Dilbert and the Duke of Wellington:
The role of strategic communication in knowledge management
(First published in Knowledge Management Review Issue 12, January/February 2000)

by Jonathan Steffen

‘All the business of war, and indeed all the business of life, is to endeavour to find out what you don’t know by what you do; that’s what I called “guessing what was on the other side of the hill.”’ (The Duke of Wellington in The Croker Papers)

If one were to substitute ‘All business’ for ‘All the business of war’, the Duke of Wellington’s pragmatic philosophy might have come straight from the mouth of a British captain of industry. Unpretentious, practical and informed by a sublime self-confidence, Wellington’s “guessing” strategy might be the secret behind the establishment of an outstanding company or the orchestration of a transformational merger. No Continental theorising and no American evangelising here: just a plain reliance on one’s own intuitive powers and a healthy readiness to take calculated risks. You find out what you don’t know by what you do. It can be applied to the battlefield, the boardroom, and probably the billiard-table, too. No wonder the Iron Duke dominated the British military for the best part of half a century.

The analogy is pertinent to a discussion of knowledge management strategies not just on account of Wellington’s intuitive approach to gathering information but because the word strategy derives from the Greek strategia, the office or command of a general (strategos). The Oxford English Dictionary defines strategy as ‘The art of a commander-in-chief; the art of projecting and directing the larger military movements and operations of a campaign’ (first recorded use 1810), while Webster offers ‘The science and art of employing the political, economic, psychological, and military forces of a nation or group of nations to the science and art of military command exercised to meet the enemy in combat under advantageous conditions’ (Webster). Pedantic Noah Webster makes an important point which the OED overlooks: the aim is to ‘meet the enemy in combat under advantageous conditions’ – i.e. to use your brain to help you win the battle. Webster also, however, adds a further definition which could function as the creed of a contemporary change manager: strategy is ‘An adaptation or complex of adaptations (as of behaviour, metabolism or structure) that serves or appears to serve an important function in achieving evolutionary success’.

Strategic communication in the business context, therefore, is the deployment of selected communication media and methods to achieve an advantageous operational outcome. Communication methods and media are used to encourage the effective marshalling of the company’s store of knowledge in the pursuit of defined business objectives. As everyone in business knows, however, that is easier said than done.

We are living in an age which offers us more communication technologies than ever existed before. The means of communicating knowledge – and of storing and managing it – are incomparably more sophisticated than they were even a decade ago. And yet business leaders are increasingly claiming that face-to-face contact is more important than at any time in the past. There is a simple explanation for this. To revert to our military metaphor, ‘God is on the side not of the heavy battalions, but of the best shots,’ as Voltaire observed. The cynical French philosopher says it all: in business, as in war, you have to hit your targets, and those are usually moving targets.

In the context of knowledge management, they are people. Whether they work in Accounts or Personnel, Manufacturing or Logistics, and whether they are equipped with Internet access, mobile phones or Lotus Notes, they are designed by nature to cultivate their own store of knowledge by a careful process of selection. Certain categories of information will be readily assimilated and others just as speedily rejected. Some facts will be traded lightly whereas others will be jealously guarded. This tendency to garner and exchange knowledge, which is common to all people, is reinforced in working life by the professional behaviours which institutionalised existence encourages. An understanding of these behavioural patterns can help the communication strategist develop the model of knowledge transfer most appropriate to the needs of his or her organisation.

Anyone who has worked in an office for three months will have noticed these varying manifestations of communication behaviour. Accountants are traditionally not the most forthcoming of business types, while sales people can pitch to virtually any animate object which is set before them. There are people in any working environment who seem mysteriously to know everything that is going on in the place, while others seem determined to know precisely nothing about what is happening. While everyone in a company will have their own personal ways of dealing with information, broad patterns of knowledge behaviour do exist, and an understanding of these can help the communications strategist hit the target with a far higher degree of accuracy.

People within organisations can be divided into four archetypes which articulate their own relationship with knowledge in the corporate context. These are the Knowledge Seeker, the Knowledge Keeper, the Knowledge Sharer and the Knowledge Avoider.

