Learning Out Loud: Takeaways from the 2025 Midwest KM Symposium
I recently had the pleasure of attending the Midwest Knowledge Management Symposium 2025 a small regional conference for KM practitioners to connect in person. This one day conference has no cost to attend and presentations open to anyone who wishes to present. I had a great time and came away with many ideas to enrich my own KM program at Cisco.
Communities of Practice
Stan Garfield is the Community Manager for the SIKM Leaders Community an active and global community of practice for KM practitioners started in 2005. Stan shared proven practices for stimulating collaboration and the role of a leader in facilitating the community, whose role includes increasing membership, hosting events, asking/answering questions, recognizing colleagues, and posting useful information.
Community members need to pay attention to discussion, so email alerts are essential tools for a successful community platform. Many in the room had experience managing Communities of Practice using Microsoft’s Viva Engage platform.
You cannot force people to join. Unwilling community members are unlikely to participate beyond asking to be removed from the membership list. The community should be voluntary and opt-in.
Discoverability of content is important, including the ability to find old topics and threaded discussions. This is a challenge with many social platforms such as LinkedIn, as well as workplace data retention policies that may purge old topics after a certain period of time.
Successful communities span boundaries, hierarchies, and break down silos in the organization
The number of members is important and according to research Stan completed, communities can become stale and idle if there are less than 100-200 people. With this in mind, it’s important to avoid too narrow a scope for the community and resist the urge to spin up new communities for different topics. If someone suggests wanting to make a new community, Stan recommends offering to make the proposer a co-leader of the existing community and encourage discussions to continue in the current community, only splitting into a new community if discussions become very, very prevalent in the current community.
Lurkers are expected and completely ok! Stan notes only about 1% of attendees are frequent responders and as long as the quieter participants are reading and learning, they are participating in the community.
The health and success of the community can be conveyed to leadership using participation metrics, anecdotes, and other health metrics available in the platform you’re using. Stan recommends the community leader keep a separate community of “Community Wins” that shares examples of people successfully leveraging the community for anecdotal demonstration of it’s value to leaders.
Finding shared problems for the community to work on is a great way to encourage engagement.
I really enjoyed the talk and have many ideas for applying these practices at Cisco. I recently started a KCS Council, which is a community that is walking the line between being a community of practice and the “governing body” for KCS. It has already been fruitful in breaking down the silos between several different knowledge management teams and I would love to continue to grow it. I’m not sure if making a wider KM community that connects our tech docs teams with the support docs folks would be useful, or if we should keep our focus just on teams who are practicing or hope to learn more about KCS.
Lessons Learned
“You can lead a firm to knowledge, but you can’t make it think.” This session with Dennis Pearce focused on Lessons Learned, which discussed how important reflecting on our work is to improving the organization. Dennis described that reflection should be built into our operational processes and should have transferability and lead to behavior change. He shared several models of Lessons Learned including organizations like After Action Reviews with the US Army, NASA Lessons Learned Programs, and models from other organizations such as Dell and HP. He created a modified After Action Review that asked:
What did we expect?
Did it happen?
Why?
Do we improve or sustain this practice?
What will we do next time?
Next stage of the project (who, how, when?)
Barton Malow’s team, a LEAN organization, also shared their insights from retrospectives that are stored in a Power BI dashboard. The things their organization learns across the project lifecycle are documented with a title, what happened, what was learned, the project type, and any additional references. This data is leveraged in many way, including during project meetings, work scope creation, kickoffs, and throughout the project lifecycle. Employees are encouraged to submit as they learn things and the owners of this program regularly look for success stories, where they hi-light when content is successfully used to improve a future project/process and celebrate activities that avoid problems.
Stan Garfield, an author and thought leader in the KM space, closed out this block of sessions with his own Lessons Learned after 30 years in KM. There was a lot of wisdom packed into his presentation, but the things that stood out to me were:
Knowledge Management is a broad field with over 100+ specializations. He stressed it’s impossible to master every aspect of the field and recommended developing expertise in a few key specialties. (I was excited to see KCS as one of the listed specialties!)
The need for Knowledge Management never goes away, though the value is not always recognized by organizations. He described the patten as cyclical, where Knowledge Management will be undervalued and subject to layoffs, organizational knowledge will degrade, and then someone will restart the KM program. That’s why selling KM in the organization is an ongoing responsibility for all KM leaders.
Interestingly, Stan told me that Cisco used to be a major player in the KM space with knowledge contribution incentive programs and a robust KCS program, but that gradually died off about 10-15 years ago. And here we are restarting KCS in 2025! The cycle continues.
Knowledge management doesn’t happen until somebody actually reuses something - otherwise you’re just collecting knowledge. The whole objective is reuse and application of the content in the docs.
Innovation is easier to talk about then to actually implement. He recommended seeking out stories of innovation in examples from other organizations, communities of practice, conducting experiments, book clubs, discussion groups, and conferences like these!
Many KM people are actually bad at KM and fail to lead by example! Practitioners can be bad at searching, reusing what has been proven, and fail to learn from mistakes. Many practitioners end up in roles and fail to research the field at all (a pitfall I am hoping to avoid!)
The field of KM is often perpetually infected with “shiny object syndrome” and often falls victim to myths and fads. One example is adopting new tools to improve knowledge instead of improving findability in the tools we already have. We can often use what we already have instead of acquiring new tools.
KM should be handled by at least one full-time person. People who manage knowledge as a split role often cause KM to take a backseat to other priorities.
Finally, Stan stressed the importance of practitioners sharing what they are learning in communities like SIKM, writing and publishing to share knowledge. A participant added to the discussion how important Learning in Public is, which is the renewed inspiration for blogging about my own KM learning journey.
Tips for Success in KM
Many tips for success were shared at the conference including:
Learning about the field of KM
Identifying objectives of your KM Program
Getting leadership commitment
Assessing the culture in your organization
Investigating the people, processes, and tools in your organization
Articulate your vision for KM
Define your KM strategy
Develop compelling use cases
Establish governance
Define the KM workflows
Establish all the components of KM
Integrate, improve, and iterate
Share, seek feedback, and pay it forward
AI and Search
Deloitte and Barton Malow presented on their efforts with implementing AI and AI Search. These were interesting topics but I had fewer takeaways personally from these sessions because at Cisco, KM is not part of the teams that are building AI. We have had a few initial conversations with a couple AI teams and have done some very light testing, but we are far from part of the workflow for these tools. I believe KM has a huge opportunity with the advent of AI and it’s important to establish the importance of accuracy in the source data these tools rely on, but it’s challenging to find time to do that while also rolling out KCS. This will be a renewed focus of mine in the second half of the year.
Standards Work
Closing out the session, Shannon Alexander from Barton Malow shared the work they are doing to document all their organizational processes and procedures. It was incredible work to translate every process into a concise workflow document. My main takeaway was that I really liked the formatting of their workflows and I’ll be seeking to emulate the consistency and clarity in our own workflows we’re developing for KCS.
Conclusion
Overall, I had a fantastic time at the conference and will definitely be attending next year!
