The Foreign Service Journal, October 2021

24 OCTOBER 2021 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL agement in the department we need to change the narrative, the incentives and the strategy. First, we need to appeal to the values and mission of the department as part of our communications effort: KM is about the success of our mission. We start to do this by creating aware- ness of the importance of KM among all department staff. We need to be more proactive about promoting existing IT platforms where officers can go to find and access common KM tools and guid- ance. We need to identify senior-level champions to create momentum behind communicating such a culture change. This visibility is needed to ensure buy-in from every bureau and post. We need to incentivize all staff on KM. If officers, and supervisors, know they will be evaluated on their KM performance, they will see it as a higher priority, and it will counterbalance the culture many have noted at State—one of competing instead of collaborating and building on our predecessors’ efforts. In addition, as job descriptions are updated, we must make KM a basic responsibility for all officers, especially office management specialists. As one stakeholder we interviewed told us: “If it’s not in anyone’s job description, it’s not anyone’s job.” A Steering Committee We need champions. We need leader- ship. The department must establish a Knowledge Management Steering Committee consisting of senior represen- tatives from various bureaus and posts, representing both the business and the management sides of the enterprise, who can collectively make recommendations, not just for their own shops but for the good of the whole service. The steering committee would be a deliberative body, convened by the Deputy Secretary for Resources and Management or the under secretary for management, and would consist of major stakeholders from across the department, including the bureaus of Information Resources Management, Global Talent Management, Administra- tion, the Office of Management Strategy and Solutions, and the Foreign Service Institute, as well as regional and func- tional bureaus. The steering committee would be the conduit for developing the policies and processes that can catalyze organizational cultural change. Its approach would be agile and iterative. We recommend that committee efforts begin with a baseline assessment of the department’s capabili- ties, benchmarking against comparables and industry leaders. The Knowledge Leadership Division (KLD) in IRM has already launched such an effort and could complete it and report back. Armed with this information, the steering committee would be well placed to make some important organizational decisions about how to best leverage the expertise and skills of those cur- rently charged with the department’s KM responsibilities—the chief knowledge officer (CKO), a role ascribed in the Foreign Affairs Manual to the deputy chief information officer, and KLD. We also need knowledge management representatives at each bureau and post. These individuals would act as champi- ons, working closely with bureau and post leadership and with a steering committee to hold employees and offices account- able in implementing the common KM tools and standards. The Knowledge Leadership Division is currently buried far down in the organiza- tion and does not directly report to the Chief Knowledge Officer. Fourteen years ago, the Secretary’s Advisory Committee on Transformational Diplomacy recom- mended that the CKO report directly to the Deputy Secretary or the under secre- tary for management. Implementing that would be a good start. On the policy front, the steering com- mittee would also update the FAM or the Foreign Affairs Handbook to codify lan- guage that better reflects the critical role of knowledge to the department’s mission and enshrine KM principles that would help create the shared understanding of KM that is currently lacking. The steering committee would look for systemic and structural solutions, even as the imple- menting bureaus and offices look for simple ones. A revamped, rebranded Office of Knowledge Leadership would start small, with products that are already familiar to the organization. For example, we would recommend producing a series of handover note “templates” that could be deployed overseas and domestically, available on Infolink, and then evaluating user adoption. 1CA in the Bureau of Consular Affairs, the office that promotes leadership, man- agement and innovation excellence across the bureau’s global operations, already has customizable templates available. “User adoption” is itself a process. It took nothing short of a pandemic for employees to adopt a platform as straightforward as Microsoft Teams. The exponential increase in use was driven by the urgent need for virtual collaboration. Strengthening our policies and processes now will help lay the foundation for future seismic events and easy adoption of dis- ruptive technology. User adoption requires user-focused design, which can then generate feedback that informs systems decisions. Creat- ing innovative new products that are accepted by the organization requires sig-