The Knowledge Seeker is someone who is driven by the quest for knowledge itself. This figure is symbolised in our typology by the Grail Knight. The Arthurian knights who set off in search of the Holy Grail – the chalice which Christ was believed to have used at the Last Supper – became the figures of legend not by sitting at a round table (which does not make a good story) but by setting out on the perilous trail of something unique (which does). Modern equivalents of the Grail Knight are the sales rep in search of a sale and the marketing specialist in search of a USP. They can also be employed in new business development or in research. Whether or the commercial or the scientific side, however, these people have one vital thing in common: they want to find information, but they do not necessarily wish to communicate it.

They do not wish to communicate it for this simple reason that they derive more satisfaction from setting off in search of it. The sales rep on the road hates to file his weekly report, and no amount of portable computing capacity will separate him from the dog-eared notebook in his pocket in which he jots the information vital to his job. The research scientist is used to not being understood by his colleagues and would rather quietly get on with a bit of real blue-skies research. These are not malicious or vindictive positions; they are merely the natural consequence of a mental and professional bias.

The Knowledge Keeper, by contrast, is in the business of divulging knowledge in precise doses for precise reasons. This is the High Priest who is party to a body of arcane wisdom, some but not all of which is for sharing with the commonality. Recognising that knowledge is power, and that the privilege of possessing knowledge is attended by responsibilities, the Knowledge Keeper is the guardian or gatekeeper who will tell you some of the truth, but only as much as is deemed appropriate for you to know. In business life, this figure will find incarnations in a range of business functions from Corporate Planning through Finance and Accounts to Logistics and Personnel. Part of these professionals’ function is to inform; and equally great part of it is not to inform, or to inform only select audiences. This figure is thus unlikely to give you a straight answer to a straight question, but will do so with a perfectly clear conscience. Ask for information about your colleagues’ salaries or the company’s acquisition plans and you are unlikely to get an open response.

Knowledge Sharers are a very different breed. The messengers or evangelists of this world, they are more motivated by the transmission of the message than the message itself. Whether the message they are charged with carrying is for a single person or a group, the Knowledge Sharer will take pleasure and pride in getting it across – and then gallop back at double speed with the response. In companies, such people are most commonly found in the training function. They will lobby for the release of funds, design training modules and then deliver them repeatedly with unflagging missionary zeal, boundlessly generous in their dispensation of the knowledge they possess. They are boundlessly generous because they know how extremely difficult it is to get that knowledge into the heads of the people they are training.

If not occupying an official place as trainers or facilitators, Knowledge Sharers will of course be office gossips, and the influence of these people is not to be underrated. Other roles in which the Knowledge Sharer is ideally to be found are that of the mentor to a junior member of staff or manager of a group of employees. The de-layering of corporate structures has brought about a culture in which great emphasis is placed on teamwork, coaching and the sharing of knowledge. Unfortunately a person appointed to a knowledge-sharing position is not always a natural sharer of knowledge, which can lead to considerable group frustration.

Finally, there is the Knowledge Avoider. This unhappy creature is represented by the peasant farmer in our gallery of archetypes. The Knowledge Avoider wants to know nothing of the battles of the high and mighty. He wants to live his life in peace and get on with tending his cabbages and mending the leak in his roof. Unfortunately, and by a process of which he has no comprehension, he regularly finds himself in the front line of the most appalling battles. Barbarous marauding armies trample his vegetable patch, set fire to his cottage and carry off his livestock. Worse, they often conscript him into their ranks, so that he finds himself doing the same to other peasant farmers in far-flung countries of which he has no understanding and in which he has no interest. The Knowledge Avoider wants to live in peace because he equates knowledge with massacre and pillage, phenomena that change the world by destroying it. The field marshals of this world know little of his cabbage path and care less.

In modern mythology, the Knowledge Avoider is of course Dilbert, the cartoon character who spends his frustrated existence in front of a computer screen while the company is restructured around his ears. The exquisite irony of Scott Gibbs’ creation is that of course Dilbert is a knowledge worker: he actually spends his working life dealing with information, and is in many ways better informed than his bosses. His bosses, however, possess the power which he lacks, and so their brand of knowledge, however inferior in quality, will always triumph over his. Their supreme ignorance actually turns into a form of anti-knowledge, a black hole into which all of Dilbert’s painstakingly written reports and hard-won professional insights are sucked.

