The BC Forest Service: Mobilizing knowledge in a complex and unpredictable environment

Like many public sector organizations, the BC Forest Service found itself facing a myriad of challenges. The primary driver for work with knowledge as an asset was to increase flexibility, resilience and innovation in times of rapid change. There were three additional drivers:

• A key objective was facilitating the shift from a historically command-and-control culture to one that allows knowledge to flow across the different business units in order to increase innovation and make policy and other strategic work more effective.
• A 2004 workplace survey which revealed low morale throughout the organization showed that steps were needed to empower staff and better enable management to communicate the organization’s vision and direction.
• The Forest Service was at risk of knowledge loss given the high number of expected retirements of people with specialized knowledge. 

The "knowledge management" strategy employed by the BC Forest Service included a number of interrelated initiatives aimed at preparing the organization for change, supporting resilience and mobilizing knowledge. In effect, the Forest Service’s approach can be described as a group of strategies designed to promote self-organization and the emergence of excellence in a complex, unpredictable environment.

This approach is supported by a body of research that has concluded that a leader’s role in complex, knowledge-intensive organizations is to create environments for conversation, reflection, learning and innovation rather than to control for results (see, for example, Bennet 2004; Snowden 2002; Wheatley 2000). In complex environments, where organizations operate with great uncertainty about the future, one-size-fits-all plans, approaches and measures are often not effective. It is more desirable to constantly learn from – and respond to –  small steps, while ensuring that the approach is coherent with the organization's direction and culture.

In this respect, the BC Forest Service approach is highly coherent with the objectives of change and resilience in an uncertain and complex environment. As the Deputy Minister during the initiation of this work put it:

“If we had articulated a plan and stuck to it, we would not have modeled what we aspired to be…. Organizations need to understand the rapid change that is taking place, develop patterns and experiment around patterns…. You need 10 scenarios and you need to move and adjust all the time. But you also need to review where you have been to decide where you want to go.”

Leadership: The BC Forests Service had strong support from executive to make this change. It was this leadership that helped to spark action across the entire organization. Executive members modeled this approach.

There was also recognition that leadership was needed throughout the organization.

Strategy: Most knowledge-related efforts in the BC Forest Service expanded under the broad strategic organizational change initiative named The Road Ahead.

Objective 2 in the 2005/06 Ministry of Forests and Range service plan outlines the six key strategies of this initiative:

Objective 2: To be a high performing and learning organization -To continue building an innovative and even higher performing organization that focuses on both business and people performance strategies. Key strategies include: fully implement The Road Ahead initiative that focuses on the following six strategies: Mandate — vision, mission and values; Stewardship; Leadership Development; Learning Organization; Workforce Planning; and Organizational Wellness.

Interviewees describe many of the activities undertaken, which focused mostly on developing new tools, a common language and processes to support organization learning through empowering staff to improve business performance. Exhibit 2 shows some of the interrelated activities for which there was training, support and activity. A synergy was created through the introduction of the different activities and each provided the organization with tools and processes to better generate, share and move knowledge.

Other critical process elements identified were letting people choose the knowledge-related training and work they wanted, and trusting staff to organize themselves and take responsibility for their work.

Exhibit 2: Interrelated knowledge activities in the BC Forest Service

Source: Compiled by the Office of the Auditor General of B.C.

The strategic model used by the BC Forest Service can also be thought of as an interrelated series of learning conversations (Exhibit 3). There have been six phases of ministry-wide conversations over several years, gradually building new knowledge, improving cross-boundary knowledge-sharing and developing capacity for change.

Exhibit 3: Knowledge and capacity-building conversations in the BC Forest Service

Source: Compiled by the Office of the Auditor General of B.C.

 Each “conversation” drew from a range of experts and resource material and helped to move the organization forward. Diverse, high quality feedback was included, and opportunity for learning and adjustment was provided. The “Strategic Conversation” was a ministry-wide initiative where all staff were asked to develop scenarios about the future of the BC Forest Service. This process generated about 1,800 scenarios about the future from across the province. The conversation itself helped ready the organization for change and drew out knowledge from across different levels in different regions. These scenarios are stored in a database and are currently being used to support new business transformation efforts. Employees spoke about the value of this work, saying the organization could never have realized transformation without these initial steps that shifted culture over several years.

Efforts to stimulate networks and decrease degrees of separation were built into many of the Forest Service's business initiatives. The proposal for a major overhaul of policy process in 2005 was one of the first to show strong knowledge management links in some of the expected benefits it listed, such as:

• better ability to demonstrate results;
• provides opportunity to identify horizontal linkages between divisions and branches;
• allows executive the opportunity to focus more time on strategic linkages instead of responding to one-off issues;
• creates a platform to engage with other ministries;
• taps unknown resources in the ministry for good ideas (anyone can submit an idea);
• intent is to build a community of practice on policy within the ministry to ensure best practices are built into ministry work; and
• a policy website that can offer other features for skill development such as access to best practice guidelines and how-to checklists for policy development. 

