Pioneer Knowledge Services welcomes you to the next because you need to know. I'm your host, Edwin k Morris. I serve as president and founder of this organization, and we are thrilled to offer this educational program. These design conversations bring you people's experiences from all over the globe in the field of knowledge management, nonprofit work, and innovation. If your company or organization would like to help us continue this mission and sponsor one of our shows, email byntk atpioneerdashks.org. Hello, everyone. My name is Laura Pike Seeley. I'm joining you today from the awesome city of Dallas, Texas. And, you know, while Dallas has many fascinating things about it, one of my personal favorite places is Fair Park. It is the home of the state fair of Texas. I just love it for its iconic art deco architecture. And currently here in Dallas, I have the privilege of working as the knowledge program manager at HKS Inc, which is an award winning global architecture and design firm. My role involves helping our organization harness its knowledge, connect experts, and facilitate learning all within the framework of our digital workplace. And I've learned some really great vital real world lessons here, including the fact that technology alone can't solve people problems. It's all about understanding how to build on what already works for individuals and communities. And, you know, I absolutely love working in knowledge management for designers. They are such an interesting subpopulation of knowledge workers. They have the brains of artists and engineers all at once. They are passionate. They're curious. They're willing to experiment, but, you know, they're also busy in particular. So it's an interesting challenge, and it's one that I learn from every day. And when it comes to learning off the clock, I'm a huge reader. I recently read 4000 weeks, time management for mortals, which is a book that reminds us of life's finite nature and the importance of prioritizing what truly matters. A topic I think I could talk about on and on is the art of knowing when to say yes and when to say no in a world of limited time, which we all have. Choosing the right opportunities is so crucial, and I know this all too well as a working parent. And outside of work and writing, I enjoy hunting for treasures at antique stores and estate sales. I just feel like there's something, so profoundly human about connecting with the past and all of the people around us through the objects that people once held and cherished. To me, connection is everything. Connection between ideas and people. My intent to show up in the world is to promote learning, listening, and understanding because I believe that's how I create value, by learning, listening, and understanding. That is quite a manifesto right there. Thank you. The demographic you work with, again, could you give us a little more detail on what knowledge management looks like for a lot of architects? Great question. What's interesting about designers, again, they think very creatively and out of the box, but they also have that brain where they wanna solve real world problems. Working with architects, especially at a firm the size of HKS means working with people who are involved in all sorts of projects. Everything from advising on health care campus master planning, all the way to someone who is designing office space and trying to make it great for the employees that work there. Yeah. So everyone's thinking about human experience and they're thinking about sustainability. So we're getting to do things that I think really make a difference in the world, which means that their work for them is very very value driven. For them, they really are busy. They've got project deadlines. So knowledge management for them is a lot about making sure that they can connect to the information they need when they need it. When they're facing a challenge, they wanna be able to get quickly to the resource they need. Well, let's talk about the case for connection. Give me more details about how and why. And I I'm just thinking of our listeners if they're in a small to midsize organization. Connection may have different weight depending on the industry and type of organization, maybe. You tell me. Mhmm. Yeah. I think so. And I think also when we think about connection, there's emotional connection, and there's intellectual connection. And that can look like, do I feel connected to the people I work with? Do I feel connected to the overall vision and mission of the organization? Do I like the way that our work processes go here? Do I feel connected to the way I'm doing my work? So I think connection can be lots of different things to lots of different people. And as I wanted to talk about today, I do think that the idea of connection is something that we all want, but we also struggle with in an age of information overload. The connection piece is a loaded concept for sure. But in the current state of affairs when so many people are now seeing distance work or remote work for maybe the first time A lot of us have already been doing that kind of work, so it's nothing new. But there seems to be quite a culture shock in that some organizations think virtual work is less than. That to me is a mismatch connection because I think that here again, going back to what you're saying, this connection between