Do you know what you know?
Organisations can be sometimes get to the top of their field by magic. By that I mean that they have a combination of great people and brilliant ideas that comes together with a favourable operating environment in such a happy way that everything works to their advantage - for a while. Then something changes, performance falls off - and suddenly everyone realises that noone actually knew what the magic ingredient was.
Truly great organisations are a little different. They sustain great performance not by magic but by knowing exactly what it is they know - and leveraging and protecting that knowledge for all they are worth. Here are three keys they typically employ...
1. Great organisations recognise that knowledge lives primarily in people's heads and that the way they select, retain, mentor, grow and, especially, connect great people matters more than having a server full of standard operating procedures. They develop people who know what they know and how it fits into the big picture.
2. Great organisations can distinguish between areas in which they have critical know-how and those in which they just need to ensure that they keep up with best practice. Failure to distinguish between these areas can mean the organisation dying under a weight of bureaucracy (where ever jot and tittle of every operation is documented to the nth degree) or that they get religious about the wrong things. Getting it right means that the organisation can focus in detail on the few things that really matter (and possibly outsource some of the rest).
3. Great organisations run their internal operations like a franchise chain. That is to say, their command of their know-how, both connective (ie in people) and captured (ie articulated critical know-how), is such that each office or region or division that opens embodies the organisation's DNA to at least the extent that a new McDonalds restaurant anywhere in the world embodies "the McDonalds way". That is more than just a comment on superficial appearance or brand presentation; the experience a great organisation delivers to its customers, clients or stakeholders will be the same wherever they touch the organisation because the same values and know-how will be brought to bear on every problem or opportunity, and with deep understanding of what those values and that know-how mean.
And the starting point for all of this is found in two simple but ultimately profound questions:
"Do we know what we know? And how do we know?"
Truly great organisations are a little different. They sustain great performance not by magic but by knowing exactly what it is they know - and leveraging and protecting that knowledge for all they are worth. Here are three keys they typically employ...
1. Great organisations recognise that knowledge lives primarily in people's heads and that the way they select, retain, mentor, grow and, especially, connect great people matters more than having a server full of standard operating procedures. They develop people who know what they know and how it fits into the big picture.
2. Great organisations can distinguish between areas in which they have critical know-how and those in which they just need to ensure that they keep up with best practice. Failure to distinguish between these areas can mean the organisation dying under a weight of bureaucracy (where ever jot and tittle of every operation is documented to the nth degree) or that they get religious about the wrong things. Getting it right means that the organisation can focus in detail on the few things that really matter (and possibly outsource some of the rest).
3. Great organisations run their internal operations like a franchise chain. That is to say, their command of their know-how, both connective (ie in people) and captured (ie articulated critical know-how), is such that each office or region or division that opens embodies the organisation's DNA to at least the extent that a new McDonalds restaurant anywhere in the world embodies "the McDonalds way". That is more than just a comment on superficial appearance or brand presentation; the experience a great organisation delivers to its customers, clients or stakeholders will be the same wherever they touch the organisation because the same values and know-how will be brought to bear on every problem or opportunity, and with deep understanding of what those values and that know-how mean.
And the starting point for all of this is found in two simple but ultimately profound questions:
"Do we know what we know? And how do we know?"
