Transcript: 

 

Pete Wright:
Let’s ask a simple question. What happens to knowledge in your organization after it solves a problem? For a lot of companies, the answer is nothing. It solves the issue in that very moment, and then quietly disappears. It’s buried in a Slack thread, it’s lost in an inbox, it’s stuck in someone’s head. It’s Homer Simpson backing slowly into a hedge. But what if every solution became a building block? Not a fix, but a foundation.
That’s the idea behind Knowledge Centered Service, or KCS. But KCS isn’t just about documentation, it’s about culture. It’s about teaching teams to share what they know as they go, and building systems that support, not slow collaboration. And that’s what we’re talking about today with Lana Kosnik, a certified KCS v6 trainer and consultant, who is passionate about helping organizations turn knowledge into one of their most valuable assets. We’re going to talk culture, we’re going to talk coaching, we’re going to talk AI, of course, and all the other tools that make it stick, including RightAnswers, a KCS-verified platform that’s changing the way teams work, and learn together. I’m Pete Wright, and this is Connected Knowledge. Lana, oh, my friend, Lana. Welcome back to the show.

Lana Kosnik:
So nice to see you. Thank you.

Pete Wright:
Oh, so good to see you too. We’re going to start with a little bit of a refresher, if we may.

Lana Kosnik:
Okay. Of course.

Pete Wright:
And now… The last time you were here, you were brand new, in a very new role related to your KCS coaching. That was super fun, and now you’re a seasoned expert. You’re a pro. And so, I’d like to talk about what KCS is, and why it matters right now.

Lana Kosnik:
Love it. Yeah, we’ll get right to it. KCS stands for Knowledge Centered Service, and it is a methodology, so a set of practices, core concepts, and principles that show us how to incorporate the reuse, improvement, and creation, if it doesn’t exist, of knowledge into our day-to-day work, so that we’re not adding more time, and then we can all gain the benefits from having that collective experience of knowledge captured, and also being reused, and available to customers. So, super helpful for trying to build that self-service space, and empowering your audience to be able to help themselves. So, that’s the big one.

Pete Wright:
Yeah, I feel like I know the answer to this next question, which is broadly, why do you think KCS is gaining traction today? But then, how easy is it to follow up with, good Lord, organizations are not getting smaller, and more lean, and service organizations are not having an easier day keeping up with their requests. So, let’s talk a little bit about KCS related to service and scalability.

Lana Kosnik:
Yeah.

Pete Wright:
How are you seeing things grow?

Lana Kosnik:
Definitely when it comes to service and scalability, KCS is the answer to the problem. You have a pain point of, how do we work with teams that are all in different time zones, and geographies, and needs, and how do we get them… How do we leverage the knowledge that each of them are working together, when we’re working kind of asynchronously? We’re working as a unit, but at different times in the world. Right?

Pete Wright:
Right, right.

Lana Kosnik:
So, KCS is wonderful, because you can put it all into a knowledge base, and then I can leverage that information. But in addition to just being able to see an article that somebody in Japan writes, I can also review it, and add my own information to it if I need to improve it. So, it always makes sure that our knowledge that’s available to the organization is always the most complete, and the most accurate. So, that really helps when we’re dealing with scalability, just generally, having complete accurate information is what we’re always going for, right?

Pete Wright:
Yeah. Right. Right. So then, let’s talk about getting it right, and I think this comes in the form of quality control, and continuous learning on behalf of our teams, and I want to talk about culture in a bit, because that’s huge. But first, let’s talk about this double loop process. What is the idea of the double loop, and why is it so essential to KCS?

Lana Kosnik:
Wonderful. I love it. So, when I think of the KCS practices, we have eight different practices, and they’re organized into two loops, our solve, and evolve loop. And so we have two loops going all the time. Our solve loop is capture, structure, reuse, improve, and that’s really the tasks that our knowledge workers are doing every day to make sure that they’re getting the information, they’re improving information, and they’re making sure that they’re putting it in a way that’s easy to find and use.

