Creative learning with Stephanie Barnes

Loris Marini: There are many ways to talk about knowledge management, but one of the ways that makes more sense to me is to look at the world that we live in: how complex it is, ambiguous, uncertain, and volatile. You can't really make plans anymore. That's one lesson we all learned. In an environment like this, making plans and try to solve problems is much harder. So the question is, how can we enable people to do that job more effectively in an environment like this?

Knowledge management is all about that, but it turns out we've been doing it wrong for a long time. We worry too much about the technology and how to store and access knowledge and we neglected the mindsets, the attitudes, the behaviors, and all the soft skills that we need to develop to put knowledge to use, not just store it and access it.

We need to stimulate that curiosity and creativity, but how can we do this? Today I want to learn about this topic and I'm speaking with Stephanie Barnes, the creator of Radical Knowledge Management. Stephanie is Chief Chaos organizer at Entelechy, a consultancy that helps people and organizations become more collaborative, innovative, flexible and transparent. Her work is all about improving employee engagement and adapting to an ever-evolving environment.

Stephanie's an artist, a subject matter expert in knowledge management and culture. She advocates for curiosity, playfulness and creative learning as the cornerstones of the journey towards knowledge principles that, as she says, have been educated out of us through production line thinking. Today, we talk about radical knowledge management, its guiding principles, benefits, and how to put it into practice.

Stephanie, welcome to Discovering Data. Thanks for being with me.

Stephanie Barnes: Thank you. I'm happy to be here. Thanks for having me.

Loris Marini: Absolutely a pleasure. So, let's start with basic definitions. What is knowledge management? How you think about it and what have we done wrong so far? Why isn't it working?

Stephanie Barnes: I've been working in knowledge management for almost 25 years and I started out with a definition that it's connecting people to the knowledge they need to do their jobs. I still believe that. It's just that our environment has changed. The externalities have changed to be more VUCA, as you mentioned in your introduction.

25 years ago, it was much more about stocks and flows of knowledge and creating repositories and development and life cycle processes to keep it updated. Those things are still certainly important, but now it's more about giving people the skills, I think, to create and to thrive in this VUCA world, where there was more, I'm going to say, certainty 25 years ago. Now, there's really not the same amount of certainty, and yet we're still trying to make things certain. I think that’s the wrong way to go about it.

Loris Marini: VUCA, again, stands for?

Stephanie Barnes: Volatility or volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous.

Loris Marini: Perfect description of what's happening in the world right now.

Stephanie Barnes: It is.

Loris Marini: AKA a mess.

Stephanie Barnes: Yeah, a big mess on so many levels. I feel like knowledge management needs to keep up with how the world has changed. Creating repositories is not the way to keep up with the way the world has changed. It's about giving people the skills and enabling them to be flexible and adaptable to accommodate VUCA, to be able to change and adapt.

Loris Marini: Yeah. In one of the papers you sent me before this call, which I will add to the show notes for those that are interested and want to read more about, you speak about the role that creativity and playfulness actually play in the knowledge management process of an organization. Do you want to tell me a little bit more about why we need to think about creativity to manage the knowledge in a team and an organization?

Stephanie Barnes: The first part of the knowledge management life cycle or knowledge development life cycle is creation. The question is, how do we create knowledge? One of the ways we do that is through learning and playfulness, how we all learned as children.

Creativity ties into that playfulness, that curiosity of, how do we create something new from scratch? If I already know what I need to document, then it's not the same thing as I can write down stuff that's in my head that I already know. If I'm in a situation where I have a problem that I'm trying to solve, and I don’t have what I need in my head, it's not top of mind certainly just to write down a couple of paragraphs or create a document or whatever I might do. If I'm in a situation where I need to create something new, then we need to tap into that knowledge within ourselves and within our teams.

Creativity and arts-based interventions that I'm talking about with Radical KM is how to do that. How to get people out of their comfort zones, get out of the boxes that they live in every day and look at things differently. Question the status quo, question how they've always done things, question their assumptions about a situation or an outcome.

Loris Marini: Yeah. It's interesting because in the data management community, we talk a lot about data quality and structuring the data and interoperability and systems knowing what people know. There's a strong focus on the automation side of things, linear thinking, if you allow me the term. It's a linear type of problem-solving where all you have to do is to connect the right knowledge, the right information, right data at the right time when the problem arises.

