The Key to a Successful Share Fair: Getting the Right People in the Room
Jim Collins’ book on management, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap…And Others Don’t, emphasizes the importance of hiring the right people. He discusses the choice many managers face when starting a company: hire people who already have the skills you want or identify people who have the potential to acquire those skills. Francesca Gino and Bradley Staats echo this contrast in their Harvard Business Review article “Why Organizations Don’t Learn”:
When making hiring and promotion decisions, leaders often put too much emphasis on performance and not enough on the potential to learn.
Learning potential is also critical to developing a knowledge-sharing culture and something I’ve been thinking about since I began work with three intergovernmental organizations operating in East, Central, and Southern Africa as part of a Knowledge for Health field project. As part of this work, my colleague, Willow Gerber, and I designed and implemented a Regional Knowledge Management Share Fair, to build local knowledge management (KM) capacity and leadership and grow the network of KM practitioners in East, Central, and Southern Africa.
A Share Fair is a proven technique for catalyzing knowledge sharing and learning. It uses face-to-face participatory techniques to engage a group in conversation around implementation methods that have been effective in their work. Local knowledge and application are highlighted and the conversation involves the engagement and collaboration of many as opposed to a select few. The knowledge and information exchanged in this setting is then synthesized and widely shared, thus supporting continuous improvement and learning.
When developing the invite list, Gerber and I acknowledged that the vast majority of public health practitioners don’t have formal knowledge management training; instead, people tend to practice knowledge management intuitively. We decided to invite health professionals at all levels, from assistants to directors, who exemplify a positive attitude towards learning and possess soft skills like the ability to communicate effectively and develop and nurture strong interpersonal relationships.
According to the Consortium of International Agricultural Research Centers, a share fair is a participatory event — usually focused on a single topic or field — that promotes learning from participants’ experiences to improve their work.
In preliminary planning for our April 2016 Share Fair in Arusha, Tanzania, we assembled a healthy list of 30 potential attendees from our own networks. To fill the remaining 70 registration spots, we looked outside our immediate network. We asked our partners — the East, Central, and Southern Africa Health Community; The East Africa Community; and The Lake Victoria Basin Commission — to invite contacts with potential to become knowledge management champions.
Over the course of the next three months, our list grew to as many as 132 and shrunk to 86 as people were added or removed based on their skill set, role, interest level, and our take on the overall mix of attendees.
The Value of Diversity
On April 13, the first day of the Share Fair, we were pleased to be joined by 102 health and development workers that included librarians, data analysts, communication officers, and project directors. While only seven attendees had knowledge management in their job titles, everyone had shown an interest and willingness in helping to develop a knowledge-sharing network. The participants came from South Africa, South Sudan, and 11 countries in between. Fifty-six percent of attendees were male while 44% were female.
During the first day and throughout the second, an important theme emerged: peer-to-peer learning. Not only did we witness participants connecting with one another over tea and coffee and during breakouts; we saw them discussing different network sharing patterns in a group exercise.
The exercise was based on Eva Schiffer’s Network Pattern Exercise and focused on how people share knowledge. The attendees were split into groups of about 30 and asked to discuss a set of 10 network patterns. Each pattern showed a different number of people (represented by circles or nodes) connected in unique ways.
Although Willow and I had been trained by Schiffer in developing custom Net Maps to help people understand and visualize situations in which many different actors influence outcomes, we’d never worked with predefined patterns. We weren’t sure how the exercise would be received and since it was the first participatory activity of the first day, and we knew that it would set the tone for the other break-out sessions.
Initially we had some difficulty explaining the process since not everyone identified with the organizational categories we asked them to divide by and I was a little worried that we’d be off to a rocky start. However, what happened next showed me that we had succeeded in getting the right people in the room. The attendees in the group I was working with instinctively divided themselves into smaller units of three and dove into discussion about which patterns they used in their work and how the structures could be improved.
There was a diversity of thought about the value of each pattern, as no one pattern was a good fit for every context or knowledge sharing need. Among the patterns discussed, a few stood out to the attendees. The Boss is the Boss pattern elicited discussion about merits and demerits of traditional hierarchies, while Everybody Holding Hands was seen as one of the most desired structures.
In criticism of Everybody Holding Hands, one attendee pointed out that not everyone needs to know everything, and often times, people don’t want to know everything. For example, a research team does not need to know all the work that a program team is engaged with, they just want the parts that are relevant to their work. Knowledge overload poses a serious challenge for many professionals, and sharing knowledge based on the audience’s need can help combat this challenge. Furthermore, resources — both time and money — are often limited, so strategically choosing what knowledge to share, and how, is a budget imperative.
Another attendee held up the Celebrating Diversity card, noted the many different colors of the circles, and compared it to other structures which were all one color. According to Schiffer, the different colors represent different characteristics which might include people from different organizations or have distinct philosophies. This person spoke to the value that interdisciplinary teams provide in creating efficiency and driving innovation.
Harnessing Networks to Reach the Right People
I realize now that Willow and I used the Celebrating Diversity structure to develop the attendee list for our Share Fair. Our reliance on second- and third-degree connections brought the right people to the Share Fair. Getting the right people in the room was a critical first step in developing a regional knowledge network composed of people who seek and provide knowledge freely and as needed. We hope this knowledge network will continue to blossom in East, Central, and Southern Africa.
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The Exchange is a K4Health publication. The Knowledge for Health (K4Health) Project is supported by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) Office of Population and Reproductive Health, Bureau for Global Health, under Cooperative Agreement #AID-OAA-A-13–00068 with the Johns Hopkins University.
The contents are the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of USAID or the U.S. Government.
