22 Jul WHAT CHANGES IF ANY WOULD YOU MAKE TO UNILEVERS COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICE?
Unilever started its knowledge management activities in 1996. A key strand of its activities has been the development of several dozen communities of practice (CoP). To initiate these informal networks they organised Knowledge Workshops to bring together key experts and practitioners from around the world. The purpose of the workshops was to focus efforts in a functional domain and to ascertain what people did and didnt know about the area. The domain had to be core to Unilevers strategy. This allowed a shared vocabulary and terminology to develop as well as identifying any knowledge gaps. Each workshop generated a Knowledge Domain for each community of practice. This comprised handbooks manuals presentations and any information deemed valuable to that domain. There was also a list of key people and groups within Unilever who had long-term experience in that domain such as meal sauces.1 Each CoP had a champion to help coordinate and mobilise the network. The champion held a relatively senior position to encourage commitment and focus to the CoP. The aim of the CoP was to encourage collaboration between geographically dispersed plants and to cross functional boundaries. The CoPs were built around four key principles: deliverables people operations and leverage. The deliverables could be business deliverables such as increasing efficiencies in organisational processes or they could be knowledge deliverables such as new insights or producing best-practice guidelines. The people aspect ensured that there was a right mix of experts from diverse geographical and functional backgrounds. An activist role was articulated in each CoP. The activist position rotated around the group and was introduced to ensure that there was strategic alignment with community activities. The operations element of each CoP was around creating a safe and trusting environment where people felt comfortable to contribute and co-create new knowledge. The leverage dimension was to create linkages between the different communities rather than having lots of isolated communities within such a large organisation. Each community developed their own identity and brand and engaged in two-way dialogue with other communities. 2 External feedback was provided to each CoP after it had been in operation for some time. This took the form of a health-check questionnaire and identified strengths and gaps in the persistence of the community. Each CoP also tried to classify the value of their activities in a variety of ways. This included a list of success stories quotes from satisfied community customers and use of the balanced-scorecard framework.
Another major strand in Unilevers knowledge management endeavours was the development of an Intranet portal. The aim of the portal was to aid knowledge sharing and increase collaboration across the organisation. The portal held a knowledge repository with a search engine covering different CoP projects a CRM database as well as key procedures and practices. The knowledge repositories were supported by chat groups who provided hints tips and guidance on how best to use the material. Community interactions were maintained using community software such as e-groups and Geocrawler. A yellow pages database was created to help identify experts. The main challenge was getting experts to maintain and update their profiles regularly.3 Unilever has tried to capture the knowledge and learning of retiring employees through narrative accounts called learning histories. They used two game-show formats Blind Date to match people with the necessary expertise and Mastermind to help people question a departing expert. The learning histories served as a form of organisational memory to help employees think through what they might do in similar situations.4 Learning from projects was captured in Knowledge Debriefs to help prevent recurrent mistakes re-inventing the wheel on each project. The debriefing focused on process and technical learning. Interviews were conducted with project participants to capture the five best and worst aspects of the project. These were discussed with all participants and documented as a form of process learning. Technical learning came from comparing key product attributes and consumer attributes set at the beginning of the project. Two delegates from new related projects attended the project debriefs to
ensure that mistakes werent repeated and any learning was transferred to the new project.5 Cathy reflected on her earlier meeting with Paul Polman and smiled at his perceptive remarks around knowledge management. She recalled her own affirmation in this area through organisational circulars:
Knowledge management needs to be aligned with CEOs strategy. It will be essential to define how KM can support the business strategy as well as build and/or strengthen KM competencies across the business. Professional competencies need to focus not only on what people do but also on what they need to know in order to deliver. In that sense the discussion shouldnt be as to whose responsibility it is either the CKO CIO or HR function but rather of how to ensure that those needs are deliberately identified and addressed.
It was time to move some of this rhetoric into reality. Cathy called her knowledge management team together to discuss the way forward.
1 von Krogh G Nonaka I et al 2001 Making the most of your companys knowledge: a strategic framework Long range planning 34: 421-39.
2 Poss A Linse K et al 2005 Unilever: Leveraging community value Inside knowledge 8(4).
3 Iske PL 2002 Building a corporate KM community Ibid 6.
4 Higgison S 2007 The Knowledge: Sam Marshall Ibid 27 June.
Questions:
1.What advice would you give Cathy Bautista on improving the strategic focus on Unilevers knowledge management activities?
2. What changes if any would you make to Unilevers communities of practice?
3. How could learning histories be further developed to capture organisational memory?
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