Introduction to "The Old Guitar" - Part of our new series, "In the Co. of Readers & Writers

 

Introduction to the Old Guitar

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 Blake Melnick

Well, welcome to this week's episode of, for what it's worth. I'm your host Blake Melnick. And this is the launch of our new series called In the Company of Readers & Writers. 

Who doesn't love a good story? Stories and myths are our lifeblood. They're fundamental to who we are. They're what define our experience as human beings, and they provide a glimpse into our past and our beliefs about what it means to be human. The very act of storytelling as part of human culture. Stories are and have always been a source of human knowledge at a given point in time. From the time we were children, stories serve as our moral compass, guiding us to our sense of what is good, what is evil, what is right, and what is wrong. They are the springboard to our imagination and fantasy worlds. Myths and legends help us make sense of the world and provide an explanation for the parts we fail to understand. They ground and comfort us, and in some cases protect us from the harsh and unfeeling realities of a world, which we cannot fully comprehend.

They belong to our history. They're part of our evolving culture to be preserved in order to truly understand and appreciate our past. Myths are not only important in understanding where we came from, they also play [00:02:00] a role in shaping our present as certain stories connect us deeply on a personal level that spans time and space.

They make us remember our connection to the collective energy and the deeper soul of the world, that brings us back to our core and connects us to our hearts and our inner most essence. By listening to, sharing and remembering old stories, a deep primal and ancient part of us is awakened. Whereas facts, talk to our mind stories, speak to our hearts.

We identify with them and realize that we all share a common ground. They have the power to encourage, to motivate, to educate and to heal. They can help us better understand and relate to one another in the world that we're all part of. The story is one of the basic tools invented by the human mind for the purpose of promoting universal understanding.

There have been no human societies that did not tell stories. [00:03:00] The famous Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, Carl Jung, who founded analytical psychology believed in the power of stories. He advanced the idea of the collective unconscious. That all human beings share a subconscious mind that stores the memories of all of us alive and dead.

According to Jung, we carry the memories of our ancestors in our subconscious, and we use this collective unconscious to assign structure and meaning to the world. This is all the result of stories passed along from one generation to the next. Stories make information, memorable. The purpose of myth is to help us make sense of the universe and our place within it.

Myths might be based on factual accounts of events, discoveries, and realizations, but more often than not, they are deeply metaphorical and filled with symbolic, meaning. They aren't literal accounts of truth, but stories with lots of hidden meaning, and to understand [00:04:00] them, you have to look beneath the surface and peel back the layers.

Myths and legends convey and reinforce customs and shared values. They often contain a profound truth that resonates with us, and this is why we come back to them time and again. The funny thing about myths and legends is that even in the face of irrefutable facts, to the contrary, they continue to persist unabated, and we carry the misconceptions in these myths with us throughout our lives.

Why do they persist? Well, part of the explanation lies with art. Artists use myth to explore the darker side of human nature. Myths, explore the full gamut of human emotion, love and lust, envy, and rage, rejection and loss, violence, and death, pride and insecurity, and every type of family relationship. We relate to the characters in them because their emotions,  desires and struggles are our own.

They have in effect become part of our DNA. From the Midas touch to the Sisyphean task from Pandora's box to Achilles' heel characters from classical Greek and Roman mythology have become archetypes of our humanness. Their stories are continually retold in paintings, sculpture, literature plays... and in music. There is one such myth that has captured the imagination of musicians, conscientious music, listeners, and historians for decades.

It's an old tale that continues to grow in proportion, reaching out to touch the lives and deaths of musicians even today. It is a legend with roots, which reach back to the origins of the deep south. Encompassed in an individual whose life is shrouded in mystery and devoid of tangible facts, making it difficult for us to disregard  the legend for fear that it might actually be true.

Join us for the prologue to our first story called, "The Old Guitar" on the next instalment of, "In the Company of Readers & Writers.... for what it's worth.

Message from Blake Melnick, CEO/CKO - Knowledge Managment Institute of Canada

We are living in unprecedented times as a result of the Corona virus pandemic. The world has changed in ways we have yet to comprehend and we collectively face challenges on a grand scale.

However, it is times like these that bring out the best in us;  that provide us with an opportunity to re-imagine a better future and collectively to build a better world. In a very short period of time we've seen what's possible.

