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Rick Dove, Paradigm Shift
International, www.parshift.com, 
| Agility =
Knowledge Management + Response Ability (download zipped Word 6.0 version) Rick Dove, Paradigm Shift
International, www.parshift.com, |
| Agile enterprise, knowledge management, organizational learning, and
collaboration concepts are all being explored by various groups of business managers,
consultants, and academics. The general motivation for this interest is that organizations
are finding it more difficult to stay in synch with the pace of change in their
operational and competitive environments. Though many of these explorations are still
myopically focused on a single one of these issues, more and more are recognizing a
convergence. I examined this convergence in a paper for the Journal of Knowledge Management (3/99) from the point of view that all of these concepts are strongly interrelated, and argued that organizational agility is only achieved when knowledge management and response ability are balanced organizational competencies. Knowledge Management, Response Ability, and the Agile Enterprise is available in the library at www.parshift.com. My personal interest in knowledge management has come about through the back door - I was trying to understand how to design highly change proficient agile organizations. After an initial focus on systems engineering principles applied to the design of highly adaptable business practices and processes I eventually came up against the fact that changing anything requires that somebody learn something, and that this learning process is every bit as big an obstacle as rigid inflexible system design. Since learning is the process that develops knowledge, moving my focus on to knowledge management was a natural step. From this new perspective hindsight showed that I had been heavily involved in the key issues of knowledge management all along - in my attempts to understand the agile enterprise I had employed and refined collaborative learning mechanisms that brought hundreds of similarly interested people together in a mutual knowledge development quest. I now believe that knowledge management and response ability have a co-dependent relationship, and see them as the enablers for an agile organization. And I view the current interest and need for both as caused by the accelerated pace of new knowledge development. I view agility in organizations not as a goal or a strategy, but rather as a fundamental existence necessity. Organizations have always had to be sufficiently agile to adjust to their changing environment or cease to exist. New knowledge has no value until it is applied. Knowledge This human thing we are distinguishes itself from other life by
generating and applying knowledge. Our increasing population is building upon an
increasing body of past knowledge - which increases the frequency of new knowledge
generation and speeds the decay of old knowledge value - making the general business
environment, which is built upon knowledge, more unstable. Agility In 1991 I co-led an intense four-month-long collaborative cross-industry
workshop at Lehigh University that gave birth to the concept of agile enterprise. Our
intent was to identify the competitive focus that would be the successor to lean. Response Ability The other key enabler is response ability - a competency that
allows an organization to apply knowledge effectively - whether it is knowledge of a
market opportunity, a production process, a business practice, a product technology, a
person's skills, a competitor's threat, whatever. |
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| Agile is a word we associate with cats. When we say a
cat is agile we observe that it is both physically adept at movement and also mentally
adept at choosing useful movement appropriate for the situation. Agile carries with it the
elements of timeliness and grace and purpose and benefit as well as nimbleness. A cat that simply has the ability to move quickly, but moves inappropriately and to no gain might be called reactionary, spastic, or confused, but never agile. Picture a cat on a hot tin roof. Conversely, a cat that knows what should be done but finds itself unable to move might be called afraid, catatonic, or paralyzed, but never agile. Like the cat that's got itself up a tree. Up until that 1991 workshop my career was involved with start-up and turn-around management - where speed and urgency are important. First hand experience helped me appreciate the difference between developing a strategy and implementing it successfully. Knowing what to do was too often mismatched with the ability to do it. My engineering background started me looking for obstacles and solutions in the design aspect of organizational systems. Rather than go back to the entrepreneurial world I began a series of collaborative learning events with industry - seeking to understand what makes some business practices and process highly adaptable while most are extremely difficult to change. Concurrently the concept of knowledge management and learning organizations were capturing increasing interest in other circles - for the same underlying reasons. In recent years our collaborative investigations have converged on the co-dependent relationships of change and learning. You cannot do one without the other. As to knowledge management - nothing happens unless and until somebody learns something. The concepts of knowledge management and response ability are not new. Organizations throughout time have practiced both successfully or they have ceased to exist. What is new is the need for more formal and conscious understandings about these practices - raising them to the level