Knowledge Management in a time of crisis, lessons learned from COVID-19

On the 19th May, CILIP is holding a one day conference event looking at how Knowledge Management has helped large organisations in the public and private sectors deal with the disruption of COVID-19. This article explores the role of KM in a time of crisis and how harnessing knowledge can help any organisation or community to be more resilient in future.

People who work in emergency preparedness and disaster recovery around the globe often speak of the three ‘phases’ of any crisis - the event itself, the impact of the event and the gradual process of recovery.

In the case of COVID-19, the ‘event’ is still unfolding. It has disrupted every aspect of our daily lives, our society and our economy. It is too early to tell what the longer-term impacts will be, but it is clear that our ability to harness, share and make effective use of knowledge will be a decisive factor, not only in how we deal with the initial shock but also how effectively and confidently we are able to think about the future.

Be prepared

How quickly a Government can identify that a pandemic is underway and how decisively it responds in the initial days and weeks has a dramatic impact on its impact on a civilian population. The speed of response depends to a significant extent on the ‘pandemic preparedness’ work which ought to have been undertaken long before the current pandemic took hold.

The first known case of the novel coronavirus was reported as a ‘pneumonia of unknown cause’ to the World Health Organisation on the 31st December 2019. By the 30th January, it had been declared a ‘Public Health Emergency of International Concern’. Now, at the start of May, there are more than 4m documented cases worldwide and the directly-attributable toll stands at nearly 300,000 lives lost.

Governments, public health officials and emergency services had already learned from previous experiences such as the SARS outbreak in 2002–04 of the need for an ongoing process of pandemic planning and preparedness. The ‘standard planning’ model involves 5 stages in a continuous cycle:

• Strategic planning
• Operational planning
• Exercises and reviews
• Implementation
• Evaluation

This cycle will be all-too-familiar to knowledge management professionals, involving iterative learning, socialising and developing shared knowledge, reflecting and improving the overall capability of the system. While it is presented as an abstract model, in reality the effectiveness of any nation’s ‘pandemic preparedness’ is about the people involved and how effectively they can harness and share knowledge.

“The world is ill‐prepared to respond to a severe influenza pandemic or to any similarly global, sustained and threatening public‐health emergency.”

- World Health Organisation (WHO), 2011

It is now widely acknowledged that many of the key recommendations of Exercise Cygnus — the 2016 cross-Government pandemic preparedness exercise — went unheeded. The exercise showed that a pandemic like COVID-19 could easily overwhelm available capacity in the NHS, with dramatic results for the civilian population. Tragically, the knowledge that was generated through this exercise was not translated into Government policy or action - ultimately at the cost of human lives.

Not that the UK is alone in this. Also in 2011, the WHO published its view that “The world is ill‐prepared to respond to a severe influenza pandemic or to any similarly global, sustained and threatening public‐health emergency.”

Of course, hindsight is a wonderful thing, but it is likely that the future assessment of how the UK responded to COVID-19 will focus on how the knowledge from such exercises can more effectively be used to drive pandemic preparedness.

Three essential fields of knowledge

The 2011 Government Pandemic Preparedness Strategy highlights three definitive elements which determine the impact of a pandemic on society and the economy:

• The characteristics of the virus itself
• The capacity and preparedness of the healthcare system
• The attitude and behaviour of the public

Each of these three ‘controls’ depends in a fundamental way on the ability of organisations, Government and public health agencies to create, capture, share and act on knowledge in a timely way.

Getting to know COVID-19

When reports of the novel coronavirus first emerged, it was an unknown. Still now, after several months and millions of reported cases, there are key things we do not know about the virus. While data can track the impact, such as the appalling disparity in COVID-19 related mortality between BAME and non-BAME people, it tells us relatively little about why the virus behaves as it does.

These insights can be key. There are many potential factors which contribute to the incidence of mortality among BAME people, but without being able to share knowledge, data and analysis between public health authorities in different countries, the data cannot be crystallised into shared knowledge, which in turn prevents the development of effective strategies to mitigate the risks.

This is why much of the global response to COVID-19 has focused on sharing knowledge between nations - and particularly between nations where the impact of the virus is moving at different speeds or developing differently.

The Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network, a network of 260 technical and research institutions worldwide, has played a key role in facilitating this global knowledge-sharing effort. Their Knowledge Hub has acted as a global clearing-house for knowledge and insight about the virus itself and the impact of different response strategies around the world.

Mobilising Knowledge for Healthcare

We now know that there have been periods during which the UK’s healthcare infrastructure has been at serious risk of being overwhelmed by COVID-19.