people, mission, vision, the org structure, the work being done, that does not matter if it's digital or physical, does it? I don't think so. I think that clarity is so critical here, especially when it comes to connecting intellectually to the mission of your organization. And the digital workplace is one of the ways we can offer that clarity. Clear in in communication style, clear in content, clear in channel. Yes. I think that so much of when it comes to balancing things like connection and focus. We have to understand what our priorities are so that as we seek opportunities to engage in connection, we're directing them in the right way. Mhmm. Leadership has to really communicate those values and priorities. Otherwise, it's really difficult for those of us who are thinking about communications, who are thinking about learning and connection to decide Mhmm. How to direct what we might think of as an organization's internal attention economy. Well, does all that fall on HR to pull off? Or is that a Kilometers function for you? I think that that falls on anyone who's at the top of the organization needs to be very involved in setting the priorities. Once those are understood, I think teams like knowledge management, technology, internal communications, HR, professional organizational development, all have roles in taking the priorities of the values that have been communicated and making sure that the work that they're producing, the way they're directing the attention of employees is in line with those priorities. I mean, it's so kinda depends on how your organization is, kinda set up there. Well, yeah. And a a lot of that is those undefinable things to some degree in the non tangible cultural behaviors and that's not always expressed. Ideally, it would be but not all cultures express it that this is how people will engage or interact You had brought up something earlier on the Cal Newport's concept. Does it fit in here with the flow and the Yeah. The deep work? You know, I think that we've all heard a lot about the importance of deep work, of staying heads down, of achieving what we call flow state at the same time that we're so aware of the importance and the value of staying connected and engaged. And it's something I think a lot of us face daily. And I think 2 things could be true at once. Mhmm. 1, information overload has undermined our ability to focus, but it's also true that innovation requires exploration and thinking outside of the box. So there's that contradiction there that where we have to balance the idea of deep work and meaningful connections. So Cal Newport has a quote. It says distraction is a destroyer of depth. So in his opinion, he's Wait a minute now. Distraction is the destroyer of depth. Right. Meaning that if you are distracted, you've lost your focus and you're not as deep as you were. You weren't in You're not as deep. Okay. Got it. You're not as deep as you were. And he believes that that state of flow of deep work, that's what you need to have to produce high quality valuable work. But there's another quote that I think about a lot from Daniel Epstein who wrote the book range. And when I think about the 2 thought leaders that really sum all this up for me, it is probably Cal Newport and Daniel Epstein. And Epstein in his book range said, everyone is digging deeper into their own trench and rarely standing up to look in the next trench over even though the solution to their problem happens to reside there. So we're talking about depth. Right? Yeah. When can we get too deep? What happens when we get really, really deep? Great things happen. But are we missing opportunities when we do that? And I'm hearing it what you're saying, but I'm also visualizing it in a different way. So the depth of expertise is not the thing, where depth of involvement is what you're speaking. I think, really, what he's talking about here is, yes, the depth of involvement in the work in the moment. Right. We know that people wanna be able to focus deeply on their work without distraction, with minimal stress. Mhmm. Let them do what they love to do, and let them do it well. Something like a third of people say they face information overload. There's meeting notifications, all of our calendars, just multitasking and all of that's really contributing to our stress and burnout. And someone like Cal Newport in a book like digital minimalism, which he wrote is gonna argue that getting rid of some of those distractions and allowing us to spend the majority of our time in that kind of flow state of deep work, deeply involved as you said in our work is gonna be what helps us be productive and happy. There is a documentary called California typewriter. And they talk about just this, that the concept of using a typewriter to create content like music writing or writing a book or any kind of creation and text and language that the fad of some of these big minded creative people are using a a technology that actually nobody even makes anymore, which is a mechanical typewriter because of what you just said. In the documentary, they talk about, well, why? Why are you using a typewriter? You know, there's so many computers and this the the point was made. There's no distractions creating content. Now, another odd thing that came out of that documentary talking about that is that they also said there's no little squiggly