We know that that is kind of not possible because you can't predict all possible problems. That's why we still need humans in the loop. Otherwise, we could run businesses completely with bots. There's something about being humans that is special, different. What is that thing that makes us different from bots?

Stephanie Barnes: That we're not linear. We've got creativity, which is really what differentiates us from the technology. At least at this point, and honestly, I don't think that it's going to be anytime soon that technology is going to be able to replicate it because it's not linear.

We're not sure how that happens. How my brain has some space and going and doing something else, engaging in something else. For me, oftentimes lately, I've been waking up with the idea of how to solve a problem that I've gone to bed thinking about the night before that I didn't know what the solution was. I woke up in the morning going, “This is what it is.”

Loris Marini: Yeah.

Stephanie Barnes: We don't understand our brains. This is why I do the arts-based stuff that I do and try to help people make those connections and create the space for those things to float up in those connections, float to the surface from wherever they are.

Loris Marini: Yeah. There's a clash here. I see an obvious problem between the expectation of a lot of business leaders, particularly those that are financially driven that worry about measuring things and putting our eyes close to every line item in every spreadsheet, which is something we need to do as businesses.

We need to stay afloat. We need to make profits and we need to use those profits to execute our mission. It can be blinding if we focus only on those numbers, particularly when we're trying to find solutions that are not obvious that require that elasticity, that freedom to not measure everything, to not worry about, “Am I making progress?”

Your subconscious is doing work even when you sleep and the solution could be around the corner, but motivating this to a financially driven business leader can be tough sometimes. You're the first one that brings those two worlds together and am publicly says, “Hey, it's not either you're an artist or you're a scientist or an engineer. You can be both. Actually, everybody is a bit of both. It's just that we kill the one of the two because we want to conform to society of the expectations of people have on us.”

How do we undo that damage?

Stephanie Barnes: Yeah. That's a good question. I don't know that I have an easy answer for it, honestly. I think keeping an open mind and being curious and recognizing that not everything that matters can be measured.  Some of the things that can be measured, honestly, don't matter. That's a paraphrase of a quote from somebody else. Those are not my words.

Yeah, we get so caught up in trying to create this certainty because we're uncomfortable with uncertainty. I think if we're going to get better at accepting that we are both analytical and creative, both the scientist and the artist, it's being more comfortable with the uncertainty of that situation, of that apparent conflict of, “Well, I can't be both.” Who says you can't be? I'm both.

I have my undergrad in accounting and I have an MBA in IT and I can tell you when I started being more artistic and creative, life got a whole lot more fun and enjoyable. My work got a whole lot more fun and enjoyable combining them together rather than saying, “Oh no, I can't be both things.” I think we need to question why we have these beliefs and throw them out the window, quite honestly.

I think the idea of bringing the whole self to work, the whole person at work is trying to get that notion. I look at radical KM as building on that, as supporting that idea.

Loris Marini: Yeah. You also write about sustainable leadership. I believe in one of the two papers you sent me, you identified the three pillars or building blocks of sustainable leadership. You speak about sustainable mindset, system thinking and relationship building. Let's dive into each of them because I want to understand what makes each of these pillars and how we can stimulate more of those in our teams to be more resilient.

Stephanie Barnes: I have worked on the idea of creativity and knowledge management since 2011, and I'm gradually putting the pieces together.

Worked with some folks here in Germany that had written a book called The Creative Company. They talked about artistic practices and artistic attitudes and the things that we can learn from being an artist. I got tied up to someone else who talked about sustainable leadership and knowledge management and I hadn't really heard a lot about sustainable leadership.

I looked at it and went, “Well, but these are all the same behaviors that we learn from tapping into our inner artist.” I was like, “Oh, well, isn't this interesting that in our rush to be analytical and rational and process-oriented and turn everything into a manufacturing line, we have educated out of ourselves our creativity?”

Our creativity is what informs our sustainability and helps makes us sustainable leaders and help us see the bigger picture and look at the relationships among things and have a systems view of it all. In our specialization, we've optimized what's in the box and not optimized the system as a whole.

Loris Marini: What makes it sustainable for you?

