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Managing team knowledge: core processes, tools and enabling factors
Pergamon
PII:
European Management Journal Vol. 18, No. 3, pp. 334–341, 2000 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved Printed in Great Britain S0263-2373(00)00015-3 0263-2373/00 $20.00
Managing Team Knowledge: Core Processes, Tools and Enabling Factors MARTIN J. EPPLER, University of St Gallen, Switzerland OLIVER SUKOWSKI, University of St Gallen, Switzerland Based on action research with product development teams from Roche and DaimlerChrysler, and project teams from Pixelpark and Versicherungskammer Bayern, the following article proposes a model of how team leaders can improve the knowledge management within their teams. The model consists of five layers. The first layer describes the necessary communication platforms for a team. The second level, the normative layer, consists of team rules, goals, and standards. The third layer represents the core team knowledge processes. The fourth layer assembles the relevant tools. The last layer describes the necessary leadership functions to foster effective team knowledge management. 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved Keywords: High-performance teams, Knowledge management, Leadership, Team processes
Introduction Making effective use of the collective knowledge in a company is often seen as a challenge that arises mostly at the organisational level. Issues such as leveraging best practices throughout the organisation and fostering or exploiting core competencies have often been debated in knowledge management literature (see for example Cerny, 1996). In our experience with several companies, however, managing knowledge is already a major challenge at the team level. Thus, the goal of this article is to show systematic ways in which the management of team knowledge (i.e. its elicitation, development, application and reuse) can be improved. Possible application areas for team knowledge management, as it is discussed here, 334
are project and process teams, taskforces, management teams, or advisory teams. The following findings and their aggregation in a model are based on questionnaire-based interviews with 41 team members from 11 teams in four European companies and action research with three teams from two companies over the course of one year.
The Wisdom of Teams — the Knowledge of Individuals? In their seminal work ‘The Wisdom of Teams’, Katzenbach and Smith define a team as ‘a small number of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose, performance goals, and approach for which they hold themselves mutually accountable.’ (Katzenbach and Smith, 1993, p. 45). Subsequently, Katzenbach and Smith focus on ways to achieve a high-perfomance culture where team members are determined to reach common goals. They conclude that the single most important factor determining team performance is a focus on just that — performance. Although they also stress the importance of team knowledge management, they do not elaborate on its functioning, but merely state its central role in high-performance teams: ‘Real teams communicate and learn whatever is necessary to get their job done; team “doors” are always open. Moreover, through the “extended team” influence, the communications and knowledge management of others work better.’ (Katzenbach and Smith, 1993, p. 254). While fast learning and open communications are two important prerequisites for a team’s success, they are probably not sufficient. This is especially European Management Journal Vol 18 No 3 June 2000
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true for knowledge-intensive team-tasks, such as product development, consulting engagements, or due diligence projects, where the systematic combination of individual expertise is a crucial element. Hence, a comprehensive model of team knowledge management will have to go beyond Katzenbach’s and Smith’s analysis of knowledge processes in teams (this also holds true for the later anthology Katzenbach, 1998).
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A Framework for Team Knowledge Management ❖ The following framework of team knowledge management has three distinct sources. First, it is based on the problems we encountered in working with teams in product development at the truck division of DaimlerChrysler and the diagnostics division of Roche. Second, it is based on interviews with project team members and leaders at the European multimedia agency Pixelpark and at the German insurance group Versicherungskammer Bayern. Third, the model incorporates relevant findings of prior literature on team performance and knowledge management. Figure 1 outlines the model of team knowledge management that will be discussed in the remainder of this article. Before we describe the levels of the model in detail, we will briefly outline some of the main problems we encountered in managing team knowledge. The model, put to work by a team leader, should help to avoid the following problems: ❖ Team members were not aware of previous experiences of their team mates or their special skills. ❖ New team members who joined an existing team
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were not aware of crucial events (and subsequent learnings) that happened prior to their arrival in the team. One new team member we interviewed indicated that he felt he ‘went blindly into the project.’ There was a lack of knowledge about stakeholders and their goals in respect to the team’s work. Knowledge that individual team members had acquired externally or developed themselves was not sufficiently shared with other team members. Many team members we interviewed indicated that due to time pressure, they often felt insufficiently briefed by other team members and did not understand their tasks, problems, and results. Collective knowledge creation was often difficult due to time, language or co-ordination problems. One team member we interviewed indicated that he felt frustrated because he realised that ‘the team was not going down a learning curve together.’ The teams did not gather and combine their insights into the overall process systematically and did not deduce lessons learned for future activities. When we questioned project team leaders whether they gathered lessons learned at the end of a phase or an entire project, the most common answer was ‘we ought to, but rarely have the time or inclination.’
In order to address these problems, a team leader has to provide the team with real and virtual communication spaces and with a set of guiding norms. He needs to assure that the four core team knowledge processes can take place, namely a team knowledge assessment or audit, team knowledge development (creation and acquisition of new knowledge), mutual briefings and updates, and systematic reviews or lessons learned sessions. In order to improve these processes, the team leader has a number of tools at his disposal, such as the team matrix, the expert web, the project compass, visual protocolling, or lessons
Figure 1 The Conceptual Framework for Team Knowledge Management
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learned repositories. A last vital element in addressing these problems is the team head’s leadership function: a team leader has to create an environment for trust and identification by creating collective experiences and artefacts. He has to create a sense of urgency to align team members towards completing a common (ambitious but realistic) goal, while at the same time allowing time for crucial reflection processes. Below, we provide examples of these five necessary layers and describe them in more detail.
