Knowledge Management & Organizational Learning for Startups

To be successful, startups need to know how to fail early and fail fast, work with prototypes, engage in a lot of testing and a rapid iterative cycle of planning, doing, testing, assessing/learning and planning again.  They need to be agile.  They need to make decisions very quickly about a myriad of issues.

In that sense, they can benefit from knowledge management if they adopt practices that will support improved decision making based on rapid organizational learning. You don't conduct After-Action-Reviews or their equivalent every year, you incorporate an element of "pausing to learn" in every weekly core staff meeting and you make it a practice that gets disseminate as the organization expands so that it becomes part of the organizational culture.

In addition, startups are, by definition, small and immature organizations.  They may lack organizational structures and governance because as long as they are small, they can get away with having very little formal structure.  That may be exactly what is needed at that early stage of organizational development, but if they look ahead and think in terms of increasing maturity, they will want to pay attention to the inevitable emergence of organizational silos and preemptively set up information and knowledge structures and governance to ensure continuous knowledge sharing across the organization as it grows and evolves. Creating teams and giving them autonomy to go do what they do best is great but they will tend to go off and reinvent the wheel if they are allowed to, resulting in a multiplicity of tools, duplication of resources, proliferation of intranets and overlapping discussion forums, none of which will be integrated within a global vision of where the organization's knowledge resides and who to leverage it for the organization's benefit.

For something more substantive to read, see Piera Centobelli, Roberto Cerchione, and Emilio Esposito, "Knowledge Management in Startups: Systemic Literature Review and Future Research Agenda," Sustainability 2017, 9, 361.

Mapping to Support Decision Making

This morning, I was scanning through a book I've owned for a while and not fully read.  It's called Visible Thinking: Unlocking Causal Mapping for Practical Business Results, by John M. Bryson, Fran Ackermann, Colin Eden, and Charles B. Finn.

 There was one example of how causal mapping can be used to support decision making and immediately I thought of a specific personal application.  I've been ruminating about a decision.  For an upcoming trip to Morocco, I have identified two potential biking activities.  I have to choose between a five-day trip in the mountains and one or more day-long trips on reasonably flat terrain. I have to decide soon because should I try to do the five-day trip in the mountains, I will need to seriously train for it.

Here is my map.  It's hand-drawn, with no rewrites and edits, which in most cases is good enough.

Decision-making Map: Biking in Morocco

Note the couple of insights:
1. The map helped me make the decision to stick to the less challenging day-long bike trips without feeling like a loser for failing to take on the challenge of the five-day trip.
2.  Beyond the decision itself, the map helped me identify additional actions to take ahead of the trip to maximize benefits in the context of the decision taken.  The day-long bike trips can be combined with biking in the city itself and hiking or some other physical activity.

Garry Emmons, Senior Associate Editor of the Harvard Business School (HBS) Alumni Bulletin, recently wrote a short article titled "Encouraging Dissent in Decision-Making."

The format for these HBS articles is very reader-friendly. The articles are usually 3-5 pages, often summarizing broader research efforts. The articles are essentially teasers if you get really interested in the topic and you want more, but they are also giving you enough information to stick to the article if you don't have time for more. If the 3-page article is too much for you, stick to the paragraph executive summary and you'll still be getting something useful.

The gist of the article: "Our natural tendency to maintain silence and not rock the boat, a flaw at once personal and organizational, results in bad—sometimes deadly—decisions. Think New Coke, The Bay of Pigs, and the Columbia space shuttle disaster, for starters."

As is often the case, the key to encouraging dissent and overcoming our reluctance to speak up is to set up the right incentives and rewards system. If this requires changing the organizational culture, it's not a small task and as pointed out in the article, it needs to start from the top. What is the advice, then, for those lower down in the chain of command who would like to find constructive ways to dissent? I would like to find an article on dissent from the point of view of the employee: "How to dissent without getting fired -- or resigning?"

Here is a start from Kevin Daley in T+D:"How to disagree: go up against your boss or a senior executive and live to tell the tale."