On November 20th HSE’s International Business Communication Unit and HSE Corporate Relations organized an evening seminar on knowledge communication in the corporate communications function. The speakers included Professor Martin Eppler from the University of Lugano, Switzerland, a leading knowledge communications researcher and advisor for several international organizations, and Lauri Peltola, Vice President of Communications in the financial service group Nordea, recently chosen as the best Communications Director in Finland for the seventh time.
Reconstructing knowledge
The old Confucian adage "I hear and I forget; I see and I remember; I do and I understand” goes together well with the concept of knowledge communication. Knowledge communications refers to conveying complex issues to multiple stakeholders in a way that allows people to reconstruct the information in a familiar and understandable form. Knowledge communication is always interactive and can be mediated, for example, by visuals. By calling attention to participation and interaction, in other words “doing,” people will be more apt to understand complex issues.
– You cannot communicate knowledge – you can only communicate information, Eppler said.
– The more about an issue you know, the less you’re able to communicate it precisely. You start to take what you know for granted and can no longer relate to people who don’t share your insights.
There were two key takeaways that Professor Eppler pointed out. First, don’t think communication, think communicating to emphasize interactivity and avoid the one-way information trap. Second, use visuals such as pictures, diagrams, metaphors, and maps to enable people to activate their prior knowledge and use something they already know to understand something new.
Knowledge communication in practice
A successful example of knowledge communication in action that Professor Eppler described was a strategy diagram that was in the form of a metro map. The map was placed in every corridor of a large organization at each elevator entrance. Employees soon started talking about and commenting on this “metro map,” about the metro lines i.e. strategic routes, metro stations i.e. milestones, and so on. In the familiar format of a map, it was suddenly easy to comprehend the company’s new strategy. Management got hundreds of comments and suggestions of the strategy, and had to revise the map numerous times. By the end, employees were committed to the strategy that they had been able to participate in refining.
In the second part of the evening, Vice President of Communications in Nordea, Lauri Peltola, spoke about the practical side of knowledge communication. He recounted Nordea’s communicative journey from the early 2000’s to the present.
In the beginning, when four companies with separate cultures and hundreds of different brands were merged into one company, communication at Nordea “was a mess”. In the next phase, from about 2002 to 2006, communication was mainly communicating facts and figures to impress analysts. To turn a good company into a great company, communicating facts is not enough, which is why Nordea is now focusing on communicating knowledge.
Peltola described the main channels Nordea to communicate knowledge. Informality was the key characteristic describing each of the five channels: informal meetings, coffee table discussions, story telling, mentoring, and management road shows.
Photo: Università della Svizzera italiana