence (growing innovative solutions in complex environments) and understanding the need for building anticipative capacity, inventive capacity and adaptive capacity within government through research, learning ,knowledge management, prototyping and crowdsourcing.
• Ability of public institutions to learn to work within networks rather than strict hierarchies, and across boundaries rather than within closed siloes. This relates closely to the contribution of next-generation knowledge management (KM 2.0) to organizational development as it was introduced to UNDP in the last three years through its Knowledge Strategy 2009-2011.
• Commitment to open data, open government and open management in general. Or as Bourgon puts it: "Trust breeds trustworthiness. Systems designed based on distrust impose high costs on society and are unlikely to lead to better results".
• Understanding that civic empowerment, social innovation and participation of citizens in creation and production lead to increased resilience of societies in times of crisis.
• Understanding compliance within public administration as a matter of shared accountabilities and responsibilities across agencies and external actors, rather than as a mechanism for performance control of isolated entities (e.g. a programme or ministry).

This is not a complete summary, but just the main points that stood out for me. It becomes clear that all these items relate very closely the mandates of capacity development, knowledge management and innovation that me and my colleagues are concerned with daily. So yes, my critique of the communication deficiencies of the “New Synthesis” notwithstanding, I recommend this book highly to every practitioner involved in any of those three areas. The New Synthesis Project is on to something here, and we as development practitioners seems well advised to get involved in this global discussion. I am very much looking forward to seeing how this discussion among public administration community will evolve further.

Proud to receive a Knowledge Management award as part of UNDP's KM team

During the last three years, I have been working in a small team at UNDP's Knowledge Management Group working on a number of KM initiatives such as connecting UN agencies with regards to KM topics, supporting UNDP's communities of pratices on development topics related to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and on establishing the social collaboration platform "Teamworks" for UNDP and its partners. I am therefore quite proud that UNDP as an organization has now received the prestigious "Column of Knowledge Award 2012" by Knowledge Management Austria (KMA) in Vienna, Austria, for its “outstanding efforts and achievements to promote the idea of knowledge societies”.

The UNDP website features a respective article here, quoting the Managing Director of KMA, Mr Andreas Brandner, highlighting “UNDP’s role in connecting UN Organizations with Knowledge Management" and in particular emphasizing Teamworks as “the most promising knowledge management initiative within the UN focusing on knowledge networking within a global knowledge partnership”. Mr Brander also mentions UNDP’s “effort on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of the Millennium Development Goals, to document MDG (uneven) achievements with case studies, good stories, supported by videos, and other media, which were tremendous and outstanding within the UN”.

My colleague, Giulio Quaggiotto, UNDP’s Practice Leader for Knowledge and Innovation at the UNDP Regional Centre in Bratislava accepted the the award on May 31st on behalf of UNDP, and during his keynote speech highlighted the importance of focusing on people and cultural change, becoming a real time organisation by harnessing the power of social networks and the digital footprint, and harnessing the knowledge outside of UNDP through initiatives such as the RioDialogues (see my earlier blog post here).

According to KMA's letter to UNDP informing the organization about the award, "the Knowledge Management Award is presented annually by Knowledge Management Austria to one personality with outstanding achievements in the field of knowledge politics and knowledge management, as well as to one international organization with a global impact on knowledge societies." Since the foundation of the Austrian Knowledge Partnership, two other UN organizations have received the award, namely the International Atomic Energy Agency in 2010 and UNESCO in 2011.

For more information on Knowledge Management Austria and the award ceremony, including pictures, presentations and the entire Laudation text, please follow this link: http://km-a.net/forschung/Pages/AgendaWissen2012.aspx.