Lessons learnt at the Thought Leaders' Forum

Analysis of themes discussed at this year's European Knowledge Management Thought Leaders Forum, including details of a benchmarking and networking exercise carried out by participants.

By Catherine Flutsch, Bird & Bird.

The third annual European Knowledge Management (KM) Thought Leaders’ Forum was held over two days from 19 September.

This year, a broad range of delegates attended from all over Europe including representatives from Shell International, Ericsson, Jones Lang La Salle, Coca-Cola and Cadbury Schweppes. Three law firms sent representatives – Bird & Bird, Linklaters and CMS Cameron McKenna.

The opening exercise
I was pleased to be invited back to chair the first day of the forum. The forum organiser, Osney Media, asked me to repeat the opening benchmarking/networking exercise, which I ran at last year’s forum. As quite a few delegates asked me for the materials to run this exercise, I thought I would share them in this column.

The exercise is designed to help delegates benchmark themselves against their peers in an informal way, which also encourages networking.

The exercise has become something of a tradition at the forum, first started by chairperson Colin Cadas of Rolls Royce, in 2005.

It provides each person with an opportunity to give his or her opinion on how far along their own organisation is in each of the following four main KM goals:

KM for competitive advantage;
Capturing and disseminating documented knowledge;
Sharing tacit knowledge;
The integration of KM principles into every aspect of the business.

Each goal is represented on a separate graph (see Figures one, two, three and four) showing a continuum from ‘You’re just starting’ close to the bottom; to ‘You’re on your way’ in the middle; to ‘You’ve made it’ at the top. Each person writes their organisation’s name on a post-it note and places this on the area of the graph that they feel represents where their organisation is for that particular goal.

An explanation of each of the three points of the continuum is provided in boxes on the graph. I also hand out a written explanation of each point prior to the exercise. I am happy to send a copy of the written explanation to anybody who e-mails me (contact details are included at the end of this article).

At the forum, each graph is made into a large poster and mounted on four different walls, so that the process of placing post-its also requires the delegates to mingle. Once every delegate has placed their post-it note on each graph, the chair person leads a discussion of the results. If anybody has put their organisation at the top of a graph – that is, a public statement that they have succeeded in that area – I will usually ask that person to give a brief explanation.

Of course, this is not a scientific benchmarking exercise, but it is a good way to stimulate discussion and enable delegates to get to know each other.

The Forum
Having discussed this year’s forum with the other law firm representatives, it seems that we came away from the forum feeling a combination of elation and despair. From the presentations it soon become clear to us that most law firms are way ahead of the other industries represented, especially in the capture and dissemination of documented knowledge.

One particular presentation was a stark reminder not to neglect the KM solutions implemented outside one’s own industry. The presentation came from a representative of a government department, who had just spent the past few years implementing a database for the purposes of storing and filing all documents created by the employees of the department.

It seemed that the database was not integrated with MS Word, Powerpoint, and so on, so employees were told that they must file every document they created into the database. Success, according to the presenter, had been achieved because every month over 80 per cent of employees filed at least one of the documents they had created.

If I understood the presentation correctly, it seemed clear that the kind of document management (DM) and matter-centric filing systems that law firms have been using for years, would have been the perfect solution for that department. It could have taken advantage of the broad range of experience that any law firm using DM has gained (and is generally happy to share) and could have expected a success rate significantly higher than one document filed per month.

More interesting was the clear distinction between those organisations that use KM primarily to increase competitive advantage or bottom-line performance (corporate KM) and those organisations which do not (not-for-profit KM). Three outstanding examples of the latter were:

Ron Donaldson’s presentation about how he used techniques for sharing tacit knowledge to support the merger of part of the Countryside Agency, English Nature and part of the Rural Development Service to form the new organisation, Natural England;
Lucy Macnab of the Southbank Centre, outlining how she used KM techniques to engage the public in the launch of the Royal Festival Hall through a programme of capturing and using the public’s memories;
Jeannine Brutschin Kummer of the Novartis Foundation of Sustainable Development, on how to use techniques for sharing tacit knowledge to gain a greater insight into the issues and challenges surrounding sustainable development.

Of those presentations, I believe that the Cognitive Edge techniques used by Ron Donaldson could be most easily translated to the law firm environment. Details about the cognitive edge programme can be found at www.cognitive-edge.com.

Catherine Flutsch is head of KM at Bird & Bird. She can be contacted at catherine.flutsch@twobirds.com.

Note: To view a PDF of the charts used for the opening exercise mentioned in this comment please e-mail the editor at kclifton@ark-group.com.