I agree with Shannon, rewards and incentives are important. Every one needs to find his / her benefits when sharing information, knowledge, best practices which reprensent an unstructured (informal) way to train each other.

But I will point out another barrier: English language.

Let me explain by example: I had, once, a meeting with French, German, Japanese, and English poeple. We talked about coaching. After 10 minutes I had to stop the meeting to define, by writing, what was coaching for each and every one. You may be surpised by the differences we found, all of these linked to a cultural reinterpretation of this common word.

This is to say that, when working in a multicultural environment, the use of English often leads to misunderstanding of the goals, objectives, stakes, etcetera. So when you want to boost the productivity of knowledge people while using English in a multicultural environment, you need to be very precise and give definitions of key words.

I agree with these barriers but would add the biggest: rewards. If sharing, collaborating, connecting, and other “knowledge intermediary-type” activities are valued, then they should be rewarded.

It’s all about efficiency and effectiveness. As long as there is reasonable distinction between the two and the responsibility and accountability can be traced through, the productivity will soar!

The strategy that Indian companies follows is Economies of Knowledge (similar to Economies of Scales’ fixed cost). This essentially refers to leveraging comptencies across mutiple industry verticals, which helps cross pollinate knowledge, and ideas, thus improving the returns or productivity of human capital.

While increasing knowledge worker productivity is an important concern—particularly eliminating unnecessary barriers—the focus should not be on measuring the productivity of the individual. Instead the focus needs to be on the group. It is the collective entity which needs to become smarter and agile.

Here’s my simple POV. People need a game to play, an activity they can get into and engage in. An organisation undertakes transformational projects and delivers services and/or products and every day there is action on the field. It is dynamic/chaotic and if you turn up at work to enter the game and the coach and refs are helping you play the game well, you can contribute to the game plan, get out and score, pass, encourage others and back slap and high five. Sometimes you need to hang your head for a while and think, why? If you have lost a game in the round, but at the end of the day you go home and relax and recover to be back on the field the next day!

I think the time constraint goes even deeper than the authors imply. Knowledge workers complain about “not having enough time” and use that reason to justify:
- ignoring their health
- texting while driving
- checking email on smartphones in meetings while “no one is watching”
- increasingly giving up what used to be personal time (vacations, holidays, sick days, etcetera) to do work on laptops/mobile devices
- converting family time to work time by maintaining digital connections to the office

Many employers have no problem with these short-term problems (and benefits), and ignore the long term impact.

A knowledge worker’s performance can not be managed—only judged by other knowledge workers.

Nice summary article Eric and Larry. Each your sub-headings could be a book in its own right!

I’d like to build on your heading on cultural barriers, and add that it’s important to understand and address the dynamics of the knowledge marketplace:

What makes it difficult for the suppliers of knowledge, insight, lessons, and ideas to make their offers to the organisation? (e.g. Tall Poppy Syndrome)

What makes it difficult for the consumers of knowledge, insight, lessons, and ideas to make their needs known? (e.g. Not Invented Here Syndrome)

Measuring individual productivity is difficult, because most of the tasks handeled by knowledge workers are team tasks, where knowledge workers play the roles of either leader or follower. If tasks are aligned with the time-bound company goals, productivity can be measured in terms of team productivity. In such a situation, a leader can decide for each individual on his team a matrix to measure his or her productivity.

Facilitating knowledge sharing within an organization, across departments and geographic areas, clearly holds the potential for improving knowledge-worker productivity. With increased focus on access to internally-produced content and organizational expertise, the value of externally-published content is often overlooked or deliberately ignored because of cost. Embedding targeted, relevant external information in business processes and workflows can aid in decision support, ongoing learning, and professional development—and more importantly, prevent an organization from being blindsided by trends and discoveries outside its walls.

How well knowledge workers are treated and led in an organization is, in my considered opinion, the best determinant of productivity and efficiency of knowledge workers. I believe there is a close link between how comfortable knowledge workers feel working for an organization and their work effort.

An organization which pays workers well, makes them feel at home, recognizes and rewards their performance and gives them opportunities to grow, can find knowledege workers more eager to stay there and, thereby, give them an incentive to put forward their best effort which, in turn, will boost their productivity and performance. These are three things the management can do to make that happen.

