Caution: this post may bring to you to unknown places!
Take a ubiquitous metaphor, transform it to accommodate new meanings, apply reasoning to the emergent framework and see where you wind-up.
a useful knowledge production pattern or a stream of nonsense!
Landscapes with their fitness gradients, their species niches and evolutionary selection, give a whole new meaning to the term knowledge ecology - memes & genes - will talk about this another time.
Knowledge accumulation can be likened to travelling through a landscape. There are hills and peaks to climb (gaining understanding and competence), valleys and plains to cross (mastering unknown or novel environments), a sense of urgency pervades (local competition). We are driven by identity, curiosity and necessity to explore wider and further. Error, poor judgement (miss-reading) and economic disturbance can result in us being forced to descend from comfortable lofty peaks to wander in the lowlands seeking a new hill to master.
FROM FITNESS LANDSCAPES TO KNOWLEDGE LANDSCAPES By David Oliver and Johan Roos, 1999
Examines the relationships between topography and knowledge. I find this to be a useful way to picture the dynamics of knowledge gains and the need to unlearn before gaining expertise in an adjacent or new field.
Knowledge landscapes apply to individuals, groups and organizations, there are the same fractal qualities we observe when moving up-scale from sand grains to rocks to mountains, the same linkages, relationships, competitive games, sources and sinks that characterize personal KM, CoPs and organizational learning. Often we become stuck on a local plateau, unable to find the real mountain top, or face deep ravines we do not have courage to cross in our knowledge 'walks'.
Metaphor and analogy are powerful tools for working with knowledge. Often times it seems to me, our fitness landscape is not only complex, but heaving at the same time in the knowledge world!.
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