Dr Grant Wardlaw
Director, Office of Strategic Crime Assessments
Attorney-General’s Department
The fact that PSMPC is organising TANGO lessons for middle and senior managers may seem a little odd. But the training is part of a broad strategy to ensure that public sector leaders are equipped with the tools to deliver the best policy advice and program implementation for government and the people in a fast-moving and increasingly knowledge-based economy.
TANGO is a unique business simulation that demonstrates how managing the organisation’s intangible assets is critical to the delivery of high quality outcomes and to organisational health. Teams of four participate in the management of their own knowledge organisation, competing against other teams for personnel and customers. In the process of working through seven “years” of operations, participants learn valuable lessons about strategy setting, valuing and managing intangible assets such as knowledge, reputation and image, and the importance of trust and communication in effectively functioning organisations. Over two intensive days of simulated operations and facilitated discussion of lessons learned, participants gain valuable insights into the contribution that knowledge management can make to organisational outcomes.
As knowledge-intensive organisations become a more important part of the “new” economy, creating, capturing and sharing knowledge become ever more vital to organisational performance and survival. Reflecting this, knowledge management is the fad of the moment. Seminars and courses on it abound. Traditional librarianship, information management, corporate databases and intelligence analysis are all being “rebadged” as knowledge management. According to IT vendors, knowledge management is essentially about the right links and appropriate software.
But this elusive thing called knowledge is much less easily grasped than these approaches would have us believe. To start with, a knowledge management strategy needs to reflect the type of business the organisation is in. An organisation that deals with knowledge that is easily codified requires a strategy very different from an organisation whose information is more difficult to codify. Many public sector organisations fall into the latter category. Here knowledge processes are people processes and that is where the focus of knowledge management should appropriately be.
The focus on people, organisational relationships and communication, together with a focus on strategic thinking and learning how to value intangible assets such as knowledge, competence, image and reputation, is what makes the TANGO simulation so valuable. It reinforces the relevance of and provides practical tools for meeting many of the criteria set out in the recently released Senior Executive Leadership Capability Framework. There is plenty of fadism in much of the current hype about knowledge management, but properly conceived and executed knowledge management will be a critical element of future success.
Many members of the SES will question whether or not they have the time to spare to participate in the TANGO simulation. My own experience may be instructive. My organisation, the Office of Strategic Crime Assessments (OSCA) is an intelligence assessment and coordination body within the Attorney-General’s Department. OSCA is a knowledge organisation and its success depends almost entirely on the knowledge and skills of its people, the adequacy of its processes and the quality of its relationships. These are all intangible assets that require careful nurturing.
The TANGO simulation proved a very efficient way to attune the OSCA team to a wide range of issues surrounding the effective management of knowledge and relationships, to be introduced to some useful tools and to initiate a process of further organisational development. OSCA has begun the development of its own Intangible Assets Monitor (using the model developed by Dr Karl-Erik Sveiby) as a way of measuring its intangible assets and monitoring performance. The sessions run by PSMPC so far have been attended mostly by middle managers, who have rated them highly. But the insights gained are especially relevant for senior mangers. I would highly recommend attendance by SES teams if the full value of the learning experience is to be gained by organisations. TANGO is stimulating, challenging and fun. And the issues raised go to the very nature of the future of public sector organisations
Further information.
For further information on OSCA’s use of the TANGO simulation and the development of the OSCA Intangible Assets Monitor, contact Dr Grant Wardlaw, Managing Director Wardlaw Consulting Pty Ltd on (02) 6288 2649, Fax (02) 6288 4864 or by e-mail on gwardlaw@ozemail.com.au..