How KM is related to Talent Management

Posted on January 23, 2011 by Roan Yong

As a Knowledge Management (KM) professional, I believe knowledge is ‘sticky’. It can’t be separated from people without losing its context. That’s why talents are valuable. Although we can’t transfer the exact knowledge to other people, we can transfer similar knowledge to other people. Thus people who received knowledge will re-interpret its meaning and usefulness in the new context that allows him or her to achieve the performance level of the person who transfer the knowledge. For example: I learned golf from my coach. I can make the ball fly as far as my coach can (I can achieve the same performance level as my coach can), but I can’t swing in exactly the same manner as my coach can (I don’t use his exact knowledge to perform the swing – I re-interpret his knowledge into a new knowledge that works for me). Hence, talented people are valuable resources for any company, and each company should develop their (junior) staff to be talents.

So what am I saying? KM is inseparable from Talent Management, just like the brain is inseparable from the nerves. Managing knowledge is not limited to creating and designing a database of lessons learned, or that of best practice. It involves people development. It means growing people to meet their true potentials and bringing people who enables the organisation to carry out what it wants to do. This means we need to:

Provide opportunity where our staff can talk to each other and find out about others’ skills, experience, and education.
Recruit people with the right skills and expertise, that can add value to specific project that a department / a team is dealing with.
Train / develop people according to knowledge needs of the team / department.

The above points lead to three KM action plans for Senior Management and Head of Departments:

Build an online platform where staff can connect and share in their own free time. Since learning in an online environment is asynchronous, then they can access the online platform when they have the time to do so.
Provide opportunity for staff to network and work on a common project (preferably a cross-departmental one).
When planning for future workplan, a department (team) needs to audit their knowledge and see if there is any knowledge gap. They can then close the knowledge gap by training / developing several staff in the required skills / expertise, or recruit a new staff who possess the skills / expertise.

Building an online platform (also called intranet, or knowledge portal), managing / facilitating conversations, and conducting knowledge audit – are Knowledge Manager’s job. In other words, what I have described above requires KM professional’s involvement. Alas, that is the ideal. But it is not how most companies manage their ‘talent’. Traditionally, talent management initiative is usually led by Human Resource (HR) department, and here is how they implement the ‘talent management’ initiative.

For recruiting a ‘talent’:

Get Head of Departments to write job description.
Post job advertisement internally and externally (through newspaper or job portal).
Arrange for interview between the candidates and the Head of Department.
Offer the selected candidate the job (At this point HR’s job is completed).

For training ‘talents’:

Get Head of Departments and the staff to discuss and write ‘Training Roadmap’. Staff can apply for several training course provided by external training providers.
(If there is no budget cut for training) Staff can go for training course as stated in their ‘Training roadmap’.

We can see the problems with the current practice of recruiting and training staff. First, staff cannot relate what they have learned from an external training provider, with their task. This is partly due to the external training provider can’t comprehend the complexities surrounding the task that the staff needs to perform. Second, HR is playing a passive role in recruiting talent. The need to train / recruit talent cannot be solely left to Head of department’s hand. It has to be identified during corporate workplan, when various departments propose what they want to do for the upcoming year. At this point, each department would have a rough idea whether they have knowledge gap or not. And HR ought to be aware of this gap, and assist the respective Head of Department to justify the need to bring in the required manpower to the senior management.

Clearly the current model of recruiting and training staff is no longer suffice. Staff development cannot be ‘outsourced’. It cannot be divorced from the work that the organisation is doing (or going to do). And because of this, KM and Talent Management have to be integrated.

Lessons from the Times Square Failed Bomb Attempt

Posted on May 14, 2010 by Roan Yong

Recently we learned a failed act of terrorism in New York in the Unites States of America. The paragraph below summarizes the incident.

On 1st May, a crude car bomb was discovered in the Times Square in New York. Fortunately, the bomb did not ignite. On 3rd May, a naturalised United States (US) citizen of Pakistani descent – Faisal Shahzad – was held responsible for the Times Square failed bomb attempt. He was taken off from a Dubai-bound airline at John F. Kennedy International Airport.

During the frantic 53 hours that the authorities spent to make sense of the clues, four important facts stand out:

Shahzad did not know that the M88 fireworks – one of the components he used to assemble the car bomb – would not ignite one another. Thus, the bomb failed to detonate.
As a routine procedure, the Custom and Border Protection recorded Shahzad’s unregistered prepaid phone number when he returned from Pakistan. The agency shared this information with Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). As a result the investigators were able to trace the number’s owner – Shahzad – after they learned about the number from a woman who sold her car to Shahzad.
The airline he was flying, Emirates, failed to act on an electronic message notifying all carriers to check the no-fly list for an important added name. That meant lost opportunities to flag him when he made a reservation and paid for his ticket in cash several hours before departure.
An FBI surveillance team had lost track of him, before he drove to the airport. As a result, the investigators did not aware that Shahzad was planning to fly abroad until a final passage list was sent to the Customs and Border Protection agency minutes before takeoff.

