I was a little disappointed when I first read the title of Patrick Lambe’s commentary at Inside Knowledge, “Should be it be wisom — not knowledge — management?“.

However, as I got into Patrick’s arguments, my disappointment gave way to a sense of relief — Patrick, by the end of the article, dismisses “wisdom management” as the red herring that it is.

Discussions about whether knowledge management should be called “wisdom management” (or anything else, for that matter), usually stem from epistemological arguments about the nature of knowledge and wisdom, and whether it’s truly proper to call what we do “knowledge management”.

Well of course it’s not. A name is, after all, just a name. And it’s unfortunate that “knowledge management” is what has stuck, but that’s the nature of naming things — sometimes the name you end up with is not really the best for something.

Continue reading »

Anecdote has an interesting post from a few days ago about the power of storytelling in organizations. The particular example used in this post is the story of a particular manager:

One of the stories often selected as significant is a seemingly simple account of a woman whose manager stops whatever he was doing whenever she visited his office, moves to a table in the middle of the room and invites her to sit down and then totally focusses on her. She felt that she was being listened to and her ideas were important. It was remarkable for this woman because other managers didn’t do that.

When presented along with about 150 other stories, leaders often selected this story as something they would like to get their managers to start doing. They believed that getting their managers to effect this change in their own behaviour would lead to an overall organizational change.

Continue reading »

I’ve been thinking lately about what it takes to successfully share knowledge, and how this type of sharing can used to maximum benefit by anyone who needs to know something someone else knows better than they do.

Here’s some ways to do share knowledge better that I came up with:

1. Share failures as well as successes. If you only ever tell others what you’re successful at, it’s going to be impossible to improve what you do. Also, there may be a critical area that you or your team is deficient at that another person or team can help you improve. Don’t be afraid to let others know where you’re struggling — that’s one of the important steps to improvement.

2. Don’t oversell your own work. Don’t go into any knowledge sharing exchange with the intent of proving the greatness of your own work — that doesn’t make for a very useful or fair exchange of ideas. Be humble, but also make sure to give yourself and your team honest credit where you should.

3. Ask questions about others’ work. Don’t just be a bump on a log — actively ask questions about what someone is telling you. It shows an interest in what they’re saying, but more importantly, asking the right questions will always get you more than just passive listening will.

Continue reading »

Matt Moore’s got a short but insightful presentation on demonstrating the value of knowledge management (found via Bill Ives’ post), — and surprise, it’s not about the amount of documents your user base downloads or how many community members you have.

I think Matt’s point is a good one. While it’s important to demonstrate the value of your projects, it’s also important to be selective in what metrics and measures you use to describe that value.

However, I think the value of knowledge management in a specific organization is often dependent of what that organization is looking to get out of KM. In one organization, it may be a better quality of work than previously existed, whereas in another organization, it may be cost savings.

Nailing down what you really want to get out of KM (just like you would for any endeavour) is one of the keys in making you get what you want out of it in the end. The “we just want to do everything better than we do now” approach is always going to fail.

I thought my post about the potential decline of knowledge management on my other blog, memetiks.com, might interest my readers here. While I suggested in that post that the declining searches on Google Trends may be due to an increased understanding of what KM is about, I’m still reminded of the knowledge management as nonsense argument.

Knowledge management, in its purest, distilled form, was always about (or should have been about) making things simpler for people (yes, I’m being very liberal with my interpretation here). It would seem, however, that in its present incarnation, KM is rarely making things simpler for people.

Part of the problem seems to be that we, as knowledge management folk, assume that people want to know what KM is (or perhaps we just hope they care). Funny thing is, they don’t really care. They care about being better at their job.

Continue reading »

Jared Diamond, author of Guns, Germs and Steel, postulates that there are four important environmental factors that contribute to the ultimate success or failure of a society:

1. “Continental differences in the wild plant and animal species available as starting materials for domestication.” Having more domesticatable species of flora and fauna mean a head start for that society in terms of farming, feeding a population and manual labour (from domesticated animals).

2. Rates of technological diffusion and population migration within a continent. How fast people can move around within a particular continent affects how fast they can spread technologies to other people within that continent — as well as allowing for other proximate technologies such as increased communication speed.

3. Rates of technological diffusion and population migration between continents. North Africa, being relatively easy to reach from both the Middle East and Europe, benefited from many early advantages that more southern African countries did not, due to their separation from North Africa by a large desert.

Continue reading »

 Today I came across an article in The Globe and Mail (for my non-Canadian readers, the Globe and Mail is daily national newspaper in Canada) entitled ‘Mobilizing minds‘.