Platforms Nonaka and Konno (1998) introduced the ‘ba’ concept, stating that knowledge cannot be separated from the shared physical, virtual or mental space in which knowledge is created and used. According to this concept, it is necessary to specify the foundation required for knowledge management in teams. We differentiate two basic layers of shared spaces that underpin successful knowledge work in teams. The first layer represents the communication infrastructure provided for teams, specifically a shared virtual and physical space. The second layer is comprised of shared norms and rules within a team; the shared ‘mental space’ as it is referred to by Nonaka and Konno. In their article, Nonaka and Konno present the SECI (socialisation, externalisation, combination, and internalisation) model to illustrate the transfer of tacit and explicit knowledge within an organisation. Each stage within the model is attributed to a ‘ba’ (roughly equivalent to ‘place’). Nonaka and Konno distinguish between the originating, interacting, cyber, and exercising ba. The communication infrastructure layer (as illustrated in Figure 1) tackles the more tangible aspects of Nonaka’s ‘ba’ concept. The mental space in which knowledge is created and used will be addressed in subsequent paragraphs. First, we will specify the communication infrastructure layer. Knowledge management tools are difficult to implement when they lack a balanced structure for team communication. Adequate communication depends on the specific team constellation as well as the goals of a team. Specifically, efficient collaboration in a team requires the explicit definition of the communication channels desired within the team (and their usage, i.e. an e-mail policy). A 24-hour software developing team scattered all over the world has different needs in terms of knowledge exchange than a local project team with the goal to implement a new bookkeeping system in a firm. While the first team uses virtual rooms with predominantly asynchronous communication, the latter requires a shared physical room for meetings and synchronous communication. To a certain extent, it is possible to substitute physical meetings with video-conferencing. An IT infrastructure can replace bureaucratic overhead and reduce the amount of travelling of team members. However, the 336
foundation for successful team co-operation lies in a customised assortment of communication tools. When the analysis of the team’s communication requirements points to a strong emphasis on direct and synchronous interaction, it is necessary to provide adequately equipped office space and meeting facilities. According to the ‘ba’ concept by Nonaka, it is necessary to distinguish four stages of knowledge transfer. The same holds true for the layout of physical office space. For the socialisation phase (the ‘originating ba’), management has to provide team rooms where people can meet informally, share feelings and experiences. In contrast, the externalisation phase (the ‘interacting ba’) requires sophisticated meeting facilities, capable of projecting people’s knowledge in customised media. When it comes to internalising knowledge (the ‘exercising ba’), quiet study rooms with clearly personalised ‘territory’ prove to be necessary. However, in many cases, teams consist of members from different locations, organisations, and firms. For that constellation, a virtual space (the ‘cyber ba’) is necessary to facilitate knowledge transfer within the team and between teams. The virtual team space enables members to share comments, team documents, and applications. The virtual team space is frequently an IT-based tool — such as standard groupware applications augmented with additional supplements such as video conferencing or project management software.
Norms The second layer addresses issues relating to team rules, conventions and general norms. This layer stresses the importance of a common understanding of a team’s purpose, conduct, terminology (i.e., shared meanings), and accountability (see also Katzenbach and Smith, 1993, for this point). In regard to the effective allocation of knowledge, these intangible factors are crucial because they foster trust and cohesion in a team, two prerequisites for effective knowledge transfer (see Lewicki and Bunker, 1996 for this issue). One team member we interviewed indicated that ‘knowledge sharing is a problem when the team is more dominated by departmental or location loyalty than by team loyalty.’ Another team leader we interviewed indicated that ‘also in the team context, for many knowledge is power you don’t want to give away easily.’ In a related statement, a team member indicated that it was crucial in his team to agree at an early stage on a common set of quality criteria and on a common terminology to avoid unfruitful discussions. For these reasons, shared team norms are a crucial factor in fostering an effective team knowledge management. In addition, the explicit consensus on common goals and procedures European Management Journal Vol 18 No 3 June 2000
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directs the team’s knowledge development in one direction.
Processes In our work with highly skilled and specialised development and consulting teams, we were able to identify four crucial team knowledge management processes. They are as follows: 1. Team knowledge auditing: The goal of this process, which should take place at the beginning of a team collaboration, is to make the present team knowledge (skills, experiences, contacts, assumptions) transparent and discover knowledge deficits in the team for the tasks at hand. Specifically, the knowwhat (available information), know-how (skills and prior experiences), know-who (inside and outside contacts), and know-why (goals, motivations, expectations, and basic assumptions) should be made explicit (for this distinction, see also Quinn et al., 1996). A simple form of a team knowledge audit consists of every team member describing another team member’s professional background and experience in a plenary session. 2. Team knowledge development: This on-going process consists of knowledge acquisition from outside sources and knowledge creation activities through experimentation or conceptual collaboration in the team. Ideally, this process culminates in common ‘knowledge artefacts’ such as concepts, prototypes, formalised ideas, protocols or reports. 3. Mutual updating and briefing: The goal of this process is to combine the individual insights to the team stock of knowledge. This process can have the form of a simple team presentation or it can take on more elaborate briefing formats such as Q & A sessions, poster rooms, or meta-plan workshops (with brown papers and pasted cards). 4. Reviewing: The goal of this frequently neglected process is to reflect systematically about the insights that the team was able to gather during a process or project phase. Specifically, the following questions ought to be answered: what has worked well in our collaboration, what has not worked and why, and what are we going to do differently as a result of these insights? Addressing these questions, we have come to distinguish four types of critical lessons learned: 1. common mistakes, pitfalls, and critical incidents (and their main causes), 2. successful practices, key success factors, and work-arounds, 3. reccurring questions and answers, 4. and experiences with tools, resources, and partners. Since most teams do not reflect systematically on these issues, we have started to moderate so-called European Management Journal Vol 18 No 3 June 2000
CORAL (critical, original, reliable, actionable learnings) workshops in order to ‘force’ teams to think about their lessons learned. The feedback for these (typically four hour) events has been only positive so far (after four such workshops). All of the four processes outlined above are essential to the functioning of knowledge management in a team. They can be facilitated with a number of tools that are presented in the next section.
Tools for Team Knowledge Management Tools for team knowledge management focus on the elicitation, categorisation, and aggregation of dispersed knowledge in a team. Their main goal is to make knowledge in its various forms more transparent for every team member. Most of the tools we have found to be useful achieve this by relying heavily on visualisation. Below, we outline two tools for every team knowledge process described above.
