One of my favourite sessions was on “Connecting Knowledge, Learning, & Innovation to improve business performance” presented by Tracy Conn and Janine Valvoda. Tracy is the Assistant Vice President and Janine is the Chief Culture Officer at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland.
A lot like our organization, their organization is conservative, has a strong knowledge base and is expecting retirements.
Janine and Tracy provided examples of how to create a sustainable culture of knowledge sharing and innovation at the Bank of Cleveland.
- First of all, having a Chief Culture Officer is definitely a big step in the right direction.
- Recognition and performance management is another approach to incent employees to share knowledge and to collaborate.
- Also, they have implemented various learning processes such as a lessons learned system, an idea system, a collaboration café, several collaborative technologies and a simulation based learning system (Examiner-in-Charge Accelerator)
-For example, the idea system is called the Idea Management System, where employees are encouraged to share their ideas. They post their ideas on this online system and management is required to respond within 30 days. They measure their results by the number of ideas received and the number of ideas implemented. It sounds like a great tool that seems simple and effective.
-Another example is the collaboration café equipped with a lot of “cool” technologies. This café is a physical space (a picture will be posted) that fosters face-to-face collaboration, creativity, sharing and new/enhanced business solutions.
-Finally, bloging and wikis are used and viewed as an effective and efficient networking tool. I was actually surprised about this one.
Some great ideas indeed…
Catherine
#1 by Peter Zakrzewski - October 8th, 2008 at 11:41
I’d love to see the Idea Management System in action. The premise, I would think, is that there are thousands of ideas floating around. From that thousand, maybe 100 need to be discussed further, 10 will be tabled and one will be executed. But you really need an open forum to capture that initial 1000 in order to something off the ground. (My numbers aren’t exact, but I’m sure you get the idea.)
#2 by Dale Arseneault - November 4th, 2008 at 10:46
Peter.. the “idea management system” sounds a bit like the old fashion “suggestion box” that managers have been trying for decades, and rarely if ever get any value from. Any suggestion Tracy/Janine are reaping is likely because their system is part of a larger culture initiative, and the system is one of the tools available to people to support new behviours / actions.
E.g. If one of the values / cultural practices were “we hold ourselves and each other accountable for ensuring that we consistently explore and suggest new ways of working that benefits both the organization and its members,” an idea management system could be ONE of the connected, enabling vehicles, in particular if it was less “management” and less “systematized” (thinking back to your earlier post about Dave Snowden’s presentation..