With the current downturn in the economy, many companies are starting to feel a little less secure about their market positioning than they were a year ago. And understandably so — extra cash is becoming tough to come by in almost any company.

We’ve seen banks fail outright, and we’ve seen many companies trying desperately to cut costs; and, in more than one place, I’ve heard the same discussion — can knowledge management save a failing company? Well, the short answer seems to be ‘no’, and the long answer is a decisive, yes, you guessed it, ‘maybe’.

Let me first say that (while I’m not any kind of expert in failing companies or in turning said companies around), that there can be any number of reasons why a company fails. If we’re talking about a start-up, the ‘maybe it was just a bad idea’ reason seems to often be an obvious culprit.

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If you’re a knowledge management professional (that is, somebody who thinks about knowledge management more than they probably should), you’ve probably encountered the formal-versus-informal debate in some capacity.

Much of the time, as knowledge management folks, we try to come up with processes — processes for how people work, processes for how organizations make decisions, processes for how technology gets put into place. Yet where there’s a place for building, there’s a place for tearing down.

We’ve all had to deal with nonsensical but well-intentioned processes. Maybe somebody thought it would be a great idea to make somebody fill out a form every time they want to be recognized for sharing knowledge — thinking that it would be easier to track who was doing a good job of sharing and who was shoveling knowledge into their own personal silo.

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The Centre for International Competitiveness recently released the 2008 World Knowledge Competitiveness Index (available for free download here), which shows North America beginning to lag in knowledge dominance, with Europe and Asia picking up the slack.

The shift in knowledge dominance has seen old guard Western centres (like New York, Washington and London — London dropping all the way from 46th to 102nd) losing ranking to smaller American cities such as Hartford and Bridgeport, as well as smaller European nations.

The report compares 145 regions across 19 different knowledge economy benchmarks. It’s worth noting however that the top 5 spots are still all in the U.S.: San Jose (#1), Boston (#2), Hartford (#3), Bridgeport (#4) and San Francisco (#5).

The persisent ascent of cities like Stockholm and Tokyo is also interesting to note, as well as the fact that Shanghai has now moved ahead of both Berlin and the Canadian province of British Columbia. China’s Guangdong region also comes first in the study’s Regional Knowledge Intensity index (a measure comparing the knowledge base of a region to its economic output).

I think most knowledge management practitioners would agree that part of their job is to educate users and management types about the possibilities of a successful knowledge management program. But what happens when the knowledge management practitioner doesn’t agree with where the business wants to go with KM?

When I talk about users in this context, there’s a bunch of different groups I’m talking about. Knowledge management implementations usually end up with a host of technologies being put in place (content management systems, enterprise search engines, collaboration tools, etc.) — and ‘users’ usually end up being any group of people that has to interact with these systems.

When you end up asking users what they want, you usually get a few consistent answers (a search engine that looks and acts like Google usually comes up, or less time looking for templates and other often-used documents), and then a smaller proportion of very diverse answers.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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