Team Knowledge Audit To perform a team knowledge audit, we have developed two tools, the team matrix and the expert web. The team matrix is a framework to assess the present and the required state of know-how in a team. Typically, we deduce the required know-how from the main goals of a project or task (gathered in a team stakeholder analysis) and then have the team position it in Figure 2 (whether the specific knowledge is crucial or not, and sufficiently available or not). From the shaded area, the team then has to generate improvement measures. In order to make the know-how and know-who in a team more transparent, we have developed the following tool that we call expert map. Every team member is asked to draw a chart like the one in Figure 3, in which he states three of his main areas of expertise and one area of improvement. In every such box he lists his contacts in the respective domain. In this way the team’s main fields of expertise and its contacts to outside experts can be made more transparent.
Team Knowledge Development The creation of team knowledge is a crucial element in both consulting and product development teams. To foster on the one hand the acquisition of new knowledge from outside sources, and the creation of new knowledge on the other, a team leader can rely on the following two tools. The first tool can assist the team leader in co-ordinating the knowledge 337
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Figure 2 The Team Matrix as a Team Knowledge Auditing Tool (Fictitious Example)
Figure 3 The Expert Web as a Team Knowledge Management Tool
development and acquisition activities in his team and aligning them to one common purpose. It is generally referred to as the pyramid principle (see Minto, 1987) and structures the knowledge that a team has to acquire or develop into segments on several hierarchies. Figure 4 illustrates this concept for a due diligence team. The first layer represents the hypothesis that the team has to validate or refute. The subsequent levels represent answers that the team members have to find in order to evaluate the overall
hypothesis. In this way, the individual insights can be combined to one overall conclusion. While the pyramid principle is already a common tool in many specialised teams, the second tool is still missing from many team leaders’ toolbox: the Toulmin map. It is based on the argumentation theory of Stephen Toulmin (Toulmin, 1958) and can be used to systematically map the knowledge present in team discussions. Figure 5 is an example of such a map
Figure 4 The Pyramid Principle Used to Split Knowledge Development Tasks into Groups
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points on a flip-chart or overhead projector. In this way, team members who cannot attend a meeting or arrive late have a visual overview on the main issues that have been discussed. Second, so called flight plans can be used to update all team members on what is going on elsewhere in the team. Figure 6 offers a simple generic example of such a flight plan that lists all team activities on one chart. The plan usually has the form of a pin-board on a central location and shows which team tasks are currently planned, under way, in a crisis situation (SOS), or about to finish. The team members can use this board to attach news about their task, ask questions, or gain the team leader’s attention by posting their task in the SOS column.
Figure 5 The Toulmin Map to Make Basic Assumptions and Arguments in Teams Transparent
taken from a product development context. The basic assumptions behind a certain claim in a group debate are systematically made transparent. This is achieved by structuring an argument into its main components, such as claim, grounds, warrant or rebuttal. In this way, the team’s knowledge development can be made explicit in changing Toulmin maps and individual differences can be made apparent.
Mutual Updating and Briefing For the time-consuming tasks of mutual updating and briefing on individual progress and new insights, the following two tools can be used. First, visual protocols or meeting compasses are an easy way to improve the transparency of issues that are communicated in a briefing meeting. Their basic idea lies in the visual arrangement of a meeting’s main agenda points and the mapping of issues along these agenda
Reviewing Besides a CORAL workshop (see above), two of the most effective tools we have encountered for team reviews and the gathering of lessons learned are the case study and the lessons learned inventory. In order to generate a team case study, the members of a team sit together to write up a concise and lively account of what has happened in the team over the course of a project or task. A possible structure for such a case study is the following sequence of paragraphs: 1. Target group of the case study (i.e., development teams, project leaders etc.) 2. Starting situation and goals of the team 3. Approach and measures taken 4. Results (quantitative and qualitative) 5. Experiences with tools, partners, and resources 6. Key lessons learned (and their consequences for future action) 7. Contact information (contact person, relevant documents and data bases) If a case study is written up in this manner, the
Figure 6 A Sample Team Tasks Flight Plan
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team’s insights are not only made explicit for the entire team, but also for other groups who might face similar problems. In a lessons learned inventory, team members are encouraged to contribute central insights into a common database or document repository. The team members contribute their findings in the same concise manner and flag their entries according to their possible impact (high, medium, or low impact of the lessons to the team’s success). In this way, the collective memory of the team is developed step by step and can be consulted before crucial events. Organisations who have already deployed such inventories are NASA, the US Army, and Siemens Information and Communication Networks. The described instruments serve as examples to show that a team can use various means to manage its knowledge more systematically. We believe that the tools discussed in this article are applicable in a variety of team contexts and can be easily mastered by most professional teams if the team leader encourages their disciplined use. We discuss this crucial role of leadership in the next section.
Leadership While a team leader already has a great number of tasks and responsibilities (such as motivation, controlling, co-ordination, reporting, etc.), knowledge management also requires a leadership commitment. In regard to team knowledge management, the team leader should serve as a role model (sharing his or her knowledge openly, taking time for crucial reflection processes, documenting important insights, etc.) and coach the team members in their development of knowledge. Above all, he has to strike a balance between creating a sense of urgency that forces the team to share knowledge and work together, and allowing time and space for reflection and experimentation. He has to provide opportunities for the team members to develop competencies and develop knowledge, but he also has the responsibility of assuring that this knowledge is relevant to the goals of the entire team. This is the two-fold dilemma that a team leader faces in respect to knowledge management. Without this kind of credible leadership commitment — and the discipline that goes with it — systematic team knowledge management is difficult to sustain.
