People-focused knowledge management

Evolutionary
Focus changes to present issues
Wait-and-see attitude to approach challenges as
Incremental
Criteria for overall situation may be unknown 
they present themselves
Problem-Solving
& are not considered
Uses whatever knowledge is required for local
Optimizes locally
problem-solving
Exploratory
Primary goal is to determine what the conditions
Situation may be “perturbed” by changes to
Problem-
of the situation are
determine the nature of effects
Solving
Secondary goal is to determine if & how the
Uses idealistic & systematic knowledge to 
situation warrants changes
explore & pragmatic knowledge to act
Innovating or
Driven by “desire to make life easier”
Mostly performed alone
Creative
May be highly practical & directly concerned with
Relies mostly on idealistic, pragmatic, &
Exploration
aspects of daily work
automatic knowledge
Criteria may be nonconscious
Uses idealistic knowledge to determine criteria &
Constraints are considered explicitly
pragmatic & automatic knowledge to find 
Sharply focused on desire to improve
solutions
Flexible, no particular solution sought

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People-Focused Knowledge Management
have sufficient impact and value to their clients to correct the
present state?
In spite of Parity itself employing customer relations experts,
the team decided to explore the experiences and approaches that
others had with repairing customer relations. They quickly con-
tacted and interviewed anyone they thought could provide
insights. Three members of the group sat down to examine how
they would feel if they themselves had received Parity’s treat-
ment and how that would have affected them. They explored
what they would require from Parity to set things right. In prin-
ciple, the team engaged in divergent thinking to generate a spec-
trum of plausible approaches that might provide solutions to the
dilemmas. They agreed that it would be important to go to some
length, particularly if the measures were of great value to clients.
However, Parity could not go too far in providing compensat-
ing measures.
After discussing and evaluating the potential approaches, the
team decided that, for one aspect, special compensations should
be provided to the affected clients. Quite another aspect — and
perhaps a more important one, with greater market visibility
and impact — would be to strengthen its customer support and
software development, testing, and bug-fixing capabilities. They
should also publicly acknowledge the problems and explain how
they were being corrected to never occur again.
The team, and subsequently Parity, elected to immediately
allocate additional customer service representatives to the
affected clients and compensate those who had experienced
losses. They also decided to expand both the customer service
and software departments and to explain their actions openly
and truthfully to the marketplace. In addition, there were indi-
cations that most customer support representatives (CSRs)
needed to be better prepared — particularly by understanding
Parity’s products better and understanding how clients benefited
from the products in their business. A comprehensive educa-
tional program — including knowledge sharing within the CSR
community of practice — was therefore initiated. These actions
were expensive but were judged to be both the best way to go
and good investments with acceptable returns.