We've seen politicians from all parties working together for the benefit of all Canadians and for the benefit of peoples from other nations. We've seen front-line workers risking their health, safety and well-being for the benefit of us all. We've seen the reduction hydrocarbon emissions in China by a staggering 25% over a period of one month, with a decline in global emissions predicted to be as much as 1.3% this year. This will hopefully allow the world to develop more aggressive climate targets, while spurning innovation in the existing energy as well as in the Alternative Energy sector.  We've witnessed extraordinary examples of leadership by our politicians our business leaders, healthcare professionals, and by ordinary citizens demonstrating compassion for each other in recognition that we are all in this together.

What is clear to me however, is that things are likely to get worse before they get better, and while we need to focus on dealing with the present situation, we also need to be looking forward and preparing for what comes next. This amounts to a shared challenge.

I believe KMIC and our partner WINCan (Workplace Innovation Canada Network) has a responsibility to accelerate our mandate and mission to help Canadians and Canadian organizations thrive and prosper in the increasingly complex knowledge economy; to increase Canada's capability and capacity for Innovation, and to advance the global body of knowledge necessary to allow us to collectively address the challenges that lie ahead.

While our business has also been directly impacted by the current situation. We are in a unique position having had years of experience operating virtually with relatively low overheads. To this end, I've undertaken to have the Knowledge Management Institute of Canada contribute our knowledge expertise and experience in the following ways:

As cases of COVID-19 have been particularly devastating for those between the ages of 40 and 80, we face a real, tangible risk of critical knowledge loss across all industry sectors. Coupled with this, is the huge number of displaced workers from Industries, which are most acutely affected by the pandemic. There is no guarantee that these workers will return to their jobs after this is all over, and then of course, we have an aging workforce.

Since our Inception in 2008,  KMIC has trained and certified more Knowledge Management professionals than anyone else in Canada. I believe these knowledge managers have a key role to play now and in the future in helping organizations create strategies to protect against the loss of critical knowledge, to build institutional memory, to support operational and organizational effectiveness, and to help develop sustainable cultures of innovation within their organizations.

For the foreseeable future KMIC will be offering all our training programs online at no cost to help increase the number of people with the requisite skills to take back to their organizations to promote new ways of thinking working and learning.

Advisory Support

We will be offering our Lifeline product, a virtual advisory service we launched in 2017 for a nominal charge. We will be offering this service to support client projects we feel will have the most significant impact on the lives of Canadians.

Just in Time Training and Learning

KMIC will be launching two initiatives to support just in time, as needed training and e-learning. The first will be a series of weekly live webinars and micro training sessions. Topics will be emergent, but our focus will be on what we see is the critical skills, mindsets, knowledge and experience necessary for rebuilding our economy post COVID-19.

For What it’s Worth

Inspired by the famous protest song by Buffalo Springfield, we are in the process of launching a new podcast series called "For What it's Worth” These podcasts will provide additional context for the content presented in the webinars. We will engage in dialogue with subject matter experts from across the across a wide variety of Industries and disciplines to hear their views about the impact of COVID-19 on their businesses and on the industry sectors in which they operate and Our focus will be on what actions they will be taking to adapt their businesses. We will also provide the means for you to suggest topics and themes for the show.

Workplace Innovation

Innovation is an imperative like never before. It will be absolutely essential to rebuilding our world post COVID-19.

Since 2013 KMIC's training and learning programs have been geared towards increasing the capacity of the individual and the organization to move beyond their current best practices, in order to create cultures of innovation and excellence.  In 2015, we embarked upon a deep research initiative called "Workplace Innovation Canada" or WINCan, along with a number of partners from business and academia to study the Innovation dynamic.

Specifically we asked the question, what mindsets, skills knowledge and experience lead to innovation capability amongst both graduates and employees? As part of this research, we introduced a new model of learning which treats the classroom "as the workplace” where students work alongside their counterparts in business and industry, in real time, to address forward looking, complex challenges like the kind we are now facing, while learning in the classroom.

In 2019, we launched a 6-week online prototype program called "KM and Workplace Innovation" to test the classroom as the workplace model. With generous support from Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation and the Bank of Canada, we designed a new kind of online learning and collaborative knowledge building program, where students and professionals from across disciplines work together to advance solutions for ensuring every Canadian has access to affordable housing. We will offer the next iteration of this program at a minimal cost. For more information, please see our website.

In closing KMIC is committed to doing our part during these difficult times and I would like to encourage our past students, partners, members, and associates to join us to help us increase our capacity and reach, by offering to be guest speakers and our webinars and podcasts, by being facilitators or virtual visiting subject matter experts in our online courses.  For more information please see the News section of our website and  follow us on our company LinkedIn page.
Thank you.

