William Ross W. • Perhaps we could look at a "smart" organization as one that is created in a manner that empowers all of its members to comprehend and know the significance of their contribution. I've seen this at work a few times and it is sublime. these organizations tend to dominate their fields. When members of an organization are able to feel heard they begin to think in terms of what is best for the organization rather than simply what is required to get a paycheck.
How can we use our efforts to design organizational cultures with this basis?

Ian B. • I like the question. I have been in organizations that claimed to be learning organizations. It sounded good, but it was meaningless. Further, they did not know what they did not know. This is a leadership challenge. If people got up in the morning and were excited about their work, their ideas were welcomed, change and creativity were nurtured, and leadership was fostered and embraced at all levels, and they went home feeling good and smarter every day, that would be a pretty smart organization. HR departments, not unlike modern learning institutions, expend most of their resources on activities that do not an impact on the individual, the organization or society. Have a smart and sublime Christmas and 2011.

Christina H. • an interesting question. maybe we need to define smart - do you mean smart as in intelligence or smart as in smart looking? an organisation is as smart (intelligent) as its members - and if they are really smart memebers the whole is more than the sum of its parts.........
and yes, be smart with all the lovely people you will be meeting during these holiday days :-)

Christina H. • PS - I totally agree wit Ian Bayne - and it will happen more and more that individuals are empowering themselves - not giving all the power to their orgnisation - I am sure of it.

Albert S. • Cristina - Here's a start at definng "smart" in anorganizational context (retrieved fropm the archives).

I am reasonably confident that an organization can be smart. For example, consider a number of cases where there is a higher-order organizational equivalent of an individual attribute.

• An organizational position is higher-order equivalent of an individual opinion.
• Authoritative knowledge is the organizational equivalent of individual tacit knowledge.
• Organizational learning is the social equivalent of individual learning.
• Knowledge Services are the organizational equivalent of individual communication.

The challenge is to figure out what it means for an organization to be smart. I’ll begin where I usually begin when I don’t know what I’m talking about…yet. I went to the dictionary and found a number of relevant synonyms for “smart” (along with several that have no bearing here). These include: knowing about something (knowledgeable), capacity to learn & adapt (bright, intelligent), street smart (shrewd, clever), quick on the uptake (mentally alert), and witty (which opens a whole new batch of synonyms – too numerous to mention).

Collectively, these terms describe the attributes of smartness (what it looks like). They don’t define it in an organizational context (what it is). Although the latter is much more difficult, we can only claim to understand something when we can define it. However, we have to first describe something before we can define it, hence, this dialogue. Note that as with knowledge and knowledge management, a definition may turn out to be highly context sensitive, but we don’t know that yet.

I would say that, a smart organization would have a firm foundation of core knowledge and that knowledge would flow as the life-blood of the organization. A necessary condition is that everyone is connected, both internally and externally and they practice sharing, collaboration, and networking. In other words, the organization would function as a whole, as a system, within a knowledge ecosystem, rather than as a collection of disparate parts with diverse sub-goals (e.g., government agencies). But connectivity and relationships are not sufficient. A smart organization would know how to efficiently and effectively transform what it knows into action to support it’s business (short-term competitiveness). It would certainly be a learning and adaptive organization, (long-term sustainability).

I define a knowledge organization (short version) as an organization that generates, manages, and uses knowledge to achieve it’s business objectives. Much of the above attributes describe a knowledge organization. But, that’s more about how it works than what it is; what it means to be “smart.”

I like bill's reference to enabling or empowering people (within a strategic business context). However, I'd go even farther. Notwithstanding that it would be a major step forward in some organizations, empowering implies "allowing" - a relatively passive approach to incentives. Motivating is somewhat more proactive, but tends to increase productivity of relatively well-understood processes. For creativity, which I see as the ultimate knowledge work, I believe that we need to go all the way to "engagement." That is causing them to want to work based on intrinsic motivators.

It was also suggested (I don't remember who) that we should probably focus on positive outcomes. This would exclude smart criminals and short-term smartness but long-term dumbness. I'd also suggest that smartness in the absence of ethics isn't smart over the long term.

So, the challenge before us is to discover whether or not there is an emergent property related to a smart organization, and if so, what it is.

William Ross W. • I too like the addition of the word "motivate". I think that getting comfortable with what you don't know comes with experience, wisdom and confidence.Fortunately, by not having a college degree in a world filled with over confident engineers, I learned to learn a few years sooner than most. This has helped considerably.

Ian B. • I am not sure what an "emergent property" is, but an approach might be to think about the characteristics (of the people) that inhabit the work and social environment. Definitions are problematic. Most of the examples are weak if not irrelevant. Empowerment is over-rated. I think one can give too much credit and power to the organization. Human-like characteristics (that contribute to smartness) might include free, alert, visionary, sensitive, focused, diligent, committed, trustworthy, ethical, energized, agile, resilient, creative and innovative... Of these, for me, thrust emerges - trust in oneself and each other. So how does an organization foster an environment built on trust? Does the brand reflect the people or do the people try to reflect the brand, and/or do they meet somewhere in the middle, and leaders shape this relationship over time including by paying particular attention to the external environment and feedback from customers/users of whatever the organization produces? If trustworthiness is the desired outcome, one could draw an causal loop diagram to capture the variables that the organization, as a social system, should be able to influence. One could repeat this process for other outcomes. The strongest "influences" and the associated levers that emerge should be components of the strategy to create and sustain the environment that fosters the smart organization. This would have to be a dynamic, participative and iterative process that is inherent in the management system.

Albert S. • Ian - An emergent property is something that we didn't know about or recognize before we began this discussion. It is usually associated with a higher level of organization or structure. In our case, we're looking for something about organizations that is comparable to individual smartness. Does the idea of a smart organization have any useful meaning as a concept?

