Documentation & knowledge

A oft repeated question / assertion in KM is the link between explicit documentation and knowledge.

The point I'm trying to make, is documentation alone does not = knowledge. To retain knowledge against attrition you have to have a community that can appreciate the context, understand the issues, talk the language, adopt the assumptions, share the tricks, interpret and adapt the explicit stuff to changing external circumstances.

Agree we need to know how to make things and deliver services, but that knowing does not come from documents, it emerges in the dialog around the practice. To capture and preserve the knowledge, - not the data or information, - but the meaning and shared understanding, you need to sustain the community, energize the questions and promote the learning, rather than capturing content or storing the document.

It is around the tacit stuff; what you may feel, observe, intuit and never 'see' or read, the relationships, the mentoring, the validation by talking, by 'being' and through doing, that creates and finally preserves the knowledge. If we loose the 'community', we revert to information and have to bring forth the knowledge in another community to enliven, validate and refresh it.

If you still have doubts read Doug Hofstadter