KM and Workplace Innovation - Open Letter of Thanks

 

 
I would like to take the opportunity to congratulate the following recent graduates from the Knowledge Management Institute of Canada’s new prototype program, Knowledge Management and Workplace Innovation.

• Stephen Cohos
  
• Anne Marie Robert
  
• Mike Dyman
  
• Anne Marie Robert
  
• Babak Mokri
  
• Nicole McArthur 
  
  These students participated directly in co-creating the program and through their collective efforts, demonstrated the knowledge, skills, mindsets and experiential learning of an innovation capable graduate and employee and applied these attributes to address the complex challenge of providing Canadians with access to affordable housing by 2030. 
  
  As a result of their outstanding contribution and commitment to improving Canada’s capacity for innovation, they have all been afforded the opportunity to be part of the WINCan (www.wincan.ca) movement. 
  
  I would also like to express my sincere thanks to the iSchool (Colin Furness) at the University of Toronto, and particularly our workplace partners, Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (Steffan Jones, Jonathan Chan, Emily Bashir and Cassandra Bernard) and the Bank of Canada (Dhaval Shah, Michel Tremblay, Sylvie Mougeot, Rakesh Arora, Dinesh Shah) for their invaluable contribution and ongoing support in helping to develop Canada’s first KM and Workplace Innovation credential. 
  
  Finally, I would like to thank our incredible WINCan team, Dr. Tom Carey, Allison Davies, Tyranny Anderson, Doug Symington, Anahita Baregheh, along with my friend and mentor, Dr. Marlene Scardamalia, her right hand, Susana La Rossa and the IKIT support team.
  The final report addressing the challenge of affordable housing for Canadians , developed by the students will be published on the KMIC and WINCan websites shortly. 
  
  Blake Melnick,
  CEO/CKO,
  The Knowledge Management Institute of Canada 
  
  

KM and Workplace Innovation - About the Program 

This unique micro credential is the result of over four years of research around the relationship between KM and innovation involving many of Canada’s leading universities and workplace organizations. 

The result is a new program designed to ensure all graduates are “Innovation Capable” by helping students develop the mindsets, skillsets, and knowledge that will prepare them for opportunities in a world characterized by complexity, uncertainty, and exponential change. 

The 8 week online course introduced a completely new model of education, which treats "the classroom as the workspace”. The program emphasizes experiential learning and focuses on addressing real-world challenges with respect to workplace innovation. It included weekly webinars, podcasts and virtual visitations by senior leaders, workplace organizations and interdisciplinary subject matter experts who engaged with participants, shared strategies, and collectively explored how to design and foster cultures of innovation within workplace settings. 

Workplaces include start-ups, businesses, the public-sector, governments, and non- profits. Innovative workplaces utilize the skills, develop the talents, and express the values of all employees. Innovative workplace cultures emphasize self-organized teams, encourage risk-taking, help build resilience, demonstrate inclusive decision- making, and value self-improvement. Such workplaces make people feel fulfilled in their jobs. Ultimately, innovative workplaces create a virtuous cycle where satisfied employees deliver higher levels of performance.

What Toronto's Efforts to Control Traffic During the PamAm Games can Teach us about Change

Leading up to the start of the PanAm Games, Toronto city planners instituted temporary HOV lanes on all major highways in and out of the city. Nothing unusual - we are all familiar with the concept of HOV lanes. However what was different was the requirement to have 3+ passengers to use the HOV lane instead of the typical 2 person minimum. In Addition, taxis buses and motorcycles were also allowed to use the HOV lanes.

On The first Friday of the games I was planning on getting out of the city. Unfortunately as a result of meetings we were forced to delay leaving until 5:30 pm - smack dab in the middle of rush hour going north on arguably Toronto's worst artery - the Don Valley Parkway (aptly referred to by local residents as the "Don Valley Parking Lot") with a feeling of trepidation akin to having someone threaten to stab me in the eye with a pencil, I approached the Bloor street on ramp. Lo and behold I noticed the HOV lane was almost completely empty - some quick mental math told me I had 4 people in the car and I headed over. It took us a sum total of 10 minutes to reach the top of the DVP a feat I had been unable to accomplish since 1981. As we were whizzing by the "parking lot" on our right to the sultry overtones of my wife singing, "see you later sucksaars!" I realized someone in the city planning department had come up with, whether intentional or otherwise, a simple, cost effective,  short term solution to Toronto's mounting traffic problems .

