Process and knowledge management (KM) teams often have different personalities. Process people are more linear thinkers focused on the straightest path to a given outcome, whereas KM people tend to be more freeform and value the journey as much as the destination. But one thing these groups have in common is the love of a good roadmap. Process and KM teams both value planning, and they want their plans to line up with the organization’s overall strategic priorities.
The disruptions and transformations of the past few years have brought process and KM teams closer to the action inside their organizations. Leaders have realized the role that defined processes and seamless knowledge delivery play in promoting efficiency, cohesion, and decision making—and that has earned some process and KM teams a seat at the “adult table” when it comes to business strategy. KM and process teams have also grown closer to each other and partners like innovation, quality, HR, and IT. All these enablement functions are taking advantage of the camaraderie that has flourished amid chaos, creating a more open and collaborative discourse between peers.
At APQC’s 2022 Process and Knowledge Management Conference, we’re gathering process, performance, and KM professionals in one place to think and learn. Our conference theme, Building the Roadmap Together, represents our aspiration for enablement teams to join forces with one another and business stakeholders to understand the organization’s most pressing needs and craft creative, multi-disciplinary solutions. We hope these groups can strengthen their partnerships and expedite improvements by weaving together the best that process, KM, and related disciplines can offer.
In designing the conference, we wanted to highlight skills and methodologies that are essential for collaborative innovation, prioritization, and engagement. We see design thinking, immersive storytelling, and emotional intelligence as three key ingredients for building and communicating a shared roadmap. Below is an overview of each and how it will be featured from the conference’s main stage.
Ingredient 1: Design Thinking
A good roadmap requires you to know your destination and the path you want to follow. Design thinking is a five-phase methodology for tackling these directional decisions: It allows you to figure out what problems the organization should address and how. As part of a design thinking project, collaborators:
- Empathize—understand the customer (or another stakeholder) and their needs
- Define—scope the problem from the customer (or stakeholder) perspective
- Ideate—brainstorm potential solutions
- Prototype—develop minimally feasible models of potential solutions
- Test—conduct a series of experiments to assess the applicability of the prototypes
Conference keynoter Dan Kraemer, co-founder and co-CEO of global design and innovation consultancy IA Collaborative, will break down the principles of design thinking and explain how to apply them to your next project. His advice will be relevant to product and service design, but also to broader strategic and cultural initiatives.
Design thinking can help partners with diverse perspectives converge on problems and co-create solutions. It also forces cross-disciplinary teams to cast the net wide, instead of gravitating toward a predetermined set of improvement methodologies. “It’s a process that can complement Agile, systems thinking, and other kinds of business thinking to solve nearly any problem,” Kraemer said.
Ingredient 2: Immersive Storytelling
While design thinking can help you sketch your roadmap, storytelling can help you convert it into a shared vision for the future. Conference keynoter Lance Weiler, director of Columbia University’s Digital Story Telling Lab, will provide insight into how immersive storytelling can help process and KM teams convey purpose, socialize ideas, persuade skeptics, and provoke meaningful change.
Weiler’s agile and innovative approach reflects the reality of the current moment, whether that means redesigning in-person immersive experiences to be delivered over Zoom or embracing AI and online productivity tools to turn passive audiences into active co-creators of a shared experience.
His experiences throughout the pandemic can be applied to help organizations collaborate effectively and refine strategies that the whole organization can get behind. “What has been striking is the ability for large groups of people from around the world to mobilize and organize quickly around passions, challenges, and opportunities,” he said. “I’m seeing trends that are emerging from the arts that could greatly benefit other industries.”
Ingredient 3: Emotional Intelligence
Conference keynoter Bill Benjamin, partner at the Institute of Health and Human Potential, defines emotional intelligence as the ability to recognize, understand, and manage our own emotions combined with the ability to recognize, understand, and influence the emotions of others. Whether you’re building a shared strategy or presenting it to people you need to embrace it, none of it works without emotional intelligence.
“Many of the things that are required for Building the Roadmap Together—collaboration, trust, agility, openness, and influence—are emotional intelligence-based competencies, rather than IQ or technical skills,” Benjamin said. “When we are not managing our own emotions or connecting to others’ emotions, trust breaks down. This means people aren’t as open to our ideas (or we are to theirs), relationships become frayed, and people don’t feel safe sharing ideas or giving feedback. All these affect people’s ability to work together effectively and adapt to changing circumstances.”
To learn more about how design thinking, immersive storytelling, and emotional intelligence can help process, performance, and KM professionals, join us in Houston May 11-12 at APQC’s 2022 Process and Knowledge Management Conference.