The Performance Improvement Blog

Learning to Share Data

One of the biggest barriers to learning both inside and outside organizations is the reluctance to share information. Departmental units and academic disciplines put up cultural walls that prevent people   from sharing what they know. In doing so, people lose out on their collective wisdom. However, we are seeing some examples of critically important medical breakthroughs that have occurred because those barriers have been overcome.  One example is in the area of Alzheimer’s research.

Gina Kolata writes in The New York Times:

In 2003, a group of scientists and executives from the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, the drug and medical-imaging industries, universities and nonprofit groups joined in a project that experts say had no precedent: a collaborative effort to find the biological markers that show the progression of Alzheimer's disease in the human brain.

Prior to this joint project, there were no mechanisms nor was there the will for these stakeholders to share data and methods.  Kolata  continues:

The key to the Alzheimer’s project was an agreement as ambitious as its goal: not just to raise money, not just to do research on a vast scale, but also to share all the data, making every single finding public immediately, available to anyone with a computer anywhere in the world.

No one would own the data. No one could submit patent applications, though private companies would ultimately profit from any drugs or imaging tests developed as a result of the effort.

It’s not only Alzheimer’s research that has benefited from this model of collaboration; a similar project is advancing knowledge about Parkinson’s disease. What if we had this kind of cooperation among organizations addressing some of society’s most challenging problems, such as education, race relations, health care, unemployment, hunger, drug abuse, crime and violence, and natural disasters? What if all of the major stakeholders that are working on these problems agreed to combine resources and share data and make their findings public? What if all sectors (business, government, universities, nonprofits, and philanthropy) pulled down the walls between them and applied their combined knowledge to solving the most intractable of society’s problems? 

Employer-Employee Loyalty

The social contract between employer and employee has changed dramatically in recent years. Loyalty has been the loser. In commenting about a post I wrote last year, Milan Moravec presents the case that long-  term loyalty is no longer part of the implied understanding between management and worker. He writes: 

Employee loyalty and retention: It's not what you think! Business and the public sector are into a phase of creative disassembly where reinvention and adjustments are constant. Hundreds of thousands of jobs are being shed by United Technologies, GE, Chevron, Sam’s Club, Wells Fargo Bank, HP, Starbucks etc. and the state, counties and cities. Even solid world class institutions like the University of California Berkeley under the leadership of Chancellor Birgeneau & Provost Breslauer are firing staff, faculty and part-time lecturers. Yet many employees, professionals and faculty cling to old assumptions about one of the most critical relationship of all: the implied, unwritten contract between employer and employee.

Until recently, loyalty was the cornerstone of that relationship. Employers promised job security and a steady progress up the hierarchy in return for employees fitting in, performing in prescribed ways and sticking around. Longevity was a sign of employeer-employee relations; turnover was a sign of dysfunction. None of these assumptions apply today. Organizations can no longer guarantee employment and lifetime careers, even if they want to. Organizations that paralyzed themselves with an attachment to “success brings success’ rather than “success brings failure’ are now forced to break the implied contract with employees – a contract nurtured by management that the future can be controlled. Jettisoned employees are finding that the hard won knowledge, skills and capabilities earned while being loyal are no longer valuable in the employment market place. 

What kind of a contract can employers and employees make with each other? The central idea is both simple and powerful: the job or position is a shared situation. Employers and employees face market and financial conditions together, and the longevity of the partnership depends on how well the for-profit or not-for-profit continues to meet the needs of customers and constituencies. Neither employer nor employee has a future obligation to the other. Organizations train people. Employees develop the kind of security they really need – skills, knowledge and capabilities that enhance future employability. The partnership can be dissolved without either party considering the other a traitor. 

The new social contract between employer and employee that Moravec describes is based on trust with a heavy dose of reality. Employer and employee must be able to trust that each is making the best decisions given actual market and financial conditions. Although, as Moravec says, they don't have a "future obligation" to each other, they do have an immediate implied obligation to do the best they can for the organization under the circumstances. Employees should do what they can to help their organizations be successful and employers should help employees develop the competencies they need now and in the future, even if that will be with a different organization. This is also  true for temporary employees who have become the norm, not the exception. To get the most from these workers, an employer must create mutual trust quickly and sustain it until the temporary employee leaves.

Which came first, management or impact?

The chicken came first and then the egg, according to British scientists. I’m relieved to know the answer to that age-old question. But there is another question just as vexing for nonprofits (and all organizations, for that matter). Which should they do first: improve the way the organization is managed, or clarify the goals and intended outcomes of the organization?

This question is explored in The Chronicle of Philanthropy interview that Hildy Gotlieb (founder of the Community-Driven Institute and author of The Pollyanna Principles: Reinventing Nonprofit Organizations to Create the Future of Our World) did with Jan Masoaka, editor of the online magazine Blue Avocado.  According to Masoaka, former Executive Director of CompassPoint, a leading California-based consulting and training firm for nonprofits, better management of organizations doesn’t necessarily lead to higher impact. She says,“Instead of asking what do we want to be doing we should be asking who is our constituency and what do they want us to do right now.” She goes on to say that leaders should be asking themselves, “What kind of leader does this organization need me to be right now?” And board members should be asking themselves, “What kind of board member does this organization need me to be right now?” The answers to all of these questions will change over time and depend on the impact that is needed at a particular point in time. 