Pete Wright:
But we’re still talking about ingest at this point, right? We’re talking about, let’s say I’m your knowledge worker, and I’m in that first loop, right? The knowledge we’re talking about is stuff that I am participating in the creation of at this stage, right?

Lana Kosnik:
Yes.

Pete Wright:
Okay. All right. Good.

Lana Kosnik:
In the creation and maintenance of, exactly.

Pete Wright:
See, now this is why I need you to tell me about evolve, because I would put maintenance in evolve. So why are they different?

Lana Kosnik:
They are different. So, when I say maintenance, I mean as a knowledge worker, you’re responsible for the quality, and accuracy of anything that you interact with. So, that’s different maybe than a more traditional knowledge management approach, where I’m a technical writer, I’m in charge of anything that I write, or author. In KCS, you’re in charge, you’re responsible for anything that you interact with.
So, when you are looking at an article to reuse it, to see, “Hey, does this fix my answer, or does this fix my issue?” I want to know two things, so I’m going to review it at that time. A, does it answer the specific question that the customer’s asking? And B, is it up to date? You’re already reviewing it, so at that time, that’s when we make updates. So, we have this concept of flag or fix. So, if we see something, at that time, it’s my responsibility to say something. So when I see it, I will fix it if I can. If I don’t have the access or the time, then I’ll put a flag on it so that someone else can fix it, right? “Hey, the screenshot’s out of date, fix it.” So, that is what I mean by maintenance. So that’s where we’re reviewing, and improving things as we’re doing it. That’s in our first loop.
Our second loop, the evolve loop, that’s really where we’re focusing on is the solve loop going well? So, we have knowledge workers, so people who are doing the day-to-day interactions with our customers. So, then there’s always this concern, can they make customer-facing content? Is that going to be okay? They’re not technical writers. They don’t have this skill set. This makes me nervous as an organization. So, we have the evolve loop there as that kind of balance, the check and the balance there, to make sure that it’s good. With our evolve loop, we’re making sure that we have healthy content, that we have an integrated process, we have a way to assess how they’re doing with their performance, and what measurements we want to use for success. And really, we want to change how we measure things, and that’s a big conversation, as well as understanding the role of leadership, and communication in a sustained KCS environment.

Pete Wright:
Okay. That is very helpful, because what I’m gathering, while there is some work on the content, do we have good content in the evolve Loop? It’s also sort of the knowledge management court of appeals. You’re also addressing the process of how we capture knowledge, and that seems very, very important. Now we get to the culture bomb, right? Culture is the thing that it seems could make, or break the way an organization adapts to KCS, to a KCS approach. So, let’s talk about it. Why does… There’s a saying I was thinking about as I was working through this outline this morning, “If we knew what we knew, we’d be unstoppable,” right? This feels especially true with KCS. So, why is culture so critical?

Lana Kosnik:
I want to start by saying, when you adopt KCS, you are inadvertently kind of shifting the culture, like we are now focusing on what value is. We’re redefining how we look at measurements, how we look at success, how we look at customer experience, and success as well. So, no longer is it just, “Are you happy with this experience? Yes or no?” Five stars, right?

Pete Wright:
On a scale of 10 stars, how likely are you to recommend this experience?

Lana Kosnik:
It’s not… Just that. Right. Right. The customer experience is indirect. So with KCS, we’re trying to find ways to enable customers to be able to help themselves, A, but also provide them with usable, findable, usable self-service content. So, that can be in the form of articles on a self-service space, but it can also be in the form of any kind of chatbot, or push recommendations, or any kind of AI functionality that’s based on what we have in our knowledge base. So, that really helps enable the success. So, changing the way that we think about the role of support. Before, or previously, before KCS, or outside of KCS, you might think of-

Pete Wright:
In the before times.

