Ed Hoffman outlines knowledge strategy at NASA

Today I had the pleasure of attending a presentation at PM Oz on the Gold Coast, by Ed Hoffman, Director of NASA Academy. Below are some of my notes from that presentation.

What is the mission of the organisation and yourself? Having a good answer to this is the biggest difference between “good” and “great”.

NASA training was formerly geared to classroom training – disasters in the 90’s dictated the need for change to a culture of learning to support to mission of the organisation.

Challenges at NASA range from responding to the effects of radiation from Mars on a mission, to new hardware and software to knowing how 7 people can cohabit in a tin can for 3 months at a time.

Pretty much everything that happens at NASA is a project.
Project Management and Systems Engineering were identified as the two most important disciplines at NASA

Uncertainty is the key constant across NASA projects, but unknowns need to be anticipated and responded to. Some missions span 10, 20 or 30 years. 1, 2 and 5 year projects need to feed into these missions, even though future circumstances are not known. The academy needs to ensure that these can be delivered over multiple generations of people.

80% of people at NASA are eligible to leave (retire?) in the next 5 years.

Most NASA missions are international partnerships, so strategy needs to manage this integration.

NASA academy provides a common frame of reference for all NASA employees, providing standards, policies etc.

How do you learn? NASA people say that it is by being hands on. Give people tasks to undertake so they can apply what they learn on the job.

“Non-traditional learning” did not provide NASA with the knowledge that it needed and was a factor in the failures on the Mars program.

Four fundamentals to successful projects:
leadership
teamwork
processes
knowledge
For any organisation that needs to exist for more than a year, what is the knowledge needed, how do you share this?

Knowledge intensive organisations are effective because people trust each other and are willing to share.

Two kinds of people – the ones how insist that you must follow the processes, plus those who say you should throw them out. Blindly following processes will not work.

What are the most critical goals of your project?

What is the knowledge that you will need to deliver on these goals?

“Work the system” to get access to the resources you need.

Make sure that you have some time to reflect and think.

Build the community.

Tell stories. NASA does this through a magazine where people can tell stories of their experiences.

Project success capabilities:
teamwork
leadership
process
knowledge

Change Artists - Nestle

I don't normally push HP communication to my colleagues outside HP, but I found this one really interesting. A great case study on how Nestle implented a major change:

CEO Peter Brabeck and Deputy Executive VP Chris Johnson of Nestlé discuss how change has helped the world’s largest food and beverage company manage complexity more effectively.

http://h30294.www3.hp.com/hp/pub/changeartists

Dare to share

In the afternoon "Workshop J" of KM Asia, David Gurteen eventually abandoned the rigid structure of his presentation to increase the engagement within the group, so that we could share our real life concerns and experiences about running KM programs. A number of themes emerged, such as "should I try Stealth KM", "should I try to link my program to direct business outcomes?", remember to praise people, set realistic expectations with sponsors.

In a short space of time workshop J, henceforth known as "dare to share" agreed to experiment with this virtual community. Thanks David for providing this environment as I think it was welcome relief from two days of death by powerpoint!

Matt (not Patrick!)

Creative tension at KM Asia 06

The key schools of thought were on show at KM Asia. Complete with the schoolyard bully, the new kid on the block and the wise old sage teacher.

A few topics raged for debate during the conference: Do I need a senior sponsor to succeed or should I focus on people in the field? Should I try to place an economic value of knowledge in the organisation?

By the way there was no debate about should I connect or collect – there was consensus that knowledge collection has failed. In it’s place, “narrative” is the new capture: create an ecosystem of blogs and wikis, argues Dave Snowdon, and people will collaborate because it is in our DNA.

David Hallilwell from DLA Piper asked "is Dave Snowdon actually a mad Welshman". He confessed to preferring the Tom Stewart school, which considers the value of intangible knowledge assets.

Keynote Professor Leif Edvinsson tells us about a number of opportunities and challenges opening up in the future: how do you create a sustainable knowledge city? The city of Ragusa thrived for hundreds of years without an army, by ensuring they had the best intelligence of their time. What could we learn from them?

Dr. Alex Bennet implemented possibly the largest KM program ever for the US navy. Navy’s decision to move from command and control to one with empowered decision making in the field required huge improvements in KM. Faced with thousands of stakeholders - each with a legitimate stake in resisting the transformation of the Navy – Dr. Bennet’s team succeeded in achieving significant change. They achieved this through strong commitment from the top and an innovative approach, ensuring that the field decision makers defined what knowledge was critical to them to support decision making.

Niall Sinclair believes that “Stealth KM” is the best way to succeed. “Stay below the radar” he says. “NO!” responds Jerry Ash, I have seen people lose their jobs trying to run KM this way.

Thomas A. Stewart comes with enormous credibility, being the editor of Harvard Business Review. He reminds us that all businesses are knowledge businesses – the salient challenge is to understand how we should harness our knowledge to achieved sustainable competitive differentiation.

Colin Henson from Arup gave us a great practical perspective on how people and engagement-focussed collaboration can ensure that lessons learned in one place can make a real difference elsewhere. One example was an engineer in the UK with excess vibration in a bridge there tapped into specialised skills from around the world to solve the problem. And don’t forget that if engineers don’t have a problem they will focus on creating one for themselves to solve.

Jerry Ash told us about how in his career he has learned from the masters of KM methods that have been found to achieve great outcomes for the business. HP's own Stan Garfield featured in the talk for his achievements in implementing what made sense for the business at the time, which was knowledge capture and reuse. Given the shift in HP to connect not collect it could be time for an update to his presentation.