line when you misspell something or it's grammatically not correct. And the one author said, being your own editor snuffs your creativity automatically because now you're playing both sides. Oh. And he said, with a typewriter, I can just create. The editor can go fix all the stuff, you know, but it's an ether or. Yeah. And I just thought that's a very powerful statement. If we could just think of being in a channel of creativity and no governor, no editor, no spell checker mindset. Wow. It's with the same kind of concept, I think. People in an organization, they need to understand that they're only the ones that are in control of the consumption and deflecting all the things that are happening. So if you don't make space and become aware of that, it's always gonna smack you in the nose. And I think you're right. I think that that is how people think of it now is that the onus is on each of us. Have you seen, like, people have, like, boxes where you put your cell phone in that locks it for a certain amount of time? There's a book called stolen focus by Yohan Hari that talks about his experiment with all of this. To your point, they want to and even thinking about those squiggles, we don't wanna be taken out of the moment when we're in a creative deep flow state. That's really where people can have some really great ideas, and we don't wanna keep people from doing that. And then I would argue, we don't wanna expect them to have to do traffic control to make sure that that is something that is an opportunity employee is that if they the employee is that if they don't adopt, like, when you're off, you're off. You're not still True. Accessing email. And I understand there's a trade off with that when you're at a certain level. You can't just shut it off all the time. But if the organization's not willing to say no emails on your birthday or Friday, there's no emails, you know, some something to make it different Yeah. To create space for something else to happen. It's those communication norms that, can be set at the team level. They can be set at the organization level, or each of us individually, should have space to say that, we're defining what distraction free focus time looks like for us. Yeah. Yeah. In in an ideal world, it would be some mixture of those. Well, let's go back to the balancing. I think a lot of what we just talked about Requires an awareness to understand where the fulcrum is for the individual to achieve balance If they really don't look at it in this holistic way, what you're explaining of shutting down distractions in order to get to deeper flow. And am I saying that right? That's the way I'm hearing it. Yeah. Mhmm. If nobody sponsors that or shows that as the example, nobody's gonna do it. So is that your job as a knowledge manager? My job as a knowledge manager is to find the balance between promoting that flow and that focus while also making sure that people don't get so deep in their trench that they're not learning new skills, failing to connect with people they haven't connected with before, and they're not innovating. And innovation can come from digging deep, but sometimes it comes from other disciplines, from ideas you hadn't heard of before. When you're deep in the trench, you're not getting exposure to those. Well, you bring in a good point, and that's interdisciplinary, and you're able to Mhmm. Spread out into different throes of knowledge in order to be inspired, innovate, or strike a new concept, or even just reframe an old concept Exactly. Is huge. And here again, that's all people connection. Mhmm. That's not just an HR class where you're, oh, well, go take this 45 minute training. It's kind of a skill to to learn how to to do that. I would agree. So how do you train people to do that? I think people wanna do it. First of all, I think that as much as they love focus, spending too much time on one task again is keeping them from growing in new areas and it can lead to burnout and stress to if we don't have the chance to step back. Think about times you've stepped away from a hard task and done something else and you come back and you solve them more quickly. Right? That's one of the ways our brains work. But we do know that employees also want that emotional intellectual connection. They wanna feel like part of a bigger picture. They wanna contribute to a bigger vision and feel like they know what that is. For them, it's not just punching a clock and making sure Yeah. That they're always engaged in super deep work. They wanna learn and grow, explore new horizons. I wanna know what's happening. And, also, people thrive on the wisdom of people across our organization, all corners of the company, and their industry as well. We value mentorship. We know that shared knowledge goes a long way. And then there's the social side of things, especially remote work like we talked about. The ability to find some human connection and warmth. Mhmm. It's a big deal for a lot of us. Our workplace environment is where we get a lot of our connection and that warmth that we need to just feel human. So we know that all of that matters to them. So the question then becomes, how do we create a workplace environment that allows them to be focused when they need to be, but also feel connected when they want to knowing too that there are have you heard like t shaped and I shaped people? Yeah. Why