Lana Kosnik:
In the before times, yes. We can think of how we think of value as all looked at, and measured in this assisted space. It’s all in the transactions. It’s very… Like I can count the numbers, and the KPIs, and I know your talk time, and your hold time, and I know your caseload, and you have to reach these specific KPIs in order to prove that you have value.
And with the KCS approach, we think that the… We recognize that what’s happening in support, if they’re doing KCS, and feeding into this knowledge base, they’re also enabling the self-service success as well. So, we have to count that as part of their value. And ideally, when we have a really successful self-service platform, people will be able to help themselves on known issues. So, the role of support changes to be able to handle more new issues. So, this kind of culture of transactional, get to your numbers, get your numbers fast, fast, fast, is a little… Is going to be shifting to, “Wait a second, let’s solve the issue faster, so that there’s no more tickets for this issue. Let’s get the information, and leverage this reuse, so that our development can fix it, make happier customers.”

Pete Wright:
It seems like there are two things going on here that I want to get your thoughts on. The first one is, we have to change our mindset, in the organization, of the people who are in that, the knowledge management, the creation and maintenance loop, in order to refocus their attention on, how do you put it, quality of the actual knowledge they’re putting in, and maintaining in the system. And the other is, you hit a big one, measurement. How do you change culture around measurement, when there are expectations that we’re going to hit numbers that we know, and can predict, and have seen before, and you’re speaking a language now, I don’t understand. So, how do you make that shift? The best ways to sort of spark that mindset shift?

Lana Kosnik:
Yeah, so that’s why I like to mention the measurements first, because just like you said, how do you do that, if you’re supposed to be reaching these measurements? If we’re supposed to be reaching these metrics and these goals, how do we do both things at one time? And the answer is you don’t. So, leadership really has to be on board with understanding that while we are rolling out KCS, while we’re getting everybody coached up, and understanding, and getting used to this new way of working, those measurements are going to have to change. Those goals are going to have to be a little different.

Pete Wright:
So what do those new reports look like?

Lana Kosnik:
Oh, they’re very different. So, RightAnswers has some really wonderful report functionalities, as well as some dashboards that I would 100% recommend looking into. But, when we’re talking about the different kind of value-based measurements that we’re looking at, we want to think about measurements like we think about the concept of triangulation, right? So, with a GPS for example, they use triangulation, where they use different satellites to get from point A to point B. But you can’t figure out how to get from point A to point B with just the data from one satellite. One number is not going to tell you if they’re doing well or not.
So, we want to try to have five to nine different data points, and it should be a combination of different types of data points. So, that should be like your trends in activities, your business outcomes, or your goals, and then your KCS outcomes. So, those are like your process adherence review, and your content standard checklist scores, which measure how well are you creating articles, and how well are you using this KCS process in your day-to-day work? So you can see we’re going to have a variety of different types of measurements there.

Pete Wright:
Right, right. And so you are measuring both the quality of how well the knowledge is actually solving those problems, and the meta process of how well are you actually creating, and maintaining those pieces? How well are your people adhering to those processes? Okay. So, I know from last time you were here, we talked a lot about the importance of peer coaching, and I want to make sure we review that, because that’s such a huge element in the cultural process, and you are grinning maniacally at this point.

Lana Kosnik:
I am. It’s my favorite thing to talk about.

Pete Wright:
Oh, good. Oh, good.

Lana Kosnik:
I’ll take a talk about coaching literally for two days. I have a two-day workshop for it.

Pete Wright:
Okay.

Lana Kosnik:
So, 16 hours of just coaching. We can go for it.

Pete Wright:
All right.

