During a discussion on elephant conservation a friend once commented tongue in cheek, “Wouldn’t be interesting to hear what the elephants had to say in an anecdote circle?” This was one of those crazy and provocative comments that quite often act as a stepping stone to an even better proposition. Right now, we need lots of good propositions because the Asian Elephant population which once numbered in the millions is diminishing at a rate of knots and now numbers less than 30,000.

Elephants actually do have their own sophisticated language but we are not quite at the stage of comprehension. However ….. What if we undertook the next best thing? What if we collected the stories and experiences of the people that know the elephants better than anyone else in the world?  The elephant’s Mahouts.

In most instances an elephant and its Mahout are paired together at a young age and spend the remainder of their lives together. Collectively, the mahouts possess a body of knowledge about elephants that no one in academia or research can ever hope to match. Who better then, to provide experiences and insights that may assist in saving this species, which many are now suggesting may not survive beyond this current generation?

To assist the great many already undertaking elephant conservation work worldwide, Think Quick is now working with A Future with Elephants and has developed and commenced implementation of the Elephant Mahout Insight project (EMI) with a view to collecting the stories and experiences of the elephant mahouts across South East Asia and the rest of the world. Cognitive Edge from Singapore will be partnering us in this project by allowing us access to their unique Sensemaker software which we will use to both capture the narrative from the mahouts and to help build deeper insights and understandings about the elephant and its current, and future place in the world.

The insights gained will be shared with elephant stakeholders across South East Asia in a number of workshops where we hope to co-design new experiments, interventions and projects that will make a difference to the long term survival of the species. One of the most important premises of the EMI project is that we make no claims about our knowledge of elephants and how to save them, but rather we will rely upon the distributed intelligence of those that work with elephants on the ground in Asia. Our skill lies in capturing the narrative, helping stakeholders to make sense of the patterns appearing and assisting assisting them to design new ways forward.

It is important to note also that there are many elephant experts across South East Asia who are, and have already undertaken significant research with mahouts and we hope to incorporate as much of this knowledge as possible into the EMI project.

In addition to the opportunity to gain insight and design new interventions in this conservation effort, the narrative collected will also serve as an ongoing knowledge repository which will be made available to interested parties and researchers globally to aid in future conservation efforts. Of course as the numbers of elephants decline so do mahout numbers and their collective knowledge. So another reason this activity is a priority is it will play an important part in capturing the experiences of mahouts while we still have them amongst us.

This approach to knowledge harvesting offers significant opportunity for any group or organisation that is facing the issue of an aging workforce and the subsequent skills shortages that many retirements will bring.

We believe this is one of the more resonant and extensive knowledge management projects being undertaken in the conservation / sustainability space at the moment and we hope to report on significant progress over the coming year.

Anyone seeking more information or would like to contribute to the project in some way, shape or form is very welcome to contact me.

Follow a Future with Elephants on Facebook & Twitter.

Frank Connolly

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I attended at KMLF meeting last month and someone shared an interesting observation; i.e. “70% of all KM strategies have failed.” As bad a figure as this is, I suspect the overall failure rate is actually closer to the 90 percentile given the degree to which we rationalise our efforts in hindsight, selectively tout good aspects and neglect to encompass the whole longer-term picture..

I’ve heard many a strategy spruiked as a major success by practitioners, but conversations with the troops on the ground often tell a very different story. (I too, have been complicit in this type of behaviour in the past … guilty as charged your honour!)

Having worked (or at least been employed) in the “knowledge management” field for 10 years now, I’ve seen many a noble endeavour designed to get meaningful knowledge-transfer happening.  I can’t help but think however, one of the key areas in the transfer of knowledge has been largely ignored throughout the journey.

Anyway, the point I’m laboriously moving toward is,  that maybe it is radically different thinking that is needed to achieve the kind of successes that we envisage and are so fond of making Powerpoint presentations about. My humble contribution to this is, I concede, a rather simple thought and one therefore that has perhaps been overlooked for this very reason.

We spend millions on IT systems to capture, store and disseminate ‘stuff’. We endlessly attempt to codify “what we know” into different forms of media for those who might benefit from it, so they can completely ignore it. We set up communities of practice to connect the unconnected and link our structural silos. We endlessly promote the virtues of Web 2.0 and social media as the panacea of all our knowledge ills. We do all sorts of things in the name of KM it seems – except tackle potentially the most productive and lowest hanging of all our fruits …. our meetings.

In terms of knowledge-transfer and decision-making our meetings are potentially our most potent method because we:

• have the right subject matter experts invited and in attendance,
• if they are in attendance, they should be there with intent, and
• they are in a face-to-face setting where the most meaningful communication should be possible.

Why then are our meetings so unmemorable and unproductive? And more importantly, why don’t we do anything about it?

There are a number of methods doing the rounds that focus on improving meeting processes and many of these work quite well but the real key to effective meetings is addressing the thinking that takes place within those processes. Now, this is one area where I can, with hand on cold heart, claim to have a good degree of success using the parallel thinking methods of de Bono’s “Six Thinking Hats.”

Not all meetings require such facilitation, I suspect a great deal could be run simply and efficiently if the participants could simply develop some tolerance and empathy for opinions that differ from their own. However I routinely use parallel thinking when:

• there are strongly held views
• there are challenging issues at hand
• there are diverse perspectives on offer
• the conversation is rambling and unfocused, and
• when time is short

Contrary to popular belief there is rarely any reference made to hats or colours in a meeting and I find that skeptics who like to dwell on this aspect are those who do not understand the methodology and are unwilling to learn it. Unfortunately, when this is raised I do myself no favours by didactically explaining that “one needs to be sufficiently adult enough to understanding why such “seemingly” childish concepts are used.” (Simply put, the hats and colours create ‘mental hooks’ for the language and methods to embed and exist in the mind.)

Anyway I digress, what I really should be making reference to are the substantial quantifiable outcomes I can direct their attention to, that we have managed to save in such meetings that the usual meeting modus operandis have failed to deliver, particularly when we have incorporated some lateral thinking techniques to gain some traction on some of the more difficult issues.

Now that’s my primary way of dealing with the difficult issue of meetings and there are other efficient ways of doing so as well – I’m just wondering why they are not absolutely mandated and being put into use?

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