That the NHS has been able to absorb the impact of the pandemic is due to a significant extent to the work that has been going on for decades to mobilise knowledge at every level of the healthcare system. As a result, the two arms-length bodies involved - Public Health England and Health Education England - have been able to scale up knowledge services in a very short space of time to meet the massive and growing demand for timely and accurate understanding of the development of the virus.

The NHS requires proactive knowledge services as business-critical instruments of informed decision-making.

NHS Knowledge for Healthcare Policy (2019)

Building on the existing Knowledge for Healthcare programme, NHS Health Education England has been able to scale up the distribution of knowledge to frontline NHS workers and clinical staff remarkably effectively. Early in the emerging public health emergency, they made their Coronavirus training resources available under an open access license - as a result of which they have been accessed more than 950,000 times by health and social care professionals.

This, then, must be a key lesson from COVID-19, and indeed from SARS, influenza and the many other pandemics throughout human history - that the impact of the pandemic is governed as much by the preparation and investment in knowledge, human capital and infrastructure between pandemics as it is by how we respond when a new one is underway.

It is no accident that the NHS ability to harness knowledge to help manage the crisis follows on from a longstanding commitment to building KM capacity across the healthcare system.

Tragically, it seems that the lack of a similar focus on situational knowledge and capacity-building in the social care system may have contributed to the spiralling mortality rates seen in care homes - an issue that seems not to have been taken into account in the Government’s initial contingency planning.

An informed public

The ‘behavioural response’ of the public - essentially, what they know about the pandemic, how seriously they take it and how effectively they engage with preventive measures like hand-washing and social distancing can define not only the infection rate, but how much pressure is placed on the nation’s healthcare infrastructure.

This creates a huge Knowledge Management challenge for the Government and public health agencies. How do you take a complex and emergent public health crisis and resolve it down into simple knowledge that people can incorporate into their daily behaviours?

At the same time, how do you take ‘local knowledge’ - the kind of tacit community-based knowledge and understanding that drives social behaviours, and harness it to the regional and national pandemic response? One of the insights from COVID-19 is that understanding and awareness of ‘local hotspots’ is key to targeting interventions such as ‘track and trace’ and testing of potential cases.

This has formed a primary focus of the Government’s communications campaign around COVID-19. Ensuring that the public not only knows what they should be doing, but why - the underlying modelling and rationale that has driven the Government’s efforts to shape public behaviours to limit the spread of the virus.

Organisational adaptability & resilience

Alongside the response to the virus itself, the social and economic disruption caused by COVID-19 has tested the resilience of every type of organisation in all industry sectors.

In the early days of the pandemic, when Government guidance escalated from ‘wash your hands’ to ‘social distancing’ to an all-out lockdown for all but key workers, organisations had to scramble quickly to transition their work and their workforce to online delivery.

This has been an immense challenge. Industries like manufacturing and construction have had to learn rapidly how to sustain minimal operations without putting their workers at serious risk. Leisure, hospitality and retail - industries that are often highly seasonal, operate on razor-thin margins and depend on a regular throughput of cash - have had to furlough staff and to try and hang on with much-needed Government support.

It remains to be seen how COVID-19 will impact on knowledge-intensive businesses such as consultancies, training providers or professional services firms. In theory, these ought to be more amenable to the transition to remote and virtual working, although in practice their success is often highly contingent on the overall health of the economy.

But taking a workforce - with all of its behaviours and habits, its processes and rituals - and translating it into an online space has served to highlight the central role of Knowledge Management in our organisations. We have learnt rapidly that while videoconferencing platforms and email support the rudiments of communication, they can be a poor way to build trust and collaboration, strike new ground or create new relationships.

It has been notable that alongside ‘remote working’, many organisations have turned to strategies which bear more than a striking resemblance to some of the core techniques of Knowledge Management. They have created ‘tea breaks’ and ‘coffee mornings’, informal chats and even dinner parties on Zoom - all in an effort to sustain the very human element that makes up much of our daily work.

Knowledge Management teams in large enterprises have mobilised quickly to help their organisations make best use of these tools. They have been working to help with the deployment of remote working and collaboration tools, to train colleagues in using KM platforms and to support business continuity efforts. On a basic level, KM has an incredibly important role to play in ensuring that the workforce is informed and connected throughout a period of considerable disruption to their normal working practices.