While the beginning of the article had the usual warnings about the importance of knowledge workers in the knowledge economy, and that catering to knowledge workers was often more important than other corporate strategies, there was a passage later in the article that struck me as insightful:

“Market mechanisms can also improve the flow of ideas. For the better part of two decades, companies have invested heavily in ‘knowledge management’ – but with limited results, because real value comes less from managing knowledge than from creating and exchanging it. A ‘knowledge marketplace’ is one device to promote the exchange of ideas.”

Knowledge management often does have an inordinate focus on the management of knowlege (I guess it wouldn’t be called knowledge management if it didn’t), rather than focusing on the knowledge creation and sharing aspects of work life.

What is implicit to this statement is that ‘management’ usually ends up being an information warehouse (and yes, I deliberately used the word information instead of knowledge). Opinions, reports and methods get written and then get digitally bundled and tossed into a warehouse (which is often called a ‘knowledge base’).

Continue reading »

Building on the principles that Shawn has put together over at Anecdote (which I came across this afternoon via Jack Vinson), I came up with a little acronym that I think summarizes some of the main points. Overall, I think in order to get people to share knowledge, we want them to be… B-R-I-I-T-T-E-R.

Borrowing: Taking ideas from others (with attribution, as Shawn points out, and which deserves its own letter, as per the next word).

Recognizing: Providing the attribution for ideas that people deserve.

Investigating: Don’t be a bump on a log. Research, investigate, find out what’s going on inside and outside the organization — especially when stuck on a problem.

Inquiring: Don’t just bury your head in books — ask people what they think, how they think, how they work, and what they do.

Trusting: It’s hard to trust people, but they’ll be more willing to trust if you make the first move. Make a point of trying to open up to colleagues about issues and challenges you’re facing in your job.

Teaching: Don’t give up on people that don’t know how to do something as well as you do. Be willing to take the time to teach the things you know well.

Encouraging: Even if you think someone’s idea is the dumbest thing you’ve ever heard, don’t tear people down. You can be critical in a positive, constructive way.

Receptive: Be willing to learn new ways to do things. Don’t always be a teacher — we all need to be a student sometimes as well. And don’t get flustered when someone knows how to do something better than you.

I think if we all worked every day to stick to these 8 ways of being, not only would knowledge sharing increase dramatically, but I think people’s general productivity and happiness would increase. And it’s good to remember that creating a trusting environment where knowledge sharing can happen has to start with a few people who are willing to take a chance.

After spending some time categorizing the elements of knowledge management, it became obvious that knowledge management actually consists of many rather disparate components.

While it would be nice to think that these components always complement each other, it also seems apparent from this list that there is certainly an inordinate focus on technologies.

So the obvious question that stems from these observations is: is knowledge management bloated? Have too many other domains, technologies and processes been borrowed by or absorbed into knowledge management, causing practitioners to lose focus on the people side of things?

If we take a look at the basics of knowledge management, we often see information technology listed as an ‘enabler’ of strategic knowledge management initiatives. Yet to look at this another way, it would seem that as more and more technologies are thrown into the ring, it becomes more and more difficult to focus on which technologies should be doing what.

I talked about the obsession with wikis a few weeks ago, and how wikis are often touted as the solution to any particular problem. Yet wikis are often implemented where a simpler solution (a forum, for example) would not only have sufficed, but may have been a better fit.

So if a wiki is part of a knowledge management strategy, and we consider a forum a knowledge sharing tool as well, isn’t pretty much any web or intranet page also a part of that strategy? And by extension, should an organization’s whole information technology infrastructure not be subsumed under knowledge management, since it’s all ‘knowledge-related’?

With knowledge management’s drive at inclusiveness in terms of technologies and processes, there has been very little that has been defined as clearly outside the scope of KM.

I’d be interested to hear people’s thoughts on this — is there anything you can think of that is definitively not part of knowledge management? Is it useful to define terms, processes and technologies as inside or outside the knowledge management sphere?

Last week, I dropped the 59 pieces of knowledge management I had identified into 5 interrelated buckets. While I feel the buckets were certainly representative of what knowledge management is about, they are only one interpretation.

So I am making the Microsoft Visio document available to everyone who wants it, as I promised last week. This way, if you’re so inclined, you can open up Visio and move the boxes around.

Feel free to change colours, resize shapes, add or remove items and generally do whatever you want (I’d appreciate it if you mentioned the origin of the diagram if you’re going to republish it).

If you don’t have a blog or website, and feel you’ve put together something that’s worth showing off, feel free to send it to me (use the contact form to get in touch, and I’ll give you an email address to send it to), and I just may post it here on this site.

Enjoy playing around with the diagram — hopefully we’ll get some interesting takes on the makeup of knowledge management.