Lucidea’s Lens: Knowledge Management Thought Leaders
Part 102 – Madan Rao

Madan Rao is an author and consultant in knowledge management and new media. He is research director at YourStory Media and co-founder of the Bangalore K-Community. Madan’s specialties include entrepreneurship, knowledge management, innovation, digital (Internet/mobile/social), ICT4D (Information and Communications Technologies for Development), and content management. 

Madan has authored over 15 books on knowledge management, innovation, and digital media. He has given talks, lectures and workshops in over 90 countries around the world. He has developed a range of frameworks and metrics based on his cross-domain expertise and experience, to help companies improve their organizational creativity, knowledge sharing cultures, innovation programs, skills upgrading, and co-creation partnerships. 

Madan is a charter member of TiE Bangalore and BIG APC’s Innovation Officer. He is the Conference Chair for Extensia’s Digital Summits in Africa and was research director at the Asian Media Information and Communication Center (AMIC) in Singapore. He is the co-founder of MXR.world, a hybrid platform for showcasing innovations, co-founder of MiraIndia (promoting Japan-India business), and IDG Open RAN advisor. 

Here are definitions for five of Madan’s specialties: 

• Design Thinking: A human-centered approach to innovation that draws from the designer’s toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success. 
• Digital Experience: The take-away feeling an end user has after an experience in a digital environment. Using digital technologies, it provides some kind of interaction between a single user and an organization, usually a company. Mobile apps, websites and smart devices all provide digital experiences to customers, partners and employees using them to interact with companies. 
• Content Management: Creating, managing, distributing, publishing, and retrieving structured information – the complete lifecycle of content as it moves through an organization. 
• Innovation: The process by which an idea is translated into a good or service for which people will pay. 
• Social Software: A range of tools that facilitate social networking, typically personal web pages with bios, interests, links, photos, videos, personal networks, posts, and comments. 

Madan created the following content. I have curated it to represent his contributions to the field. 

Books by Madan Rao 

Knowledge Management Tools and Techniques 

Design Thinking and Knowledge Management 

1. Key contributions of design thinking to KM include: the emphasis on emotion and empathy, focus on rapid experimentation and testing before scaling and confidence even in the face of uncertainty. Thus, buy-in for KM initiatives increases when adequate empathy has been shown to employee concerns and if participatory design elements have been used to come up with the KM architecture and processes. 
2. Design thinking calls for a progressive approach to dealing with failure; mistakes are treated as stepping-stones toward a final solution. That can help knowledge organizations by celebrating not just successes and best practices, but also failures as a source of learning. Many organizations have a repository of best practices—how about a museum or gallery of failed prototypes? 
3. In their haste toward project completion, many companies focus only on the results and final products. Design thinking allows for creation of extra levels of documentation along the journey, which may reveal new insights of value to subsequent project teams. 
4. Through immersion and interaction, design thinking places a greater emphasis on conversations and thus yields deeper clues about employee, customer and business partner expectations and aspirations. The use of customer personas also helps bring more holistic insight into the business modeling process. 
5. By focusing first on minimum viable products and then full features, design thinking can help avoid “feature bloat” and large failed projects. KM can help in this regard in capturing best practices of frugal product and service development. 
6. Design thinking and agile approaches can be deployed right at the stages of requirements specification and not just design and rollout. Vendors can, for example, have dialogs with business clients right at the early stages and even help them question their understanding of the problem space and solution path. Better alignment can be brought between companies and clients, and lead to new pathways of knowledge co-creation. 
7. With its philosophy of “get out of the building and into the street” and “think with your hands,” design thinking brings about better interaction between a company and its customers, particularly in an increasingly digital world where all kinds of assumptions are being made about customer aspirations and problems. That calls for improved formats of interpersonal conversation and knowledge extraction during interaction sessions. 
8. By repeatedly questioning basic assumptions behind problems, design thinking helps frame and reframe problem statements in a more effective manner so that more appropriate solutions emerge. KM, after all, should involve not only solving problems in a smarter way, but also smartly choosing which problems to solve. 
9. Design thinking blends top-down and bottom-up approaches to problem solving, which can help overcome some of the biases in those KM initiatives that are top-down or led by higher levels of management without adequate factoring of 360-degree input. 
10. Find the balance between “design thinking” and “factory design.” There are times when employees need to strictly adhere to established doctrine, and there are times when fundamental operating assumptions should be questioned in light of changing contexts. Thus, best practices certainly play a role—but the shelf life is limited, and design thinking can help come up with “next” practices. 
11. Design thinking is not just for designers or product developers. As explained by Jeanne Liedtka, Andrew King and Kevin Bennett in their book Solving Problems with Design Thinking, the discipline has been used for better design of healthcare portals, vision alignment in technology companies, more meaningful visitor experiences at conference booths, effective customer response cultures, deeper citizen engagement in urban planning and collaborative projects in industry associations. Design thinking applies in knowledge interactions of white-collar and blue-collar workers alike. 
12. Trends to watch in the field of design thinking include use of 3D printing for rapid prototyping, social media usage for customer diaries and employee sentiment analysis, sophisticated tools such as wearables for mood capture, and the growing profile of design thinkers in key innovation promotion organizations such as venture capital firms. 