Enabling Factors for Team Knowledge Management The framework for team knowledge management illustrated in Figure 1 has to be viewed in the context 340
of certain enabling factors within the team and the organisation. Korine (1999) points out that due to substitution of bureaucratic structures with team organisation, management faces new challenges resulting from arbitrary behaviour of team members. In order to avoid this, Korine identified enabling factors for effective team management: ‘By stressing respect for team autonomy, making decision processes public, and encouraging challenge and gamesmanship at all levels, [...] managers have created novel, non-bureaucratic ways of adressing arbitrariness.’ In our work with various teams, we also encountered frustration and demotivation due to a lack of sufficient team autonomy. One team member described the situation as follows: ‘Decision-making by higher level management is just like a black box to us. We have no idea about the reasoning behind their decisions and yet the team has to live with them and be compensated accordingly.’ Thus, arbitrary decision-making in and between teams is one of the major sources for performance problems and distrust in teams. We will get back to this crucial point in the conclusion of the article, where we summarise the enabling factors of team knowledge management. Another frequently neglected factor in our experience with teams is the deployment of a performance measurement and incentive system that encourages knowledge transfer within the team and does not create incentives for unhealthy internal competition. Pure individual compensation can limit the knowledge transfer among team members significantly. The integration of a team bonus into the compensation scheme can foster additional willingness to share knowledge in a team. A third enabling factor for team knowledge management is continuity. Continuity in the sense of a stable team composition and sufficient, on-going resource endowment. A stable team composition can lead to the development of highly complementary skills in a team which in turn lead to high levels of performance. Team continuity can also lead to a higher level of trust in a team, because the team members have a set of shared experiences (for this point, we refer again to the seminal analysis of trust in Lewicki and Bunker, 1996). This higher level of trust, as mentioned before, is a prerequisite for knowledge transfer. Sufficient resource endowment can give the team the necessary room for reflecting on the procedures of the team e.g the derivation of lessons learned. However, providing sufficient resources should be accompanied by a measurement framework that focuses on the knowledge dissemination process. As one team member put it: ‘We simply don’t have the time for reflection and knowledge transfer. Management does not seem to be interested in it. What counts is the successful completion of the operational tasks.’ This enabling factor is closely linked to what Von Krogh (1998) calls ‘care for knowledge creation’. In his article on knowledge creation, Von Krogh emphasises the necessity to deploy incentive systems European Management Journal Vol 18 No 3 June 2000
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focusing on behaviour that builds up care in organisational relationships. Von Krogh suggests care among organisation members to be of paramount importance for the creation of knowledge. In order to foster care in an organisation, he stresses many issues present in our model, such as values and norms (trust, openness, and courage as explicitly stated values by top management), lessons learned gathering (project debriefings) and regular interactions in the same physical space (social events). In addition, he also proposes mentoring and training programs as a means of fostering care for knowledge creation. Having outlined the advantages of continuity for team knowledge management and especially team knowledge development, one should not forget the possible dangers that lie in team continuity. Longterm team consistency with little or no new input from outside can also be the source for potential hazards to team performance. This danger is frequently referred to as ‘Groupthink’ (Janis, 1982): Group phenomena such as pressure on dissenters, the illusion of invulnerability of the group, and ignoring input from outside sources can have substantial adverse influence on team performance. Little perturbations in a team constellation, such as new team members, can therefore have beneficial effects.
Conclusion As we have outlined above, we believe that team knowledge management will become an integral part of project and team management in the near future, as team and project work in general are increasingly adopted as the most effective form of organising
knowledge work. In order to achieve this, teams have to be aware of their communication requirements and of the infrastructure or platforms they need to fulfil these requirements. They have to pay attention to the four main team knowledge processes and facilitate them with tools that stress the aggregation of individual knowledge in a common team framework. Team leaders, finally, need to be aware of the factors that enable effective team knowledge management (such as autonomy, team incentives, and continuity) and strike a balance between urgency and reflection. References Cerny, K. (1996) Making local knowledge global. Harvard Business Review May–Jun, 22–38. Janis, I.L. (1982) Groupthink: Psychological Studies of Policy Decisions and Fiascoes. Houghton Mifflin, Boston. Katzenbach, J.R. (ed.) (1998) The Works of Teams. Harvard Business Review, Boston. Katzenbach, J.R. and Smith, D.K (1993) The Wisdom of Teams. Harvard Business School Press, Boston. Korine, H. (1999) The new team organization: learning to manage arbitrariness. European Management Journal 17, 1–7. Lewicki, R.J. and Bunker, B.B. (1996) Developing and maintaining trust in work relationships. In Trust in Organizations, eds R.M. Kramer and T.R. Tyler. Sage, Thousand Oaks. Minto, B. (1987) The Pyramid Principle. FT Pitman Publishing, London. Nonaka, I. and Konno, N. (1998) The concept of ‘ba’: building a foundation for knowledge creation. California Management Review 40(3), 40–54. Quinn, J.B., Anderson, P. and Finkelstein, S. (1996) Managing professional intellect: making the most of the best. Harvard Business Review Mar–Apr, 71–80. Toulmin, S. (1958) The Uses of Argument. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Von Krogh, G. (1998) Care in knowledge creation. California Management Review 40(3), 133–153.
MARTIN EPPLER, MCM Institute, University of St Gallen, Mu¨ller-Friedbergstrasse 8, CH-9000, St Gallen, Switzerland.
OLIVER SUKOWSKI, MCM Institute, University of St Gallen, Mu¨ller-Friedbergstrasse 8, CH-9000, St Gallen, Switzerland.
Martin J. Eppler is the Managing Director of the Competence Centre: Enterprise Knowledge Medium at the Institute for Media and Communications Management of the University of St Gallen. He is a Senior Lecturer in the graduate programs of the University of St Gallen. His research interests are in the domains of knowledge management, strategy, and information quality.
Oliver Sukowski is a Research Assistant at the Competence Centre: Enterprise Knowledge Medium. Prior to joining the MCM Institute, he worked as an IT and performance consultant. His research interests are in the domain of knowledge management for projects, project knowledge media, and performance measurement.