Stephanie Barnes: Things like making the right decisions. Recognizing how something we might be doing in our organization impacts the environment. Now it's not so easy as, I'm just going to extract this oil from the ground or this metal from the ground, or I'm just going to manufacture whatever my business is. I'm just going to do this and I don't have to worry about the environmental impact and the bigger picture of how these impacts the communities where the manufacturing is happening or the extraction from the natural resources is happening.

Those have impacts and so many organizations that are in those fields aren't considering it or are doing the minimum amount. They’ll say, “Oh, well, it's too hard to calculate so we're not going to.” It's interesting to me, because of my accounting background, when I took those classes in my undergrad, I remember them saying that if you're building a gas station, you have to include the cost of returning that site to the way that it was.

Loris Marini: Yes.

Stephanie Barnes: When you sell it or when you rip it down or whatever is, that's got to be built into it. What seems to have happened is that people have gone, “Well, the government will take care of that,” or “It's too hard to calculate,” or “I wouldn't make this decision if I had to really calculate how to return the site to the way that it was so I'm not going to do it.” Just say, “Oh, I can't measure it so I'm not going to do it.”

The truth is you can probably measure it. The bits that you can measure would make it not profitable to do that. They find some reason to say, “Well, we're not going to do that because it’s too hard.”

Loris Marini: It's a delicate balance, for sure. Especially in fast-moving industries like startups where it's all about that 10X growth at least. There's huge pressure to return on the investment. The thing is you don't really know what you're doing because by definition you are trying to find a sustainable, viable business model.

You don't know exactly where your customers are because there's still a lot of trial and error. You have an idea; you have the embryo of a product. That's true in a startup, but it's also true in an established organization that's trying to innovate. They might have a small, agile team within it that's trying to create new products.

There's always pressure, right? Money is limited and time is limited. You can spend all your time thinking about the implications of every single thing you do, or you can spend time doing them, or there's maybe a sweet spot in between where it's not the two extremes. There's more balance.

What made you realize that there was a connection between the artistic attitude and this awareness of the bigger picture?

Stephanie Barnes: Artists do take a step back and look at the bigger picture in creating their works and looking at what's available to create what they're doing. I think artists, by nature, question and see the interrelatedness of things in a way that a lot of people don't for whatever reason. I think that there's a flexibility with art and the possibilities.

There's also an understanding of, well if I put paint here? That's going to impact the balance of the picture. If I build something a certain way, it's going to impact the things around it because there's the environment around us. Building a piece of public art, how is that going to interact with the buildings around it and people in the space?

I think by, by nature, yeah, artists take a more systemic look at things.

Loris Marini: It could be a painting. It could be a sculpture; it could be a data set. It could be a machine learning model.

Stephanie Barnes: it could be dance, could be theater. It could be all kinds of stuff.

Loris Marini: Interesting. It reminds me of a recent conversation with Brian O'Neill. We talked about user experience, design, design thinking, and the process of asking, “what does it feel to be the user of a product, whatever the product, that is trying to solve a problem?”

You think about an artist essentially as someone that asks, “Why are we doing this? What would happen if we didn't? What if we changed the way we're doing this?” That questioning is the beginning of the artistic process.

Stephanie Barnes: Yeah. If I want to convey a particular message, how am I going to do that using the mediums that I have available to me? I look at my own painting practice. A few years ago, I wanted to express in a series of paintings the idea of opening up and I thought, “Okay, so my medium is paint and canvas. I have all these tools and things that I can use, but what says opening up? How am I going to express that using paint?”

What opens up? Zippers open up. Velcro fasteners opened up. Buttons open up. I made a little list of things that open up. How can I put this in a painting? I ended up exploring with buttons and zippers and sewing zippers into my painting, throwing them on to pieces of canvas.

I think artists just look at the world differently and see some of those things and aren't so afraid to borrow from other disciplines.

Loris Marini: Does it matter? No.

Stephanie Barnes: It is crazy, but it works and it gets the message across.

Loris Marini: There's another message that's really important in your papers that struck me and particularly got me interested because I was looking for the connection between creativity and artistic attitude. This thing that you mentioned a couple of times, it's about sustainably through sharing and resharing instead of creating again and again, and again.

Another way to see it is information silo. There's a million ways to say the same thing, but for whatever reason, the process of recreating things, assets, pieces of information, models, data sets, why do we do that instead of recreating? What's the cost of sharing and can we really expect an organization to achieve maximum sharing?