The incident had a happy ending – no one was injured, the Times Square was not damaged and the officials managed to identify and eventually capture Shahzad before he left the US. It was a triumph for the US government and a defeat for terrorism.

However, this did not mean we could assume that we are in safe hands and can carry on with our ‘business-as-usual’ attitude. It is important to treat the incident as a near-miss incident since Shahzad nearly got away. Any near-miss incident carries valuable lessons which we can learn from.

Clearly, there is a mixture of luck, good collaboration, and a missed opportunity. The New York residents are lucky because Shahzad could have used a more ‘deadly’ component than M88 fireworks to assemble the car bomb and he could have changed his phone number. In addition, the government officials collaborate well because they shared important information like Shahzad’s unregistered phone number and the no-fly list. On a less positive note, the Emirates staff could have checked the no-fly list more often.

Implications for Knowledge Workers

It is conspicuous to say that there is a room for improvement in the way the US government officials handled the incident. What may not seem obvious are the implications of the incident for the citizens of the world, including knowledge workers. As we move towards knowledge-based economy, the incident teaches us (the knowledge workers) several obvious, but often forgotten, lessons:

Don’t assume that we ‘know everything’. Thankfully, the bomb did not ignite because Shahzad used the wrong component, and he did not consult an expert in bomb making. Shahzad ‘thought’ he knew how to make a car bomb. This did not mean that terrorists like Shahzad ought to learn proper knowledge transfer techniques, but rather knowledge workers should learn from all mistakes, regardless who committed them.
Share information, no matter how trivial, with others. Who could have foreseen that seemingly innocuous sharing of phone number of people returning from Pakistan, would lead to the failed Times Square bomber’s identity.
Make use of shared information. Shahzad managed to board the plane because the Emirates staff did not cross-check his name with the names of people on the no fly list. Luckily, as is routine, an analyst in the Custom and Border Protection did so and informed the relevant authority.

Furthermore, there is a need to expunge the finger-pointing habit and inculcate the learning culture, which would allow us to learn not only from the good stuff, but also from the sore points. A good way to start is through dialogue – a conversation among equals that allows all parties involved to discuss ideas and solve problem together. Unfortunately, in the Times Square failed car bomb incident, there is no dialogue among the officials – which could have explained security lapses that allowed Shahzad to board the plane. Instead of conducting fruitful dialogue sessions, the officials are either busy ‘defending’ themselves, or focusing only on the positive side of the story.

If we are serious about capturing knowledge and learning from past experience, then we need to conduct dialogue sessions. Capturing knowledge via dialogue is not going to be easy, and as a matter of fact, Dialogue is perilous, especially when accountability is required. However, there is no better alternative to capture tacit knowledge, since it is embedded in people’s head. Thus, getting people to converse and to exchange their thoughts openly in a safe environment is more important than ever.

Reference:

http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/t/times_square_bomb_attempt_may_1_2010/index.html

Three Doctors and The Right KM Strategy

Posted on April 12, 2010 by Roan Yong

I had ‘the privilege’ to observe how Knowledge Management (KM) being implemented in health care industry in Singapore recently. National Skin Center (NSC), a public organization that specializes in treating skin diseases, seems to use KM personalization strategy – a strategy that revolves around knowledge transfer from one health care specialist to the other. I went to NSC about two months ago to be treated for ‘strange mosquito-like’ bites that surfaced on my arms, legs, and belly.

When I met the doctor, he was accompanied by an apprentice, who was busy writing down notes about my conversation with the doctor. After hearing my story, the doctor confidently concluded that I was bitten by ‘nasty’ mosquitoes. I was quite puzzled by his diagnosis, since the bite marks were appeared in linear pattern – a sign of bed bugs bites. When I asked him whether bed bugs could be the culprit instead of mosquitoes, his reply was “there is no bed bugs in Singapore due to the cleanliness of our nation”. Several days later, I couldn’t sleep because my arms and legs were so itchy. I decided to turn on the lights, and finally, I saw some bed bugs. To be sure that they are bed bugs, I squashed some of them and saw blood, my blood that is.

The NSC doctor consultation fee cost me about $70, and I received ‘misguided’ advice due to his unwavering faith in Singapore cleanliness. I was not sure why he insisted that Singapore was clean when the nation depended on foreign workers to clear our rubbish. The majority of Singaporeans, unlike their Japanese counterpart, did not seem to care about public cleanliness. A trip to any hawker center would verify this fact. While his utterly useless advice has certainly hurt my pocket, I was more concerned about ‘false’ knowledge that his young apprentice received. I was wondering whether the apprentice would eventually find out about his mentor ‘misdiagnosis’. Only time will tell…but I’m afraid I will not visit NSC for bed bugs treatment.