European Management Journal Vol 18 No 3 June 2000
341
PII:
European Management Journal Vol. 18, No. 3, pp. 334–341, 2000 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved Printed in Great Britain S0263-2373(00)00015-3 0263-2373/00 $20.00
Managing Team Knowledge: Core Processes, Tools and Enabling Factors MARTIN J. EPPLER, University of St Gallen, Switzerland OLIVER SUKOWSKI, University of St Gallen, Switzerland Based on action research with product development teams from Roche and DaimlerChrysler, and project teams from Pixelpark and Versicherungskammer Bayern, the following article proposes a model of how team leaders can improve the knowledge management within their teams. The model consists of five layers. The first layer describes the necessary communication platforms for a team. The second level, the normative layer, consists of team rules, goals, and standards. The third layer represents the core team knowledge processes. The fourth layer assembles the relevant tools. The last layer describes the necessary leadership functions to foster effective team knowledge management. 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved Keywords: High-performance teams, Knowledge management, Leadership, Team processes
Introduction Making effective use of the collective knowledge in a company is often seen as a challenge that arises mostly at the organisational level. Issues such as leveraging best practices throughout the organisation and fostering or exploiting core competencies have often been debated in knowledge management literature (see for example Cerny, 1996). In our experience with several companies, however, managing knowledge is already a major challenge at the team level. Thus, the goal of this article is to show systematic ways in which the management of team knowledge (i.e. its elicitation, development, application and reuse) can be improved. Possible application areas for team knowledge management, as it is discussed here, 334
are project and process teams, taskforces, management teams, or advisory teams. The following findings and their aggregation in a model are based on questionnaire-based interviews with 41 team members from 11 teams in four European companies and action research with three teams from two companies over the course of one year.
The Wisdom of Teams — the Knowledge of Individuals? In their seminal work ‘The Wisdom of Teams’, Katzenbach and Smith define a team as ‘a small number of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose, performance goals, and approach for which they hold themselves mutually accountable.’ (Katzenbach and Smith, 1993, p. 45). Subsequently, Katzenbach and Smith focus on ways to achieve a high-perfomance culture where team members are determined to reach common goals. They conclude that the single most important factor determining team performance is a focus on just that — performance. Although they also stress the importance of team knowledge management, they do not elaborate on its functioning, but merely state its central role in high-performance teams: ‘Real teams communicate and learn whatever is necessary to get their job done; team “doors” are always open. Moreover, through the “extended team” influence, the communications and knowledge management of others work better.’ (Katzenbach and Smith, 1993, p. 254). While fast learning and open communications are two important prerequisites for a team’s success, they are probably not sufficient. This is especially European Management Journal Vol 18 No 3 June 2000
MANAGING TEAM KNOWLEDGE
true for knowledge-intensive team-tasks, such as product development, consulting engagements, or due diligence projects, where the systematic combination of individual expertise is a crucial element. Hence, a comprehensive model of team knowledge management will have to go beyond Katzenbach’s and Smith’s analysis of knowledge processes in teams (this also holds true for the later anthology Katzenbach, 1998).
❖ ❖
A Framework for Team Knowledge Management ❖ The following framework of team knowledge management has three distinct sources. First, it is based on the problems we encountered in working with teams in product development at the truck division of DaimlerChrysler and the diagnostics division of Roche. Second, it is based on interviews with project team members and leaders at the European multimedia agency Pixelpark and at the German insurance group Versicherungskammer Bayern. Third, the model incorporates relevant findings of prior literature on team performance and knowledge management. Figure 1 outlines the model of team knowledge management that will be discussed in the remainder of this article. Before we describe the levels of the model in detail, we will briefly outline some of the main problems we encountered in managing team knowledge. The model, put to work by a team leader, should help to avoid the following problems: ❖ Team members were not aware of previous experiences of their team mates or their special skills. ❖ New team members who joined an existing team
❖
were not aware of crucial events (and subsequent learnings) that happened prior to their arrival in the team. One new team member we interviewed indicated that he felt he ‘went blindly into the project.’ There was a lack of knowledge about stakeholders and their goals in respect to the team’s work. Knowledge that individual team members had acquired externally or developed themselves was not sufficiently shared with other team members. Many team members we interviewed indicated that due to time pressure, they often felt insufficiently briefed by other team members and did not understand their tasks, problems, and results. Collective knowledge creation was often difficult due to time, language or co-ordination problems. One team member we interviewed indicated that he felt frustrated because he realised that ‘the team was not going down a learning curve together.’ The teams did not gather and combine their insights into the overall process systematically and did not deduce lessons learned for future activities. When we questioned project team leaders whether they gathered lessons learned at the end of a phase or an entire project, the most common answer was ‘we ought to, but rarely have the time or inclination.’
In order to address these problems, a team leader has to provide the team with real and virtual communication spaces and with a set of guiding norms. He needs to assure that the four core team knowledge processes can take place, namely a team knowledge assessment or audit, team knowledge development (creation and acquisition of new knowledge), mutual briefings and updates, and systematic reviews or lessons learned sessions. In order to improve these processes, the team leader has a number of tools at his disposal, such as the team matrix, the expert web, the project compass, visual protocolling, or lessons
Figure 1 The Conceptual Framework for Team Knowledge Management
European Management Journal Vol 18 No 3 June 2000
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learned repositories. A last vital element in addressing these problems is the team head’s leadership function: a team leader has to create an environment for trust and identification by creating collective experiences and artefacts. He has to create a sense of urgency to align team members towards completing a common (ambitious but realistic) goal, while at the same time allowing time for crucial reflection processes. Below, we provide examples of these five necessary layers and describe them in more detail.
