Christopher MacCormac of the Asian Development Bank: interview transcript and power point presentation

Last month, Senior Advisor for Knowledge Enterprise at the Asian Development Bank, Chrisopher MacCormac visited DG DEVCO to share his experience of defining the ADB’s new Knowledge Management Directions and Action Plan 2013 -15, which extends across all aspects of institutional management, including Operations, Human Resources, Information and Communication management, as well as IT solutions.

His full interview can be seen in the 'Voices & Views': The Asian Development Bank on Knowledge Management

His powerpoint presentation is attached at the end of this blog.

Here is the transcription of his interview:

C4D:  Why did the Asian Development Bank (ADB) need a new Knowledge Management Directions and Action Plan?

Christopher MacCormac: In Asia, the scale and complexity of development challenges that are emerging are unprecedented, so we have to look at new sources of knowledge to make sure that we are at the highest quality of knowledge provision, and also to think about looking at knowledge that is more focused away from single disciplines, but looking at interdisciplinary knowledge and inter-sectoral knowledge.

The other reasons are that Asia itself is interested in becoming a modern knowledge economy, where knowledge in a sense becomes the central asset by which economic productivity is generated, an opportunity for higher wages and it enables many of the countries to avoid the middle-income trap.  

A third important reason is that Asia itself has demonstrated unprecedented success over the last few decades, in lifting people out of absolute poverty, and the challenges that the world faces, such as climate change, improvement in economic and inclusive growth worldwide, these need to be, and are being achieved, in Asia. It is important that the rest of the world has access to the knowledge and the success, and understands why Asia was successful – we want the knowledge from Asia to be shared with the rest of the world.

This has been an interesting exercise that I have been closely involved with for the past 15 months.  In March this year we approved the new Knowledge Management Directions Action Plan and the key thing now is to ensure bank wide implementation.  

The Action Plan will be implemented over the next 15 months itself, and we have strong support from the leadership of the institution; we now need to roll it out, resource it and keep it on track.  A large part of this will be working with our partners.   We are eager to develop knowledge-based partnerships with many other development financing organisations, even working with the private sector in some cases, and we look forward to working with the European Commission as well.  

What are the advantages of Knowledge Management for both the staff and the institution?

Knowledge management -  in the way that we have structured it and the way we will implement it -  is intended largely to benefit the developing member countries.  That is important. That is the key goal – using knowledge for greater development effectiveness.  

In the process, it helps the institution, in the sense that the higher the quality of our knowledge work, the higher quality and recognition we have for our knowledge management and our knowledge products. The reputation of the institution, the ADB, will also increase.  

There is also an advantage for individual staff.  Staff like to work for an organisation that is renowned for what it can do and what it can achieve, so many of the staff in the Bank are eager to demonstrate and show that they have knowledge capabilities - perhaps more than has been used or demanded from them in the past.  

They are keen on working with their colleagues in this institution and with other Centres of Excellence to make known their capabilities, and the capabilities of their colleagues and peers at the ADB, and get some recognition that is due in terms of what they are contributing in their own knowledge work. 

What are the key elements of the Knowledge Management Directions and Action Plan?

Some of the key elements are the following: 

We are working harder to prioritise.  There are, of course, many demands on the ADB on what kind of knowledge work that we should be doing, but we have to prioritise.

So we have put in place a more rigorous system by which we will look at the knowledge work that we plan in individual countries for certain sectors and thematic areas, and resource it well.  This also means that we want to stay with these priorities over several years. We need to make them signature areas that we want to develop.

Some of the other things that we are working on are, for instance, improving the quality of our own capability to generate and share knowledge.  We have been working hard to support Communities of Practice at ADB.  We have about 15 of these, getting them closely involved with the operations of the institution and making sure that they are far more knowledgeable than they have been in the past about what is happening in terms of development and development achievements, new knowledge, new development practices across Asia, but also globally.  

Our clients want us to bring not just regional knowledge but also global knowledge into our operations, so our Communities of Practice have been mandated and resourced to improve their ability to source knowledge globally as well as regionally, and identity what is the right knowledge for ADB to bring in to its own development practices.  

