KM fundamentals

* Understanding knowledge: What it means, how to work with it, who owns it, how it flows, finding who knows.

* Supporting knowledge: Making sharing and knowledge creation happen, applying new & useful knowledge level practices, developing & appreciating symptoms and diagnostics. Walking on a different (higher?)landscape.

* Scaling knowledge: Moving from individual insights, to group validation, to enterprise meaning, and then beyond. Overcoming the 'stickiness' at community level and the 'slipperiness' associated with professional / domain interactions.

* Speeding cultural changes: Knowledge is closely tied to people and identity, changing mindsets is more than altering process and habits. Making sure we 'listen' and empathize with discontinuous insights, killing NIH (not invented here)

* (How to) transfer learning: Making & taking new concepts to action, thinking together, collaborating and delivering to a market that will not wait. Retention, taking action and embedding not just access & experience.

Some things stand out here for me:

1) Deep dialog, a freedom to 'voice', creative abrasion where both challenge and empathy are high, a value set that includes 'listening' in all its forms as a core practice

2) An executive that 'walks the talk', believes in the power of openness and the innovation that springs from exploration and sharing. Top management that models what they wish to change and see happen

3) A recognition and reward system that is congruent with values of sharing, collaboration, member diversity and group synergy.

4) Appreciation and fundamental understanding of the dynamics of relationships, the changes due to an always connected, networked world, the principle of reciprocity and the social capital that drives innovation

5) A feel for the power that comes from shared meaning, co-design, the leverage of an ontology and the potential of shared spaces / forums.

I have seen these come to 'be' in self-selected communities of practice, that support identity, encourage social learning, engage in cycles of participation / reification, seek to create new knowledge, increase mutual awareness and build trust.

Comments

[David Locke]

About two weeks ago, I was looking at Advance Organizers. They are supposed to help overcome the lack of "old," to which the "new" can be situated. They help overcome stickiness.

Sliperiness really seems to originate with the notion of a single "corporate culture." Electrical engineering is a culture, so electrical engineers exhibit sliperiness in their own discipline. It is only when bound artificially by the organization does sliperiness become an issue.

[David Locke]

About two weeks ago, I was looking at Advance Organizers. They are supposed to help overcome the lack of "old," to which the "new" can be situated. They help overcome stickiness.

Sliperiness really seems to originate with the notion of a single "corporate culture." Electrical engineering is a culture, so electrical engineers exhibit sliperiness in their own discipline. It is only when bound artificially by the organization does sliperiness become an issue.

[Gautam]

is some kind of knowledge more useful than others?

I would think so...knowledge at the edges/peripheries is much likelier to be useful for innovation and creativity than 'traditional knowledge' however important

Traditional knowledge maintains the status quo...emergent knowledge viewed through fresh perspectives challenges it !

[lady sonia]

Interesting take on knowledge management from an insider. Thanks for the definitions, they have helped me understand what it is all about in a much clearer context than the usual management speak meant to confuse and intimidate, yet at the same time tell us nothing.

[Rod]

Don't cross the bridges before you come to them...

[milf hunter]

nice!

[Sergio Z]

It seems to me a very interesting topic I'm analyzing in my MBA degree. From your point of you, what do you think are the current & future trends of KM for the industry?? For managing organizations??

[denham]

David,

Thanks for your many keen comments.

'Sliperiness refers to knowledge leaking via shared ontologies, i.e. engineers from different companies in the same industry sector have a language in common and share tacit thought forms that make it easy for inventions and ideas to flow.

'Stickiness' is the difficulty of moving ideas (distinctions) across community boundaries where there is no shared practice, ontology or lingua franca. Ideas tend to find homes and bounce back from those boundary constraints.

This terminology comes from John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid - their book "The Social Life of Information".

[David Locke]

I am having a hard time grasping what you mean by sliperiness relative to professionals or domain interactions. I translate stickiness to mean resistance to adoption of new ideas by the community, who still hold and defend the previously adopted idea. I wold likewise translate sliperiness as non-adoption by the community. Domains are communities.

[David Locke]

In "Dialogue: The Art of Thinking Together" the author says that empathy or having you say is a matter of expression under a power relationship. Ephasizing is not the appropriate approach to ensure adoption of outside ideas or discontinuous ideas.

Pilot projects that focus on small subsets of the community should work.