don't you go over a quick definition of both of those so we all know? Yeah. It's like t shaped people. They have a balance of this broad knowledge and deep expertise. They they're pretty versatile collaborators. They can solve problems quickly. But then you have I shaped people super valuable. They are specialists with deep deep knowledge in a single area. They're very valuable for that domain. When we think about that balance, is there also something to be said for the fact that different types of people may value connection over focus and vice versa and maybe differently at different times. How do you communicate with all the people in your organization about what Kilometers is doing in your organization? That's a really good question. For us, our focus has always been on that kind of old mantra of find the right information at the right time and get it to the right person. We do communicate about our value in the area of Kilometers. We do get a lot of questions even personal knowledge management or how do I make my team's resources easier to find. But a lot of how people have begun to understand Kilometers within our organization and engage with it is through some of our signature knowledge products that we make available within our digital workplace. So we have tools that have been designed to help, specifically, our designers find resources based on what they're doing at any given time, what their role is, what the challenges on their project. So if they're trying to design a building that has passive design and uses less energy, what are some of the strategies that are available to them based on, are you an interior designer? Do you design envelopes and plods? As they kind of get to a place where they get to explore all of that, I think even if they don't maybe know it, they are experiencing the Kilometers function, and that's probably most intimately how they do it. It sounds to me what you just said is that the tool structure leads the way with the interface with your people. Yes. There's no actual CAM training to build a better awareness across your universe? What we do have is training around smart searching. So helping our designers and our all of our employees understand what it looks like to find information and evaluate it. Mhmm. We also have quite a bit of training on how to actually use some of our basic Internet functionality. Here again, it's more focused around the toolset. The reason I keep saying this or picking this up, the 3 main domains are people, process, and technology. And it sounds like you're kinda heavy to process and technology. I would say so. We also do a lot to a facilitation. I guess, it'd be another area where you would see our Kilometers work come into play. So we have a lot of thought leaders in the firm. Mhmm. They may be in our sustainability group called Design Green. They may be in our research team. We have people in Marcom, and then across our practices. So the times that we probably work most closely to to help people develop Kilometers, I guess, principles in their own work would be with those thought leaders. So if someone comes to us and says, we are all talking about the experience economy in the sports practice, but a lot of us don't fully understand what that is. But this person over here really is an expert there. We would work with that SME to develop the resources that reflect our h k s point of view as well as curate resources that can help people speak to it to our clients and also design in ways that support it. A lot of we work with quite a few different people in terms of just helping them learn how to be communicators of their knowledge specifically. I like the way you honking your hat on that because you're talking about communications. Mhmm. You're helping them be better communicators. That is such a rudimentary but necessary element to this because language and comprehension, cognition, all these things are key elements to making clear, concise Mhmm. Transferable knowledge. Absolutely. Yeah. And not every these are architects, remember. So they're not necessarily they don't know much about information architecture as much as they know how to make a building. Yeah. To actually frame ideas in a way that helps people understand step by step what they need to know about a topic is where we come in. And we do find that in working with them, we mentor each other. We're learning a lot about the topic. They're learning a lot about what it means to share and communicate knowledge. We can do that at scale at times because we have worked with so many different people that they work with each other to develop those skills as well. So that's one of my favorite parts of the job is getting to learn from other people Right. Find out about concepts I'm not even familiar with. The cross pollination. You had said something about nag metric nag metric. What Yeah. Can't because that fit here? What is the nag metric? So I think going back to that idea of of well and really what we're talking about even right now, which is working with people to develop knowledge content, knowledge resources. Mhmm. Every time we do that, we're introducing more noise into the environment. How do we make sure that it's worth people's time? Mhmm. The first thing I think to know is just, you know, the idea of the attention economy, our attention that's in high demand, but, you