Radical knowledge management in government contexts? Encouraging creativity

Stephen Gregory

Stephen Gregory is currently Honorary Secretary to the GIG Committee and works as a Welsh Government library team leader. He writes here in a personal capacity.

A recent article by Stephanie Barnes (Introduction to radical knowledge management: making knowledge management sustainable. Business Information Review, 2022 Vol 39(1) pp.32-35 (available through CILIP Membership see Member Only Journals), outlines that “radical KM adds space for creativity into our organisations and our knowledge creation processes”, arguing that creativity is an essential element in helping us adapt to our volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) world. Barnes argues that creativity will need to be relearned and re-activated. Creativity has been “educated out of us”, especially as a consequence of educational systems to split artistic and scientific education. “Relearning creativity enables a variety of behaviours: curiosity, passion, confidence and resilience, which are also known as having an artistic attitude …” Want to know more about Radical KM? A number of short and informative materials have been curated into a YouTube playlist by Barnes.

Barnes suggests two ways to implement Radical KM and to foster creativity:

• Small scale with an individual / team approach; initiating small acts of creativity. Short “icebreaker” sessions such as a drawing activity, building a sculpture from items found on your desk, doing a guided meditation, etc. Icebreakers can be used to “get people centred on the purpose of the meeting, and to get them out of their comfort zones and thinking differently.”
• Larger scale – the “studio approach” which “involves larger, longer creative interventions and takes more planning and support from the organisation”. It appears to revolve around an appropriately named space and service for creativity, supported by facilitators.

 

My interest was piqued here because Barnes cites a case study from Danish government where a creativity space and service were used to help resolve problems “that would not have been solved in any other way.” The studio and facilitation service broke through organisational silos and internal politics, enabling effective knowledge sharing and problem solving. (Meisek & Barry (2016) “Organisational studios: enabling innovation” in: Artistic interventions in organisations: research, theory and practice, Skoldberg, Woodilla & Antal. London, Routledge).

 

So, this got me wondering … Have other GKIM practitioners experienced using icebreaker techniques to inject and encourage creative thought processes into smaller-scale projects, meetings or routine work? How effective was this, what did you do, would you use these techniques again? Pre-pandemic in my organisation we certainly adopted a studio approach to enabling creativity, but I do not think this service continues now. Interestingly our internal learning platform also houses very little about encouraging or re-learning creativity. Have you had experiences with studio approaches in government or government agency contexts? How successful were these, and do they continue to be provided? Has post-pandemic hybrid working and new IT collaboration channels (e.g. MS Teams, Office 365) transformed studio approaches to the online environment? With gradual return to on-site working are new physical collaboration spaces being crafted in our offices? Is Radical KM seemingly too controversial for UK government contexts, but has it taken root under other names and guises?

GIG welcomes your thoughts and experiences! Perhaps you can answer some these questions, or share your own experiences in a blog posting or GIG webinar? We would be delighted to hear from you! Secretary.gig@cilip.org.uk