From fairytales to spherecards: Towards a new research methodology for improving knowledge productivity

The Forum Qualitative Social research-journal, (one of the online open-access journals) has published our article! We, that means me and some of my research-practice-colleages, are very proud of this new and unusual publication in this noteworthy journal. It is a contribution to the special issue on performative social science in which we give a new perspective on the collaboration between research and practice. In our article we combine a solid foundation on the basis of literature with msn-conversations, pictures, lively examples of innovative research methods, and we develop a new model that presents a connection cycle. The model puts into words the stages of co-production that researchers and practitioners go through when collaborating with the aim to be knowledge productive. The model connects the learning cycles of both researchers and practitioners. There are six stages of co-production: 1) curiosity, 2) approach, 3) experience, 4) ideas, 5) knowledge creation, and 6) knowledge productivity. Enjoy reading the article!

• Doornbos, A., van Rooij, M., Smit, M., & Verdonschot, S. G. M. (2008). From fairytales to spherecards: Towards a new research methodology for improving knowledge productivity. Forum Qualitative Social Research, 9(2), nr 48.

Shop assistants as innovators

Later this week my I will present a paper on shop assistants as innovators. I will do this together with my colleagues Tjip de Jong and Joseph Kessels at the HRD conference in Lille. In this paper we critically examine three assumptions on which activities in traditional change processes are commonly based, and we propose an alternative approach. This new approach has three starting points:

• We consider the supermarket staff as knowledge workers
• Knowledge workers have an important role in developing innovations during their work.
• Instead of imposing an intended change as if it were completely new management should look for 'seeds' or successful examples.

We conducted action research in 17 supermarkets. That means that we worked in the shops, talked with the employees, sat in the canteen. One of the things that we found was that there are three types of supermarkets: one organised as a family; one organised as a student house, and one organised as a firm. Each of these types has different qualities. From the research it revealed that it is necessary to allow for diversity; that ownership and entrepreneurship contribute more to change than discipline and obedience; and that the specific role and capability of the manager seems to be crucial. Staff needs to develop competencies that match their own ability and interests in order to successfully innovate in the supermarket. In order to become innovative shop employees should be granted the authority to engage in knowledge work. In the supermarkets that we visited during the research, we found various interventions that could support the development of ownership and entrepreneurship of the supermarket staff. I've attached the paper to this entry. 

Paper on the descriptive quality of the 11 design principles

Do the eleven design principles for knowledge productivity work as descriptive principles? That's what the paper I've written with my colleague Joseph Kessels is about. One of the conclusions is that the design principles do not help you in designing the process in your innovation project just like a map helps you to design a route from Amsterdam to Lille. We found that the design principles do not work as prescriptive rules that in a specific combination, applied to a predefined situation, will result in certain effects. However, the design principles each offer a new perspective on the innovation practice you are working on. This new perspective helps to get new ideas for interventions. After the design of these interventions it is mainly the facilitator who has an important role in making it a success. If he sees opportunities and is capable, then he can use the interventions to create breakthroughs in the innovation practice.

We've submitted the paper for the 9th HRD conference in Lille. The conference takes place 21-23 May. We'll be there!

Quiet Leadership

David Rock says in his book Quiet Leadership that leaders who want to improve their employee’s performance should improve their employees thinking instead of telling them what to do. Rock offers a six-step guide, the dialogues he offers as examples throughout the book make this approach very concrete. And they offer handles to start conversations like these yourself:

• Step 1: think about thinking (Paul says to Sally: "I really don't know how to lift our sales right now". Sally then does what most managers do, and says: "It's important to get our sales moving so we hit our targets. I think you need to get more focused and put more time into this, the deadline is coming up fast". Here Sally is trying to help Paul to perform better by telling Paul what to do. In another approach where Paul would do more of the thinking, Sally could ask: "How can I best help you think this through?" and "When you say you're not sure about the project, which part of this do you want to discuss with me?" p. 37)
  Here it is also important to focus on solutions instead of problems. In relation to this Rock introduces an interesting distinction: "Why versus Learning". He says that questions with the word 'why' in it usually do not lead to learning, the lead to reasons and justifications. Learning questions sound different. The why-question 'why did this happen?' has a learning-question equivalent: 'what do you want to achieve here?'.
• Step 2: listen for potential. And that means that you concentrate on not listening for opportunities to sound intelligent, not listening to get information you want, and even not listening to see how you can help.
• Step 3: speak with intent. That means: be succinct (express yourself compact and don’t waste words), be specific and be generous. In this chapter the author also shares his way of dealing with digital communications in his own company. They have several rules for sending emails: Use emails for exchanging information; if emails are longer than one screen, delete the email and email an agenda instead and use mail to schedule a phone call. Never send an email that could emotionally affect another person unless it’s pure positive feedback.
• Step 4: dance toward insight
• Step 5: CREATE New Thinking
• Step 6: Follow up

What I like about the book is its starting point that we can’t think for others and that therefore good managers don’t offer solutions but rather help their people think. The dialogues he uses to illustrate this approach make it a very useful book.