Stephanie Barnes: Well, I think in sharing it becomes more sustainable and more innovative than, I don't have to learn that first part that somebody else has already learned. I can take what they've done, and either use it as it is or go, oh, this builds on this piece, or this fits in this piece. I'm going to use that as a launch pattern, a stepping off point and build on that rather than you don't have to keep recreating the wheel every time.

I think there's a mindset that people get into that, “It’s just easier for me to recreate the wheel than it is to go out and see what somebody else has done already that I might be able to leverage.”  I might think that my problem is special for some reason.

Nobody's done it before and I'm not I'm just going to do it myself. It’s lazy thinking, at least from my perspective, because there's lots of interesting things going on and people doing lots of research and doing lots of interesting things that I can learn from. In building Radical KM, I've just put other people's pieces together in a different way to create a different picture out of it. That's what's unique about it. I think there was also a timing aspect of it.

The connection between creativity and sustainability and knowledge management, the three cornerstones are unique in their own right. Those are three things that exist completely on their own. It's recognizing that there's similarities between them and that they can be used synergistically together rather than going, “Oh, no, that's not knowledge management.”

It has that, “Look, I'm in my sustainable leadership box. I'm just going to stay in that. I'm going to ignore everything else. I'm not going to play with anybody else. I'm just going to stay in my sustainable leadership box.” Well, that's not very sustainable of you really to make that decision. Sustainability is about doing things so that they can continue, not recreating the wheel all the time/

Loris Marini: Yeah. We love putting people in boxes, don't we? There was an interesting TED talk. I think they're called multipotentialites or polymaths. People that are passionate about different disciplines. They spend their lives jumping from topic to topic, domain to domain. They never want to specialize too much on one thing because they're always wondering, “what am I missing?”

The way that I'm saying it sounds like FOMO, but really, it’s a genuine interest in learning different things, that curiosity that drives you to explore. The world can be a bit welcoming for people like that because there is a tendency to specialize.

In that VUCA environment that you mentioned, yes, we need the engineers. We need the doers. We need the absolute specialists because sometimes you just need to get a job done as fast and as efficient as possible. That calls for top expertise, someone that knows immediately how to solve a problem, but there are other situations where that doesn't work at all.

We need to combine these two and I want to dive in with you into what happens at the intersection between these two ways of thinking within the same person. If you feel like sharing your own relationship with these two parts where you have a business, so you need to measure stuff, but you're an artist. You paint, you think non-linearly. How do you reconcile this two? First inside yourself, then I’ll share a story of my own struggle with reconciling these two parts. I want to extend that argument into organizations.

Stephanie Barnes:  I think we need to allow it to a certain extent in everyone. I think there are some people that are rightly placed to focus on it in the majority of their day. I think that we all benefit. Organizations benefit. We as individuals benefit by tapping into both of those parts of us, in a work setting, in our lives in general.

That's what I've done with my situation, with my art and my consulting. I was recently asked if my painting was a hobby and it was all like I could do not to jump down the person's throat. It was an innocent enough question. No, it's not a hobby.

Loris Marini: I relate to that so much because it something very similar happened to me last week.

Stephanie Barnes: Yeah. Art informs my consulting practice. They're not separable. Yes, I have art exhibitions and I make some money from my art, not enough to live on. For me, I feel like I need both things because my life informs my art.

I need to not be in that silo, in that box. I need to be doing things and interacting in the world that I exist in. The world that I exist in, with my education, is a business world. I think that the value is in integrating those and bringing them both together. I do pure knowledge management and by pure, I mean, people process and technology focused knowledge management.

I also have Radical KM that I bring in the creativity piece. I have the art galleries, the exhibitions. They don't care about my consulting practice and that's fine. Some of my clients don't care about my art practice, although they benefit from it in the workshops and how I run the workshops and how I approach the deliverables and the work that I do for them.

Loris Marini: So, you're for mixing the two in each and every individual, instead of creating two functions sort of. Yeah. It makes total sense because that would also create a lot of stress, but sometimes it's hard to reconcile them. Maybe the approach is to develop both of them, but also realize that it's a luxury to be able to do art and also make it sustainable.