Few weeks ago, I had high fever and sore throat. I visited a General Practitioner (GP) – a man in mid-30s – in Bukit Batok. After hearing my illness, he keyed-in the symptoms in a computer software. The software analyzed the data entered, and it indicated that there was 66% chance that my illness was flu. Based on this result, my GP prescribed medicines for flu, fever and sore throat. My condition improved, but I have not fully recovered. This GP is mainly using KM codification strategy where experts codifies their knowledge in the form of notes or into a computer database, so that the knowledge can be reused by others.

Today, I visited another GP – a middle-aged man – in West Coast. After I told him my illnesses – sore throat and dry cough and that I have not been feeling well in the past two weeks, he immediately ‘knew’ that my nose was slightly blocked, although I did not feel it. To show that I did not ‘breathe properly’, he asked me to compare the sound between breathing with my mouth and breathing with one nostril closed. I could tell that I breathe ‘heavier’ with one nostril. The GP explained that I was having breathing issue because I was not completely cured from the flu. I was amazed by his deep insight and the fact that he did not rely on any computer software, or anyone. Incredibly, this GP used his own profound knowledge, accumulated over the years of medical practice. Alas, he was not managing his knowledge effectively.

Comparing the three doctors and how they manage their knowledge (the third doctor has no KM strategy), I can safely deduce that the personalization strategy is more prone to bad decision making than the codification strategy. In the earlier strategy the expert could only access the nearest or available peers. Whereas in the latter strategy, experts could access their peers collective knowledge instantly, and fine tune the knowledge to suit the context. Nevertheless, this does not mean that codification strategy is always superior to the other strategy. The second doctor failed to detect breathing irregularity, because of his lack of tacit knowledge in dealing with flu.

Thus, to get the best of both worlds, experts should apply the two KM strategies in 80-20 combination, where one strategy is more dominantly used than the other, depending on the context. In relatively ‘predictable’ environment, where cause and effect are known, codification should be the dominant strategy. On the other hand, in chaotic environment, where cause and effect are not immediately clear, personalization should be the dominant strategy.

The Role of Tacit Knowledge in Talent Acquisition: A Lesson From Football

Posted on November 1, 2008 by Roan Yong

Henry Winter wrote in Today, 28 October 2008, the following remarks about English Football

#1. Two clubs with directors of football, Spurs and Newcastle United prop up the premier League. Conversely, the two clubs with the most Premier League Success, Manchester United and Arsenal are run by managers who enjoy the first, middle and last word on enlisting talent.

#2. Alex Ferguson, the Man Utd manager, and Arsene Wenger, the Arsenal manager, knew exactly what type of player they need, and what type of player that will thrive in the league.

The big questions are of course: What caused such disparity? surely the Director of Football appointed by either Spurs or Newcastle are no clown, they have extensive knowledge about upcoming players otherwise they wouldn’t be appointed to hold such position in the first place.

While there are many possible reason that caused the two Director of Football to fail their duties, one possible answer lies in Tacit Knowledge of the manager that the Director of Football unaware of.

Alex Ferguson and Arsene Wenger gained the tacit knowledge through years of managing and coaching football club. They are the person-in-charge of overseeing training and deploying tactics such that they understand what kind of players fit their tactics. But directors of football only responsible for players recruits and often they don’t buy players according to the tactics that the managers deployed. The Directors of Football concentrates in buying good players, but does not necessarily the player that plays according to tactics. Rafa Benitez summed this point nicely during his time in Valencia, “I asked for a table and they bought me a lampshade.” He resigned soon after. It seems that clubs operate best when they have one man, one vision.

Please note that tactics are more than just figuring out formation such as 4-4-2, 4-2-3-1, 4-5-1, or 3-4-3, it is actually contain the tacit knowledge of the manager, i.e. his understanding of what tactics better suited to win the game. Tactics is about getting the best out of teamwork, instead of individual stars. Such knowledge is difficult to be articulated or appreciated for several reasons:

1. The job description of Director of Football is to recruit good players, and often asks the manager to change tactics according to the player that he bought so that he “worth his salt” (he does his job). This means there is “divided line” that reduce the need to collaborate rather than increase it.

2. The structure of the Director of Football, which place it higher than the post of manager, inhibit the socialization process required to transfer tactical (tacit) knowledge from manager to “his boss”

3. The accountability falls in the hand of the managers. Such imbalance caused “what in it for me” attitude in the Director of Football side, in other words, he will less care about the impact of individual player to the overall team play.

In other words, as long as there is little collaboration and common understanding between the role of Director of Football and the manager, the club will be divided and team performance will suffer. It follows from this fact that the role of tacit knowledge in talent acquisition has implication beyond the realm of football management, especially in the realm of Human Resource (HR).

Implication #1. The HR Manager should scout for talents but leave the final hiring decision to the direct supervisor. In this case, the HR Manager acts as an advisor to the direct supervisor, which leverages on the HR Manager knowledge on Recruitment & Hiring skills and at the same time taps into the direct supervisor tacit knowledge on best person for the job.

Implication #2. The Direct supervisor should justify his hiring decision to the HR Manager. In this way, there is a feedback mechanism that ensure HR Manager to do better talent shortlisting in the future.