1. Make every effort to build long-term relationships with knowledge workers based on mutual trust and respect. Mutual trust and respect will motivate knowledge workers to give maximum efforts to increase productivity and efficiency.

2. Knowledge workers are self-motivated and can self-manage. They are ambitious and willing to take responsibilities. They don’t need managing. What they need is leading. A manager can do better if she/he offers knowledge workers an opportunity to be part of the decision making that concerns them and their future in the organization.

A manager should be willing to communicate with them constantly, share information, work with and through them in attaining organizational goals. This will naturally make knowledge workers more productive and better performers.

3. A manager should make every effort to create a positive work environment in which knowledge works are automatically energized, can grow, participate, and contribute. In other woords, give them a sense of belonging to the organization. This will also encourage maximum work effort from knowledge workers which will help shift their prouctvity and efficiency curves higher.

A challenge to productivity is that the average knowledge worker is measured using 30-year-old standards. This encourages knowledge hogging and then creates a disincentive for collaborative efforts. In many organizations, the critical learning that can come from outside-the-box questions is not encouraged. How many times have you had a good question lead you to answer “I did not think of that.” Productivity increases when the worker who did not think of it can learn from the worker who did with out fear of looking bad.

I really like the article’s concept of using social communities to make geographically-dispersed knowledge workers more productive. Give them the tools to collaborate and then provide a structured performance measurement and coaching process.

Fascinating article. But if “knowledge workers spend half their time on interactions” then half their time is spent on something else. I would guess that is actually creating the work. An analogy might be with a master jeweler—half the time discussing the piece with the client and half the time crafting it.

One way, therefore, of removing the temporal barrier is to improve the craft tools. The way that the outputs of knowledge (documents, drawings, plans, etcetera) are reviewed and finalized can make a significant difference in time savings.

Time saved is also a measurable commodity, and can be easily placed in an ROI equation. That can be the pivotal factor for influencing an uncertain senior executive.

My experience suggests that the real problem is a lack of understanding of the day-to-day activities, motivations, and general psychology of a typical knowledge worker on the one hand, and over-reliance on technology buzzwords like web 2.0 on the other. Although most organisations are focused on collecting information or capturing knowledge, it is not the lack of it that is the problem. Indeed there is too much of it.

As a knowledge worker already stretched to the limit (Singapore works more hours annually than any other nation), I have no motivation to try and understand what others are up to—unless I need that information right now to do something.

Hence my approach to this problem is twofold. First, focus on information utilisation (our work on utilisation quotient is a step in that direction) rather than merely collection. Second, attack the problem as a decision-support issue rather than knowledge sharing; providing decision support at that point in the process where the knowledge worker needs to act or make a judgement call. (Needless to say, this decision support capability is a function of information collection, organisation, and utilisation).

Only when all this is in place, will Web 2.0 and user interfaces make a real difference. I think the McKinsey piece titled “When IT Lifts Productivity” should make interesting further reading.

This article has been good kindling for discussion. While it’s not expansive enough to encompass every aspect of the problem, it’s certainly been enough to elicit most of the major contributing factors.

But if the problem of the productivity of knowledge workers is viewed through the lens of knowledge interactions, then one important missing question must be this: how do we capture the result of knowledge worker interactions? When knowledge workers interact, do we allow the pulses of energy and inspiration to dissipate? Or can we contain them somehow?

The more knowledge workers interact—assuming their interactions are efficient and beneficial—the more they learn from each other and the better they become at doing their jobs. But what happens to that knowledge when they leave? The contextual barrier that Matson and Prusak discuss does not fully consider the problem of attrition. Corporates spend billions on training and on facilitating interactions between their staff, but this amounts to nought when an employee leaves the company and takes their knowledge with them.

I agree with Jonathan Levy on this. Creating powerful interfaces that allow employees to share intellectual capital can do a lot to solve the problem. But I take a slightly different view. I think that the problem of knowledge sharing can be solved not just by improving interfaces, but by improving the way that knowledge is packaged.

My brother and business partner often talks about the analogy of containerization. Before containers, ships would spend up to 18 days in port. With containers, a ship can be loaded and ready to sail in 24 hours.

