itSMF Bulletin November 2017 Bulletin - November 2017 | Page 5

You can read more at the Wikipedia link about how
the tool works in a personal development setting,
but it’s also been built on as a workshopping tool for
uncovering corporate and project risks. Here’s Dave
Gray’s step-by-step adaptation called, The Blind
Side.
It struck me that the Johari Window is a solid basis
for a map to guide leaders on selecting knowledge
management practices to contribute to an wholistic
knowledge sharing strategy. Taking the quadrants as
shown in the above image, I’ve described them each
in the context of organisational knowledge.
an employee level, while industry conferences and
competitor analysis can provide insights at the
organisational level.
Reveal
The Reveal quadrant relates to the unknown-
knowns. Luft and Ingham described this region of
awareness as the façade—it is where an individual
knows things about themselves that they keep
hidden from others. In a corporate sense, this is
our tacit knowledge. Tacit knowledge is that
which is constantly in use but remains unarticulat-
ed (and unwritten) until someone happens to ask
the right question. It’s what happens when we
become unconsciously competent at something.
Discover
Leverage
The Leverage quadrant represents our known-
knowns. We know we know these things and now
we look to practices and tools that help us put that
knowledge into operation. Process integration is
crucial here. It’s no good collecting lessons learned,
for example, if we don’t then interact with them
routinely to help us to make better decisions.
Growth
The Growth quadrant are our known-unknowns. We
know there are things we don’t know within our
domain, so we actively seek to expand our
understanding and depth of knowledge. Learning
and Development programs sit in this quadrant on
5 itSMF Bulletin—November 2017
The Discover quadrant is where we can work to
mitigate risk within our organisation. Our un-
known-unknowns are where the potholes lay—
budget blowouts, unexpected project failures.
Deliberate exploration is what takes place here.
NASA conducts some of the riskiest activities both
on and off Earth, and through necessity, have a
rigorous knowledge management program. See
page 15 of this paper for what goes into their Risk
Mitigation Plan. For anyone else, noting the steps
that might get you to imagined worst-possible
outcomes of a project—a process called back-
casting—can provide useful insights that can be
addressed in the planning stages.
When we expand our organisational knowledge
through Growth, Reveal, and Discover practices, it
is ideal to find ways to improve our practices so
that new knowledge can enter the Leverage
quadrant. Continuous improvement of the design
and functioning of our products and services is
another way to leverage the knowledge we
uncover.
If I take the processes I’ve mentioned, and then
add a few more examples, we begin to get a map
that gives us guidance on how we can apply
practices in a more strategic way.