Open
Dialogues and Closed Communities
Balancing the benefits of
increased openness and increased liability is a challenge that the
intelligence community has been grappling with in recent years. Its thinking
around these issues is now migrating to knowledge management consultants.
Andrew Campbell, senior
vice president and CKO, and Carol Willett, executive vice president for
innovation and learning, now work for Applied Knowledge Group in Reston, Va.,
a consulting company that specializes in virtual teams. Both are former
employees of the Central Intelligence Agency, where they learned to weigh
benefits against risks before sharing knowledge.
At the CIA, Campbell
recalls, "It's drummed into our heads from day one that you have to think
about information as having differing levels of sensitivity and value. There's
a lot of naiveté in American industry. I don't think enough attention is paid
to that aspect of knowledge and how it's managed."
Willett says that
sensitivity to who needs to know something must be seen in terms of
external--not internal--competition. When someone refuses to share with a
colleague, for example, the message should be, "It wasn't that I won't
tell you because it would give you a leg up on me but because I have
responsibility for protecting it," she explains.
This kind of thinking has
obvious implications for the value KM thinkers place on ad hoc conversations
and the innovation that comes from combining bits of knowledge from normally
unrelated disciplines. The ex-CIA workers argue that this conflict can be
resolved.
"I know it's an
oxymoron, but you can have controlled serendipity," Campbell says.
"Serendipity happens within the community of people who are working on a
project. In the experience of the intelligence community, you don't go out and
have that serendipity at a public conference, because if you are not careful,
there are people who are skilled at cleaning your clock."
Willett, who has taught
U.S. government teams that deal with sensitive information, says it's possible
to do interdisciplinary problem solving without making all of the details
explicit. "There are ways to describe problems using analogies and to ask
how someone would do it in their discipline," she explains.
She recalls an instance
when she was called in to facilitate a breakthrough for a sensitive operation.
"There was a group using satellites to determine what was going on
elsewhere in the world. It included astrophysicists, economists and military
experts--a motley crew," she says. "They were all looking at
something, asking what is it, why is it there and what does it betoken? None
of these people had the time to educate each other in their disciplines, so
each came with their own views of what it might be. I was facilitating a
three-day session, but late in the second day one guy yelled the equivalent of
Eureka, and they all went out of the room jabbering happily. They had figured
it out, but I didn't know what they figured out--and I had no need to
know."
Another aspect of this
conundrum is that security concerns can make it more difficult for knowledge
workers to create reciprocal exchanges of information and experience.
"For a good exchange where there is value for all sharing parties,
customers, suppliers and the company need to clarify what they hope to achieve
and what they assume the other party is bringing to share," Willett says.
"But those conversations rarely happen, so there tends to be mutual
disappointment because people don't articulate their expectations."
"Some coin has to be
used to maintain the balance," Campbell adds. "This happened all the
time with people outside the boundary of the agency, such as academic experts.
Anybody I ever ran into who was truly skilled at this kind of transaction was
good at paying attention to the relationship capital."
To
have productive conversations, they conclude, people must make decisions about
need to know in real time. "It is a question of unconscious
mastery," Campbell emphasizes. "Carol's actions to the millisecond
will make a decision in her mind about what kind of information this is--is it
something I can share, is it something he needs to know? How sensitive is the
information, the source or the context?" A professional skilled in these
situations can decide whether the issue can be divorced from its context and
the question answered without jeopardizing the organization's strategy or
industrial secrets.
http://www.destinationcrm.com/km/dcrm_km_article.asp?id=774
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