I always think about having a conversation with the CFO. Imagine myself at a bar with a coffee in my hand, looking at a CFO looking at me talking about creativity. They talk about numbers and you're like, “Well, it's non-linear. It's very useful. It's needed but can I put a number on it?” Not really.

Stephanie Barnes: Yeah, there are numbers. There are case studies. All too often though, they get dismissed. I think of a particular case study I talk about with the Radical KM and stuff that I’ve mentioned in at least two of the articles.

It was something that was done by a KM team and they brought in arts-based interventions into the organization and they had great success with it. They created a studio space. They solved problems that they hadn't been able to solve. They improved the collaboration and the knowledge flow between teams in the organization. Word got out into the rest of the organization and everybody wanted to do it and use the studio space and take advantage of it.

It was successful. They had the numbers and yet there was a reorg. The organization shut the whole thing down because the numbers didn't matter. I'm reading a bit between the lines from the case study that I read, because it's not work that I did, but reading between the lines a little bit, whoever came in and was in charge then of the KM team, just didn't get it and so shut it down.

I worked in legacy knowledge management for 25 years. I've seen it. I wouldn't even care to guess how many times I've seen it. The KM and the activities that they're doing in the organization support it, but a new VP comes in and they don't understand, or they don't care or they don't get it somehow. It doesn't matter that there are numbers that the organization has benefited because they look at and go, “Oh, well that's touchy-feely stuff.”

Loris Marini: They feel uncomfortable themselves. Yeah. They project that feeling into the decisions they make.

Stephanie Barnes: Yeah. They look at the numbers a lot of times. I look at some work that I did early on in my KM career, and the numbers were high, like 160%, 180% return on investment. Management looked at it and went, “No.” When you're talking about fixed assets, you're talking about returns on investment around 12%, 18%, 20%, 25%, like way below a hundred.

The thing with knowledge is that it multiplies when you share it, it's exponential. The sharing and the learning that's exponential growth. It's not, “Oh, I'm going to use this asset a little bit better so I get another 1%. I'm going to use my knowledge a little bit better,” and it impacts everyone down the chain.

This is how you end up with these really high returns on investment and management looks at it and goes, “Oh, well, that's, you're making that up because there's no way we could have that kind of return on investment on something not tangible.” Because they're used to tangible assets.

Loris Marini: What are the types of customers that approached you and how do you know whether they're a good fit for the principles of Radical knowledge management?

Stephanie Barnes: I think anybody that has some kind of existing knowledge management program.  They understand the concepts of knowledge management and they're looking at doing something. They've recognized, because of the pandemic largely, that they need to do something different.

The things that they've been doing for knowledge management are just not enough anymore. We're doing this hybrid work thing. People are stressed out. They're not getting the innovation that they need. They need something new.

In many cases, the KM team is somehow being tasked with bringing innovation and creativity into the organization and they don’t know what to do or how to do it or where to start either. Those are the people that find me, that go, “Oh, I found your paper.”

I'm so glad I had managed to get three papers published in the last year because so many people will find me because of Google and find the papers and find me and find my LinkedIn and my webpage and whatever. Oh, this is really cool. You found me because of the paper.

Loris Marini: Yeah, it pays to sit down and write our ideas in a neat, concise way. What's the bird island workshop?

Stephanie Barnes: I haven't figured out a way to do it remotely or virtually yet, so I haven't been able to do it during the pandemic, but it's a game takes a couple of hours and it takes people through the learning process.

Sort of an after-action review. They're given a task and then they do an after-action review as a team. They think about how they might improve their processes and things they would do differently next time. We make notes of those sorts of process improvement, things based on their own experience.

We do a peer assist activity, which is another knowledge management activity. One person will go from one team to another team. There's this exchange between teams and they learn about what happened on the other team and things that the other team learned and experienced.

They do this next round of sort of estimation of, “What I learned from this other team, I would do these differently and I could build my tower this much higher given that I know this stuff.”

The workshop has actually been going on for more than 20 years at this point. There's a lot of data which is what was in the article that I published on it.

Loris Marini: Yeah.

Stephanie Barnes: We share best practices. This is across 20 years of experience of teams doing this exercise. This is exponential. This goes from maybe the first tower that they built 50cm tall, and they guess what the process improvements. They'll get to maybe 100cm when we share the best practices. They go 250cm which is doable because we have the data, we've seen teams build that high.

