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Once Upon a Time
We wouldn't be breaking any new ground to say that storytelling is a fundamental form of knowledge transfer: searching
"Storytelling Knowledge Management" in Google returns about 507,000 pages. Stephen Denning of the World Bank is probably the thought leader here, and in his book, The
Springboard, he explains how he found storytelling to be the most effective way to get his audience to understand the value of KM. It was a particular story, in fact, in which a health worker
in Zambia was able to learn something new about malaria by connecting to the CDC's website in Atlanta. For some reason, making this incident into a story made it more compelling than just stating it as fact. As a narrative, with a beginning and a middle and an end, it was somehow able to permeate the mental membranes of a broader community.
This may be why blogs are perhaps the quintessential knowledge application -- the thing we've wanted that can provide real, grass roots support for knowledge workers. Time, chronological time, is a blog's basic organizing principle -- blogs tell you what happened today, and what happened earlier and maybe what the writer thinks will happen tomorrow. That makes them natural storytelling vehicles. Plus they allow readers to add comments, and post their own hyperlinks, which provides the kind of feedback a good storyteller needs. Their lack of meta-data and the other trappings of Big Time KM systems may make them seem insignificant. They will probably never deliver the official Seal-of-Approval flavor that companies want when establishing Best Practice. But they can't be beat as searchable repositories of otherwise tacit tidbits.
They work pretty well at engaging a community, too, and that's always the first step. You can't share knowledge (or anything else) until you've found a group that's willing to share it with you.
Managing Knowledge Knowledge
We've been re-tracing our steps over some basic KM ground in the last few weeks, working on
a research paper for a K Street client. So we've been browsing and reading and thinking about things like tacit knowledge vs. explicit knowledge, and learning organizations, and personalization vs.
codification strategies. These were the foundational elements for our own introduction to KM, and they seemed really fresh and exciting in the late 90s. They still seem exciting, actually, but it's
surprising there's been so little progress. A lot of people are still writing KM overviews and survey articles and general introductions. The concept has moved out of academia and into the mainstream
media. But a generic "KM 101" article written in late 2004 is about the same as one written in 1998.
It's as if KM has fallen victim to its own kind of infloglut. Where there were
thousands of web pages before, now there are millions. Unfortunately, most of them are saying mostly the same things. Ironically, this is illustrative of the problem that KM was intended to solve. Today,
you can still get a good grounding in KM theory and practice by searching the web. Now, it will take a lot longer than it did 10 years ago, because there's so much more stuff to look at!
One of those recent pages is an amusing commentary at CIO Australia, warning that "a little knowledge management is a dangerous thing." The author's advice is to forget about funding "know how departments" and set up a good reference library instead. Food for thought.
Sneaking Up on Knowledge Management
Back in the day, we recommended an indirect strategy for an internal KM program at a
large consulting company, anticipating something that has come to be called "Stealth Knowledge Management."
We were ahead of our time.
Since then, a number of analysts have observed that there's something off-putting about the very phrase "Knowledge Management," especially to hard-nosed
accounting types. It sounds so vague and amorphous that it just cries out for budgetary attention: "Cut me! cut me!" One of our colleagues in Europe has noted it's also easier to sell knowledge
services if they aren't called knowledge services. There are all kinds of things that clients find easier to swallow, which often come down to the same thing: Risk Management, perhaps. Or Organizational
Development. Core Competency Analysis...
The truth is, organizations are not going to invest in KM until they see it as the solution to a real problem. Knowledge practitioners may be absolutely
convinced of KM's benefits (and they may be absolutely right, too). But the jargon gets in the way of implementation. What you call a thing is critically important, even though you may have little
control over it at the highest level. At a very early KM conference, IKMS 98, keynote speaker Peter Drucker was asked whether he
thought "we" should change Knowledge Management to something less highfaluting. He thought for a moment, shrugged, and replied. "And just how would you go about changing it? Like it or
not, KM is what KM is called."
That's true for trade journals, and web sites, and conferences and professional organizations. It isn't necessarily true if you're trying to get a knowledge
initiative implemented in your own organization. If you're having trouble getting an explicit KM proposal off the ground, take a look at the way it's written and try a different approach. Sneak up on ’em.
Now You’re Cooking!
One of the challenges in doing KM is getting past the sometimes arcane language that comes from its
roots in think tanks and universities. The famous Knowledge Spiral, which first appears in The Knowledge Creating Company, is a very dense cluster of ideas. It speaks of
four fundamental knowledge processes (Socialization, Externalization, Combination and Internalization) as well as four "modes" of transformation (Field Building, Dialog, Linking and Learning by
Doing), overlaid not with a comfortably linear, beginning-to-end vision, but with an endless, mystical spiral. Deep...
It's not hard to understand, though, when illustrated with ideas that are a
little closer to home. There's an old family tradition, in the home of one K Street principle, which calls for the serving of Clam Dip every Thanksgiving. The Socialization of this knowledge emerged from the tacit agreement that the family would continue a tradition started by our parents, and carry it into another generation. It was Externalized when Dad's recipe was captured and written down for the first time. Combination happens when new ideas connect with the old, and innovations appear in the basic ingredient list (although such innovations are not always met with the approval of the community). Finally, the designated Maker of the Dip abandons the recipe altogether, since the basic mix has been so Internalized that
an explicit set of instructions is no longer necessary. At least not until the torch is passed to another family member, or to the next generation.
This helps illustrate the idea that while KM is
a relatively new label, what happens inside the knowledge box has been happening for a very long time.
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