Organizational Development for Knowledge Management at Water ...

Chapter 4: Characteristics That Support Knowledge Sharing and Learning Organizations | 33
The structure design supports the workforce in their daily decision-making and actions. In
other words, the structure contains the informal network as much as possible and it supports the
knowledge needs of workers, managers, and leaders.
The structure supports the long-term needs of the workforce, including learning professional
development, and career management. The technology roles and responsibilities, facilities,
and policies all need to function effectively to satisfy both short-term and long-tem utility
needs. Short-term needs such as flexibility, adaptability, surge requirements, cycling, technology
opportunities, coherence of activities, operational procedures, and stakeholder demands often
place different demands on the structure than long-term activities such as learning, adaptability,
strategy, knowledge management, core competencies, career management, stakeholder satisfaction,
and public image.
The structure supports leader and manager needs for loose-tight control of resources. For
example, the utility needs only loose control over self-organization, empowerment and internal
communication, but may need tight control over financial transactions, career assignments, safetyrelated
decision-making and strategic direction. In the Project 4003 survey response to level of
management control, the mean was 3.57 with a median of 4.
STAFF ROLES AND RESPONSIBILITIES THAT SUPPORT SUCCESSFUL
KNOWLEDGE SHARING AND LEARNING ORGANIZATIONS
Continuous Learning
Individuals in staff roles have high visibility. Not only can they set expectations and validate
those expectations by personal example, but they are also in a position to encourage and provide
opportunities for learning. In addition, while employees cannot be ordered to learn, the
environment can be set to facilitate individual learning. For example, staff management can make
continuous learning a bullet in every individual’s performance appraisal. Each employee would
then develop their personal continuous learning plan in concert with their manager and team leaders,
self-certifying completion of this plan during performance appraisals.
Staff managers/supervisors can also facilitate and support rotational assignments, allowing
individuals to build viable networks based on relationships across the organization (and beyond
the organization in their field of expertise wherever possible).
Knowledge Moments
A core staff role and responsibility is the nurturing of knowledge moments. Knowledge
moments are the daily experiences and interactions cross the utility and among individuals within
the utility and its larger stakeholder community as people read, write, converse and think during
their workday—and often in reflection and mental chatter outside of the workday. Knowledge
moments happen at the intersection of people, places, processes and purpose, with every knowledge
moment offering a learning experience to those involved. Because knowledge is defined as
the capacity to take effective action, knowledge moments refer to exchanges that provide the
potential for, or lead to, effective action. Similar to the butterfly concept in chaos theory, there is
the potential for success or failure based on knowledge moments which cannot always be specifically
identified or tied directly to that success or failure.
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