Toronto has been grappling with ever increasing traffic congestion for the past 10 years. On one level the problem is simple, the city planners of yesteryear didn't anticipate the extent of growth the city is currently experiencing when they designed the highways.  On another, it's more complicated. The habit of driving alone, treating the car as a personal refuge, is part of the average driver's mindset and as we all know getting people to change their mindset is notoriously difficult. City planners and politicians have floated all kinds of different ideas for doing this from toll roads to increased public transit to increasing parking rates in the downtown core. None of which has produced the kind of change in behaviors necessary to dramatically alleviate the problem.

Any experienced KM practitioner knows  helping organization manage change is key to ensuring the success of any KM initiative. I have always believed In order for employees to embrace change they need a compelling reason to do so. Even so, getting employees to adopt a different mindset is extraordinarily difficult. First you need to get them to change their behaviors (habits)

We are all creatures of habit and typically we default to what is familiar and easiest when we make decisions about how to approach a particular task, like getting from point A to point B. The best way for new thinking to replace old habits is when doing the "familiar" becomes more difficult than changing.

People change when doing things the old way become more difficult than adopting the new

As I watched drivers fuming in their cars on the DVP that Friday afternoon while I zipped by in the HOV lane, it struck me that if Toronto City Council decided to keep the 3 Person HOV lanes post Games,  it wouldn't take long for drivers to see the advantage of having more passengers in their car  and start changing their driving habits and ultimately their mindset towards commuting - It certainly did for me for the duration of the Games as I had to make a number of trips across the city over the next two weeks and I made sure I had at least three people in the car, or I opted for public transit.

We can apply the same change strategy within organizations when we are attempting to get employees to change how they do things. Instead of simply introducing something new, along with the old and letting people choose (because we know most people will opt for the familiar) we need think about (and communicate) how the change(s) we are proposing will be better,  making the old way of doing things more difficult, less efficient, more time consuming etc.  Once employees see the advantages, it won't take them long to embrace the change.

 

Final Word 

 

Toronto City Council -  "keep the 3-person HOV lane in place!"

 

Idea Diversity

Good Ideas Often Come From Unlikely Sources

Developing organizational supports for idea diversity is essential to advancing knowledge. In order to improve upon an idea it is necessary to understand the ideas which surround it and those which stand in contrast to it. Within our organization we want to create a culture where the importance idea diversity is prized. (core values, performance management, professional development, rewards and recognition etc.) - A rich environment for ideas to evolve into new and more refined forms and develop mechanisms for these ideas to be transformed into tangible outcomes and results which have value to employees and to the organization as a whole.

Idea Silos

It is not uncommon for organizations to have idea silos which reflect their functional silos (Management, Marketing, Engineering, HR, IT etc.), so when faced with a "Management" challenge, idea diversity is limited to those within this department. Organizations tend to limit their "reach" for good ideas according to perceived experience of their people, often determined by title or role. Rarely is a management challenge isolated to those within management and decisions made tend to have a cascading impact throughout the organization. The same would apply to all the functional areas noted above e.g. If IT decides to change a policy, procedure or procure new technology this would have an impact across all functional areas of the organization. Undoubtedly, the impact would be positive for IT, but might not be so positive for other functional areas, so it would make sense to want to solicit their input.

As we well know the experience of our people is not limited to their job description or the title on their business cards. Organizations need to tap into the breadth of experience and expertise of their people when faced with complex challenges. This is not as difficult to do as one might think.

Imagine if you will that management is building a new strategy for IT. Presumably in drafting the strategy they have consulted IT for their ideas. Typically this is where the consultative process might end. In order to create more idea diversity leading to better business outcome, try taking the ideas developed by IT and rolling them out to other departments to build upon and improve these ideas.

Where Critical Knowledge Resides - Idea Diversity - The Bigger Picture

 

The graphic below is my adaptation of the KSN model developed by Scardamalia and Bereiter. It illustrates where pockets of critical (and competitive) knowledge reside within organizations. Above I discussed how to increase idea diversity within your organization. Now we need to look at bringing the customer and the Industry at large into the mix.

The best businesses I know work hard to understand their customer's business, knowing that by doing so, they are able to anticipate their customer's present and future needs and align their products and services to address presen needs.

However fewer organizations solicit ideas from customers about how to improve their business, enhance the value of existing products and services and/or provide new products and services to address future needs.

Why is this important? - Capturing ideas from customers allows your organization to be pro-active rather than re-active; It helps you expand your sales/marketing pipeline while improving the accuracy of your forecasting and budgeting and most important, the customer's ideas will guide the continual improvement of  your existing products and services and energize your R&D program through the targeted development of new products and services, which you know the customers actually want and are willing to to pay for.

