This is the second part of my post about organizational learning. It will end with a little case study about KM in law companies.
In the second part of the process (double loop learning), the company is able to change its routines, process, strategy according to what is learned from experience. It made me think about a few things.
What about the learning process?
Organization will learn from experience…and so what? How can we say some experience is more important, more valuable than another? Who will decide of the changes that have to be made consequently.
All feed back comes from operational people. All decision come from managers. What’s important is to know how information goes from operationals to the management. If there are too many filters the process may be unusefull for the only reason that one never dares talking his superior about things that go wrong. Censorship and autocensorship are learning process’ most important enemies.
In the same way, considering decisions are to be made taking in account collective experience and feedback, how are people associated in decision making?
A double loop learning process supposes that, according to me, experience is collected, people share it and discuss in ordre to know what’s important, management aknowledge something may change and all concerned people help management to make the better decision because they are closer to the market, they are those who know the best the impact of decisions.
Which tools can help to make such a process easy and valuable.
I’m convinced that what the report on intranet’s best practices calls collaborative driven intranet would be an efficient support. A real Intranet 2.0 based on sharing and discussion. Something like blueKiwi for example as it’s the first real integrated intranet 2.0 I’ve ever seen.
About KM Lawyers
I found a very interesting article in a french economic newspaper called “la tribune”. It was about KM in law companies where top level lawyers are monitoring law actuality to build company’s doctrine.
I didn’t knew about this special kind of lawyers and it seems to me it’s a perfect example of collaborative process in the way of managing collective intelligence.
I’m sure that such people would like to use an intranet that not only allow them to share but also to discuss, comment and co-build their doctrine. This should be a typical case of a relevant use of an intranet 2.0, considering the context, the needs and the writing culture of the occupation.