I, too, see many nonprofits that put all their time, energy, and money into the latest and greatest management fad without having a clear sense of the impact they are seeking. Occasionally, organizations need to step back from their day-to-day practices and ask themselves, “Is that what our clients/customers/constituencies need us to be doing right now?” It’s Chris Argyris’ and Donald Schon's “double-loop learning”. It’s listening to the people we serve, not to ourselves. It’s first being clear about the impact we want to have (and how we will measure that impact) and then improving management to achieve those goals.

Evaluation Ethics: Going to the Movies

Sometimes our work as evaluators, whether measuring the impact of a corporation’s leadership training program or measuring the results of a program to keep teenagers in school, can negatively affect the welfare of participants. Several years ago I was evaluating the business impact of a leadership development program in which senior managers in an IT organization were loaned to nonprofit organizations for approximately 18 months. After conducting follow-up interviews with each of the participating leaders, writing case-studies about each of their experiences, and showing these stories to my client (participants knew I would be doing this), she asked me to omit a quote by one of the participants because it might have offended a named executive and jeopardize the respondent’s career. I agreed to make the change. Was this ethical?

In many education and health care organizations, collecting and using data from human subjects is regulated by an Institutional Review Board (IRB) convened for the purpose of protecting research and evaluation participants from violations of their rights. However, in many data-gathering situations, there is no IRB and the effect on people’s welfare is not clear cut. Evaluators and stakeholders have to use their own best judgment about right and wrong.

To prepare her evaluation students for these kinds of difficult ethical decisions, Kathleen D. Kelsey, professor at Oklahoma State University, uses film. She uses the film, Capote, to show what one journalist did that was in violation of the ethical principles of the American Evaluation Association. She writes:

At the conclusion of the film, Capote notes that his life was “changed forever” as a result of   writing the book, In Cold Blood. I ask students to hypothesize why they think his research project changed Capote’s life forever, stimulating critical thinking about the many implications of our work as evaluators, such as our use of power, our position in the research site, and balancing these roles with conducting high quality evaluation.

Professor Kelsey realizes that often with ethical issues there are no absolutes. She asks her students to think critically about Truman Capote’s behavior in the movie and how that relates to their work as evaluators. This is the kind of conversation that anyone who collects evaluative data from people should be having frequently. This goes for evaluators, management consultants, survey research companies, and internal HR, learning and development, and OD professionals. We all need to consider how our surveys, interviews, and focus groups effect the welfare of participants. Maybe we should be taking Professor Kelsey’s class. 

Knowledge Management vs. Knowledge Creation

Is KM dead? John Hagel III, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davison, all with Deloitte’s Center for the Edge,   argue that passive repositories of organizational information (i.e., Knowledge Management) have failed to advance learning. They write:

The best KM systems succeeded at capturing and institutionalizing the knowledge of the firm. But for the most part the repositories and directories remained fragmentary and the resources didn't get used. The folks with the knowledge were often reluctant to put what they knew into the database. The folks seeking the knowledge often had trouble finding what they needed.

They go on to say that a new, more problem-solving approach is needed:

In these circumstances, the last thing the world needs is another knowledge management scheme focusing on capturing knowledge that already exists. What we need are new approaches to creating knowledge, ones that take advantage of the new digital infrastructure's ability to lower the interaction costs among us all — ones that mobilize big, diverse groups of participants to innovate and create new value.

Hagel, Brown, and Davison propose the development of “creation spaces” that help people interact around major performance problems of an organization. They use the analogy of the “World of Warcraft” computer game.  Its community of advanced gamers helps each player get through to the next WoW challenge. They share information, experiences, and tools with each other for the purpose of anyone in their “guild” reaching higher levels within the game.

Like WoW, “creation spaces” have three elements that need optimization in order to solve performance problems: 1) participants; 2) interactions; and 3) environments. Participants need to have an easy and low cost way of observing and contributing to the conversation. Interaction must be encouraged and rewarded. Environments should be developed that link participants to each other and link participants to external networks.

Storing, sorting, and retrieving information, the characteristics of any good KM system, are not sufficient, contrary to what some software companies that sell KM products would have us believe. Of course, it’s nice to be able to archive lessons-learned and best practices, but without processes and tools for knowledge creation, KM will have little impact on achieving organizational goals. As Hagel, Brown, and Davison suggest, and I have written previously, KM alone will not have much impact on an organization. Learning requires sharing knowledge with others, applying new knowledge to collective problem-solving, and giving and receiving positive and negative feedback. This doesn’t happen in the typical knowledge management system.