Knowledge Management and Organizational Learning

Many projects deliver tangible outcomes, such as physical artifacts, buildings, and infrastructure. Others produce software, reports, or other types of output. But all projects create knowledge. Indeed, this knowledge can end up being more valuable to the organization than any short-term financial gain. However, because intellectual capital is longer-term and intangible, it is often underappreciated at the point of creation.

An organization that is fully committed to project management maturity does not make this mistake. On the contrary, it cultivates a culture of systematic knowledge management, which William R. King defines as follows:

Knowledge management is the planning, organizing, motivating, and controlling of people, processes, and systems in the organization to ensure that its knowledge-related assets are improved and effectively employed. Knowledge-related assets include knowledge in the form of printed documents such as patents and manuals, knowledge stored in electronic repositories such as a "best-practices" database, employees' knowledge about the best way to do their jobs, knowledge that is held by teams who have been working on focused problems, and knowledge that is embedded in the organization's products, processes, and relationships.

The processes of KM involve knowledge acquisition, creation, refinement, storage, transfer, sharing, and utilization. The KM function in the organization operates these processes, develops methodologies and systems to support them, and motivates people to participate in them.

The goals of KM are the leveraging and improvement of the organization's knowledge assets to effectuate better knowledge practices, improved organizational behaviors, better decisions, and improved organizational performance.

Although individuals certainly can personally perform each of the KM processes, KM is largely an organizational activity that focuses on what managers can do to enable KM's goals to be achieved, how they can motivate individuals to participate in achieving them, and how they can create social processes that will facilitate KM success.


When done right, knowledge management leads to organizational learning, or the process of retaining, storing, and sharing knowledge within an organization. More than the sum of the knowledge of all the members of the organization, organizational knowledge "requires systematic integration and collective interpretation of new knowledge that leads to collective action and involves risk taking as experimentation".

Organizational learning as we define it here is a positive thing, a source of renewal for successful companies. But not all learning leads to good outcomes. Haphazard learning that occurs without any conscious evaluation can lead to bad habits and half-baked notions about best practices. As Daniel H. Kim explains, learning is an essential function of all organizations, but it's not all productive:

All organizations learn, whether they consciously choose to or not - it is a fundamental requirement for their sustained existence. Some firms deliberately advance organizational learning, developing capabilities that are consistent with their objectives; others make no focused effort and, therefore, acquire habits that are counterproductive. Nonetheless, all organizations learn.

In Lesson 13, we discussed some important ways to contribute to organizational learning - capturing lessons learned during project closure, and taking part in communities of practice. These and other practices can help transform a company into a learning organization, which David A. Garvin defines as "an organization skilled at creating, acquiring, and transferring knowledge, and at modifying its behavior to reflect new knowledge and insights". Note that knowledge is only half of the equation. A true learning organization responds to knowledge by modifying its behavior:

This definition begins with a simple truth: new ideas are essential if learning is to take place. Sometimes they are created de novo, through flashes of insight or creativity; at other times they arrive from outside the organization or are communicated by knowledgeable insiders. Whatever their source, these ideas are the trigger for organizational improvement. But they cannot by themselves create a learning organization. Without accompanying changes in the way that work gets done, only the potential for improvement exists.


Sharing Learning as Stories

The authors of Becoming a Project Leader worked with several companies (Procter & Gamble, Motorola, NASA, Skanska and Turner, and Boldt) to create communities of practice. These organizations identified their best project managers to take part in a forum, which would meet 2-4 times per year for a day or two per meeting. Forum members submit stories before meeting, and a handful of those stories are then selected for discussion. At the meeting, stories are discussed and reflected upon and then eventually published and shared with the entire organization.

Denise Lee extended the community of practice concept with her Transfer Wisdom Workshops at NASA to help serve "NASA's practitioners who were not members of the community of practice and were located at NASA centers throughout the US". As stated by Denise, "Our aim was to help the men and women who work on NASA projects step away from their work for a moment in order to better understand it, learn from it, and then share what they learned with others".


The concept of the learning organization was first popularized by Peter Senge in the early 1990's in his book The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization. Since then many researchers have investigated the role of learning in organizations. After over two decades of study and experimentation, the general consensus is that, to be effective, learning needs to be targeted at specific goals. Most importantly, according to Shlomo Ben-Hur, Bernard Jaworski, and David Gray, it should support the organization's strategy:

Too many corporate learning and development programs focus on the wrong things. A better approach to developing a company's leadership and talent pipeline involves designing learning programs that link to the organization's strategic priorities…. The word learning, which has largely replaced training in the corporate lexicon, suggests "knowledge for its own sake". However, to justify its existence, corporate learning needs to serve the organization's stated goals and should be based on what works.

This is a good time to reflect back on Daniel H. Kim's definition of learning as "increasing one's capacity to take effective action". It's one thing for an individual to translate learning into effective action. It's quite another for an organization made up of hundreds or thousands of individuals to accomplish the same thing. Despite millions of dollars invested in learning initiatives, organizations struggle to become learning organizations. In their article "Why Organizations Don't Learn," Francesca Gino and Bradley Staats discuss some barriers to learning that include 1) an excessive focus on success that prevents people from learning from failure, 2) and a tendency to rely on perceived experts rather than on the people who are on the front lines, dealing with and learning about a problem.

Another barrier to organizational learning is a tendency to view it as simply the acquisition of information (the know-how), without giving equal weight to the big-picture understanding (the know-why) that comes from actual experience at the individual, team, project, and corporate level. As a result, organizations as a whole, and the individuals within them, fail to realize that the best way to learn about a job is often by actually doing the job. It's at the project level that individuals achieve growth and learning, and eventually succeed in reaching their goals.