of a recognized competency - brought about by the quickening pace of knowledge development and knowledge-value decay. What used to be done unconsciously and in its good old time is no longer adequate in competitive enterprise. Balancing these two competencies is important. A few years ago a Canadian auto plant decided to abandon the chain drive that moved all cars synchronously through the factory from work station to work station. They foresaw advantages in an asynchronous movement, and placed each car-in-process on its own automated guided vehicle (AGV), capable of independent movement and not in harness to the car in front. This promised more flexibility for adding mass customized features to individual cars without dragging all cars through stations where no work was performed. More importantly, if a workstation was shut down for any reason cars could be pool-buffered or rerouted to other stations first and then return - while the rest of the factory continued to operate. Unfortunately when the plant went live the expected high throughput turned out considerable less then the traditional chain drive had provided. Under the old system a failed workstation shut down the entire production line and the silence was deafening - gaining immediate and total attention. With the highly fluid AGV flow, cars simply bypassed out-of-service stations and the comforting noise of industry continued. A classic architecture for increasing response ability that resulted in a major failure because it was unmatched with the knowledge management issues. This shop-floor example may not appear to be what we currently call knowledge management. Perhaps because we do not yet have a general theory of knowledge management. Nevertheless, this situation occurred because of a disproportionate focus on response ability without a balancing knowledge base of how and why to use it. Thus, we have a mismatch of both strategic knowledge as well as real-time operating knowledge. As to a mismatched balance on the other side - revisit the classic story of Xerox and its Palo Alto Research Center. PARC was a collection of extremely innovative thinkers and learners, organized around active collaborative learning concepts. A very progressive knowledge management organization - yet unable to transfer its fruits into applied results within the Xerox family. |
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| ========= Reply ========================= From: ItwZK@aol.com Date: Tue, 9 Mar 1999 Dear Rick - I am just looking at your article. I did not finish reading it yet. Statement that "New knowledge has no value until it is applied." made me furious. It is about the same as saying, that money have no value unless they are spent. Knowledge even not applied pays dividends as any knowledge potentially applicable can be build only on previous knowledge (very often inapplicable). Saying that I shell return to reading your article. Regards, Zdzislaw Korytkowski, Proj. Engineer, ITW Spiroid ========= Reply ========================= ========= Reply ========================= ========= Reply ========================= I was thinking about your example of a Canadian auto plant driven assembly line. Something that might apply to this was our visit to an IBM plant where the halls were wide and used to be filled with inventory between process steps. They eliminated the inventory and enhanced (lowered) the residence time material was in the production line. It strikes me that the Automobile Company did the reverse of the IBM solution to the problem. At IBM they needed to use Knowledge Management to change the way things worked and only achieved the positive result when the organizational intelligence was raised to enable the system to operate efficiently. An industry shifting from "make to inventory" to "make to order" is one of those opportunities that could use a dose of knowledge management and a change in the organizations intelligence. I will be making a presentation to our industry group involved with the safety and impact of our production processes. (If a pipe breaks we can kill our employees and our neighbors). This presentation, to be given in June, is to get all 10 Silicone Industry Companies using a tool so that the operational people react correctly and instinctively to any threatening circumstance as it arises. Their action will stop the sequence of events that are required in a pathway to a disaster. John Oleson, Dir. of Manufacturing Technology, Dow Corning Corporation ========= Reply ========================= ========= Reply ========================= In support of the OODA model, I employ the Balanced Scorecard as a tool to support Observation; the Capability Maturity Model as a support tool for Orientation; TRIZ and ARIZ as mechanisms to underpin the Decision component; and the application of RRSI-designed (reusable,reconfigurable, scalable, interoperable) technologies, organizational structures, et al as the mechanism for translation of decision into ACTION. I'm going to be conducting a workshop/seminar on OODA as the unifying concept for Agility, and the various tools as support mechanisms for same, at Carnegie Mellon University later this spring for a group of senior foreign business and technology executives .. and plan to reference your article as corroboration of the necessity for balancing the Agility practice's learning and the doing elements. Many thanks for keeping the beacon of Agility shining so that those of us who sail the uncharted waters don't run aground on the hidden shoals. John Canter ========= Reply ========================= ========= Reply ========================= ========= Reply ========================= ========= Reply
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