If the best and brightest of a corporate have better ways to package their knowledge, then it can spread further and faster through an organization and it can remain there when they leave.

Knowledge worker performance suffers from the age-old problem of “what doesn’t get measured doesn’t get done.” Regular and cost-effective human capital measures are “the missing metric” in organizational performance.

Knowledge workers face challenges that may all have the same root cause, if you look at the raw materials that go into interactions:

The Knowledge Worker
The Customer
The INFORMATION that they need...regardless of whether it is automated or manually maintained.

The need for correct, complete, accurate, available, trusted, and appropriate information in the hands of a knowledge worker is NOT a physical, technical, social, cultural, contextual or time related barrier.

It the absence of high quality raw material (DATA) can play a large role in root cause of all of these barriers.

Data in context is Information
Information in context is Knowledge

But Knowledge in action is only profitable if the data at it’s base is trustworthy; data management is an imperative that many companies are beginning to realize has a concrete value proposition.

Data, whether in computers or on paper, must be cared for with analogous policies, procedures, and incentives that executives have for managing human resources.

Given incorrect information, a knowledge worker can make a mistake and not even realize the cost.

It’s the reward and recognition system that needs to be appropriately aligned to encourage knowledge workers. If this system measures the performance for only core and more visible activities only, certainly this will push employees to focus more efforts other than knowledge sharing, and thus it becomes an add-on activity (desired but not mandatory, a professional hobby, maybe).

Knowledge workers are experts in a particular area or specialty, as such, they view their contibution to the company as a key ingredient to success. They often don’t understand the other components of the organization or what value they bring. This creates silos of information and a failure of communication across the breadth of the enterprise. Productivity increases can be expected when an understanding exists about what each component of the organization does and how each role contributes to the overall value creation of the organization.

Our recent book, “Far From the Factory: Lean for the Information Age” is all about knowledge-worker productivity and the identification of, and elimination of, process waste. We believe that the proper application of new Web 2.0 technologies and tools can be a significant help. One of the key challenges in the modern office is the “invisibility” of processes which are buried within computer workflows and information transfer. We highlight techniques to make the invisible visible, categorize wastes and inefficiencies (not unlike the authors of this piece), and offer solutions.

This is very nice and timely article. We can also look at the productivity improvement from a different perspective. If we go back to basics and look at the productivity formula as output/input, it is obvious that we can improve the productivity by reducing the input. So to reduce the input we need to focus on the process the knowledge workers are following to produce the output. We should analyze the process in two different aspects. 1. Can we improve the process to increase the efficiency—is there a better way to do the tasks? 2. Elimate the waste in the process. We should analyze each and every activity in the process flow by asking a simple question, whether this activity is adding any value to the customers or to the organization itself.

In short, we need also to look at the productivity issue from the process perspective apart from people perspective. There will be lot of scope of productivity improvement in the systems and processes.

Reading is one of the most time consuming daily activities for knowledge workers. The average knowledge worker or technical professional in today’s information-overloaded corporate, engineering, research and development, or technical support environment is faced with a minimum of 2 to 3 hours of necessary reading each and every work day. This reading comes in the form of e-mail communications from supervisors, co-workers and vendors, background information for upcoming meetings, procurement programs, intelligence presentations and briefings, benefits and organizational information, as well as technical research and professional updates. In addition many professionals have direct job-related reading that continues throughout the day. The ability to read, process, understand, and then act on this information in an efficient way is imperative to the productivity of today’s knowledge worker.

The average professional reads general material at a rate of 200 to 250 words per minute and will score 60 to 80 percent comprehension on a basic test on the material. If these professionals could increase their reading speed, their level of comprehension and their ability to recall and retain the information they read they would experience a significant increase in their personal and professional productivity.

The key is in designing and implementing tools which enable “Management of Daily Improvement” by the lowest level in the organsiation on a daily basis without help from his superiors. These small productivity improvements cumulatively over time have a larger impact than project teams attempting to improve productivity from their office cabins.

The availability of software tools can lower technical barriers as noted, but there is no guarantee that users will use them effectively. Indeed social and contextual barriers play a large part in hindering adoption. Further, the perceived lack of time (Temporal) is also a critical barrier to adoption. In my experience knowledge workers do not consider time spent using social media and collaborative software tools as important as other activities. Under time pressure they will stop using these tools if they need to spend more time on other activities they perceive as “real work.”

