Living Documents and Opening Up an Emerging KM Strategy Case
20-Aug-04
Emotionally, I find the classical strategy document format one of the most boring on earth. It get low marks among chartering communities: it doesn’t look fit for a hyperlinking age where many people can contribute questions and answers. And compared with a package holiday brochure or a red Michelin guide, it doesn’t look as if it wants to grow transparently with all its users and stakeholders.
Worse its language is usually not simple for all disciplines to understand, and to the extent that it has any mathematical or other logic framing it, the assumptions on which this logic is founded are buried so far away that usually the leaders signing the strategy document don’t know how to differentiate facts and assumptions. You only need to look at the hundreds of accounting restatements involving more than a billion dollars a go to see that strategic theory and human relationship realities have become separated by more than a proverbial mile.
This is especially worrying if your life is in any way impacted by a so-called global organisation, and its strategic gaps. As one of the co-authors of Strategy Maps claims : 95% of the workforce of global corporations no longer understand how to operate the strategy at actionable levels if you bother to quiz them at that level of practical detail. Unfortunately you can spend as much as you like on ICT, and this in itself will make the likelihood that human beings know how to perform the strategy even less unless you have helped them understand at experiential levels. Tell someone how to do something and 6 months later 10% of human beings are likely to remember how to do it. Let someone experience how to do something and 90% of human beings will still know how to do it for many years.
About 10 years ago, I helped coin the term Living Document as a practice through which people discover other styles of updating the core threads that knowledge workers need to commune around if they are to activate projects and service work in the directions that leaders are intending. And conversely so that leaders can walk values as well as just printing them.
What we have learnt is there is not standard format for a living document. There are patter rules like some I have already alluded to. However, the truth some of the most highly creative work any organisation can do is in 1) deciding which are its most important living documents that need organisation-wide participation, 2) how to make a specific living document feel engaging for all who need to collaborate around and evolve with it.
OPEN CASES
I am encouraging an early team of participants in The Global University of Poverty - KM4/30K to develop ‘strategy’ in a living document way. We’ll report back as we can. For a start, ponder the first question that excites me. What would you like to see magnetised by an emerging space like GUP. Examples:
Individual Alumni Listing – open directory of why members are signing up
Some conversational threads that can be syndicated anywhere such as 30000 project ideas for Global Poverty.
A directory of live projects.
Some blogs on background information on why the last 40 years of aid hasn’t changed the system for those most trapped in global poverty compiled in common sense language. So that every man and woman can ask does the world have to be like this? And more to the point, what can we do first that doesn’t cost us anything but makes the poor better off.
Walk-through Maps that people can connect to. I want to walk on here and connect with people over there, and the qualifying routes and permissions fro doing that are as easy to read as a street map.
Details
- Author:
- Chris Macrae
- Publisher:
- KnowledgeBoard
- Date:
- 20-Aug-04
- Categories:
- Emotional Intelligence
- Sections:
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live and let strategic plans die?
Here's a pretty insightful academic paper and confirmation that just as netwiorking best practice is often being pioneered in contexts of most desperate human need, so are living document strategies and other collaborative forms of maximising every participants' productivity.
Paper Summary
The complexity of today’s aid operations requires a fundamental change in the management skill set and a much longer-term view to strategic decision-making and development. It is clear that the tools in widespread use today, particularly strategic planning variations of logical frameworks, are unsuited to this task. These tools were developed specifically to improve planning at a lower project level. It is within this project level mindset that most aid organisations confuse operational and organisational strategy, in most cases adapting the latter to an aggregation of various country operation plans. This results, over time, to the organisation becoming less and less in control of its own direction and this problem can be
particularly acute within aid when multiplied within the competing demands of a large number
of influential stakeholders. This ‘strategic drift’ continues over time up to a point where
organisations find themselves out of step with current reality and must painfully transform themselves simply in order to keep up. This transformation is difficult to successfully execute and can exacerbate current problems or create new ones that can lead to inadvertent changes of strategic direction.
Any strategy execution requires change, whether this change is incremental over a long
period of time or whether the change is rapid and transforms the organisation quickly. Either way the most profound influences on the process and outputs of change require a closer examination of organisational culture. This requires envisioning the organisation not as one homogenous body, but made up of very many ‘tribes’ that can traverse organisational, hierarchical and national boundaries. Seeing the organisation this way, and through its relationships with other organisations within aid, follows the realisation that there is no such
thing as one change management program for one organisation. Change management
techniques must be adapted to fit particular sub cultures within organisations and that these must be quite specifically targeted in order to achieve the greatest possible chance of take up. This is, in itself, a strategic decision of some importance.
What would be in a strategy document so that every one could know/live GUOP?
GUOP is proposed as a network: Global University of Poverty.
1) we see this as an alumni space that anyone desperate to change global poverty but feeling something is missing in current NGOS and networks can join, and explain what they passionately most want to connect. So section 1 of our document is how do you protype a membership register so people can see whom to benchmark with
2) let's heroise a list of active projects
3) let's find some simple conversation threads(eg1) on poverty which can be openly syndicated in any caring virtual community; which popularise questions of why global poverty resolution has actually been going backwards in many parts of te world, even ones where lots of aid has been put in
4) which large poverty networks or organisations do we want to approach and suggest they share a branch of GUOP- and what is it that can get GUOP through their knowledge-multiplying doors as an open partner? Let's make a list of what's - eg since worldwide organisations of all kinds are as yet pretty immature with social networks at the do now level that local action teams need; maybe we can construct a social network IQ test that an NGO can adminster and then benchmark against other NGOs in our dtatbank
5) How do we keep GUOP flexible so that different alumni find their own biggest inquiry is supported without reinventing wheels? How do we become a model cooperative network both within ourselves and with any networek that sees poverty resolution as involving the same chhallenges or conflicts as our founding alumni see? Does GUOP need a formal constitution or a loose one.
WE realise the above is only a start on a living stratgy document. But unless we can see space for questioning and answering these 5 areas, there doesnt seem much point in expanding the strategy document, or indeed believing our network has a strategy that will make the most out of everyone's time.