know, it's not, or we know what's in high supply is just all the information information, high supply, attention. We've got high demand for that. We know that attention. It's valuable. It's limited resource. I know. I think at this point, we all kind of feel like, just we are the product, you know, in the world today. We're always being marketed to where we always have someone trying to grab our attention. Mhmm. So what do we do to optimize that attention within the workplace to minimize the distractions and make sure that when people do have information presented to them, it's meaningful that the engagement matters for them. And the idea of the nag metric, it was an article by Julie Juwa, and they wrote it for marketers, but I took a lot from it as someone who works in k m and internal cons. The idea is that, yeah, if you badger people about something you want them to do, they're gonna do it more than if you hadn't said anything. Right? But if that's if you want them to read something, you want them to do something, try something, whatever it is. At the same time, nobody likes being rang. Nobody likes an email full of spam. Like, this is something we all know all too well. Right. And no one's to be that person who's sending spam or feels like an ag. But we also know that people wanna hear about things that are valuable to them, and we wanna share the things that we think are gonna help them and be valuable to them. Going back to the idea of leadership and setting those priorities and values, if they're doing that really well, that's gonna give us the guidance we need to understand how we direct the attention economy. How do we help our employees spend it wisely? We have to know, where the business is going. We need we need that transparency. We need that clarity. Mhmm. And also, the other thing that leadership can do here is make sure that at the very start of any kind of new initiative, any anytime something's being created, if it's a new process, if it's a new resource, really look at that. Is it being integrated with the current way we're working? Is it is it worth our investment? Is it going to be extremely costly in terms of the attention economy and the cost of development? So making sure you're looking at that ROI with the focus on employee experience, I think is really key. You have to do all of that while also not hampering exploration and, you know, what we call moonshot ideas. There's big ideas out there, and we don't wanna, like, keep those down, but we need to just kind of be very cognizant of everything that's going on and how it all integrates together. That I think is a big challenge for most organizations is all of that in a proper way. But is there a metric you go by? Is there any kind of this is how we operate, by percentage. I I don't know. Is right? So how much do you put towards Yeah. Education awareness and building versus technology solution rollout, software implementation. Do you have a I don't. I think that's if someone has that, drop my email address at the end. The nag metric says something like, hey, we're gonna shoot this stuff out and see what the what conversion rate is. They look at that and say, like, nobody's biting. So this was not this has high nag metric. We sent it to all these people and they haven't responded. I think that would be a good way to do that, to say, like, who how many people do we send it to? How many people seem to be invested in this? And if it's a very low ratio, then maybe you have a nag issue on your hands. Right? Or the absolute product is not what they wanna look at or whatever the format is. Too. If it's a quick video, if it's a Something's not hitting. Well and that's all going back to understanding your audience and and really building the products to those who like to consume and how they like to do it. Yes. Before we get out of here, is what your definition of knowledge management is? My definition of knowledge management is oh, if I could like boil it down. It's your perfect world. What is it? Help people find what they need. Help people find what they need and help them develop the knowledge that needs to be developed. Some combination of those things. My background is in library science. The reason I got my degree in library science and became a librarian is because I knew that I had an opportunity through the organization of information to connect people to things they need to learn and to do better and be better. That's a good basis. So are you saying your organization would be defined as a learning organization? Yes. I think that we have places we could do better like anyone else. I think we could be better about our lessons learned and being more transparent, and I think we're heading in the right direction. But as far as, like, making resources available and at least verbally expressing how important learning is, I think we've got that down. Okay. Well, that sounds like a great place to be, and you've got nothing but blue skies to keep going in. You've got a lot more than I would say a lot of organizations do because you've got one ready audience, leadership, and, apparently, all the structure you need. It's just down to the practice. Yep. That's right. One foot in front of the other. Alright. So give us some detailed practical tips for all those little organizations out there that need some help. Yeah. Organizations out there that