Lana Kosnik:
But, coaching is so important. It is one of the top three reasons why you see an organization be successful, versus failing at KCS. If you want to be successful, and see sustained results, you 100% need coaching. And we like to focus on peer-to-peer coaching. When I say that, I mean that knowledge workers, who have worked through this KCS process, and have proven that they can create articles on their own, and do the workflow as we’ve taught them to do it, with the tools that we have for them, then they can decide if they’re interested in being a coach, who’s going to help coach their other knowledge workers who are learning about the content standard, and implementing the workflow into their day-to-day life.
So, by having this peer-to-peer coaching, it really shifts the entire culture. It also shifts the way that we on board, especially with new people. This is very helpful. The time to proficiency, it drops so quickly when you have coaching on there, because it’s not just like a canned training. Coaches are able to have one-on-one time, are able to explore objections, and work through them, in addition to identifying how you might learn, and how you might need to approach a topic, versus another person could be very different.
So by having that one-on-one attention, and having the expertise of someone who’s been through it, without the level of concern about punishment, or reward of potentially a management level, or a leadership level coming into play, there’s no power dynamics here, because we’re just kind of peer-to-peer with our coaching. So, it’s just a space to learn, and get better at what we’re trying to teach.

Pete Wright:
I like how you bring up time to expertise. I’m curious if you’re looking at anything on the back end. Do you see any connection to overall tenure, how long people are sitting in their positions with the addition of coaching?

Lana Kosnik:
So we’ve seen much greater… So, I can’t tell you exact numbers. Again, like you said, that’s kind of more an HR question.

Pete Wright:
Sure.

Lana Kosnik:
But, I can say that I know that employee satisfaction, and employee retention is tied directly to the peer-to-peer coaching, and to KCS in general. When you have a successful KCS program, you retain your employees longer, it takes less time to get new employees up to speed. And then it also… We see people are getting promoted internally more. Again, they’re growing in their positions, they’re growing in their organizations.
I know from experience both as a coach, as a lead coach, coaching coaches, all that thing, people also find a lot of personal satisfaction from coaching. So, in addition to the extra job satisfaction of things running smoother, I can break up my day now. I have time allocated on my calendar, and I get to talk to somebody one-on-one, and help them through whatever they need help with, in something that I’m good at. This is great, this is wonderful. It really makes a huge difference in your day to day. And I can say, again, from experience, that’s what turned me into a KCS diehard. I’m like, “Oh, coach? I love being a coach. I love coaching.” I like being coached. I like the opportunity to talk to people and get to know people, and again, just kind of get them to the point where they can help themselves.

Pete Wright:
It’s so beautiful, because what you’re doing is you’re coaching confidence. The sooner you get somebody to a state where they’re confident in the material that they’re using to do their jobs, in the KCS space, the sooner they’re going to be confident enough to contribute meaningfully to the organization. And if you shorten that ramp, that runway, that’s huge. That’s huge for your longevity of the employee. It’s just a beautiful thing.
So, now we have to talk about some of the hard stuff. How do… Invariably, making these sorts of changes is going to lead to some inevitable bumps along the way. How do you coach through changes in tools, changes in processes, changes to leadership that… In order to get to buy-in? How do you manage the inevitable process crisis?

Lana Kosnik:
This is kind of where I think KCS soars above other types of methodologies, and that’s because they are focusing very deeply on change management. So, how do we get people to handle this big, scary change? So, there are practices, and tools, and skills that we can employ to do that, but as far… It’s best to kind of break it down by audience, or stakeholder, depending on what you want to call it. So, if you’re talking about knowledge workers, how do we get them comfortable, or handle the rockiness of change?
What’s really important going into it is that we set ourselves up for success. And what I mean by that is, we have some knowledge workers’ feedback on the workflow, and on the content standard, so that they’re telling us, “Yes, we can do this.” Because management, leadership, they tend to over-engineer these things, and then it gets so complicated we can’t do it. So first of all, can we do it? Yes. Great. Let’s make sure our tools support that. That’s where RightAnswers comes in so handy, is making sure that we have a knowledge management tool as part of our tool stack that supports, and aligns with the KCS practices. If our tools do not support the practices, we can’t move forward.
So, we have our tools, we have our workflow, and our content standard. We have it all planned really nicely. The next thing we want to do is kind of identify those, we call them adoption allies, but really what we’re trying to see is, who is positive about change? This can be done with surveys, but who’s excited about change? Who is even feeling a little inkling towards even ambivalent towards change? We want to start with the positive people, because as we kind of work out the kinks, the rest will follow. It’s all good. And we also want to know, who are our highly negative folks, who are very resistant to change, who don’t want to deal with this, who are upset about anything new? And those people-

Pete Wright:
“I knew how to do my job yesterday, now I don’t.”

