Your desert with a map scenario is brilliant - until people philosophize about the nature of information they don’t quite see that it’s all about personal context or frame of reference…sure there is a message, but are you being INFORMED.

I like how you say the “…goal is to “facilitate thinking to support ‘doing’”

So where does that leave Knowledge Management?

What do you mean by facilitate thinking? This is an empowering statement.

First thing that comes to mind is narrative/story sessions, world cafe, AAR, etc…where people come together, and stuff emerges from their group experience.

By default people connect and build relationships just by being part of these excercises.

This stuff that organically emerges or manifests tells them something about themselves, they are learning from their interactions by participating. They can take back these rich insights and apply this new thinking in their doing (as you put it).

The same with online networks and communities, only this is a chance to still connect and learn when you are not in the same room.

Social tools are humanistic as they are about conversation and connection, that’s how we get work done in the offine world.

I can see we need information managers, but I’m not sure about
knowledge managers, rather we need people that are more humanistic, learning type facilitators.

But we do need someone to make sure that all these knowledge sharing activities and way of being are occuring, this person will be managing knowledge-related activities, not knowledge itself.

BTW - A while back I was obsessed with physics for a couple of months.
http://libraryclips.blogsome.com/2007/01/11/blog-tagged-again/

Just reading your posts now, what a great conversation you started, this fits in exactly to my blog post, wish I had of known beforehand…
http://www.fastforwardblog.com/2007/06/14/knowledge-doesnt-want-to-be-managed/
I like Dave Snowdens reply
http://www.cognitive-edge.com/2007/06/only_if_we_burn_the_office_dow.php

I’m going to have to write another blog post…

But going back to the DIKW continuum, let me offer a story I use repeatedly. In a fabulous Data Resource Management certificate program at the University of Washington, we were schooled by the ‘think-tank resources out of Boeing. We learned about things like data0 (data prime), etc.

In one of my exercises I came up with a fabulous analogy. This was 1991. It was also the height of Richard Saul Wurman (his book Information Anxiety was required reading, but I’d already read it). Richard suggests that it isn’t information until it ‘informs’, which is why I began writing the word as INFORMation in my resume at that time. With that I wrote the following scenario: You’re in the middle of the Mojave desert. You come upon a gas station, but it’s abandoned. Lying on the counter is a map. Most would consider the map information: data in context. But there’s another criteria. It isn’t information until it’s in individually-relevant context (it has to be both important and understandable to me). In the middle of the desert, there is no context. The map is useless noise.

I’ve actually been having a great ‘complexity’ conversation with a colleague the last two days. I’ve had additional critical insights through that exchange (I was offering the insights, but they were ‘’new’ to me as I said them). I’ll be doing a blog post to cover the details shortly.

I’ve had some rousing KM debates in the past as well: http://www.fastforwardblog.com/2007/06/15/km-nerves-are-raw

The strange thing is it is a little of the pot calling the kettle black. He is the one applying positivistic thinking to the topic. For example, his umbrella argument. He says that what is done under the label of KM is not managing knowledge, but either managing information or managing work practices. It seems to me that we haven’t drawn strong lines between those three things for quite some time.

But the really annoying thing for me was when he did get it right, he still stuffed it up. I totally agree with his comments about making tacit knowledge explicit. But that doesn’t mean we give up and call tacit knowledge unmeasurable, therefore not to be considered. A great deal of tacit knowledge can be transferred via social networking, CoPs, mentoring, management rotation, the list goes on. The trades have been doing this for years and because it worked they never really worried about not understanding past basic principles.

Because Wilson is basically a Taylorist himself, he seems to equate the word “manage” with the word “control”. We can’t control knowledge any more than we can control a garden.

Your points a well made, I guess I am just always tentative about making a good point on bad philosophical ground.

Thanks for your comments about my blog, It seems we are on similar journeys. I look forward to talking more.

Just subscribed to your blog, lots of good stuff…I plan soon to move on to reading about sensemaking and complexity.

Wilson’s paper was not the greatest of reads, but I feel the quotes I used were OK, and very similar to Frank Millers line of thinking.

What do you think?

A pretty good summary of the state of play and I liked most of your quotes. You have spent some time putting this together and it shows. There is little doubt in my mind that sense-making and self-organisation are the way forward…for knowledge workers at least and embracing complexity is a must.

I happen to like the broad scope of the term “Knowledge Management” and am not concerned that the lens this title bestows does not always match the activities in simple ways. You make a very good point that HR and neuro-cognitive skills should be included, as often KM people only talk of the content and IT sides of KM. Enterprise 2.0 is changing this a little but we have a way to go.

I am surprised you referred to Wilsons old paper. As a first year Master student I could drive a truck through most of his strawmen arguments and I had hoped it had died a natural death by now. I do understand that people who have been around KM for longer than a decade or so still have these of SECI conceptions of KM and if you have unearthed it to help others out of this rut, then I guess more power to you but I consider it more focused on trying to influence the ignorant CEO/CIOs ad the damage might be more than the gain.

This is the first of your articles I have read and I will read more as time permits. Well done.

Kind Regards,

Stu French.