Stories

Tag: knowledge management

  • Reinventing the path from knowledge to action in global health

    Reinventing the path from knowledge to action in global health

    At the Geneva Learning Foundation (TGLF), we have just begun to share a publication like no other. It is titled Overcoming barriers to vaccine acceptance in the community: Key learning from the experiences of 734 frontline health workers.

    You can access the full report here in French and in English. Short summaries are also available in three special issues of The Double Loop, the Foundation’s free Insights newsletter, now available in both English and French. The report, prefaced by Heidi Larson who leads the Vaccine Confidence Project, includes DOI to facilitate citation in academic research. (The Foundation uses a repository established and maintained by the Geneva-based CERN for this purpose.)

    However, knowing that academic papers have (arguably) an average of three readers, we have a different aspiration for dissemination.

    As a global community, we recognize the significance of local action to achieve the global goals.

    The report documents vaccine confidence practices just weeks before the introduction of COVID-19 vaccines. It is grounded in the experience of 734 practitioners from local communities, districts, regions, and national teams, who developed case studies documenting a situation in which they were able to successfully lead individuals and groups toward better understanding and acceptance of the benefits of vaccines and vaccination.

    Immunization staff from all levels of the health system became citizen scientists, active knowledge-makers drawing on their personal experience of a situation in which they successfully overcame the barriers to vaccine acceptance in the community.

    Experiential learning offers a unique opportunity to discover unfiltered experiences and insights from thousands of people whose daily lives revolve around delivering immunization services. But what happens once experience has been shared? What is to be done with what we learn?

    Sharing this report, we have found, has triggered remarkable dialogue and led to the co-creation of a steadily growing collection of new practices actually used to build vaccine confidence (as opposed to the many theoretical frameworks on the topic), submitted through our new Insights system. New stories and their analysis are being shared back with local practitioners and with TGLF’s Insights partners, fostering continuous learning that is an action imperative of a strong learning culture. (For Insights, we work with Bridges to Development, the Centre for Change and Complexity in Learning (C3L), and the International Vaccine Access Center at Johns Hopkins.)

    In the coming weeks, we will be inviting 10,000 leaders of the Movement for Immunization Agenda 2030 to share this report to their colleagues, teams, and organizations (in both ministries of health and civil society organizations). They will be sharing back their own insights on how the findings can be used to improve demand for vaccines – and colleagues who listen to their presentation of the report will also be able to share back what they learn, connecting with each other through our Insights system.

    Then, the Foundation’s Impact Accelerator will track if and how insights from this report are linked to reported positive outcomes, and we should be able to document this, at least in some cases. This will not only foster double-loop learning but also explicitly link learning to implementation and results.

    In this way, local practitioners will be putting to use global knowledge grounded in their local experiences, for their own needs. We believe that this provides a complementary, more organic mechanism than current top-down processes for developing normative guidance driven by global assumptions and priorities.

    As Kate O’Brien, WHO’s Director of Immunization, said during a recent Insights Live session: “The global role on immunization is actually to bring together everything that is known by people at the grassroots level. That’s where the action is. Global guidance is basically one means to share knowledge and expertise that’s coming from the grassroots level around the world with others who may not have had that experience yet.”

    What we are doing with this report is part of a larger initiative to build the IA2030 Movement Knowledge to Action Hub. New knowledge produced by local practitioners will be available as both static and living documents that local and global practitioners can add their inputs to, at any time. This Hub will be launched at Teach to Reach 7 on 14 October 2022, with over 13,000 local practitioners registered for this event.

    Image: Many paths to moving mountains. The Geneva Learning Foundation Collection.

  • The significance of digital platforms to the business

    The significance of digital platforms to the business

    Business gets done by groups in workshops and meetings and by individuals in private conversation. There is an undeniable cultural advantage for diplomacy that comes from looking your interlocutor in the eye.

    Emerging digital platforms are in the margins of this business.

    The pioneers are creaky in their infrastructure and, ironically, playing catch-up. They have long lost the initial burst of enthusiasm that led to their creation. Yet they are still here, alive and kicking with funding that can support, in principle, their reinvention. For this, they need courage and creativity, especially if they function in a bureaucratic environment.

    Then there are new platforms in search of purpose and the users it would bring. Sometimes, it is the other way around.

    No platform is perfect. All of them have strengths, experience, insights, and the potential to be more in the future than what they are now. Some have already achieved individual impact and continue to do so.

    There is no doubt in my mind that, sooner than we think, our platforms – or the ones that will replace them – will be core to achieving the strategy being defined now for the coming decade.

    Digital transformation has swallowed enough industries that we now understand how it works.

    If you think about the newspaper industry, their web sites started in the margins too.

    Digital technologies provide a new economy of effort. In our context, we now have the means to address professionals working in the very communities where targets are either achieved or not. In fact, two-thirds of the Geneva Learning Foundation’s cohorts do not work in the capital city but in the regions and districts.

