I have just returned from the UK and from co-delivering a training program for new CoP coordinators in a global company. It was a great experience and I learned much about communities of practice. In the week before, I spent some time in Brisbane looking at some of the company’s CoP success stories. A number […]

A simple way to help people develop stories of how their organisation might operate in the future is to ask them to consider specific triggering events then explain what happened. It’s important the triggering event is specific yet representative. For example, a triggering event might be Ron Wilson suddenly resigning from the investments section to […]

Strategies should result in a set of actions making the organisation more valuable to whoever it serves. Knowledge strategies are no different but most organisations develop a knowledge strategy in the following way: the company engages consultants to analyse their needs the leaders are asked, “what result would you like to see at the end […]

There seems to be a renewed interest in developing knowledge strategies. We have been involved in three in the last six months and our narrative techniques have been well received. We now need to move people from seeing a knowledge strategy as a thing to a seeing it as a process. We also need to […]

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that every knowledge strategy has the same objectives, which are: improve knowledge sharing enhance innovation reduce impact of people leaving (knowledge retention) build skills and know-how improve everyone’s ability to find relevant knowledge when they need it improve how we learn from experience If […]

Have a look at this funny take on the recent election slogan adopted by the NSW Labor Party: “More to do, but we’re heading in the right direction” (hat tip to Victor Perton) Tags: slogans

Over the last few months we’ve talked about the importance of having a short phrase or mantra to help everyone in an organisation implement the company’s strategy (here and here). At Anecdote we’ve had a few catch phrases over our relatively short life and we’ve never been totally happy with any of them. Here’s the chronology: complexity […]

A while ago I argued that the target metaphor was inappropriate for change projects. The idea that anyone could accurately define a change target, aim at it, and then hit it with a well shot arrow was, at best, an illusion. In most cases the possible, beneficial end states are wide and varied. So the question is, how […]

Bruce Nussbaum over at BusinessWeek Online has written a short piece entitled: Lessons From Home Depot’s Bob Nardelli—Why Command And Control Is So Bad. Autocratic top-down, command and control works great when you focus on process—cost and quality. Six Sigma measures all that stuff wonderfully. The truth is that in the new global business culture, […]

I was working with Tony High before Christmas when he made the point to the group that ‘people don’t leave organisations, they leave managers’.  This is certainly consistent with my experience. Even if your job is fantastic, if your manager isn’t then thoughts inevitably turn to ‘what next’ and it’s a slippery slope once you […]