By Ken Wheaton, Pacific Northwest Chapter, Knowledge Management Division

Successful teams in sports have been working together for years to achieve common goals by capitalizing on individual strengths. Team members are often given a role based on strengths and skills. Basketball for example maximizes physical strengths by putting taller players in the center and forward positions. The most skilled ball handlers are put in guard positions. Communications within sports teams are essential, usually direct, clear, factual, quick and without any personal hidden agendas. A team coach provides good leadership through teaching and mentoring thereby helping the team reach their goals and objectives. Team members learn together to develop good communication skills, confidence, acceptance, share goals and objectives, problem solve, make decisions and most importantly learn to trust one another. Trust encourages everyone’s contribution to the common purpose.

In government, education and the private sector, remains of the Industrial Age are still with us. Teams and communication were not important during that period and the assembly line created islands of isolated knowledge (silos). Everyone had very defined task doing the same thing over and over as a part of creating the product. Your strengths didn’t really matter as long as you did your job. In this paradigm you were very replaceable. 

In “future ready” organizations when strengths are maximized within functional teams, full potential can be reached just as in a sports team. Do you really want to spend a lot of effort repairing your weaknesses or being immediately more productive using your strengths?  Other team members with strengths in the areas of your weaknesses will also become immediately more productive. For example, it can be difficult to both lead and facilitate a team. That can be resolved by the team leader having another team member do the facilitation. Also, someone good at details can usually better manage meeting minutes and making meeting arrangements. All teams go through the stages of forming (being nice), storming (challenging ideas and authority), norming (healing) and performing (trust has been built).  Many teams fail at the storming phase because the remains of the Industrial Age have taught us to resist conflict.  

In today’s knowledge economy, teams, especially cross-functional, can help break down these barriers of communication. Location is playing less and less of a role with virtual teams becoming more common with collaborative technologies.

Teams of the future will be more like a “Knowledge Café” where everyone has an equal chance to be heard and no one can be wrong; where every idea is important in reaching a consensus. You have seen this for years in sports teams with their traditional circular huddle to problem solve. To be “future ready,” encourage and be part of cross-functional teams to open up communication, and know your team members’ strengths utilizing them fully to achieve your organization’s goals and objectives.

Ken Wheaton is the 2011 president-elect of the Pacific Northwest Chapter of SLA and the Web Services Librarian for the Alaska State Court System. Ken received his undergraduate degree in Biology/Chemistry from Western Michigan University and his MLIS from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Ken has 18 years of experience in special libraries in government, education and the private sector. His expertise is in change management where he has undertaken some major transformations in both his personal and professional life.

Introduction (Toni Wilson – Chair, SLA CI Division)

We’ve discussed a number of important competitive intelligence concepts and applications during CI Week on the FR365 blog – including the importance and value of analysis and industry-focused practices – all leading to the future readiness of the information professionals responsible for CI tasks and the organizations we serve. Our final post is a fitting wrap-up for the week – focusing on the highest goals of the CI process and its execution.

By Derek L. Johnson

How are you planning to elevate your competitive intelligence game in 2012?

One of the reasons I love fall so much is because it’s a reminder that we need to get our plans in place for the year ahead and get ourselves ready to meet an uncertain future as well-prepared as we can be.

Another reason I love autumn is because it’s football season; and football has important lessons to teach us about competitive intelligence being Future Ready. No football team takes the field without first giving their players the very best preparation before game day. Pre-season training camp focuses players’ attention on the field where they relentlessly drill each position even while strength training in the gym. But effective training also means working together to master the plays necessary to win. Then, throughout the season, preparing together to face each opponent, players unite to study film, keep healthy and stay fit so that, on game day, they can perform at their best.

CI teams are similar to football teams in many ways, particularly the competitive part, but with one critical difference: intelligence managers rarely have their players train together as a team. I hope you’ll help change that by investing in your people as one of the many things you can do today to elevate your game in the year ahead. But you should also be working on mastering your budget cycle, globalizing your perspective, building your internal human network and going beyond competitors.

To help understand how to achieve these goals, we’ve put together a couple of videos we hope you enjoy – part one here and part two here – that we hope encourages you to let your reach exceed your grasp and elevate your intelligence game in 2012. Enjoy!

Derek L. Johnson, CFA is Chief Executive Officer of the competitive intelligence firm Aurora WDC.

by Arik Johnson, Competitive Intelligence Division

At Aurora’s last leadership retreat in October 2010, one of the clients who so generously flew in to help us fine-tune our offerings was sharing how his staff was about to contract dramatically at year-end. This CI (competitive intelligence) director was looking for help identifying ways he was going to replace two key people that were leaving by the end of the year, one by choice, the other by compulsion.

We discussed the specific CI-related activities each of these staff were dedicated to, work such as newsletter preparation and answer-desk support, pre-analytics prep and information acquisition, vendor project management and workforce dissemination. As these two very different position descriptions filled out, I realized that, the work itself had striking similarities with another profession with which I’m becoming familiar these past few years through my association with SLA’s CI Division: Special Librarian, a.k.a., “Info Pro”.

The tasks themselves weren’t as much at issue as the desired outcomes and value these positions were tasked with creating as critical components of the larger CI team. In a nutshell, that amounted to contributing finished, actionable intelligence products that would help build a more holistically savvy workforce and culture of intelligent competitive advantage at a fast-growing, privately-held company where the chief intelligence officer of the company was two steps from the CEO and the rate of change (and uncertainty) continued to grow.

What was my advice?

“You need a librarian,” I said. But I elaborated: not two librarians either; one librarian, a “special librarian” embedded in your CI team, with liaison access to your information center resources to enable you to scale and centralize the research done throughout the rest of the company. Librarians know about all the things I just learned these other two team members do for the company. So, why not consolidate that work in a single individual specially trained for that kind of work. Better yet, there’s an abundance of talent available right now to get this work done.

What’d the client say?

“Hmmm…. You know what I think? I think you’re exactly right.”

Arik Johnson is the founder and chairman of Aurora WDC, where he works with organizations of all kinds to develop their intelligence apparatus to anticipate, monitor, detect and interpret change in their business environment.