5 Ways to Kickstart KCS Adoption

While we know KCS requires ongoing discipline, it’s absolutely true that the first weeks and months are crucial to get adoption started on the right path. Here are 5 ways you can kickstart the program through gamification:

Hold a contribution lottery. Each week or every couple of days, recognize someone who contributed positively to the process. It could be someone who wrote an article (chosen randomly amongst all the new articles, but keep picking at random until you find a decent one!), who updated an article, who linked a case to an existing article. You can keep the category random until the award for added suspense.

Use “best of” awards. Here you would look for the individual (or team!) who created the most articles, had the highest link percentage, got the highest quality score, collected the most links, etc. Be sure to include some quality criteria in the awards so you end up recognizing the team that created a large number of useless articles…

Don’t focus solely on creation. It’s ok to focus on creation for the first week or two, but make it a point to reward other helpful behaviors such as updating articles, gathering lots of citations, and other behaviors that boost quality over quantity.

Be entirely goofy. How about awards for creating an article that contains the word “solely”, contains exactly 222 words, or whose title includes a hyphen? Your imagination is the limit.

Recognize coaches and publishers. Contributors won’t embrace KCS unless they see their articles be swiftly published so reserve some of the awards for non-authors. You can use a nomination process to recognize the coaches.

What did you do (or are you doing) to kickstart your KCS program? Tell us in the comments. (And if you want more ideas on deploying successful knowledge management programs, contact me.)