Reasons why you should not incentivise knowledge publishing

Just incentivising knowledge publishing risks drowning the organisation in trivia.

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by Mark Smiciklas on Flickr

I once had a conversation with a knowledge manager, who explained to me the incentive system they used for KM. My heart sank. 

In this particular organisation, people were incentivised to publish knowledge. For each article they published they were awarded "points". If someone accumulated enough points, then they could trade them in for a reward.

"Is there any quality control on the publishing" I asked? No, was the answer.

"Do you give points for re-using knowledge?"  "No"

"Do you have a way of combining, or removing, duplicate knowledge?"  "No" 

"Do people have to know there is a demand for what they publish?"  "No"

The result was an ever-expanding supply of poor quality material, with no demand. It made the job of the knowledge seeker infinitely difficult.

This reminded me of another client organisation, which required each person to publish ten items every year.  In an organisation of 100,000 people, that was a million items per year, with no quality control, no filtering, no re-use, no guidance on what to publish; no strategy other than to flood the knowledge base with documents.

Both of these organisations were falling into a common trap;

• incentivising Push (supply of knowledge) and paying no attention to Pull (demand for knowledge), and
• incentivising publishing quantity at the expense of quality.

More knowledge is not necessarily better. 

There are many cases where too much knowledge  is counter-productive, especially where this knowledge is poor quality. 

• A highly populated knowledge base with poor structure can seem like a "needle in a haystack" problem to the user, and adding more hay just makes it worse (see my blog post on "a haystack is no place to store your needle").

• A situation where a user is already bombarded by a "Knowledge firehose" will not be made better by turning up the flow.

• Providing far too many items is less valuable than providing a few simple pieces of knowledge which people can retain in "the heat of battle".

• As I found in another client, a lessons data base which is overly full of poor quality lessons is a frustrating experience for the user. "We cant find what we need, and when we do, its not helpful" was common feedback, and users seldom visited the database a second time. 

• Another client, again rewarding publishing, but with no structure and guidance, was proud to see wikis popping up all over the place, not seeming to see the problem in having 5 competing wikis on the subject of Knowledge Management, for example. 

• Here is another example taken to the extreme, where the amount of publishing created a perfect storm of futile effort which cost far more than it ever saves.

Davenport and Prusak, in their seminal "Working Knowledge" point out that over-volumed knowledge bases do not work. 

"Volume may be the friend of data management" they wrote - "but it is the enemy of knowledge management"

Too much knowledge requires the user - and each user in turn - to  filter the volume of material to find the relevant and timely knowledge, and as the volume increases, the task gets harder and harder, and people just give up. It becomes easier to reinvent the wheel, than to find the correct wheel in a junkyard.

Go for "less and better"

The lessons from these observations are relatively simple, though perhaps counter-intuitive in the early stages of KM.

• Do not incentivise knowledge sharing - incentivise knowledge seeking and re-use instead.

• Incentivise quality (usefulness, utility and demand) of published knowledge, not quantity.

• Introduce a synthesis step, so new knowledge does not accumulate like a snowdrift, but is used to refine what is already known.

• Incentivise people who update the existing knowledge; those who build on the work of others, not people who create new duplicate knowledge.

• Provide a structured just-in-time supply of knowledge for the end user - a knowledge faucet and not a firehose - a lean knowledge supply chain .

Don't incentivise knowledge publication alone - incentivise knowledge development and reuse.