As much as I enjoy reading these articles and being informed by the ideas behind them, I am forced to say that they are often culturally biased (American culture) and, at times, too idealistic. In my opinion, this article suffers from both.

Companies are communities of power. Not only power over the marketplace but sometimes, more importantly, internally. As I so often used to say about the companies I worked with, if only we spent as much time competing against our competitors as we do between ourselves we could make miracles happen. Most companies are essentially dysfunctional because of internal politicking. Consequently, any improvement in knowledge-worker productivity that does not take this reality into consideration will be rather sterile.

Nonetheless, in the interest of constructive criticism, I will add that there are a number of very simple actions that can and should be taken by organizations to increase knowledge-worker productivity. Since the vast majority of the “non-productive” time comes from communication being more efficient, communicators is an essential factor. This is not easy for all the reasons mentioned in the article but can be facilitated through such simple tools as having a stated agenda for a meeting. How often have vague meetings been scheduled in my lifetime? Too many. Just yesterday a client of mine told me about a counterpart who flew from California to France for a meeting with them and the agenda had been fixed. Both parties ended up talking at cross purposes as they both tried to advance their own separate agendas. That is a lot of time and money for very little. Similarly arriving on time at meetings seems to be a significant challenge. When you have a bunch of people in a meeting but the boss is 15 to 20 minutes late, that is a significant amount of resources flushed down the toilet. Of course, in many cultures this is acceptable and even sought after because it reinforces the pecking order. Lastly, having people in a meeting who can and will actually “bring something to the table” is helpful. In my experience, I have sat in meetings with over 25 executives for whole mornings where only a few even opened their mouths. Interestingly, it was a meeting for an acquisition between the two parties and no one realized that the valuation assumptions were all wrong until I pointed it out at the end of the meeting. Once again, all that time and money spent for nothing.

So, I think you can see that most organizations tend to be run as bureaucracies and not as businesses where knowledge workers are concerned because of power, prestige, and culture, otherwise even the basics like those mentioned above would get done.

I am intrigued by the approach of Petrobas to the social or cultural barriers of knowledge worker productivity; whilst I can see the benefit of giving an new hire an early feel and understanding of the organisation that they have joined, there is always the risk of them adopting a “that’s how we do it round here” approach to knowledge networking. The knock-on effect could be an unwillingness to challenge the status quo at such an early juncture in their new career. Perhaps if this process was capped with a “challenge” workshop to take those early cultural observations and use them to inform a transformation process, the risk of cultural isolation would be reduced—after all, with every head and hands you hire comes a heart, and those passions are quite possibly why you hired the person in the first place.

I think the first three barriers—physical and technical, social or cultural—are well understood and I believe many organizations have overcome them to do productive work in today’s global scenario. Video and teleconferencing, face-to-face meetings, etcetera, have all come of age, and are practised universally.

But what you say about a lack of communication between different departments of an organization, or the lack of time, these are very significant factors that slow down growth and productivity. Malcolm Gladwell in his book ‘The Tipping Point’talks of mavens and connectors—we need them in every organization.

Feedback plays a pivotal role in eliminating a number of the barriers outlined and gets teams working together more effectively. This can have a big impact on productivity.

Ongoing, meaningful feedback shared by managers/knowledge workers can be a significant motivator, even more than money in some cases. There’s a great article on the topic by McKinsey: Motivating people: Getting beyond money.

Managers/knowledge workers can do more to engage their teams as well, by being receptive to feedback. Too many helpful insights are lost because employees are intimidated or don’t feel their bosses will listen.

Creating a culture of ongoing feedback can have a big impact on productivity, including:

1. Faster learning. The manager/knowledge worker learns how they can improve based on recent events, not a laundry list delivered at review time;

2. Engagement. Employees/teammates feel a greater sense of ownership in the team and collaboration improves throughout the year.

