So what is all this knowledge anyway?

I have to confess to having struggling with most discussions about knowledge management. Much of the conversation makes me feel uncomfortable in the same way that assumptions about the value of process and meetings make me feel uncomfortable and I found myself wondering "What is all this knowledge that we get so much value from "capturing" "extracting" or even "harvesting"?

I thought back to my days as a "real" manager when I was responsible for around fifty staff and involved in day to day management of real work. I rarely if ever was called upon to write about what I did or what I knew. Most of the documents I wrote were formal reporting, business information, that if it was true it was only so for a brief period of time and it's relevance decayed faster than a snowball in hell. I didn't write opinion pieces or analysis and the day to day colour that made my decisions possible was never recorded.

In contrast, and although not perfect or comprehensive, the "knowledge" that I have burbled about in our blogs, wikis and forums over the past four years will leave a much more navigable path to enable others to understand what challenged me, inspired me or even bored me. In other words I will leave behind a legacy that will give others at least a rough idea of what was involved in doing my job.

I was recently talking to a group involved in delivering knowledge management services when one of the younger guys there suggested that if they all started blogging they would make their own knowledge much more accessible than it is at the moment. Mischievously I asked how much of what they knew about managing knowledge was captured currently. How much they write up, document and "manage" what they know? You can guess the answer .....

So in the context of time consuming knowledge management practices and expensive document management applications I repeat the question - which is, I hope, neither naive nor disrespectful. What is all this knowledge that we get so much value from "capturing" "extracting" or even "harvesting"?

More importantly perhaps - what's the point?

[Originally posted to the actKM Discussion List]

Technorati Tags: internet, blogging, organizations, work, management, blogs, socialcomputing, business, knowledgemanagement

Comments

[Denham Grey]

Like you were, I'm responsible for production in a small company.

Find we repeat past mistakes, forget simple tricks, working short-cuts, heuristics and competencies that often make a huge collective difference, our processes 'wander' off course and quality degrades. We often forget why we do things the way we do, we (re)try 'innovations' that have been proven not to work.

Perhaps it is not about capture, extraction or harvesting - more about awareness, understanding, documentation, history, remembering, sharing patterns......

[Euan]

I am not implying that we don't learn from the past but more how we learn from that past, our collective past.

Seeing someone have an online conversation about something they are about to do with someone who has experience at doing it surfaces nuance and insight that a sterile manual never can. Having the collective memory of a particular event or practice emerge through reading the subjective insights of multiple blogs is much richer than the distilled abstractions of a formal report.

Individuals taking responsibility for writing about their own insights and being brave enough to share them is much more valuable than having their actions analyzed and dissected by third parties for a remote dispersed and depersonalised system.

[Jon Husband]

Absolutley spot on .. I know that this point hbas been made before by you, me and others in some of the conversations about this issue, but it needs to be repeated, clarified and expanded .. the acts of social engagement and exchang in purposeful conversations is what creates actionable *knowedge*, etc., etc.

Not whether some systems helps you organize static information that may add some value to a current issue or problem

[Jon Husband]

more about awareness, understanding, documentation, history, remembering, sharing patterns.....

... the responses and dynamics well-designed blogs, and effective blog writing and commenting, can help create ?

[Lumpy]

Two memories immediatley come to my mind. One of a company I worked for back in high school. They had purchased a computer back in the punch key and data tape days. They immediatly put it to work generating report after report. They then filed those reports. 12 years later they hired a document shredding service to dispose of the old reports to make room for more recent ones. The worst part... No one ever looked at the reports.

The other is my college fraternity. They modify bylaws, create rules and inevetably repeat the same cycle every four years as older wise members leave taking the lessons learned with them.

One is an example of useless knowledge aquisition and the other of knowledge lost.

Your post makes a very valid point. What are we to gain?

The potential is knowledge not lost but passed forward. The danger is a trivial obsession with the process of capturing it.

The answer lies in the middle. Most of the meetings I attend are, in fact, useless. They involve rhetoric and never create anything. Knowledge management is a great tool but individuals must be able to apply the gained knowledge. I do not claim to have any answer for I am currently struggling with the issue myself. I do know one thing though. I can learn more on the Internet in one week than I could in a semester at college. I can also find information much quicker than I could at the best library.

I also know that I have been able to correspond with people who are experts on such matters. This was not possible before the Internet. I am also able to grab thier OPML list and sift through filtered information. My point is simple. It is a tool just like a meeting. How it is applied matters most.

I hope it washes that way for every one else as well.

[dave Snowden]

Well, a book is a form of harvested knowledge (and I note from the blogg that you are reading a few)
The systems by bank have in place to process payments and prevent fraud arise from harvested knowledge

Lets not throw out the baby with the bathwater

[Euan]

Indeed but the way I decide what is worth reading has changed radically thanks to the writing of my fellow bloggers and the ease of Amazon.

[David]

Really enjoyed this post, Euan. In education (my line of work), pastoral "knowledge" is currently very hard to pass on and dies away the moment a brilliant tutor or teacher leaves a school. The same is true of what really makes for a good lesson — a spirit not usually caught in the snare of an official inspection!

Blogging about pastoral life, and even classroom life, is problematic precisely for pastoral reasons, but suitably anonymized and at a distance from the event (where necessary), such blogs could make a wonderful contribution to our work in schools.