Rock, D. (2006). Quiet leadership, six steps to transforming performance at work. New York: Harper Collins.

PhD research on knowledge productivity

Yesterday I attended the defense of Christiaan Stam's PhD-thesis 'Knowledge productivity, designing and testing a method to diagnose knowledge productivity and plan for enhancement'. The subject of his research is very much related to mine (knowledge productivity!) and I've read it with great interest. He combines two perspectives on knowledge productivity: a process perspective and an output perspective. The research has resulted in the design of a participative method to support organisations in diagnosing their knowledge productivity and ways for enhancing that. His work not only contributes to the further conceptual elaboration of the concept of knowledge productivity and the corporate curriculum, it also offers a very thorough design based research approach (including alpha and beta-testing!). The complete dissertation is online available via his website on intellectual capital (a website about intellectual capital that distributes a complete dissertation has indeed a very unusual approach to intellectual capital!).

• intellectual capital
• science guide on this dissertation

Research on the transfer of the ability to innovate

Kirsti Booijink has finished her master thesis! She has examined the way the ability to innovate that people acquire by participating in innovation practices is transferred to the day-to-day work environment. She has done the research in the context of Habiforum and has studied several of their 'pilot projects' (in Dutch: 'proeftuinen'). One of her findings is that the application in the day-to-day work environment of abilities, acquired in the pilot project, is influenced by a 'layer' consisting of people around the individual. These people, in what Booijink calls a membrane, facilitate the others to use their abilities. The membrane gives them the freedom to experiment, to apply new skills, and to make mistakes. I find this idea of a membrane striking: organisations themselves seem not able to offer a stimulating context for innovation. It works better when we organise pilot projects (with a way of working that is completely different from the way of working in the day-to-day work environment), and then, in order to transfer, we need a membrane, in order to have the freedom to experiment and make mistakes. This gives the impression that innovation takes place rather in spite of organisations rather than thanks to them. Wouldn't it be an interesting perspective to see if we could design organisations as pilot projects (proeftuinen or innovation practices)...? Download the research report of this study (in Dutch!).

The innovation value chain

My colleague Cees Sprenger gave me an article by Morten Hansen and Julian Birkinshaw on the innovation value chain (the HBR-article was translated for the Dutch HMR. Their article is based on findings of five large research projects on innovation they undertook the last ten years. They say that:

• … organisations that want to be better at innovation, too often start with idea generation and plan one of those brainstorm-sessions. Whereas, they say, the problem is often not generating good ideas but rather bringing them further. Therefore they propose a value chain consisting of three phases: idea generation, idea conversion, and idea diffusion.
• … organisations cannot allow themselves to be active only at one phase of the value chain. They should be aware of the whole process. It is not about generating as much ideas as you can but about connecting the ideas to further development and to the outside world.
• … organisations need to focus on the weakest link in the value chain instead of the strongest (as they quite often do). The authors offer all kinds of attractive ways to work on these weakest links (like building safe havens for emerging concepts).

Some of my reflections:

• Focussing on the weakest link runs counter to the idea of working from strengths. I think where the two meet, is in the individual. The organisation’s policy or culture might be pointed at one or two stages of the value chain, but I believe that the individuals represent the whole value chain. Some people like generating ideas, others like to think of ways to make an idea work. So it is not so much focussing at your weakest link but rather looking for the individuals that are passionate about the phase of innovation the organisation itself is not naturally working on.
• The focus of their article lies on product innovation. A product is something that can literally be distributed. How would the situation differ in organisations whose primary ‘product’ for their customers consists of services (see for instance the PhD research of Anna van Poucke (2005), she looked at knowledge intensive service firms and divides the innovation process into three phases: Idea generation, Crystallization, and Evolution). A service is not something that can be literally distributed.

References:

• Hansen, M.T., Birkinshaw, J. (2007). The Innovation Value Chain, Harvard Business Review, 85 (6), 121-130.
• Van Poucke, A. B. M. (2005). Towards radical innovation in knowledge-intensive service firms. Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam, Rotterdam.