Starting her own KM consultancy led Janine Weightman, founder of Knovolution, to re-examine the foundations of her relationship with KM. Here she speaks to Rob Mackinlay about her professional motivation to go it alone.

FOR Janine Weightman the process of setting up a business required a hard look at her own motivation; whether the work would get her out of bed in the morning; then what her potential clients needed, and if these two forces were aligned. She said: “The months following the first day of ‘operation Knovolution’ were very much spent soul searching to find my ‘why’.

“My spare bedroom was like some sort of detective room with mind maps! In addition to the usual business plans and start-up processes, my focus was on creating the brand, meaning not only finding my why, but also the value proposition, brand values, and an identity for Knovolution.”

Abstract

Janine, who was a speaker in the KM strand of the CILIP Conference 2024, said: “Personally, my service development journey started with much self-reflection on my own skills, motivations, values and biases. It afforded me the insight to identify gaps and opportunities in my capability, and what would get me out of bed day-in, day-out.”

You can read Janine’s in-depth look at the role of reflection in entrepreneurialism in a second article, due to be published in Information Professional in September.

She says that seeking clarity in one area meant seeking it everywhere, pointing out: “It felt right for me to create a concept and brand identity as I was essentially selling a service that, in essence, seemed very abstract. I’d had this problem when I was employed: how do I get across the magnitude of KM so that it resonates with my client without having to spend hours explaining it? How do I show them what they get for their time and money? How can I help them understand?

“It helped me enormously to have a tangible brand behind me, which set the direction and tone for my service. The process of working with the graphic designer to create my logo was the icing on the cake. The critical thinking around what the business was and did all came together in the graphic.”

Saddling-up

Janine traces her fundamental KM roots back to the age of seven, where: “I grew up in the horse world. I learned to ride, then trained my own horses for riding and carriage driving. In that whole 36 years only a negligible amount of learning had been from stuff written down – it had been from tacit knowledge sharing.

“This has been a huge influence on where and how I engage myself when it comes to my KM work. My horse experience has been a lifelong schooling in lesson-learning, building skills in tacit knowledge-sharing and how to elicit it from others.”

Those skills include understanding other’s thinking patterns, knowing when and how to adapt to each horse and learning in a crisis: “This has taught me the power of storytelling, and I can still hear the stories of the old horsemen that gave me that bedrock of understanding.”

Professional jumps

In terms of a tangible career, she said she has been on a “twisty-turny journey that happened to land me in KM rather than a deliberate pursuit of the profession.” Her degree led to engineering and technical sectors and roles in business analysis, technical writing, organisational learning, digital transformation, through to entrepreneurship.

She said: “Professionally it all started with process mapping – interviewing experts, capturing know-how in maps and documents. That led to technical writing and the realisation that I was a broker between those who knew and those who didn’t, translating critical knowledge for further application. That landed me my first proper KM role, managing a proprietary knowledge base for Wellstream. It was like the stars aligned when I realised that I called my work ‘knowledge management’ and it made perfect sense.

“That led into more strategic activities, technology implementations, cultural movements which I repeated and developed in future roles. I was completely taken by the concept of organisational memory and the ability for groups of people to learn collectively as a competitive advantage and to get the work done.”

Bricks and mortar

While her experience with horses has helped her grasp the value of KM, it was her awareness of her father’s trade that grounded these in practical plans of action. She said: “Despite its challenges, morphing from employed to a self-employed business owner has been a defining part of my career. Coming from a self-employed family with defined trades, I always wanted to be self-employed but couldn’t put my finger on what.

“Developing the confidence and credibility to set my stall out as a consultant was daunting. Starting just as Covid hit was something I wasn’t prepared for and made things more difficult than the business start-up books led me to believe!

“I’ve spent lots of time discussing self-employment with my dad, a master builder. Seeing him with his tools, methods, clear understanding of customer needs, and ability to effortlessly create solutions to their problems perplexed me all the more when I thought about my ‘trade’ as a consultant. What was my tool? What problems do I solve? Why would people buy from me? How on earth do I explain what I do?”

Passage of time

But now, with some of these foundations in place, Janine says it has been possible to learn valuable lessons from ongoing experience and be flexible enough to change the business. She said: “The core of Knovolution has changed over the years as I’ve learned more about my ideal clients, the messaging and what I want to occupy myself with. “It was difficult to adopt the good business advice of ‘niching’, sell one thing to one client group. When it comes to KM, it always felt like I was trying to sell a jigsaw with just the corner pieces and few of the picture pieces when I thought about just doing communities, or intranets, or lesson-learning.”

So now she says she is more focused on the client than on what she is selling. “My forte has always been in helping people define their needs and find direction in terms of solutions for their unique circumstances, so the strategic advisory has always been a core service. What has remained, unwaveringly, are the core principles of Knovolution that manifested from that early soul searching:

1. Incite capability – People Power. Enable people to act with confidence, clarity and competence;

2. Unite people for progress – Community. Through connection, we amplify each other’s effort and success;

3. Triumph over adversity – Solutions. Rebel against problems through learning, responsiveness and resilience;

4. Revolutionise success – Progress. Break from the norm, circumvent mediocrity.

These values shape everything for me.

What next?

The experience of setting up a business during Covid was slow and difficult. “A long time passed with no work since we were in the thick of lockdown. I then got a contract with the British Psychological Society to help them with a knowledge audit and shaping their KM strategy… and the start of supporting SMEs with KM. That was a defining project in many ways as it was the start of developing the Knovoscope, finding my approach to virtual knowledge audits, and supporting organisations outside the technical sector.”

Alongside these projects she said she also does contract work with large corporations covering things like communities, e-learning, KM strategy, k-audits, thought partnerships, knowledge assurance, bespoke solutions, and training. But her main focus, at the moment, is “growing my capability in helping SMEs adopt KM during their growth journey through services such as KM strategy, business growth guidance, education, and coaching”. In the next article Janine will go into more detail about her work with SMEs and how this fits into the wider KM landscape.