When we do this phased approach through our own learning process and the peer assist and the best practice to show and see how much that goes up from 50cm to 250cm, people all of a sudden go, “Oh, now I know why I should share. Now I know why I should look at best practices and lessons learned and peer assist and why this is important because this is the kind of impact that it can have on me, on my organization, on my stakeholders, on my customers,” whoever, whatever the purpose is.

Loris Marini: That's a brilliant way to influence the culture of the organization and try to bring home that message that sharing is not just caring. We all win tenfold or more when we share.

Stephanie Barnes: Yeah. All that in like two hours. The workshop takes about two hours. I've seen senior managers come in and wonder what we're doing with all these blocks and things that are on the table.  Really doubtful about the purpose of what this is. After two hours having them go, "Now, I get it. Now, I recognize that I'm going to support the KM team and we're going to do this right.”

Loris Marini: There was a paper that I shared on LinkedIn from HBR, Harvard Business Review, by Angus Fletcher, The Three Exercises to Boost your Team's Creativity. It was making the point that a lot of the creativity training stuff is actually not as effective as we would like to think even though it's a billion-dollar industry, apparently. I didn't know.

There's a lot of demand there. What was your take from that article, if you remember what the article was about? How do you think, in general, about creativity training?

Stephanie Barnes: I recall liking the article. It was really speaking about creative thinking and which is often where people start talking about in a business sense, in a business context. That ties into design thinking and user-centered design and all these things, which are important.

I don't want to sound like I don't think they were important. They are, but my thinking on it is, there's something that informs or enables the creative thinking and that's not being trained because it's not logical. This is the arts-based intervention stuff that I talk about.

It's not logical and yet playing those games, if that's what we want to call arts-based interventions, there's different things to do around that. I tend to focus on the painting cause that's part of me and my practice, but I do bring in improv or drawings and photography and sculpture and things as well.

It's sort of training ourselves or allowing ourselves to play and explore, using something, I'm going to say, non-threatening in a way. Although lots of people have bad experiences with art in public school. I've had those people coming to the workshops freak out when they see the painting and the paints and stuff on the table.

Loris Marini: Yeah, I'm terrible at this stuff.

Stephanie Barnes: Yeah. I'm not an artist, I'm going to leave. Talk them down and create a safe space for them. The psychological safety. We just have fun. We're not trying to create something. We're not trying to put a play on Broadway or get a painting in the Louvre. We're just having some fun, seeing what the paint does, seeing what we can do, what silly stories we can make up, whatever it is because the lessons that come out of those activities are transferable in the confidence that comes out of those activities.

Getting brown in your yellow paint and figuring out how to incorporate that and keep going and not have the realize that the floor is not going to open up and swallow you whole because you got brown in your yellow paint and the world is going to end. It's not going to end. Mistakes happen. Let's figure out how to go forward.

This idea, this curiosity. Oh, I just ran a survey or I did this thing at work and it didn't go the way I thought it was going to go and I failed. No, you've not failed. You've learned something. Build on that. What did you learn? What are you going to do differently next time? The art stuff is a way to get people to do that that takes them out of their comfort zones and opens up some possibilities that might not be opened up.

Loris Marini: Super cool. We're fast approaching the end of the time that we allocated for this. Perhaps as a last question that I want to ask you: how can people get in touch with you? What's the first point of contact?

Stephanie Barnes: You can go to radicalkm.com, it’s the easiest way. That'll go to my website and you can get in touch with me there. There's a link there for my LinkedIn. You can find me on LinkedIn. Stephanie Barnes on LinkedIn. I'm sure there's lots of Stephanie Barnes. stephanieabarnes, I think my LinkedIn URL is. You find me that way or just Google Radical KM.

Loris Marini: Too easy. I'd obviously put a link in the show notes as usual. So, if you guys are interested check that out. There's a bunch of papers that I read to prep for this one. I'll include links to those as well. I believe two are open access, but they're require an account, a free account if you're interested. You can just reach out to Stephanie. I'm sure she can send you a copy of those papers right away.

Stephanie, thank you so much for your time. I'm looking forward to our next chat soon.

Stephanie Barnes: You're welcome and thank you for having me. That was fun.

Loris Marini: Pleasure. Cheers.