We are also taking steps by which we can improve the management of our knowledge, learning from our operations and doing a much better job at organising, packaging and delivering both explicit and tacit knowledge from our own operations and from the skills and practices of the professionals in the institution.  

As in many large institutions and development organisations, there are a lot of tacit knowledge in the minds of the individual staff, but we need to find better ways by which we can extract that knowledge, organise it and again package it in such a way that it becomes signature knowledge practices that we can put into our operations.  

The fourth area is to build greater incentives in the institution for recognising and valuing knowledge work by the staff.  Investment operations are always important -  they are paramount in many ways -  and in the past, staff have largely felt that those who are involved in the investment operations and who bring in the big projects are those who have a certain advantage in terms of career progression.  

What the institution is doing now under the new Knowledge Management Directions and Action Plan is changing that, remedying that. We are bringing in much more of a ‘talent management approach’ to our Human Resources and we are going to recognise and reward staff who are good in knowledge areas, and help them build a career around their knowledge work at the institution.

How are you developing the knowledge management capacity of ADB staff? 

One of the things that we have also done with respect to improving the institutions incentives, but also its expectations for knowledge management at the Bank, is how individual staff and individual units in the institution have to set out in their work plan and programmes what their roles and responsibilities will be for knowledge work, including knowledge management in the institution. 

Part of their Performance Appraisal will depend on their own success and extent of responsibility that they have taken on, and how well they can take those responsibilities on in terms of generating new knowledge products, taking their tacit knowledge and putting it in an explicit form, sharing it with their colleagues, applying it to the operations of the institution.

This is something fairly new, in terms of having it in such a formal way, but we think this provides an incentive and will give greater and clearer recognition across the Bank for the Knowledge Management capabilities of individual staff. It will also help the Bank understand where further training and capacity development of the staff is required in certain areas of knowledge management.  

We think this is an excellent way in which we can tailor the staff development programmes in order to improve the knowledge capacities and knowledge management practices of all of our staff 

Can you give an example of how the knowledge management directions and actions plane is useful for colleagues working in the field?

The Knowledge Management Directions and Action Plan has some very practical aspects to it, which is essential. We have discovered, for instance, that while our country directors and staff in the resident missions are very knowledgeable about the countries in which they work, in many cases the demands that are coming to us from the countries with which we work are that they want to know what is happening elsewhere, in the region and globally.  Our country directors are coming back to Headquarters, or contacting colleagues in other resident missions, asking what are the best development practices that are taking place elsewhere? 

This is very important and that is why we need to build an excellent body of explicit and tacit knowledge at Headquarters, which we can share very quickly with country directors in any of the resident missions

How important is the Evaluations office in terms of knowledge sharing?

The Evaluations office is an important resource and a way of learning. It provides another perspective on what we think we know from our operations.  

Our operations conducted by our regional departments undertake a lot of their own analysis and knowledge work around the efficacy of their operations and they are a great resource in terms of learning and new development practices. 

But at the same time the Evaluation department can provide another perspective – be it a broader perspective, a higher-level perspective.  It can take a look at how we are doing compared to other countries and institutions in the region, or even globally. 

From a Knowledge Management perspective, even if you have an independent Evaluations department, do not think of them as being independent from knowledge, because they are not.

Please can you tell us about the Knowledge Sharing and Services Centre?

One of the initiatives that we have taken under the new Knowledge Management Directions and Action Plan is to establish a Knowledge Sharing and Services Centre.  

This is a select group of staff, not a large unit. What they do is examine the results of our operations, of the best practices that have been undertaken, and begin to distil what they see as the important explicit and tacit knowledge, that needs to be packaged and put into certain forms and made available to ADB.  This makes a big contribution to south-south knowledge sharing.  

They help convene meetings of knowledge practitioners in the various countries in which we work, and they put together the material and make it available as a resource for sharing across the various member countries.  

They can go in and support people in their operations and even in the specialised knowledge units, who may not have enough time to basically sit back and look at everything they are doing and distil the best lessons learned. Having this specialised group to help them do that, I think is an important part of the success of the new Knowledge Management Directions and Action Plan, and I would encourage you, if you are undertaking your own exercise, to think about establishing that kind of group within your organisation.