I think the article is good as far as it goes. I also don’t think it goes far enough. There needs to be a fundamental shift in the way management views employees. The work of many, if not most, people now consists of configured responses instead of prefigured routines. Consequently, instead of viewing employees as mere instruments of managerial will, employees need to be viewed as agents acting on behalf of their employer’s best interests. That, in turn, calls for a shift in management practices from supervising to supporting. This article focuses on one aspect of supporting employees; namely, removing obstacles. There is much more to enabling and supporting employee performance.

From our experience, one very important topic is the rhythm or frequency of interactions. When the frequency is low then projects lose their direction and opportunities are not developed. But when you interact too frequently, people say that they are losing their time. So, from our experience, we need to discover the right rhythm of interaction and to be disciplined about it.

One important cultural barrier that organizations which operate in a multinational setting face is the difference in the perception of individual knowledge versus organizational/shared knowledge. Organizations that promote a feeling of 1+1=3 would be the ones that would really harness teams operating in different cultural settings.

This is not easy to achieve and would involve a lot of encouragement and push at various levels of management, with a clear focus on highlighting the importance of shared knowledge. Often times, it may involve multiple ice breaking sessions or actions with one party showing to the other the possible benefits of a collaborative approach.

A world renowned scientist once said “Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler.” I think he was on to something.

Back to basics is required. A small 5- or 10-man business that grows to thousands of employees forgets the ingredients that brought about the growth. A small group communicates, shares, analyses, and makes decisions quickly and effectively. Yet as the company grows, the bonding glue begins to stretch, thin out, and then break. Somewhere in between the small buisness transitioning to a corporation, a valuable lesson is waiting to be discovered.

The classic mistake, time after time, is the insatiable desire for the creation of hierarchical structures and organisational designs that fail. A new type of business structure is evolving but yet undiscovered. The signs are clear—the failures in corporates and declining margins that are driving new thinking, but still in the wrong direction. The answer lies somewhere in the structure and design of a small business and how to use this in large corporations. By inference, this may mean outsourcing all non-core functions that are spawned as a natural result of a growing business that tries to be everything and retaining the core that represents the companies main deliverables. This will ensure focus and at the same time retain excellence in the non-core areas if the right partners are chosen.

Couple of reasons that I have observed that knowledge sharing is largely constrained is the maxim “knowledge is power” and the inherent insecurity of people in knowledge workers as well as in knowledge driven companies.

The best knowledge workers are, no doubt, bastions of good behaviour. Corporates need to invent organizational development tools with measures for emotional intelligence, compatible with company culture. The in-house competency matrices developed shall have, at least in the ‘checker/approver levels’, quantifications for this aspect. A master work sheet reflecting the dashboard view of all such scores will be owned by the otherwise indifferent discipline heads! They will automatically fall in synergy to project-level organization (team building).

It is my opinion that some of these barriers can be eliminated by training. In house training on the role each department plays in the achievement of overall strategic objectives allow experts to appreciate each other. If manufacturing employees undergo marketing basic training they will appreciate the focus towards their customers, not necessarily attributes of the products they make. Generic MBAs offered worldwide these days help technical employees like in engineering learn basic communication and other skills that can destroy barriers between employees.

This text gives a good idea on “communities of practice.” I would be also interested in case studies and tools on how this really works on a practical level.

Decentralization of decision making is one way, with principles in place to ensure sub-units don’t go off course.

I would like to add one more type of barrier, that is the compliance barrier. The company rules and prescribed procedures, and the company’s culture to strictly comply by these rules, regulations, and procedures inhibit a knowledge worker from spending time in discussing or experimenting new ideas. Some companies ask their project officers to use time sheets. The original purpose of these time sheets may be to determine cost on each project an officer is working on, but practically these time sheets end up as a tool for the managers to discipline the officers and force them to produce paper work or demonstrable work, not knowledge work.

It’s refreshing to read an article on how to navigate and prosper through current conditions versus pontificating on the ways to change it. (Not that I don’t enjoy reading these observations.) Bottom line: obstacles will always exist, if it’s not the economy there will be another reason why performance is compromised: Y2K, analysis paralysis, internet bubble, 9/11, housing crisis, and so on. If it’s not technology replacing jobs, it’s outsourcing—oh wait, it’s the baby boomers who are now retiring. The only constant is change.

Productivity impacts the EVA of a corporation. Focus on the efficiency gains among knowledge workers—what they do and HOW they do it—and supporting them to make it easier, less complex... okay, now we’re all in violent agreement.