need some help. Yeah. I would think know your audience, develop user personas. We have a series of them ourselves that we updated after the pandemic to include the way that we work now, which is in a remote and hybrid capacity. Understanding your audience, developing those personas in an ideal world, having audience targeting is one of the best things you can do to make people feel connected while also reducing the noise that will disrupt focus. Meaning, the things that they don't need to hear. Give me what you're saying on the personas. What are you saying? So a persona would be I I could name some of ours. Like, we have, trusted Trevor. And in our minds, he's an executive who's been at the firm for a long time. We have an 80 year old firm. Sometimes it feels like some of the people have been there the whole time. Maybe a trusted Trevor is reticent to try new things, but once he does, everyone listens. He's very trusted. We have, like, a busy Becca persona who is someone who might be an admin, who's putting a lot of different people and has a lot on her plate, but is truly an enabler. So if we can understand the types of personas, and we're not covering everyone here. These are broad archetypes. Mhmm. We'll talk in our conversations and be like, well, what would Nuri think about that? Or, you know, just what would Hannah say if we tried to do this? And so we think about, So do you have actual individual people that play these roles to They're they're avatars. They're avatars. We try to be very careful about not getting too close to, to anybody who really exists. That idea of constantly trying to push and pull things from other perspectives adds huge value. Yeah. And I think that's that qualitative thing that can guide you. Again, being able to segment your audience by role, by seniority, by location, and, manage your communications through those channels that are dedicated to those different segments. Again, great way to reduce noise and promote focus and connection. I would have to label that a very conscious effort. Yeah. The way you just described that, I mean, that that sounds like a very conscious organization doing that. Yeah. And that would be an HR team really leading that with their data, and aligning that with, you know, the Kilometers and the internal comms functions and working together. It takes a lot of alignment to get something like that done. Well, what would be the one thing you would not suggest anybody ever try? What was the biggest fail or poke in the eye, and you're like, don't do this? I think I alluded to it earlier, which is around thinking a technology tool can fix a problem. I can't tell you how many times I've heard people just say, like, but it it's really pretty. Our people here like pretty things. They're they're designers. They're very aesthetic. So if we order if we invest, you know Yeah. Quarter million of this, that, or the other, you know, it looks good. It's better than what we have now, so they're gonna start to use it. That doesn't happen. Just because you build it doesn't mean they will come. One One of the things I've learned is you have to figure out where they are. Think about, like, when you you see paths through grass, you know, they call them intention paths. Mhmm. Again, not thinking about the built environment and the analogs to the digital. How do we make sure we understand those intention paths within the digital workplace and build on top of those to make it easier for people to go down the path they're already taking and optimize that effort or reduce the effort it takes to get there. Jane Jacobs, who was big in urban planning in the sixties, she was very interested in retaining communities, and she talked about just being up to the edge of chaos, and how these spaces of community flourish, and they're very meaningful, and we shouldn't try to just, like, you know, knock them down and create something that's a little more streamlined just because it seems more logical to us. Something about it is working, and so we learn from that before we think we can come in and just erase it and improve it. Well, here again, that's a very conscientious mentality to do that, to know what's there before you get there and what is working and what's not working. Mhmm. Laura, this was quite a conversation, and we danced around a lot of things. Is there anything left that is still on your plate? I think we covered so much. I really enjoyed our conversation. Gave me some things to think about as well. I think this is a journey that we're all on even as individuals, not just as people working in Kilometers or digital workplace, whatever it is, for ourselves, figuring out how we protect our time and our focus, while also making sure we we stay connected and stay engaged with others because that's really what life's about. Thank you, Thank you for listening to Because You Need to Know, the reference podcast in knowledge management. My name is Sony Tonabe. As an art administrator, because you need to know has been my go to podcast and has helped me hone my management skills. Please consider sponsoring the podcast with your business. Thank you for joining this extraordinary journey, and we hope the experiences gained add value to you and yours. See you next time at Because You Need to Know. If you'd like to contact us, please email byntk@pioneerdashks.org, or find us on LinkedIn.