Source: BC Forest Service

Communities and networks are part of the BC Forest Service strategy. One senior manager we interviewed considered them the most important elements of the organization's work with knowledge as a strategic asset. There are many internal communities of practice and some that go beyond the ministry. Among the functions they serve is providing professional development, promoting knowledge creation and enabling new or shared knowledge to flow into vertical structures. As one employee stated:

"Communities and networks have helped to reduce duplication. It used to be common to find a few people in different branches working on the same policy issues. That rarely, if ever, happens now."

Many communities within the BC Forest Service appear to have become stewards of knowledge. For example, the policy community has been actively involved with improving content knowledge and know-how around good, strategic policy development and deployment as well as building a central repository for policy. The policy community has been particularly valuable as much policy work is undertaken by subject matter experts dispersed throughout the organization. This community provides a way of connecting people and moving their knowledge across organizational boundaries without needing to change their position within the organization.

Cycles of learning and development of new knowledge are an integral part of the Forest Service approach.These cycles are evident in processes described by staff; for example the learning organization practitioners had debriefing sessions or action reviews following facilitated events. These debriefing sessions focused on lessons learned, generated knowledge and identified ways to improve practices.

The policy project noted above exemplifies how different elements of thinking about knowledge as a strategic asset were embedded in regular business. For example, among the benefits included:

Builds a valuable record of policy development work and decisions that will be accessible for future work

The policy website can offer other features for skill development such as access to best practice guidelines and "how-to" checklists for policy development

Source: BC Forest Service

Elements of Forest Service technologies supported communication upward and downward. For example, the Executive blogs used by the Deputy as well as other Executive members have a very personal and open feel, and include interesting links, stories and facts as well as timely information not readily found elsewhere. The blog was initially set up to respond to employee survey findings. Low scores on the survey around aspects of executive communication were further probed through story collection and narrative analysis. The blog concept emerged in response to insights from the research.

Some people spoke about trying to encourage and maintain important conversations and content rather than falling into the trap of developing large knowledge repositories rarely accessed and with little value. The Forest Service also emphasized the importance of the connection of groups and individuals more than codification of information, though it was acknowledged that documents like manuals are still necessary for some work. However, to date the organization has relied more on boundary-spanning and stimulation of social networks than on peer-to-peer connections through expertise locators and knowledge repositories. It has also worked extensively with a form of narrative analysis – that is, where stories about the future or the past are captured, signified and analyzed to support planning, staff development and business transformation.

The BC Forest Service has a "can do" culture. As one staff member put it, "A lot of us started as forest fire fighters, and just have the attitude we can get through anything." This makes continuous improvement an easy sell, but also makes finding time for reflection difficult. Moreover, both senior managers and staff alike suggested to us that the ministry historically had a "command and control mindset" so people were action-oriented but not necessarily comfortable speaking up or taking initiative.

Another staff member from one of the regions spoke about helping to facilitate conversations using tools such as Open Space:

"I see us as providing fresh lemonade versus powdered lemonade. We give them something more to improve how they work together and communicate. We are supplying a product that they wouldn't have otherwise – cost effective because if you had to use a contractor to facilitate this work it would be a significant cost to Forests."

He also described how engaging it is to help knowledge move around the organization, and how being freed to spend 10% of one's time with such work makes it attractive to stay in the organization and in government. A learning organization practitioner described benefits of working with different groups this way:

"I know more about different aspects of our business. I am much more rounded and I can tell people about projects related to theirs, and give them contact names. I am paying it forward all the time, whenever and wherever I can."

Several interviewees also spoke about the benefits of empowerment. A director described how thousands of ideas for improvements flooded in through the Business Transformation project, which used the same software as that used in the Strategic Conversation. Experts reviewed ideas for the most promising ideas, but this work was set aside briefly because of other factors. When it was revisited, many of those promising ideas (which were considered to be smaller scale, typically straightforward and requiring limited resources) had been implemented without the need for explicit direction or support. Currently, additional transformative ideas are being considered.

Staff members we interviewed for this case study spoke with pride about their increased skills, capacity and relevance. However, some also described areas in which they still wanted to make much more progress. Pockets of relatively insulated knowledge remain, and making time for critical reflection can be challenging.

In a note to her successor, the outgoing Policy Secretariat Chair wrote:

"More than ever, the Secretariat needs to reach out to all our partners, especially in the other resource agencies. In the beginning we needed to connect; now we need to integrate a much more demanding sharing of knowledge and perspectives than before, both wider and deeper. We may also be challenged into leading deeper public engagement in our policy thinking."

In the Forest Service, the knowledge-based and other inter-related initiatives provided the conditions and opportunities for ideas to flow freely and for discussions to occur in both planned and spontaneous forums at all levels of the organization. In addition to facilitating the flow of knowledge across the organization, those we spoke to believe that this has created a state of readiness in the ministry and poised the Executive to be able to build a future direction informed by input from the ground up.