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My Best Mistake: Mike Lipka’s “Knowledge Now or Later”

WPA work safety poster from the Library of Congress.

Image Credit: Library of Congress

Before I came to work for NASA, I worked as a contractor for the Air Force. My job was to develop and deploy a knowledge management system called “Knowledge Now.”

“Knowledge Now” would support online communities and be a mechanism for collaboration and sharing information. My mistake was to assume that I didn’t need to do specific work to get buy-in and participation from the people who were supposed to use the system. After all, I thought, the military is hierarchical. There is a chain of command, and people have to follow orders. If they were told to use “Knowledge Now,” they would.

Or so I thought.

It took less than three months to realize it wasn’t happening. There are various ways of not complying, and the Air Force was not as different from other organizations as I had imagined. So I learned—or learned again—what many people who do knowledge management learn from experience: just giving people a system and expecting them to use it is wishful thinking. It’s not going to happen that way. The hard work of engaging and winning over potential users is at least as important and demanding as designing and building a system for them.

So I worked to develop an implementation plan for that Air Force initiative. I held two-day workshops to discuss knowledge gaps the system could help fill, to define community roles and responsibilities, and to explain knowledge-mapping processes. The most important element I had neglected until then was the value proposition: convincing people that the benefits they would get out of the system would outweigh the effort they put into it. It was essential to keep that message simple, limiting it to two or three critical benefits.

The implementation plan and workshop made an immediate difference. During my time with the Air Force, the “Knowledge Now” community of practice tool gained over 100,000 users globally across all branches of the military.

The lesson of that Air Force experience was fresh in my mind when I came to work at NASA in 2011. And it guided me as I developed a knowledge-sharing program for Office of Safety and Mission Assurance (OSMA) called the Safety and Health Learning Alliance. This program focuses on sharing experiences in Safety and Mission Assurance (SMA) organizations across U.S. agencies, military, and academia in a virtual environment. Rather than simply scheduling events and expecting people to show up and participate, I spent a lot of time speaking to SMA leadership and personnel from other agencies, such as the Department of Defense, to ensure I was providing useful and informative sessions. Those early efforts have paid off. The events typically attract about 80 participants, who rate them highly. The rocky start to my Air Force initiative was painful, but it was a valuable lesson that helped spur my current knowledge-sharing effort and will continue to influence me throughout my career.

Mike Lipka is responsible for the design and implementation of the Knowledge Management program for the NASA Safety Center and Safety & Mission Assurance community.

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