Can aid agencies be knowledge-based organisations?

At a recent meeting of philanthropic foundation, Brad Smith, President of the Foundation Center, laid down this challenge to his audience. Do charitable foundations want to be administrative organisations, primarily focused on managing paperwork and money? Or do they want to be knowledge-based organisations, which learn, share ideas, and add value to the grants they give?

It occurred to me that aid agencies could well ask themselves the same question.On the KM4dev blog, Tom Zeppenfeldt summarises the knowledge organization very concisely:

An organization that anticipates and quickly adapts to a changing environment by:

* absorbing and integrating feedback from partners, suppliers and customers;

* applying practices that encourage the use of ideas of others and acknowledge the capabilities of employees to improve decision making and organizational effectiveness;

* working in teams to achieve better and more balanced decision-making and to share knowledge and learning;

* eliminating unnecessary processes while maximizing added value.

Well-functioning knowledge organizations thrive on a balanced combination of hierarchical management and individual, self-organizing (teams of) individuals who can be cross-coupled as needed. The balance achieved between these two components of the system will depend upon the specific environment, mission, and leadership of the organization.

The question remains whether many organizations that consider themselves knowledge organizations are not in fact hierarchical or bureaucratic organizations of knowledge workers, characterized by one or more of the following:

* focus on organisational stability and the accuracy and repetitiveness of internal processes;

* autocratic decision making by senior leadership with unquestioned execution by the workforce;

* use of technology to improve efficiency and expect employees to adapt;

* fixed processes to ensure precision and stability with little concern for value.

It seems to me that he has got this exactly right: many aid agencies that aspire to be knowledge-based organisations are in fact hierarchical organisations of knowledge workers.