I keep coming back to the "knowledge footprint" idea

Fascinated by the idea that most orgs let serendipity guide their info intake

Ever since this post by Nick Milton on the idea of a knowledge footprint hit back in August, I found out that someone had put a name to a phenomena that has bothered me for a while (you’ll find that a lot of what I write about here - if its anything like my old blog - starts from things that bother me)…namely that in this age of more and more information being available than ever before, most orgs seem to have no plan beyond simply relying on luck for valuable information to get into their collective brains. Now I’m sure Cornerstone isn’t the only one but they did hire the inimitable Kate Graham to be their Director of Competitive Intelligence - kudos on that - and if Kate notices this post and is so inclined - would love to hear from her on her process both for tracking data points and how they get disseminated within the org. That would be very interesting but I’m looking for more than that.

I’m old enough to remember Mary Meeker’s annual Internet Trends Report (Splunk has a nice history of Mary and the report here and all are available Mary’s fund’s site here). On the L&D side, Jane Hart has been publishing the must-read list of Top Learning Tools for years. Want to do foresight? Cool. Did you know that the European Commission already has a series of Foresight reports out? Here’s my point - all this work - and so much more from all kinds of sources - is created largely free of charge to your org and just dumped onto the Web. Now maybe RAG-enabled AI will able to help surface some of this data (the front of the funnel if you will) but that still means we need to have plans in place to make sure that the data is reviewed by the right people, that decisions are informed by the data, and (maybe most importantly) we change job descriptions and performance reviews to reward people who engage in appropriate information assessing and sharing activities. What could that look like?

Scouts: designate either a person or a slice of anyone’s time to work as a scout - going out and looking both internally and externally for information that’s relevant to the team. Golly, you could even build learning content around which tools and sources are the best to use and even create a scouting community where people could share best practices etc. and even best practices on how to bring that information back to the team.

Judges: Don’t really like that word but it gets the point across - there needs be another set of people or another set of capabilities within the org that have the ability to assess the information that the scouts bring back (maybe Routers). These folks may be the same folks as scouts but in my experience running innovation programs at Amazon, finding or creating ideas is a different skill set than assessing their value. And yes, before you even ask, one aspect of all of this is that the larger org should put its collective head together and determine what criteria are most important aligned to which horizon.

Connectors: Don’t know if this a sub-category of scouts or a capability that should be present on every team and if its different from scouts or judges, in that there needs to be enough visibility across the org to know where the information might be valuable.

Calendar Sensitivity: Ideas or signals or trends don’t just get discovered, they get discovered in the context of time. We work on calendars of fiscal years, quarterly budgets, annual roadmaps, and so on. The part of this funnel that can connect the flow of data into the org needs to be sensitive to these ebbs and flows. The rest of the org also has remain flexible enough so that when a hot signal comes in, but its out of cycle, the org doesn’t reject if out of a reactionary reflex.

Systems: All of these roles will require systems to support them. Intake systems to ingest what the scouts find and make that visible to the judges. Assessment and routing systems to allow the judges to rank order the opportunities found and make sure they get to the right teams. I know one system that I always felt was needed but never found a good solution was what I called a “high quality parking lot.” That was to be a capability that would allow ideas that had potential but were out of frame currently for whatever reason, to rest but with visibility and the ability for people to interact with them.

A final aspect of systems is that if you build all of this, I’ll reiterate that if you invest all the time and money to build all of this and then FAIL to bring along HR and work with them to adjust how people are rated and assessed such they feel that contributing as a scout or judge or whatever, is an activity that is valued by the org, then you’ll have just built a pretty toy that no one wants to play with.

Would love your thoughts on what other roles or responsibilities should be included.