Lana Kosnik:
Right. “Now I don’t.”

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Lana Kosnik:
“Thanks for ruining everything.”

Pete Wright:
Yes.

Lana Kosnik:
Right. So, what’s important is that we notice, we identify who those people are, and make sure that we put them through coaching last. So, we’re going to coach, and adopt this in waves, meaning that we’re not going to do just one big push, because that’s when we see that we’re not able to learn from anything, people get a little overwhelmed. We don’t have enough coaches at the beginning to handle that big level of effort.
So, if we make it into manageable spaces, have waves of people adopting, that’s how we handle this implementation. And then we also want to put the negative folks at the very end, just to make sure that… Because usually, those people end up being my fiercest allies. They will completely go to the mat for me, no questions asked, as long as I get them at the right time. Because if I get them, if I put them through coaching last, I can give them metrics on the people who went first, and their success stories. They just need to know that it’s not a waste of their time.

Pete Wright:
Sure. Coach them through with data.

Lana Kosnik:
Right.

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Lana Kosnik:
Most of the time, that’s usually how we handle resistant folks, or negative folks. And it’s not that they are bad employees, or bad people, that’s just they just need a different approach. And so, making sure that we approach them in the right way, at the right time, will ensure best results.

Pete Wright:
That’s so smart. I’ve been through trainings in both ways, and generally, the people who say, “We’re going to fight hard for the people who aren’t supporters of our initiative, we got to get them first. If we can get them on board, we’ll get everybody on board.” But, I think you’re exactly… It just sounds really better to actually use the data of your own successes to help those people find alignment, and encourage their participation, rather than to work so hard as a trainer, just to overcome the resistance.

Lana Kosnik:
Right. And usually, a lot of times, we want to be mindful of their influence too, because if we have a high negative, high influence person, and we don’t get them on our side right away, because we decided to start with them, they’re going to tell everyone that they know, and they know a lot of people. And now they’re going to say, “Don’t do this. It’s stupid. Don’t engage, don’t do the coaching sessions, don’t.”

Pete Wright:
Yeah. Right.

Lana Kosnik:
As opposed to if I flip that, and just get them at the end, they still have a high influence, and they’re going to tell everybody how great it is, and how they’ve come up with this new thing. They can take the credit. I don’t care.

Pete Wright:
For sure.

Lana Kosnik:
Right?

Pete Wright:
Outstanding. Well, this leads us to… Speaking of inevitable questions, where does AI fit into the KCS picture? And specifically, what is the role in supporting, not replacing all of the human-driven knowledge that we’re talking about?

Lana Kosnik:
Right. So, with AI functionality right now, there’s still the conversation of human in the loop, and there’s still the conversation, kind of big picture, industry-wide, about ensuring that we use it as a tool. Let’s use it as a tool to be efficient. There’s definitely parts within KCS that we can automate. So, let’s identify what can we automate, automate it, make it easier, make it easier to create an article from a ticket with a button. No problem. RightAnswers has some really great AI functionality where you can click a button, and it’ll write it to your structure. Perfect. Use that.
But we’re also going to want to coach our folks on how to use those AI tools. So, what does our tool stack look like? What does our workflow look like? So, it might change based on the AI functionality, like instead of having to physically type it out, or to physically copy and paste, I might just be clicking a button. But I still have to make sure that this makes sense, that it’s in the customer context, that the AI didn’t do any kind of odd hallucinations. These are things that the scope of work… We still have enough work to where we need people, because there’s a lot of new issues that come up. AI is great for helping with known issues, but that’s kind of the same thing as a knowledge base. Right? We have known issues that people can help themselves with. Do they always? No. Sometimes people want to talk to a person, we get it, that’s okay. But, there’s constantly new issues that we need to be working with.
So, the role of support will shift a little bit, right? They’re going to focus more on handling new, more complex issues. So, their ticket count might go down, but they’re going to be spending more time on solving new problems, instead of regurgitating known issues all the time. Also, with kind of KCS and AI, AI needs a clean data pool. We’ve found out over the past couple years that there’s no AI button, generally. There’s nothing where you can just say, “I have AI,” click, and now everything’s ready to go.