    Bypassing established gatekeepers and pyramidal hierarchies to go “straight to the customer” undeniably brings new challenges.

    What is the incentive for collaboration between digital platforms? We are all competing for the same resources, jostling for recognition, striving to demonstrate that we are contributing to the business.

    There are practical, operational reasons to share content, ideas, lessons learned. This can help each platform improve, for the benefit of the network that we all want to serve. Such service improvement is necessary and important.

    We can imagine a collective effort in which platforms rally around a shared goal and establish a shared measurement system to track progress.

    Yet, this too would be short-sighted.

    Yes, through a process of accretion, digital platforms will move from margin to center. They will not only be relevant to the business, they will be the business.

    The opportunity is for us to harness this process and accelerate the transformation so that it serves the strategic goals that are being defined today.

    To seize this opportunity, we need to start with the reality check:

    • Access is no longer the problem. (There is still a border beyond which there are no cell phone towers, but this border keeps receding.)
    • Digital literacy is the problem.

    Many learners in these platforms are discovering key online resources, available for years on the open web. A small but significant proportion may be part of the next billion of Internet users, joining to learn, not to surf.

    For this, we need a “no wrong door policy”. Wherever people enter the system, they need to find the pipes or pathways that will connect them to the destination that will help them solve the problem they are tackling. This is not about finding content, but the process of discovery that comes from connecting with others.

    The quality of the pipes will determine how quickly platforms become core business, rather than a nice-to-have.

    Image: Diving platform on Graveyard Hill in Kabul from TV-Hill, Afghanistan. Photo by Sven Dirks, Wien.

  • Meeting of the minds

    Meeting of the minds

    This is my presentation for the Geneva Learning Foundation, first made at the Swiss Knowledge Management Forum (SKMF) round table held on 8 September 2016 at the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). Its title is “Meeting of the minds: Rethinking our assumptions about the superiority of face-to-face encounters.” It is an exploration of the impact of rapid change that encompasses learning at scale, the performance revolution, complexity and volatility, and what Nathan Jurgenson calls the IRL fetish.

    The point is not to invert assumptions about the superiority of one medium over another. Rather, it is to look at the context for change, thinking through the challenges we face, with a specific, pragmatic focus on learning problems such as:

    • You have an existing high-cost, low-volume face-to-face learning initiative, but need to train more people (scale).
    • You want learning to be immediately practical and relevant for practitioners (performance).
    • You need to achieve higher-order learning (complexity), beyond information transmission to develop analytical and evaluation competencies that include mindfulness and reflection.
    • You have a strategy, but individuals in their silos think the way they already do things is just fine (networks).
    • You need to develop case studies, but a consultant will find it difficult to access tacit knowledge and experience (experience).
    • You want to build a self-organizing community of practice, in a geographically distributed organization, to sharpen the mission through decentralized means.

    These are the kinds of problems that we solve for organizations and networks through digital learning. Can such challenges be addressed solely through action or activities that take place solely in the same time and (physical) space? Of course not. Is it correct to describe what happens at a distance, by digital means, as not in-real-life (IRL)? This is a less obvious but equally logical conclusion.

    If we begin to question this assumption that Andrew Feenberg pointed out way back in 1989 was formulated way back when by Plato… What happens next? What are the consequences and the implications? We need new ways to teach and learn. It is the new economy of effort provided by the Internet that enables us to afford these new ways of doing new things. Digital dualism blinds us to the many ways in which technology has seeped into our lives to the point where “real life” (and therefore learning) happens across both physical and digital spaces.

    The idea for this round table emerged from conversations with the SKMF’s Véronique Sikora and Gil Regev. Véronique and I were chatting on LSi’s Slack about the pedagogy of New Learning that underpins Scholar, the learning technology we are using at the Geneva Learning Foundation.

    Cooking up a round table
    Cooking up a round table

    With Scholar, we can quickly organize an exercise in which hundreds of learners from anywhere can co-develop new knowledge, using peer review with a structured rubric that empowers participants to learn from each other. This write-review-revise process is incredibly efficient, and generates higher-order learning outcomes that make Scholar suitable to build analysis, evaluation, and reflection through connected learning.

    Scholar process: write-review-revise
    Scholar process: write-review-revise

    Obviously, such a process does not work at scale in a physical space. However, could the Scholar process be replicated in the purely physical space of a small round table with 15–20 participants? What would be the experience of participants and facilitators?

    It took quite a bit of effort to figure out how we could model this. Some aspects could not be reproduced due to the limitations of physical space. There was much less time than one could afford online, and therefore less space for reflection. The stimulation to engage through conversation was constant, unlike the online experience of sitting alone in front of one’s device. Diversity was limited to the arbitrary subset of people who happened to show up for this round table. This provided comfort to some but narrowed the realm of possibilities for discovery and questioning.

