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Grass Roots: Learning to Share

Me, I'm more of a thinker than a
practitioner, and that is also the case for a significant part of my colleagues
I believe. This translates into lengthy debates on almost anything in our
company, without resulting in decisions, and implementation thereof. Part of the
problem is, in my view, that we're good at thinking up grand schemes concerning
internal organisation and not so good at getting stuff done. As I fit this
profile as well as any, you can imagine that I have problems getting
KM-initiatives of the ground. The result is that some colleagues are wondering
what the heck it is I'm doing here. That is something that needs to be remedied
fast, as it diminishes the chances of any of the changes I propose actually
making it into our everyday practice. So now I'm purposely setting out to bridge
the gap between theory and practice. First of all I have been engaging in
conversations with a trusted colleague to try and unearth why it is that I
personally have difficulties seeing ideas through to the implementation stage.
It has certainly to do with roles I am comfortable with and not. Maybe
delegation to others is a possibility, or maybe it's a question of building up
more experience. That's one track.

The other is to try and stop
mentioning KM, but start offering help in (grass roots) initiatives of
colleagues, and thus assuring KM-style input into these initiatives. In this
second track an example: our researchers that have roles in accountmanagement
meet regularly to share experiences and learn from each other, or so it was
originally intended. In practice it is nothing more than people recounting what
clients they have met, and which assignments they've taken on. Nothing that
can't be found in the acquisitionreports we all get anyway. A colleague,
irritated about the unfulfilled potential here, came to me and asked for my
assistance. We decided not to debate our issues at length (see first paragraph)
but just go ahead and try a different approach, and see how it works out. First
we have changed the way acquisitionreports are made. They used to list
clientcontacts by researcher. We've turned it around and now list contacts per
client, as we think we should talk about client-contacts and not
researcher-contacts. The second change is that we asked all researchers that
will attend the meeting to not talk about what exactly they talked about with
clients, as was the routine untill now. Instead we asked them to select one
example from their recent contacts that says something about the impressions we
make on our clients. How do they see us, and is that image the one we want to
convey? Is there a pattern in the observations we make? As an example I
recounted in my introductory instructions my recent visit to a prospect. This
prospect viewed us a software company as the only productinformation he saw from
us was one having to do with some software we happen to sell as a tool. This
tool is part of a larger product that is in the area of consulting. So I talked
with this prospect about what it is we actually do. Now how is it that this
prospect got the wrong impression? Is our productinformation not clear enough?
These are the sort of things my colleague and I want to talk about when meeting
the other accountmanageing researchers. Oh and third is, that we got the one
chairing the meeting on our side for this experiment. So at 13:00 we'll see how
the first steps in this experiment will work out, as that is when the meeting
will get underway. The reason I'm telling you this is two-fold. By publishing
this, even though it is scary as I recount weaknesses in me, and in our
organisation, I'm creating a permanent reminder that this is what I set out to
do. The second reason is that I hope to get some feedback from you as a reader.
Are there grassroots examples you would like to share? How do you bridge the gap
between theory and practice, or do you have problems connecting practice to
theory? Feel free to comment, e-mail, or cross-reference! Update after
the meeting: it went very well. People seemed to enjoy it. It is the first time
I have seen people laugh with eachother at a meeting like this. Also discussions
yielded far more than I have witnessed in the last 2 years, in an much more open
and collaborative way. Participants definitely want to do this again, and
suggested maybe picking a theme each time around which to focus
remarks/anecdotes and resulting discussion. Also the stuff we usually talk about
in these meetings was addressed, but now as it naturally came up during the
discussions. The secretary taking minutes was surprised at the amount of notes
she had to work out. Let's see how it works out the next time (Jan. 7th)

Permalink
(posted by Ton Zijlstra at December 3, 2002 11:26 AM)