A great topic. I would like to see some reasearch done on Indian and specifically science-based service companies. Enhancing productivity without eroding your bottom line is a big challenge.

Also missing from this article is perhaps the most pervasive drain on knowledge-worker productivity of all: the ubiquitous intrusion of interrupt-driven activity such as email (and to a lesser extent phone calls, IM/video-conferencing, and of course physical meetings) into the precious “thinking space” of the knowledge professional.

Many high-potential workers are forced to operate on a substantially reduced plane of executive function, simply by the constant forced interruptions to cognition that have become the hallmark of the modern workplace. Intelligent professionals are frequently reduced to mindless automatons (intrude-react-respond) by the modern workplace context. Is it any wonder that increasingly knowledge-workers are resorting to “working from home”, not to goof-off at all, but to actually get something done! What an indictment upon the modern workplace!

Of course these views may not reflect what McKinsey’s target market of C-level executives want to hear! Who would be the fearless consultant brave enough to front Fortune 500 execs and tell them that the whole construct of the workplace is completely broken and a radical overhaul is required to regain economic productivity?

Finally, to concur with John Kamensky’s views (below), what little precious time remains is frequently also robbed by mindless bureaucratic activity; the very corporate codification of Barry Schwarz’s “loss of wisdom”. Another sad dimension of the modern workplace—bring in rules so that staff don’t need to think what is/isn’t appropriate conduct. Steadily remove every degree-of-freedom until nothing at all remains.

A good and open performance measurement scheme is vital and it must be started from the top. How technology can improve and capture the knowledge will come second.

All these barriers are great and probably true. But what happened to good old fashioned hands-on management? We find the higher the ‘tech’ the more these people are left to fend for themselves. A common phrase among management in these knowledge areas is “I don’t have to manage them, they should know what to do.”

This attitude, combined with the staggering complexity in which these knowledge workers exist is the Perfect Storm for lost productivity. Why does everyone feel it is perfectly acceptable to tell a factory worker that they have to complete 100 units by the end of their shift. Yet no one dares tell an engineer or a software developer that they need to complete a certain milestone by the end of the day.

One forgets that the purpose for ‘managing’ employees in this way is to give them the respect of ensuring that they have everything they need. Just as the factory worker has the opportunity to point out that she is starting to run out of packaging material. So to the engineer can point out that he is still waiting for a critical design document from another department. Why should the engineer lose productive time having to chase down missing information instead of getting on with the task at hand? Because they’re more educated?

Give me a break. Management needs to stop looking for the ‘silver bullet,’ as one person noted. And get out of their offices and start doing their job of actively managing resources.

There is the latent barrier I would term as “enlistment.” Knowledge workers often tend to do peer comparision of aspirations and not achievements. Even if they are not fully aligned to the goals of the company, they can create an illusion of working towards it. The only way to overcome is this to build trust and shared vision.

The story of Millenium Pharmaceuticals is especially interesting, and perhaps strikes at the heart of the problem. In setting up a special team to collate the knowledge and disseminate it, they made a significant investment. This makes clear that the company takes knowlege sharing very seriously and also provides a basis for measurement of the outcome, though imperfect. Most employers, even if they include knowledge sharing in performance reviews, will not allow workers to reduce their focus or time spent on their “core” activities, thus relegating knowledge sharing to the status of an adjunct.

Overcoming each of the five identified barriers is good practice; transcending all of them at once is even better.

A solution that several companies are now using develops a company’s “virtual capability.” It does this by rethinking traditional training concepts, combining tools, data, collaboration, and best practice in a single, user-driven, contextually-relevant interface. This user-centric solution builds organizational resilience by addressing all five barriers simultaneously, identifying the tacit knowledge and capabilities of an organization and making them available as required.

This is a very different way of looking at knowledge workers; it recognizes their talent and ability, and puts them in charge of their own learning. Such user-centric solutions have been deployed successfully by several international corporations with positive results. In one instance, professionals were even given the ability to shape and iteratively refine the online interface that was used to introduce a new methodology, as well as the methodology itself. The company harvested the knowledge from the field and integrated it with the proposed new methodology, instead of just imposing the executive mandate from above.