The ‘8 Is’ of Design Thinking for Startups 

1. Intent. Intent to launch a new product or service is driven by the awareness that something profound has changed, inspiration to do something new, or a hunch that the market needs a new kind of offering. This can be due to personal motivation, an external problem to solve, or a resolution to make some dream come true. This desire can create a vision and mission for a founder or a strategic conversation in a larger firm. 
2. Insights. The next step consists of primary and secondary research to gather more intelligence about the domain, ecosystem and potential customers. Interviews with experts and trend reports from market research firms help set the broader context. Personal anecdotes and even notable travel experiences are useful here to frame and re-frame the issues. 
3. Immersion. Inspired by ethnographic and anthropological research, this step consists of suspending judgement and taking a ‘deep dive’ into the customer environment. Immersion can help discover blind spots and get past prior bias and converts hunches into informed guesses. User journey maps and cultural archetypes are tools that can be deployed here. 
4. Interaction. With specific objectives as well as empathy in mind, this step now consists of dialogue and interviews between the startup team and potential customers. The key aim is to test and validate assumptions about current and unarticulated user needs in a specific problem area. 
5. Ideation. Brainstorming sessions now commence about what approaches and products may work or how existing products can be modified, with divergence (accumulating a wide range of ideas, including wacky and crazy ones) and convergence (whittling the list down to more feasible options). Clustering techniques, storyboards, provocative ideation, role play, visualization and creative documentation are useful techniques in this step. More interaction (previous step) may also be needed here to flesh out ideas in detail. Product components and features will be conceptualized in this stage, possibly with multiple versions. 
6. Integration. Multidisciplinary perspectives are now brought in at this stage, with inputs from development, design, marketing and competitive intelligence perspectives. These feed into the creation of a series of prototypes, demos, mock-ups or virtual renditions, to be tested in parallel with different user groups. 
7. Iteration. Ideas, assumptions and actual prototypes are now subject to systematic iterative testing. It may be necessary to recast the original intent and even gather more market insights at this stage; further immersion may again be needed to see why the use case scenario perhaps did not work out as anticipated. Failures or mistakes here should be cast more as assumptions which have been invalidated, and development paths or features can be ruled out. Feedback loops should be short, and pace of testing should be fast to weed out unwanted options. Experimentation can lead to pivots if major changes are needed, in which case the original intent may need to be modified. 
8. Intensification. Only at this stage are you ready for a full launch of the first minimum viable product or service, with subsequent marketing plans and customer support once the final product is ready. You will now some have clues for what the product roadmap may look like, what adjacent or new products can be planned in different scenarios, and how you can differentiate from and outpace the competition. But these too will need to go back into the loop of the ‘8 Is’ above.