Fundamental Motives Profile: A precondition to KM

I quote this from Dinesh Tantri's Organic KM: KM & "Peripheral Vision":

"Before sinking a million dollars into deploying a "workflow enabled collaborative KM system" it makes sense to bring in a business anthropologist to identify all cultural enablers and disablers in the organization. This is crucial because while a Social Network Analysis may bring to surface the disconnect between two groups, for any intervention to have a sustainable impact we need to dig deeper and attack the underlying problems.

To do this we need a trained anthropologist. Remember the devil is in the details (your complex cultural DNA). The results of doing this cultural audit could go a long way in improving overall organizational effectiveness. For instance, the anthropologist may discover that there is a "blame" culture or there is "fear" or that too many executives wear ambition on their sleeves and so on. These pieces of the cultural DNA need to be repaired. Change & adoption are always going to remain a challenge as long as we keep pretending that the next wave of tools and services will solve all our woes. IMHO, knowledge sharing like many other good things in life needs to be an emergent behavior - driven by positive strands in your cultural DNA."

-- Dinesh Tantri

I might like to offer a lil' assistant in how we could learn to understand the people in the company:

1. Do an assessment of their fundamental psychological motives using the Reiss's Profile.

(See life between the ivory tower n reality: Fundamental Motives and Motivation to Share Knowledge at Workplace)

2. Once you have the profiles of your employees, you should know what to do; else you shouldn't be the one that manage your employees. Hey, I'm not the manager here, you are! :)

Happy managing knowledge!