It has been suggested that a company’s intellectual capital is much like the proverbial tree that falls in the forest when no one is around to hear. Does it make a sound? In this case, does a company even have intellectual capital unless it can identify it, capture it, and use it productively in the workflow?

By tapping into and activating virtual capability, companies can begin to address all of the barriers to knowledge worker productivity at the same time, and they enliven a great resource by giving their smartest people the tools to manage their own training and development themselves.

Excellent article. The challenge, however, isn’t finding ways to overcome the barriers mentioned. Among others, cubeless has focused on those very issues since it launched. The greater challenge is how to convince most organizations that they cannot hope to effectively overcome the barriers until they commit to a more open communication culture. Those courageous ones that have done so are already receiving the benefits.

The advances in technology have not commensurately helped advance the productivity of knowledge workers. In some firms, I even see an inverse relationship of technology to active knowledge sharing. Regardless, this goal, while hard to achieve, is well worth the time and effort. I do believe that organizational structure that limits or removes the opportunity for incidental contact among staff limits the sharing of knowledge and information. Structure (formal and informal) affects behavior. Organizational culture also shapes behavior profoundly and must be worked and shaped like any other asset. I like that the article mentioned the (perceived) barriers of time. With everyone seemingly so harried these days, it is hard to find the energy and enthusiasm to take the time and focus. Anything smart companies can do to generate rewards, tangible and intangible, to promote “the time” as important is always a good idea.

This article sounds like a song I’ve been singing for quite a while to deaf ears. The knowledge workers have to be worked with, listened to, and encouraged to continuously learn. The result of not doing so is apathy and lack of motivation as time goes on. It’s not always just the pay, it’s very often the feeling that you can help the company and in doing so be appreciated and listened to.

There’s a lot of cost savings and improved efficiency available just by nurturing your already available knowledge workers.

An important topic to be sure. I’m glad the article addresses the barriers with “communities of practice,” however, the barriers to technology may be cultural as well. For example, I consulted with a medical manufacturer who was having trouble modeling some of the design parameters for simulation and then communicating the design parameters to their manufacturing base in South America. Because I had been a consultant with another side of the company, I knew the aerospace side of the company had already solved similar problems and could be of some assistance. Unfortunately this company is segregated into silos and their best practices and user communities are not permitted to cross over into other silos to learn or share. Executives need to understand that more information leads to better decision making and that they must identify and break down such barriers where they exist.

What’s missing from your insightful article is the duck pecking of bureaucracy that nibbles away at productive time: travel justifications, budget requests, procurement hoops, personnel appraisals, security training, Sarbanes-Oxley certification, updated resumes, revised passwords, cybersecurity briefings— not to mention all-hands staff meetings, etcetera. Individually worthwhile, but cumulatively a drain. Managers have a duty to shield their employees from as much of the demands from the central office as possible!

Including knowledge sharing in performance reviews (and extending to compensation) would definitely help. However it seems to me that many corporate cultures are very individualistically oriented and group collaboration and problem solving does not occur.

So in such cases significant effort and cultural changes are necessary for bringing in the right attitude. Seeing the leadership of the company engage in collaboration within their divisions or departments would send a strong message. Sharing credit/recognition for successes, too, would reinforce these values.

This is the kind of mid-range theory thrashing that diminishes our intellectual momentum as a species. Please, back away from this type of simplification of a complex situation. Business continues to churn or stagnate because of attempts to find the magic bullet (or 5). By reinforcing the idea that there are simple answers to complex problems, you are part of the problem, not the solution.

I think there may be another element lurking that wasn’t mentioned, which is the barrier of politics. Rarely explicit, many organizations suffer from not-invented-here syndrome or feelings of diminished authority, leading to an unsettled feeling of the individual’s future at the company unless they keep the intelligence for themselves.

I think the the solution would be to rely on an unbiased and authoritative subject matter expert, which are the customers themselves. Organizations that can collect, report, and act on customer feedback can create more promoters (customers that buy more and tell their friends) in their business.

This article meshes well with previous McKinsey articles on organizational and individual worker complexity. Certainly reducing the individual knowledge worker’s complexity burden is a place to begin to allow them to focus on their core work.