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.

Yet somewhere along the way, we become purveyors of complexity for complexity’s sake. Much of the time, real value is realized through tearing down the inane corporate complexities that we all have to deal with every day, and allowing people to do their work.

And while this is a noble ideal that most people (including us knowledge management practitioners) would agree with, things turn around when we’re called on our proclamation of less complexity for all. I talked about this a few posts ago — and as a profession, knowledge management practitioners need to learn to let go.

Take communities of practice as an oft-quoted knowledge management best practice. Often, in practice (no pun intended), communities of practice end up turning a loose group (a community of interest, which is by definition less formal than a community of practice) into a formalized, structured body that no longer has the flexibility that it once did.

It’s the informal nature of these groups that often acts as one of their biggest strengths — and while formalization has its place (in terms of rejigging workflows, setting up good governance practices and the like), we really need to strike a balance between the formal and the informal.

Keeping and leveraging the messy, unorganized nature of spontaneous collaboration can be both scary and tough to do, but the tendency to overly-formalize these collaborative happenings often means squashing the life out of them.