Pete Wright:
Right. Make better. Right.

Lana Kosnik:
Make better. Everything works. No problems. I don’t have to tune it, or anything. No. We all know that this is… Getting AI to do what we want, when we want it, does take a lot of work before we start introducing it to interproduction. And a big part of AI working is that we’re training it on the right things. So, with KCS, we have this whole methodology in place for how to capture structure we use, and improve knowledge within our workflow. We also have this evolve loop there, to make sure that whatever’s being created is of quality. We have our checks to make sure that we’re not having a bunch of, again, hallucinations out in our knowledge base. But with that data pool, that’s what’s training our AIs, too. So, we need our humans to be making content the way that it should be made, in order to then train the AI to create in the way that we want it to create.

Pete Wright:
Well, what seems to be lovely about that is that within the auspices of KCS, you’re not making new sort of process rules that are specific to AI. You’re still generating content, and humans are still making sure it makes sense, and they’re bringing up new issues. And frankly, spending more time on more complicated things is where we should be spending our time, communicating those to our core audience. So, that makes a lot of sense to me. And it allows us, I think, to come into this conversation less cynical about the limitations of AI, when you focus on it as a tool like that. I think that’s really important.

Lana Kosnik:
I think so too. A lot of people look at it as something scary, or mysterious, and it’s not a genie in a lamp. It is what we make it. It is how we use it. And just like with any tool that we have, we want to make sure that we use it to what fits our environment, and what fits our needs.

Pete Wright:
We have been talking about RightAnswers sort of behind its own back for the majority of our conversation today.

Lana Kosnik:
So mean.

Pete Wright:
RightAnswers is… Was what… I know, right? It was one of the first KCS verified tools, platforms. Can you describe what that means in practice for us?

Lana Kosnik:
Yeah. Sure. So, the Consortium for Service Innovation, it’s a very fancy sounding title, but it’s a think tank of a bunch of member companies, Upland RightAnswers included, and what they do is they are the governing body of KCS. So, they make sure that… They’re the ones who certify trainers, and they also certify and verify products. So, as I mentioned earlier, you need to make sure that your tools can do that KCS process, so your workflow can be done with the tools that you have. And so, you do need some kind of knowledge management tool in there. RightAnswers was the first tool to be verified. So, it’s been there since the beginning. And what verification means is that we’ve gone through a vetting process. So we’ve demonstrated that each one of the eight practices are being supported by the tool. So, we have those eight practices, four in the solve loop, four in the evolve Loop, and all eight practices have functionality that are supported by RightAnswers.

Pete Wright:
Like how much retrofit did they have to do to make RightAnswers a KCS verified tool?

Lana Kosnik:
So, the Consortium for Service Innovation, they’ve been around since 1992. I think they were previously called the KCS Academy, but they’ve been around a long, long time. KCS as a methodology started in ’92. But, with RightAnswers, what I think really kind sets us apart from other knowledge management tools is that we were really… We’ve been built since the beginning to enable the KCS practices, whereas other knowledge management tools are kind of shoving in… And I guess this works. So, with all of our demonstrations, there’s a minimum that you have to meet. So, we way over meet all of those minimums on functionality to support the practices.

Pete Wright:
Okay.

Lana Kosnik:
Yeah. So, the big change, I think, or the big difference is that we’ve been… RightAnswers has been developing itself to enable KCS from the beginning, and it just keeps digging deeper, and deeper into the KCS methodology, to make sure that it’s as pristine as possible for people.

