Knowledge and knowing

Knowledge as possession and knowledge as being, is one of those fundamental polarities in KM, time to take another look.

Working with knowledge we face some interesting choices:

• Codification or personalisation?
• Explicit or tacit?
• Knowledge as object or as flow?
• Knowledge as emergent or existent?
• Do we mine existing information or create new knowledge?
• Should we focus on internal or external (customer) knowledge?
• Is our core driver process or practice?
• Must we focus on community or cognition?

Knowledge as possession pervades most of our thinking and writing. We talk easily of knowledge harvesting, knowledge transfer, intellectual capital, knowledge assets, capturing, storing, distribution, valuation, ownership, purchase and possession when managing knowledge. This is knowledge as an object, a resource, a commodity. This is explicit, explicated, static, rigid, recorded.

Knowledge can be observed from other vantage points - consider knowledge as dispersed, community bound, emergent, ephemeral, embedded in practice, as sense-making, arising from interaction and dialog. In this sense, knowledge is acquired through participation, practice, apprenticement. knowledge is 'being' and doing, shared understandings and frameworks. Knowledge is socially and culturally  mediated, negotiated interpretation and embedded in relationships.

Knowledge, in this second view, is not a token, ownership rests within the ecology and is collective, knowing is rooted in membership, practice and being, emerges via dialog and actor to actor exchange - it cannot be extracted, captured, exchanged without critical loss of meaning, context and value. This helps explain why best practice transfer is a myth, why ethnography rather than surveys  are needed to uncover knowledge, why measuring knowledge makes no sense, why mentorship, community, relationships, trust and dialog are keys to knowledge fermentation.

Way too often we reside or slide towards 'knowledge as possession' and overlook, forget, ignore or dismiss the very qualities and conditions that make knowledge really interesting.

Comments

[Geert Willems]

In literature there are lots of definition of knowledge and knowledge management. I can give a one page definition of knowledge management. If you analyse that definition it comes down to everything you do with data. I can give also give you a 3 word definition of knowledge management: 'handling owned information'...which again comes down to almost everything you do.
I am lacking the side of 'feeling' knowledge in most knowledge management approaches. While one of the most challenging things in implementing knowledge management projects is getting all the team members with the nose in the same direction and letting them go at the same speed.
I agree with David that KM is often misused: not in the least by companies selling KM-software...

[David Locke]

I don't know where your definition comes from Bruce, but knowledge isn't necessarily explicated. Once it is explicated, it isn't as valuable either. And, in terms of knowledge managment, there is more to do than manage explicit content. The content management definitions are pure buzzword, and over reaching by adjacent disciplines getting in on the KM game, mostly by people who don't have a clue about KM. There is very little value add in knowledge management as content management.

Knowledge is useful whether it is codified or not, defined or not. Knowledge is embedded, and once embedded it is transferable, not that anyone notices.

[Bruce Lewin]

Do you look at the definitions of knowledge at all? The means to define and codify?