One can only assess the terrain, the intent and the use of intelligence properly when one knows the framework of the grand picture. The question is ... do you trust the people claimed that they know the grand tangible picture, when they do not have the process to do so?
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A little knowledge is deadly dangerous
Web posted at: 1/13/2010 9:0:42
Source ::: FINANCIAL TIMES
By Stefan Stern
It is the “unknown knowns” that can kill you. But this was the category of information which Donald Rumsfeld, the former US defence secretary, left off his famous list (“known knowns”, “known unknowns”) a few years ago. A pity. One of the lessons of the September 11 2001 hijackings, as well as the recent attempt to blow up an aircraft on Christmas day, is that organisations may already possess the information they need to avoid disaster. It is just that they do not know that they know.
In criticising his security services last week, Barack Obama summed up this management dilemma well. “This was not a failure to collect intelligence,” he said. “It was a failure to integrate and understand the intelligence that we already had.” His colleagues had neglected to “connect the dots”, he observed. This is a familiar story to business leaders. “If only Unilever knew what Unilever knows,” went the old lament. And you can substitute the name of almost any other company into that last sentence.
It was this lingering sense of unconnectedness, of dots not being joined up, that led to the emergence of “knowledge management” as a business discipline two decades ago. It was based on the idea that all sorts of valuable information - about customers’ preferences or what employees knew - was simply disappearing into the cracks that separated teams and business units. People within their silos could not or would not share knowledge. Tom Stewart, chief marketing and knowledge officer for consultants Booz, moved the debate on with his 1997 book Intellectual Capital - the New Wealth of Organisations, which described what properly managed knowledge could do for businesses. Surely things were about to change? Maybe knowledge management was too drab a label to hold people’s attention. Perhaps it all sounded too much like hard work. But “KM” soon fell prey to the curse of the management fad. It was talked about, popularised, then - too often - forgotten. Today too few companies can be confident that their employees share the knowledge and information that they need. Do their people know what they know?
The events over Detroit this Christmas confirmed the danger of ignoring the information that circulates, whether unprocessed or imperfectly understood, within organisations. In a blog post last week, Harvard Business School’s Rosabeth Moss Kanter said that dispatching e-mails or entering comments into databases is not enough. Only “relentless follow-up” would hold colleagues accountable for what they were supposed to be doing.
Smart knowledge management involves spotting useful patterns in the data that you have. Leaders should reward “pattern recognisers”, she said. They should also “stress the importance of passing on items of value to others”. But while Prof Kanter is hopeful that social networking technology will lead to a greater sharing of information, others are not so sure. Morten Hansen, professor at Berkeley and Insead and author of last year’s well-regarded book, sees other factors at play. The failure of colleagues to communicate effectively “requires a change in culture and incentive systems, not an IT fix”, he says.
It is not always easy to recognise the value of the information you have. The father of the alleged Detroit bomber, a former banker from Nigeria, warned US officials about his concerns over his son. For whatever reason - fatigue, overwork - the crucial tip-off was ignored. Too casual by half. The son’s name was even mis-spelled by one official, confusing his identity.
But information must be taken seriously. Managers need more than gut instinct and past experience to help them make good decisions. This means that knowledge has to be seen as an asset, something to be both respected and exploited. This is why the collective corporate memory is so important. People forget - or just never get to learn - crucial details about the markets they are operating in. Veteran CIA officers understand this. As one former field operative, Bob Baer, told the BBC last week, it is no wonder his former colleagues seem “clueless” about where the next threat is coming from. “You’re seeing the price the CIA is paying for getting rid of so many people in the 1990s,” he said. “We fired people or let them retire.” If we didn’t know then how unwise that approach was, we know now.
http://www.thepeninsulaqatar.com/Display_news.asp?section=Business_News&subsection=market+news&month=January2010&file=Business_News201001139042.xml
"There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know." - Donald Rumsfeld
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