Pete Wright:
Okay. So, let’s talk stats, right? We’ve got both stats in terms of how… Just how well-aligned RightAnswers is with KCS methodology, and what are some of the impacts you’re seeing across customers?

Lana Kosnik:
When I was talking about the different KCS processes, there’s so many, and we’ve identified that RightAnswers supports 70 KCS processes.

Pete Wright:
That’s so many.

Lana Kosnik:
Seven zero.

Pete Wright:
So many more than you talked about.

Lana Kosnik:
So many.

Pete Wright:
I counted like nine.

Lana Kosnik:
Yeah, right, because there’s a lot of little details in there that you wouldn’t really get into the nitty-gritty about unless you’re living it all the time. To answer your question, RightAnswers customers have generally seen, when they’re implementing RightAnswers alongside KCS, A 50 to 60% reduction in resolution time. It’s a pretty…

Pete Wright:
It’s pretty significant.

Lana Kosnik:
Okay, It’s pretty significant.

Pete Wright:
Yeah, that’s legit.

Lana Kosnik:
My favorite, 50% case deflection to self-service.

Pete Wright:
That’s another big one.

Lana Kosnik:
Yeah. And then I love [inaudible 00:34:13].

Pete Wright:
Put our humans on the things that make the most sense. That’s perfect.

Lana Kosnik:
Right. Let’s get them to the right information at the right time. And then 30 to 50% increase in that first contact resolution. So, this is where a lot of the efficiencies come into play with KCS, is that you’re seeing… When you’re like, “Oh, it’s more efficient.” What does that mean? It means people can actually solve their problems themselves, so that deflection. It means that when they do need to come in, we’re able to handle it on the first contact, and not the seventh. And we’re also able to reduce that resolution time, because we’re reusing the content that other people in the organization have already done. So, we’re not doing rework as an organization as much as we were previously. Those are all really wonderful things.

Pete Wright:
Wonderful things.

Lana Kosnik:
Wonderful things.

Pete Wright:
Just briefly, as we wrap up… Wonderful things. How does the onboarding process work? What does it look like to say, “All right, we’re going to change everything, and now we’re KCS.”

Lana Kosnik:
Again, there’s no KCS button. So let’s just-

Pete Wright:
Yeah, I was hoping for a button.

Lana Kosnik:
Yeah.

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Lana Kosnik:
We’re all hoping for a button, right? KCS AI.

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Lana Kosnik:
Anything with letters, let’s just really plug that in.

Pete Wright:
Put a button under it.

Lana Kosnik:
Yeah.

Pete Wright:
For sure.

Lana Kosnik:
But generally, it’s best to have at least one KCS champion. We call them KCS champions. So, one person who’s kind of leading your KCS implementation, and having them be certified in the v6 practices. So what I do is I help get people ready for their v6 practices certification exam, get them ready for their certification. So, because it teaches them how to implement KCS realistically into their environment, it also gives them a deep understanding of the practices, and how, and why we do things, and the way that we think about things. So, generally, when we’re talking about a KCS adoption, it’s not a destination, it’s a journey. So, going back to that double loop process, there’s no end to those loops. A lot of times we think of a project, it’s a start, and a beginning, a beginning, and an end. It’s a linear process, and then there’s milestones in between. But with KCS, we have that double loop process, so it continues to go on forever. We’re never done with KCS.

Pete Wright:
This is the new ongoing operations, and we’re all going to change way we live with it.

Lana Kosnik:
This is the new normal. Yeah.

Pete Wright:
Right.

Lana Kosnik:
We need to change the way that we work, and change the way that we’re with each other, and how we determine value in this environment. So, when we say about adopting, I like to make sure that I note that first, that this is a organizational change. That’s why coaching is so helpful in sustaining that change, and that we need to be very mindful that we want some kind of strategic, long-term plan in place, knowing that this is going to be our forever.