Platforms Nonaka and Konno (1998) introduced the ‘ba’ concept, stating that knowledge cannot be separated from the shared physical, virtual or mental space in which knowledge is created and used. According to this concept, it is necessary to specify the foundation required for knowledge management in teams. We differentiate two basic layers of shared spaces that underpin successful knowledge work in teams. The first layer represents the communication infrastructure provided for teams, specifically a shared virtual and physical space. The second layer is comprised of shared norms and rules within a team; the shared ‘mental space’ as it is referred to by Nonaka and Konno. In their article, Nonaka and Konno present the SECI (socialisation, externalisation, combination, and internalisation) model to illustrate the transfer of tacit and explicit knowledge within an organisation. Each stage within the model is attributed to a ‘ba’ (roughly equivalent to ‘place’). Nonaka and Konno distinguish between the originating, interacting, cyber, and exercising ba. The communication infrastructure layer (as illustrated in Figure 1) tackles the more tangible aspects of Nonaka’s ‘ba’ concept. The mental space in which knowledge is created and used will be addressed in subsequent paragraphs. First, we will specify the communication infrastructure layer. Knowledge management tools are difficult to implement when they lack a balanced structure for team communication. Adequate communication depends on the specific team constellation as well as the goals of a team. Specifically, efficient collaboration in a team requires the explicit definition of the communication channels desired within the team (and their usage, i.e. an e-mail policy). A 24-hour software developing team scattered all over the world has different needs in terms of knowledge exchange than a local project team with the goal to implement a new bookkeeping system in a firm. While the first team uses virtual rooms with predominantly asynchronous communication, the latter requires a shared physical room for meetings and synchronous communication. To a certain extent, it is possible to substitute physical meetings with video-conferencing. An IT infrastructure can replace bureaucratic overhead and reduce the amount of travelling of team members. However, the 336
foundation for successful team co-operation lies in a customised assortment of communication tools. When the analysis of the team’s communication requirements points to a strong emphasis on direct and synchronous interaction, it is necessary to provide adequately equipped office space and meeting facilities. According to the ‘ba’ concept by Nonaka, it is necessary to distinguish four stages of knowledge transfer. The same holds true for the layout of physical office space. For the socialisation phase (the ‘originating ba’), management has to provide team rooms where people can meet informally, share feelings and experiences. In contrast, the externalisation phase (the ‘interacting ba’) requires sophisticated meeting facilities, capable of projecting people’s knowledge in customised media. When it comes to internalising knowledge (the ‘exercising ba’), quiet study rooms with clearly personalised ‘territory’ prove to be necessary. However, in many cases, teams consist of members from different locations, organisations, and firms. For that constellation, a virtual space (the ‘cyber ba’) is necessary to facilitate knowledge transfer within the team and between teams. The virtual team space enables members to share comments, team documents, and applications. The virtual team space is frequently an IT-based tool — such as standard groupware applications augmented with additional supplements such as video conferencing or project management software.
Norms The second layer addresses issues relating to team rules, conventions and general norms. This layer stresses the importance of a common understanding of a team’s purpose, conduct, terminology (i.e., shared meanings), and accountability (see also Katzenbach and Smith, 1993, for this point). In regard to the effective allocation of knowledge, these intangible factors are crucial because they foster trust and cohesion in a team, two prerequisites for effective knowledge transfer (see Lewicki and Bunker, 1996 for this issue). One team member we interviewed indicated that ‘knowledge sharing is a problem when the team is more dominated by departmental or location loyalty than by team loyalty.’ Another team leader we interviewed indicated that ‘also in the team context, for many knowledge is power you don’t want to give away easily.’ In a related statement, a team member indicated that it was crucial in his team to agree at an early stage on a common set of quality criteria and on a common terminology to avoid unfruitful discussions. For these reasons, shared team norms are a crucial factor in fostering an effective team knowledge management. In addition, the explicit consensus on common goals and procedures European Management Journal Vol 18 No 3 June 2000
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directs the team’s knowledge development in one direction.
Processes In our work with highly skilled and specialised development and consulting teams, we were able to identify four crucial team knowledge management processes. They are as follows: 1. Team knowledge auditing: The goal of this process, which should take place at the beginning of a team collaboration, is to make the present team knowledge (skills, experiences, contacts, assumptions) transparent and discover knowledge deficits in the team for the tasks at hand. Specifically, the knowwhat (available information), know-how (skills and prior experiences), know-who (inside and outside contacts), and know-why (goals, motivations, expectations, and basic assumptions) should be made explicit (for this distinction, see also Quinn et al., 1996). A simple form of a team knowledge audit consists of every team member describing another team member’s professional background and experience in a plenary session. 2. Team knowledge development: This on-going process consists of knowledge acquisition from outside sources and knowledge creation activities through experimentation or conceptual collaboration in the team. Ideally, this process culminates in common ‘knowledge artefacts’ such as concepts, prototypes, formalised ideas, protocols or reports. 3. Mutual updating and briefing: The goal of this process is to combine the individual insights to the team stock of knowledge. This process can have the form of a simple team presentation or it can take on more elaborate briefing formats such as Q & A sessions, poster rooms, or meta-plan workshops (with brown papers and pasted cards). 4. Reviewing: The goal of this frequently neglected process is to reflect systematically about the insights that the team was able to gather during a process or project phase. Specifically, the following questions ought to be answered: what has worked well in our collaboration, what has not worked and why, and what are we going to do differently as a result of these insights? Addressing these questions, we have come to distinguish four types of critical lessons learned: 1. common mistakes, pitfalls, and critical incidents (and their main causes), 2. successful practices, key success factors, and work-arounds, 3. reccurring questions and answers, 4. and experiences with tools, resources, and partners. Since most teams do not reflect systematically on these issues, we have started to moderate so-called European Management Journal Vol 18 No 3 June 2000
CORAL (critical, original, reliable, actionable learnings) workshops in order to ‘force’ teams to think about their lessons learned. The feedback for these (typically four hour) events has been only positive so far (after four such workshops). All of the four processes outlined above are essential to the functioning of knowledge management in a team. They can be facilitated with a number of tools that are presented in the next section.