    I have learned to read subtle clues and to infer behavior from comments, e-mail messages, and other signals in a purely digital course where everything happens at a distance. That made it fascinating to directly observe the behavior of participants, in particular the social dimension of their interactions that seemed to be wonderfully enjoyable and terribly inefficient at the same time.

    Only one of the round table participants (Véronique, who finished the first-ever #DigitalScholar course during the Summer) had used Scholar, so the activity, in which they shared a story and then peer reviewed it using a structured rubric, seemed quite banal. At a small scale, it turned out to be quite manageable. I had envisioned a round robin process in which participants would have to move around constantly to complete their three peer reviews. However, since they were already sitting in groups of four, it was easier to have the review process take place at each table, minimizing the need for movement. This felt like an analog to what we often end up doing in an online learning environment when an activity takes shape due to the constraints of the digital space…

    Image: Flowers in Thor. Personal collection (August 2016).

     

     

  • Death of the knowledge bank

    Death of the knowledge bank

    The complexity of the networks in which our organization operates is scaffolded by a corpus of mostly-unwritten, tacit knowledge and ‘ways of working’ that we learn mostly from our peers. It would be impossible to justify time to study even a fraction of the written corpus of policies, procedures, regulations and other instruments of bureaucracy that provides the legal and operational framework – and even that would not provide access to the tacit knowledge that we need. So we learn as we go from our colleagues. In some contexts, we may proceed by trial and error, making adjustments when we receive negative feedback.

    When asked where we learn such knowledge, sources may remain apocryphal. We seldom reflect on where, when, how, and from whom we learn.

    Relegating learning about operational complexity to the informal domain may seem to present a risk for the organization. In practice, we find that we do tend to learn what we need, when we need it as we work. It would be costly and time-consuming (i.e., impossible, as stated above) to achieve the same ends through formal training. Instead, the organization stands to benefit from recognition of the value of what is learned informally and learn to trust its validity.

    The organization’s mission and mandate – as well as its ability to deliver on these – is the subject of much internal discussion in both the central organization (“headquarters”) and the network.

    What do we do if a formal review finds limited change management capability in-house to keep pace with the rapid change in the external environment? We know that this is a critical gap because of the increased competition in the humanitarian and development world between the traditional service providers and new providers who are looking to enhance value-for-money offerings. Worse, other significant gaps may be found in our ability to drive strategically-guided programs on the ground, leading to diluted service delivery.

    Such diagnosis leads to a refocus on knowledge production, circulation or exchange, but often misses the point that learning is what brings knowledge to life. The knowledge bank model is bankrupt: accumulation (or transport) of knowledge is a costly dead end, because the nature of knowledge itself has changed. It flows and becomes obsolete faster than ever. It is process, not product. Quality is in the ‘pipes’ that connect networked knowledge. Learning is in the network. That is why it is necessary but insufficient to retool in order to move knowledge throughout the world.

    Why do organizations confronted with the same problem so consistently fail to consider that learning is knowledge-as-process? The blog posts in this series on learning strategy have consistently highlighted both the centrality of informal and incidental learning and its lack of recognition and near-invisibility to the organization. The more highly developed the ‘pipes’ of informal and incidental learning – or the more politically volatile the environment–, the less likely it becomes that the value of what is learned outside of formal contexts will be visible or acknowledged. And what cannot be seen is, of course, unlikely to be taken into consideration in times of change or reform.

    Photo: Vintage Bank Vault (Brook Ward/flickr.com)

  • Dialectics

    Dialectics

    4:35 p.m.

    “My working hypothesis is that the learning that matters is mostly incidental and informal.”

    “Maybe,” he smiled. “Yet, my conviction that we need to explore this is grounded in my formal training in knowledge management.”

    5:17 p.m.

     “When we are under-funded and overwhelmed,” he sighed, “is just not the right time to go off on a tangential project!”

    “I won’t argue with you. Let us go through with it to determine how useless it is to trade short-term survival tactics for long-term strategic thinking.”

     

    Photo: Contradiction, Tokyo train station (Stéfan/flickr).

     

  • Autopsy

    Autopsy

    Knowledge management has met its timely demise.

    No matter how sophisticated or agile, knowledge management (or “KM”)  remains fundamentally embedded in a container view of knowledge.

    Where the ephemeral and superficial nature of social media reflects the failure of communication in the Twenty-First Century, KM’s demise stems from the Chief Information Officer’s view of knowledge as discrete packets of data, each one destined to be filed in its own pigeon hole.

    The death of KM is a soulless one, because it is devoid of culture.

    Even though KM shares commonalities with publishing (static knowledge, expertise frozen in time), the latter adds the significance of culture (whether organizational or literary) to the flow of knowledge.

    A book as an object (physical or electronic) does not confuse the container with the message or the processes that infuse the former with meaning.

    Photo: Tables in disused autopsy room (Eric Allix Rogers/Flickr)