Pete Wright:
I want to set expectations for people who are thinking, “Hey, do you know what? Everything you’re saying sounds like us. What’s it going to take? Should we expect… In order to arrive at our new ongoing operations? Are we looking at a sweet 90-day tidy window that we can get everybody trained, and be up and running? Just how disruptive is the change that we’re about to embark upon?

Lana Kosnik:
Well, it depends. So, if we’re talking about changing your tool, your knowledge management tool to RightAnswers, and you’re already in a KCS environment, that we can wrap up in a tidy little package, right? Because that’s not the same conversation as changing the way that we work.

Pete Wright:
Yeah. Very different. Very different.

Lana Kosnik:
And the whole culture. Right? So, if you’re already doing KCS, and you want to change your tool to RightAnswers, then we have a great 90-day plan, and there is a team of people ready to help you, and onboard you, and train you, and provide you with the training, and the migration, and support and everything there. So you’re completely surrounded by professionals that are there to do this job with you, and make sure that you’re doing it in a sustainable way, so that you’re not just like, “Boom,” we change, and then we get lazy.

Pete Wright:
It’s good. It’s good to have a fire team with you. Right? You have this experienced team to say, “We’re going to steer, and coach, and guide, and you will feel confident when we are finished. When we are done with our project, your operation will be from a place of confidence.”

Lana Kosnik:
That is a little tidier. And the actual organizational change of going from no KCS to KCS, it is disruptive at first, but it is worthwhile. And that’s why we have coaches to help with that disruption.

Pete Wright:
I said this last time we talked in last week’s show, that RightAnswers is so cool. It’s just so cool, what it allows you to do, and what it enables your agents to do, and the people who rely on knowledge of the institution to get things done. It’s just very cool, and you got to see it. Do you do demos yourself? If somebody were to write in and say, “I want to see a demo, but I want Lana to do it?”

Lana Kosnik:
I can do demos. I’m really more focused on the workshop, so I do a lot of training, so it’s hard to get me on your schedule sometimes.

Pete Wright:
Yeah. Well, especially when you’re doing these multi-day things.

Lana Kosnik:
Yeah.

Pete Wright:
You’re busy, and definitely sign up for trainings with Lana, because she’s great.

Lana Kosnik:
Yes. Sign up for trainings. Those are really fun.

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Lana Kosnik:
And that’s where I usually suggest people start. That’s why I’d say at least have one person who’s gone through that full, big, 16 hour course with the exam, to make sure that they’re feeling confident before you start a KCS deployment, because then they know how to help you through that. But we have some really wonderful folks at RightAnswers, Alex Baker, and Adam Obrentz, who do demos almost exclusively, in addition to their day-to-day assistance with customers.

Pete Wright:
They are wonderful. We had Adam on last time, and talking about just that. So, the famous Adam Obrentz is available for your demo excursion.

Lana Kosnik:
Yes, the a very famous. Yes.

Pete Wright:
He’s podcast famous. And Lana, podcast famous in trainings. And definitely check out the catalog. I’ve got links to everything in there, so you can check out everything that Lana has been talking about today. It is… I mean, this has been a great conversation, and a reminder that knowledge isn’t just a resource, it’s a relationship. And building a culture around it takes a lot of intention, and patience, and the right tools. That’s what all of this is about.
So, if you are ready to see what KCS could look like in your team, now’s the time to schedule that demo of RightAnswers. The link is in the show notes, and I should say, as I say every time, if you’ve got questions about KCS, or knowledge, cultural, anything else we’ve covered, I want to hear from you. Submit your questions using the form, also in the show notes. You might just hear your name on a future episode. Thank you so much, everybody, for your time and attention. Thank you, Lana, for your time, and wisdom today. Sure appreciate you.

Lana Kosnik:
Thank you, Pete.

Pete Wright:
Thank you everybody. On behalf of Lana Kosnik, I’m Pete Wright, and we’ll see you right back here next time, on Connected Knowledge.