Mapping the invisible workplace
Featured in the Knowledge Management training manual
By Mike Bagshaw & Paul Phillips
Category: Management
Credit price: 4 download credits (Single user)
Organisations have systems of formal procedures which cover the official way of doing things. They also have informal and invisible methods, which, to a greater or lesser extent, cover the way things are actually done. The more the organisation promotes self-managed teams, the more influential the informal and invisible procedures will be. Even in the most autocratic organisations, there are occasions when the rules and regulations will not do. Perhaps a delivery does not arrive, or the manager, who has most of the knowledge, is ill. The team has to improvise and find a way round. This is less likely to be a crisis with self-managed teams. Systems that look to regulations for decisions are lost when there is a new situation that the regulations did not foresee. The more the culture favours the sharing of knowledge, the more powerful will be the informal network that can deal with the unusual. These informal webs of knowledge exist in all teams. Knowledge sharing allows the underlying knowledge to come to the surface, to grow, and to increase the effectiveness of the organisation.
You begin this training activity with a ‘pictorial capture’ exercise, where the participants draw, without words, their working environment. You encourage them to include the formal and informal networks, the effective and ineffective lines of communication. You guide a discussion which addresses whether their organisation encourages knowledge sharing and transmission and how the structure creates barriers, such as matrix verses silo. You do an input on the blocks or barriers to knowledge sharing and the un-blockers, and compare the structures with their pictorial maps via a discussion. Finally, you offer the participants the diagnostic tool ‘Where are the invisible blocks?’ to provide more structure to the invisible, ‘shadow’ elements of the organisation.
Who is it for: This training resource is intended for use by trainers to help the participants to describe and identify the points of high knowledge leverage in the informal ‘shadows’ of the organisation.
| Resource Type: | Activity |
| Min Group Size: | 4 |
| Max Group Size: | 12 |
| Typical Duration: | 03:00:00 |
| No of Pages: | 23 |
Resources: View standard resources for Fenman training activities
Purpose: This training resource is intended for use by trainers with participants on any programme that explores the culture of an organisation, its communications and relationship to knowledge sharing via networks and networking.
Download the training activity, Mapping the invisible workplace as featured in the Fenman training manual; Knowledge Management