Disruptive Change - The Importance of Capturing Industry Knowledge

When planning your organization's knowledge strategy remember to develop mechanisms for capturing ideas and insights from across your industry as well as from other industries.

There are many industry sectors which have gone through disruptive change over the past 10 years e.g the Music Industry, the Video Industry and the Training industry to name just a few. I heard yesterday that Block Buster has closed their doors for good - who would have thought this might happen 10 years ago? Well, the answer is those individuals and companies who looked forward and sought to understand ideas from within their industry as well as ideas which were developing in other industries which might impact theirs.

When I was in the Aerospace simulator/simulation training business, we spent a great deal of time investigating what was going on in the gaming industry. Some very insightful people in the company observed that the gaming industry was beginning to evolve to the point where they were developing products which would soon challenge the market space held by companies that developed Simulators to train pilots, maintenance technicians etc. (think MS Flight Sim) and they were doing so at a significantly lower price point. To cite an example, when we were developing a virtual reality helicopter simulator, the cost of of VR helmet was approximately $200,000 dollars. The gamers were developing VR interfaces for less than $100.00 - were they comparable - no,  but the writing was on the wall and understanding what was happening in the gaming industry and the potential impact these developments might have on our business, gave us the ability to to proactively prepare for the advent of this disruptive technology; learn from others and improve our business as a result.

Improvable Ideas

"Ideas Are Improved When Tested Through Action"

 

Everyone in the organization treats ideas as improvable objects

 

The Knowledge Building Principle of Improvable Ideas require individuals  and organizations to firstly value ideas as the means to advance knowledge and understanding, and secondly accept that ideas are subject to continual improvement by members of the organization.

Notionally I would think this makes sense to everyone, but what does this really mean to the development of an organization's knowledge strategy? How do we make this real and actionable for people within an organization?

Ideas at the Centre

I have to confess this is a bit of a mantra for me.  It really means that to become a knowledge centric organization (where the pursuit of new knowledge is considered the key to success and longevity) idea generation and improvement lie at the heart of the work for everyone in the organization.  This is very different from many organizations which place the completion of tasks as the central activity for employees.

Good ideas (ones which are valued by both individuals and the organization as a whole) typically emerge in context - e.g. to address a need, solve a problem, improve upon something we already do, or to launch something new. It is safe to say, "Ideas are the DNA of invention and innovation"

If ideas are valued as a source of continual improvement and innovation, then we must look to developing structures which support idea capture, idea improvement and idea transfer. Certainly technology can help with this, however what we are really after is to create the cultural conditions, where this principle (and practice)  becomes part of "how we do things around here"

 Some Strategies:

Below are a few strategies which I have found to work. 

1. Idea Banks: A number of companies have instituted "Idea Banks" usually employing some form of technology (see Google) to capture ideas from employees across the organization. Depending on how well they are designed, idea banks can serve as an effective means to ensure good ideas are not lost (particularly where there is yet a context for these ideas) and can be improved upon by others. Many organizations allow employees to vote on the "best new ideas" of the month / quarter. Teams and individuals are recognized (and in some cases rewarded) for their contribution to advancing and improving on ideas which  advance the goals of the organization. Some companies also use idea banks to solicit input from their customers about their level of satisfaction with current products and services or to solicit ideas for improvement or new products and services. 
2. Collaborative, Knowledge Building Environments - Virtual work spaces where employees advance ideas, build on the ideas of others in the course of  their daily work. Now the caveat here is you need an environment designed specifically to support the advancement of ideas (this will be the subject of a future post)
3. Share your Organization Challenges - If your organization has challenges it needs to solve in order to grow, diversify etc. - create a mechanism for sharing these across the organization and for allowing people to collaborate with one another in an effort to improve them. If there are already ideas for addressing these challenges being considered, share these as well and provide the directive for people to improve upon them - you will be amazed at what can happen when you tap into the collective brainpower of your organization.
4. Lunch & Learn Sessions -  Link your L&L sessions to company sponsored professional development programs. Create a form of social contract with your employees e.g. If we invest in your learning, you have a responsibility to give back by sharing what you've learned (new ideas and insights) with your co-workers. Have them host 2 lunch and learn sessions following the professional development event,  where they focus on explaining what they learned, how it changed their thinking,  and how this new knowledge could benefit the organization. It is also a good idea to have employees log a learning report in the idea bank or in your collaborative knowledge building environment, so these new ideas are accessible to everyone in the organization and in a form where they can be further improved and / or applied to address a different set of needs - often times good ideas can be used in multiple contexts.

Next Instalment:  Idea Diversity

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