Trust is fundamental to relationships, which is what makes an organization function as a whole. Trust isn't an outcome; it is a means to an outcome. In fact, trust is essential to most everything that KM does.

Lesley M. • Presumably the question is asked in a bid to identify the so-called smart organisations. But, "smart" is an odd term to use, surely? According to the question, it is the "characteristics" which define the "smart". So in defining "smart" one is answering the question. In order to apply these characteristics, one needs to be able to measure them, and to have determined a benchmark against which the characteristics counts towards a measure of smartness. As some have said, trust is very important in the worthy company, but how do you measure it? I also disagree with the notion that trust is not an outcome: I would argue that trust is necessarily an outcome as it is not a given but must be earned. Therefore, it is an outcome of the earning.

jon T. • Albert ... I do find it interesting ... that we tend to always seek common definitions.

Does it really matter if SMART means different things to different people?

Why not just accept everyone is free to make their own choices ... in their own way ... without forcing actions or outcomes on anyone?

Cheers jon

Marina H. • hi Albert, thanks for taking this discussion further. SMART organisations in my view also means that leaders must ensure that the competencies of employees are focused on the areas of maximum value adding and this is where I see improved innovation kicks in.. Making money out of your knowledge – truly leveraging your company’s knowledge with improved efficiency through re-use of knowledge resources / best practices etc. Improved effectiveness through leveraging your knowledge of your customer/partner, Being able to map your knowledge to actual services/products/revenue and not delivering physical products, but rather brainpower/knowledge products. Would love to hear your thoughts thoughts

Sahat H. • Good topic and thank Albert for your concept and your ideas,especially about funcionallity of the Trust in KM.

Feld-Marcus T. • I think this is a great way to try to figure out the basics and the struggles of the modern organizations to survive in the dynamic of the “knowledge wave”, as Alvin Toffler named this era in his book (1980).
So I tried to put into those 5 letters the 5 essential element that all together will create the smart organization- the one that can survive in the third wave- the knowledge wave.

Here it is-
A smart organization will be the one that create or has-

S - Sharing of knowledge
M - Mental picture of the future
A - Alert of his environment
R - R&D (Research and Development) strategy
T –Target oriented workers.

:)
Tali

Sahat H. • Tali, I like it, you are SMART too.

Martin B. • I notice that Marina who contributed the original question has posted a comment. I am wondering though whether the views in the comment are a reflection of all the contributions, or from some other perspective. To genuinely make use of all the contributions requires analysing the contributions in such a way to gain meaning. An increasingly accepted approach is to use Nominal Group Technique which is not a difficult process. Step 1 would be to separate all the ideas from their immediate context, and then Step 2 regroup them according to similarity of idea. A simple way would be to print everything out and literally (with scissors!) cut each idea out, and then on a large table group them together according to like ideas. Each group is then named as an emergent theme. In my head I can see some emergent themes to the question, but I would find it most interesting to see her perspective with a bit of rigour attached. It might even help the PhD.....

Marina H. • hi Martin, thanks for your comment. Yes, my comment is a bit of both, (all contributions and another perspective from my proposed Model). I am definatley planning to use some sort of technique to separate ideas and themes etc and include in my research. I like your idea :)

Sharon V. • A smart organization is a connected organization. You need to be able to see a bigger picture.

David N. • Maybe it might be clearer if we consider the opposite of a smart organisation, say a stupid organisation, and work out exactly which features lead to their failure.

An obvious example of the opposite of a smart organisation is Northern Ireland Water, which has laid off hundreds of experienced engineers in the last couple of years, and has just spent 3 weeks trying to get its network repaired, after major leaks emptied its reservoirs over Christmas. For examples of its KM failures, see the several posts on www.sluggerotoole.com

Albert S. • David - I have found that paired opposites can be used to help clarrify what something means. They are useful for defining the ends of a spectrum, such as rich and reach knowledge transfer strategies. Smart is obviously one end of such a spectrum; dumb is the other. It is generally harder to do this, but it generally leads to a deeper understanding.

The first problem is that as with so many things in life, there are a huge number of ways that organizations can be dumb but only a limited set that comprise smartness. I'm not sure how to present a balanced parallel list.

Albert S. • I’ve been away for Christmas Holidays. I tried to connect from home, but got tired of fighting with Linked in not recognizing my e-mail address or my password, or the letters that were so effective that I couldn’t figure out what they were, or the painfully slow phone modem (don’t ask).

So, here are a bunch of answers all at once, done off-line from my notes. That way, I can cut & paste so that when I click on a standard button, they won’t disappear as they just did.

Martin - What a great idea. I was thinking of doing something like that myself, but since it is Marina’s original question and she is doing research for a PhD thesis....

Talia - Using words attached to letters to facilitate memory is great for marketing or communicating with executives. However, I feel that a lot of key aspects of KM are missing from your list. For example, consider:

S Sharing (right on)
M Mobilization (knowledge work, knowledge integration)
A Assets (gotta manage the explicit stuff)
R Research (again, right on; need to generate knowledge)
T Transfer (need to move knowledge products & services to stakeholders & clients)

Now, the sequence is out of order (should be R, A, S, M, T) but what the heck!

Marina - I think that you’re headed in the right direction by tying “smartness” to organizational outcomes.

Jon - I quite agree that a commonly accepted definition of smart will probably end up in the same category as knowledge and knowledge management, and that’s OK, because we can move forward with context-specific descriptions that support practical solutions.

Lesley - An organization in which everyone trusts everyone else is a key intermediate necessity for a knowledge organization. It may be an outcome of KM, but I suspect that it results from much more than KM. But then what? Trust is a means to an end. Outcomes include things like competitiveness, sustainability, and relevance.