Tools for Team Knowledge Management Tools for team knowledge management focus on the elicitation, categorisation, and aggregation of dispersed knowledge in a team. Their main goal is to make knowledge in its various forms more transparent for every team member. Most of the tools we have found to be useful achieve this by relying heavily on visualisation. Below, we outline two tools for every team knowledge process described above.
Team Knowledge Audit To perform a team knowledge audit, we have developed two tools, the team matrix and the expert web. The team matrix is a framework to assess the present and the required state of know-how in a team. Typically, we deduce the required know-how from the main goals of a project or task (gathered in a team stakeholder analysis) and then have the team position it in Figure 2 (whether the specific knowledge is crucial or not, and sufficiently available or not). From the shaded area, the team then has to generate improvement measures. In order to make the know-how and know-who in a team more transparent, we have developed the following tool that we call expert map. Every team member is asked to draw a chart like the one in Figure 3, in which he states three of his main areas of expertise and one area of improvement. In every such box he lists his contacts in the respective domain. In this way the team’s main fields of expertise and its contacts to outside experts can be made more transparent.
Team Knowledge Development The creation of team knowledge is a crucial element in both consulting and product development teams. To foster on the one hand the acquisition of new knowledge from outside sources, and the creation of new knowledge on the other, a team leader can rely on the following two tools. The first tool can assist the team leader in co-ordinating the knowledge 337
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Figure 2 The Team Matrix as a Team Knowledge Auditing Tool (Fictitious Example)
Figure 3 The Expert Web as a Team Knowledge Management Tool
development and acquisition activities in his team and aligning them to one common purpose. It is generally referred to as the pyramid principle (see Minto, 1987) and structures the knowledge that a team has to acquire or develop into segments on several hierarchies. Figure 4 illustrates this concept for a due diligence team. The first layer represents the hypothesis that the team has to validate or refute. The subsequent levels represent answers that the team members have to find in order to evaluate the overall
hypothesis. In this way, the individual insights can be combined to one overall conclusion. While the pyramid principle is already a common tool in many specialised teams, the second tool is still missing from many team leaders’ toolbox: the Toulmin map. It is based on the argumentation theory of Stephen Toulmin (Toulmin, 1958) and can be used to systematically map the knowledge present in team discussions. Figure 5 is an example of such a map
Figure 4 The Pyramid Principle Used to Split Knowledge Development Tasks into Groups
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points on a flip-chart or overhead projector. In this way, team members who cannot attend a meeting or arrive late have a visual overview on the main issues that have been discussed. Second, so called flight plans can be used to update all team members on what is going on elsewhere in the team. Figure 6 offers a simple generic example of such a flight plan that lists all team activities on one chart. The plan usually has the form of a pin-board on a central location and shows which team tasks are currently planned, under way, in a crisis situation (SOS), or about to finish. The team members can use this board to attach news about their task, ask questions, or gain the team leader’s attention by posting their task in the SOS column.
Figure 5 The Toulmin Map to Make Basic Assumptions and Arguments in Teams Transparent
taken from a product development context. The basic assumptions behind a certain claim in a group debate are systematically made transparent. This is achieved by structuring an argument into its main components, such as claim, grounds, warrant or rebuttal. In this way, the team’s knowledge development can be made explicit in changing Toulmin maps and individual differences can be made apparent.
Mutual Updating and Briefing For the time-consuming tasks of mutual updating and briefing on individual progress and new insights, the following two tools can be used. First, visual protocols or meeting compasses are an easy way to improve the transparency of issues that are communicated in a briefing meeting. Their basic idea lies in the visual arrangement of a meeting’s main agenda points and the mapping of issues along these agenda
Reviewing Besides a CORAL workshop (see above), two of the most effective tools we have encountered for team reviews and the gathering of lessons learned are the case study and the lessons learned inventory. In order to generate a team case study, the members of a team sit together to write up a concise and lively account of what has happened in the team over the course of a project or task. A possible structure for such a case study is the following sequence of paragraphs: 1. Target group of the case study (i.e., development teams, project leaders etc.) 2. Starting situation and goals of the team 3. Approach and measures taken 4. Results (quantitative and qualitative) 5. Experiences with tools, partners, and resources 6. Key lessons learned (and their consequences for future action) 7. Contact information (contact person, relevant documents and data bases) If a case study is written up in this manner, the
Figure 6 A Sample Team Tasks Flight Plan
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team’s insights are not only made explicit for the entire team, but also for other groups who might face similar problems. In a lessons learned inventory, team members are encouraged to contribute central insights into a common database or document repository. The team members contribute their findings in the same concise manner and flag their entries according to their possible impact (high, medium, or low impact of the lessons to the team’s success). In this way, the collective memory of the team is developed step by step and can be consulted before crucial events. Organisations who have already deployed such inventories are NASA, the US Army, and Siemens Information and Communication Networks. The described instruments serve as examples to show that a team can use various means to manage its knowledge more systematically. We believe that the tools discussed in this article are applicable in a variety of team contexts and can be easily mastered by most professional teams if the team leader encourages their disciplined use. We discuss this crucial role of leadership in the next section.
Leadership While a team leader already has a great number of tasks and responsibilities (such as motivation, controlling, co-ordination, reporting, etc.), knowledge management also requires a leadership commitment. In regard to team knowledge management, the team leader should serve as a role model (sharing his or her knowledge openly, taking time for crucial reflection processes, documenting important insights, etc.) and coach the team members in their development of knowledge. Above all, he has to strike a balance between creating a sense of urgency that forces the team to share knowledge and work together, and allowing time and space for reflection and experimentation. He has to provide opportunities for the team members to develop competencies and develop knowledge, but he also has the responsibility of assuring that this knowledge is relevant to the goals of the entire team. This is the two-fold dilemma that a team leader faces in respect to knowledge management. Without this kind of credible leadership commitment — and the discipline that goes with it — systematic team knowledge management is difficult to sustain.
