How to knit organisations together: a networking success story?

Most of us face a quandry: we would like to be better networked, yet the thought of networking fills us with utter dread. This is a problem for our employers too, particularly large organisations which face inherent risks of  silo-isation, communication breakdown and work duplication. Many firms try to tackle these risks by rotating staff, fostering communities of interest that cut across management structures, or organising corporate sports teams or social events.

We tried something different in n my department. Randomised Coffee Trials (RCT) is a simple and informal networking idea shamelessly stolen from Nesta, the innovation agency. RCT works as follows:

• People across the organisation are invited to join (it’s entirely voluntary)
• Every fortnight or month, members are randomly grouped into pairs
• The list of pairings is sent to all members
• Pairs arrange to meet for a chat over coffee
• They talk about whatever they want – usually work, but it could be career plans or what they’d been up to at the weekend.
• That’s it

RCT helps people to build social networks and to find out about their organisation. It promotes collaboration and corporate identity. I set up Whitehall’s first RCT in the Cabinet Office in 2012, and then in HM Treasury when I moved over in 2013. It has spread organically, with at least 7 schemes now operating covering 900 members in total. In HM Treasury, RCT has been running for 46 ‘rounds’ and more than one-fifth of staff are signed up.

RCT may not forge many deep friendships (despite City AM amusingly running a story calling it ‘Treasury Tinder’), but it is effective at creating weak links across traditional boundaries. These links help to bridge the gap between more tightly-knit groups and so help information to flow more effectively across the whole organisation. This insight lies at the heart of the most cited paper in social science, ‘The strength of weak ties‘.

For me, the format’s real strength lies in its contrast to  traditional top-down HR initiatives to promote collaboration, which can often feel forced and artificial to staff, and as a result struggle to obtain buy-in.  RCT is the opposite: informal, entirely voluntary, and grown organically by word of mouth. It is also a doddle to run.

Why do ‘knowledge management’ projects so often fail?

A little while ago, I was on my coffee break at work and happened to glance at a shelf of long forgotten books. The organisation was in the midst of one of its periodic attempts to improve its ‘knowledge management’ and so one title captured my attention. It was called ‘The Knowing-Doing Gap‘ and I dived in, despite its terrible cover. I liked the book almost immediately.

When organisations believe that knowledge is not being effectively shared or managed, they often reach for technical ‘solutions’ such as intranets, databases and shared folders. However the authors argue that “dumping technology on the problem is rarely a solution”. Certainly this has been my experience. Technology doesn’t usually help much with the storing and sharing of knowledge because most useful knowledge is tacit, intangible and non-codifiable. Instead, they suggest that:

Most of the knowledge that is useful is transferred via stories that people tell each other, by trial and error, by the inexperienced watching the experienced and the experienced providing close and constant coaching.

The book goes far beyond what I had thought of as a rather narrow field of knowledge management. It explores a more fundamental issue: why do organisations do so many things to undermine performance when they are full of people who know and say so much about how to improve it?

The book gives five reasons that prevent knowledge being effectively turned into action.

1. Talk substitutes for action
2. Bad habits and organisational history
3. Fear
4. Measuring the wrong things
5. Internal competition

I’m going to say more about each of these in future posts. But here is their bottom line about why some organisations are better than others at turning knowledge into action:

It is not about skills or personalities but creating the right environment – norms, rituals, practices and culture.

More to follow.