The Knowledge Avoider in the real world will probably have a couple of Dilbert cartoons in his or her drawer, tucked away to share with colleagues when the next corporate shake-out is announced. Merger, acquisition, restructuring, rationalisation, relocation and, of course, downsizing: these are the words which the Knowledge Avoider dreads, the incantations which unleash the dogs of war again across the already ravaged workplace.

From the typology on the left it will become clear that a single communication tactic is unlikely to work with all types of employees. The corporate mission statements solemnly approved in the boardroom are likely to miss their mark with multi-tasking office workers struggling to meet multiple deadlines. A general exhortation ‘to communicate more’ is not going to persuade a personnel manager to circulate the details of the senior management’s bonus schemes, nor can the behaviour of those with managerial responsibility be transformed by the mere introduction of the word ‘coach’.

By the same token, improved communication between corporate functions cannot be brought about by mere invocation. The research and marketing functions are unlikely to understand each other’s respective needs if researchers spend all of their time peering down miscroscopes and marketing people all of their time speeding down motorways. Nor will the training zealots have much to say to the corporate finance specialists, or vice versa. For the best of reasons, and with the sense of maintaining full functional and professional integrity, our four knowledge archetypes will withhold information from one another or simply not bother to pass it on. The concept of an organisation in which knowledge is held in systems to which all have access and is transmitted freely in the pursuit of common business objectives is naïve, for it takes no account of human nature.

What, then, can the communication strategist do to ensure that knowledge is shared effectively within the organisation? Let us focus not on the specifics of the message, which will vary from context to context, but on the means of its delivery. There are five key steps to ensuring that an appropriately formulated message is transmitted accurately to its target audiences:

1. Recognise nature of audience
   The receiver is as important as the transmitter in the communication process. The one has no function without the other. Anyone wishing to transmit a message should thus have a very clear picture of the audience involved and the assumptions which they will bring to bear on the message transmitted. An upbeat, big-picture type of communication, which might well appeal to people in sales and marketing, might simply arouse the suspicion of those who work with more detail in the knowledge-keeping functions. These people will need more detail to convince them.
2. Recognise needs of audience
   It is often forgotten by communicators that all audiences have a history. Events of the past and concerns about the future will colour judgements. Lack of information will have a similar distorting effect. Before embarking on a communication exercise, therefore, it is essential to assess the knowledge status of the audience itself and to take any disparities within that audience into account.
3. Choose appropriate environment for communication
   The place in which a message is transmitted is as influential as the formulation of the message itself. Functional pressures, however, often lead important messages to be delivered in inauspicious contexts. While not every important corporate message can be delivered within the advantageous circumstances of a conference venue, it is important to create a space – if only temporarily – which will facilitate uptake of that message. Shouting across a room loud with the ring of telephones and the ripple of computer keyboards will not help anyone understand your new strategic approach.
4. Select appropriate timing for communication
   The frame of mind of an audience, and thus the way in which it interprets messages received, will be dictated very much by the time of transmission. First thing on a Monday morning is not a good time to get people’s attention; nor is it wise to talk long and hard at people with empty stomachs. In the arrangement of a conference, for instance, the key messages should be delivered when people are at their most attentive – first thing in the morning, first thing after a morning break, and towards the end of the afternoon, when post-prandial drowsiness has worn off.
5. Adopt appropriate means of communication
   In the communication age, audiences are highly sensitive to the means via which they receive information. A glossy corporate brochure disclosing a new corporate vision might be regarded as an unnecessary extravagance by people in fear of their jobs. By the same token, a two-line e-mail concerning changes in health insurance, pension rights or other benefits in kind is likely to inspire little confidence in people used to seeing such matters documented on paper. In this sense, the medium is very much the message.
   
   Most important of all, however, is a sixth step without which the others have little or no value. This is:
6. Understand knowledge behaviours of employees
   As previously indicated, different groups of employees will have different styles of transmitting and retaining knowledge. A comprehension of these styles is vital if the knowledge which an organisation possesses is to be effectively mobilised. The ultimate mark of a good communication strategist is to understand those styles and to create a knowledge culture that will exploit their strengths and play down their weaknesses. The Duke of Wellington once famously remarked of his troops, ‘I do not know what these men do to the enemy, but by God, they terrify me.’ There could be a worse starting-point for thinking about an effective knowledge management strategy for one’s own company.

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