One of the key discussions, as the Nation’s businesses look to get back on their feet and recover their services, is that we don’t want to return to the ‘old normal’. We must instead look ahead to a ‘new normal’ which takes the best of what we had before and blends it with the new insights and behaviours that we have all adopted during COVID-19.

Although many would not necessarily recognise it as such (one of the perennial challenges for KM practitioners) COVID-19 has forced every type of enterprise to explore new and creative approaches to Knowledge Management.

The reality, ultimately, is that crises like this will happen again. When they do, it will be our ability to harness knowledge, to manage and share it and to understand its underlying dynamics, that will define how well our companies and organisations will cope.

Informed & authentic leadership

Where COVID-19 has presented our organisations with real challenges in leveraging and sharing knowledge, it has also placed new kinds of demands on their leaders.

C-suite executives, decision-makers and leaders have found themselves having to assimilate a complex and changing body of knowledge, to internalise it and translate it into informed decisions which are likely to have long-term implications for their organisations.

With a workforce that is in many cases either working remotely or on furlough, leaders have had to find a way to become not just processors of information or points of decision-making, but capable of inspiring confidence and providing assurance to their organisations.

In so doing, there has been a marked trend towards ‘authentic’ leadership. With none of the usual trappings of power or organisational status, leaders have found themselves staring into their webcams and into the very real lives and concerns of the people they work with.

Again, many have found themselves turning to the tools and techniques of Knowledge Management - creating informal connections, encouraging conversation and dialogue, asking open-ended questions - in order to build a more human sense of purpose and optimism for their organisations.

The hope is that, when businesses return to their offices, or colleagues return from furlough, and we start to look ahead to building our ‘new normal’, this experience will have created a new understanding among senior leaders of the very human nature of their role, and how Knowledge Management can help them deliver it.

Keeping the nation’s infrastructure running

Alongside the disruptions to society and businesses, a key feature of COVID-19 is that the essential infrastructure of our daily lives has kept running. The lights have stayed on, post delivered, trains and buses have kept to their (reduced) timetable. While the heroism of frontline NHS workers has rightly been lauded, and the supermarkets have rightly been congratulated on keeping the aisles stocked and the nation fed, there has perhaps been less focus on the refuse collectors, the postmen and women, the power station safety officers.

Our transport, energy and service infrastructure has been undergoing a quiet revolution for much of the previous decade. Following hot on the heels of the ’digital’ revolution has been a revolution every bit as significant in the way they manage and use organisational knowledge.

It is this transformation - the ability for a rail network to ‘know what it knows’ and to understand better how to harness the ingenuity, creativity and experience of its people - that has arguably enabled infrastructure and service providers to adapt to the demands of COVID-19.

Fields such as Waste Management, for example, a topic on which we all depend but very few understand, are increasingly being transformed through the adoption of formal KM techniques which operate both at a company-wide strategic level (through a strategic focus on knowledge and learning) and by developing an environment of creation, co-sharing and application of knowledge.

As in healthcare, the key insight here is that organisations which understand and value their knowledge and human capital and which invest in building their underlying culture and connections are essentially more adaptive and resilient to disruptions like COVID-19 and arguably better-able to bounce back when the pandemic subsides.

Looking to the future

KM has long fought to articulate its identity and value alongside Digital Transformation and Information Management. KM practitioners often find themselves as lone pioneers in organisations that don’t have a well-defined idea of the value and importance of their knowledge capital. The value of KM, once articulated, needs to be constantly refreshed in the minds of senior leaders and decision-makers.

We are still in the ‘event’ phase of the crisis that is COVID-19, and Knowledge Management has already shown its value in helping our society and our economy adapt to its strange new circumstances. We have learnt that an effective defence against an emerging pandemic starts long before the pandemic itself - with strategic investment in our knowledge systems and processes.

As we transition into the ‘impact’ and ‘recovery’ phases of this public health emergency, it is becoming clear that KM has a central role to play in defining how quickly and how completely we recover. It will shape how our organisations regroup, how they absorb the long-term economic impact and how the pivot to identify new opportunities in our transformed world.

But beyond this, we might hope that the experience of COVID-19, with all of its very human tragedy, will accelerate the evolution of our organisations towards a richer understanding of what it means to create, manage and share knowledge. That far from being an abstract or technical discipline, KM is the way we create enterprises that are more human, more agile, more adaptive and more resilient.

To explore these themes and to share your experiences of how KM has informed your organisation’s response to COVID-19, register now for the CILIP online conference KM in a time of Crisis - Lessons learned from COVID-19, which takes place on the 19th May, 10.00–15.00.

Discounts are available for NHS and public sector workers.