Enabling Factors for Team Knowledge Management The framework for team knowledge management illustrated in Figure 1 has to be viewed in the context 340
of certain enabling factors within the team and the organisation. Korine (1999) points out that due to substitution of bureaucratic structures with team organisation, management faces new challenges resulting from arbitrary behaviour of team members. In order to avoid this, Korine identified enabling factors for effective team management: ‘By stressing respect for team autonomy, making decision processes public, and encouraging challenge and gamesmanship at all levels, [...] managers have created novel, non-bureaucratic ways of adressing arbitrariness.’ In our work with various teams, we also encountered frustration and demotivation due to a lack of sufficient team autonomy. One team member described the situation as follows: ‘Decision-making by higher level management is just like a black box to us. We have no idea about the reasoning behind their decisions and yet the team has to live with them and be compensated accordingly.’ Thus, arbitrary decision-making in and between teams is one of the major sources for performance problems and distrust in teams. We will get back to this crucial point in the conclusion of the article, where we summarise the enabling factors of team knowledge management. Another frequently neglected factor in our experience with teams is the deployment of a performance measurement and incentive system that encourages knowledge transfer within the team and does not create incentives for unhealthy internal competition. Pure individual compensation can limit the knowledge transfer among team members significantly. The integration of a team bonus into the compensation scheme can foster additional willingness to share knowledge in a team. A third enabling factor for team knowledge management is continuity. Continuity in the sense of a stable team composition and sufficient, on-going resource endowment. A stable team composition can lead to the development of highly complementary skills in a team which in turn lead to high levels of performance. Team continuity can also lead to a higher level of trust in a team, because the team members have a set of shared experiences (for this point, we refer again to the seminal analysis of trust in Lewicki and Bunker, 1996). This higher level of trust, as mentioned before, is a prerequisite for knowledge transfer. Sufficient resource endowment can give the team the necessary room for reflecting on the procedures of the team e.g the derivation of lessons learned. However, providing sufficient resources should be accompanied by a measurement framework that focuses on the knowledge dissemination process. As one team member put it: ‘We simply don’t have the time for reflection and knowledge transfer. Management does not seem to be interested in it. What counts is the successful completion of the operational tasks.’ This enabling factor is closely linked to what Von Krogh (1998) calls ‘care for knowledge creation’. In his article on knowledge creation, Von Krogh emphasises the necessity to deploy incentive systems European Management Journal Vol 18 No 3 June 2000
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focusing on behaviour that builds up care in organisational relationships. Von Krogh suggests care among organisation members to be of paramount importance for the creation of knowledge. In order to foster care in an organisation, he stresses many issues present in our model, such as values and norms (trust, openness, and courage as explicitly stated values by top management), lessons learned gathering (project debriefings) and regular interactions in the same physical space (social events). In addition, he also proposes mentoring and training programs as a means of fostering care for knowledge creation. Having outlined the advantages of continuity for team knowledge management and especially team knowledge development, one should not forget the possible dangers that lie in team continuity. Longterm team consistency with little or no new input from outside can also be the source for potential hazards to team performance. This danger is frequently referred to as ‘Groupthink’ (Janis, 1982): Group phenomena such as pressure on dissenters, the illusion of invulnerability of the group, and ignoring input from outside sources can have substantial adverse influence on team performance. Little perturbations in a team constellation, such as new team members, can therefore have beneficial effects.
Conclusion As we have outlined above, we believe that team knowledge management will become an integral part of project and team management in the near future, as team and project work in general are increasingly adopted as the most effective form of organising
knowledge work. In order to achieve this, teams have to be aware of their communication requirements and of the infrastructure or platforms they need to fulfil these requirements. They have to pay attention to the four main team knowledge processes and facilitate them with tools that stress the aggregation of individual knowledge in a common team framework. Team leaders, finally, need to be aware of the factors that enable effective team knowledge management (such as autonomy, team incentives, and continuity) and strike a balance between urgency and reflection. References Cerny, K. (1996) Making local knowledge global. Harvard Business Review May–Jun, 22–38. Janis, I.L. (1982) Groupthink: Psychological Studies of Policy Decisions and Fiascoes. Houghton Mifflin, Boston. Katzenbach, J.R. (ed.) (1998) The Works of Teams. Harvard Business Review, Boston. Katzenbach, J.R. and Smith, D.K (1993) The Wisdom of Teams. Harvard Business School Press, Boston. Korine, H. (1999) The new team organization: learning to manage arbitrariness. European Management Journal 17, 1–7. Lewicki, R.J. and Bunker, B.B. (1996) Developing and maintaining trust in work relationships. In Trust in Organizations, eds R.M. Kramer and T.R. Tyler. Sage, Thousand Oaks. Minto, B. (1987) The Pyramid Principle. FT Pitman Publishing, London. Nonaka, I. and Konno, N. (1998) The concept of ‘ba’: building a foundation for knowledge creation. California Management Review 40(3), 40–54. Quinn, J.B., Anderson, P. and Finkelstein, S. (1996) Managing professional intellect: making the most of the best. Harvard Business Review Mar–Apr, 71–80. Toulmin, S. (1958) The Uses of Argument. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Von Krogh, G. (1998) Care in knowledge creation. California Management Review 40(3), 133–153.
MARTIN EPPLER, MCM Institute, University of St Gallen, Mu¨ller-Friedbergstrasse 8, CH-9000, St Gallen, Switzerland.
OLIVER SUKOWSKI, MCM Institute, University of St Gallen, Mu¨ller-Friedbergstrasse 8, CH-9000, St Gallen, Switzerland.
Martin J. Eppler is the Managing Director of the Competence Centre: Enterprise Knowledge Medium at the Institute for Media and Communications Management of the University of St Gallen. He is a Senior Lecturer in the graduate programs of the University of St Gallen. His research interests are in the domains of knowledge management, strategy, and information quality.
Oliver Sukowski is a Research Assistant at the Competence Centre: Enterprise Knowledge Medium. Prior to joining the MCM Institute, he worked as an IT and performance consultant. His research interests are in the domain of knowledge management for projects, project knowledge media, and performance measurement.
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