Herding Cats and "the nonsense of knowledge management"

I ran a lunchtime session at the National School of Government on Friday, and used the video below to illustrate that knowledge management is an oxymoron. It's really about managing (creating, nurturing, protecting, supporting, technologically enabling) the environment for knowledge sharing - not attempting the impossible cat-herding task of managing what's in the heads of individuals... More detailed comment from me on this topic on the Uncommon Knowledge Blog. Meanwhile, here's that video - an oldie, but goodie! [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SmgLtg1Izw]

Lonely Hearts...

I wrote 50 Valentine cards today.  Actually that's  a lie - 51 in total, if you include the one for my wife.

In a moment of madness I offered to follow-up on an "offers and requests" process at a recent meeting of the Henley KM Forum looking at the topic of Collaboration.  The participants had just finished a post-it note exercise, identifying their needs and offerings on a set of flipcharts. It's hard to keep the momentum going, even with a good network like this one, once people have left the room. 

So... I spent today matching up people "who have something to share" with people who have "something to learn". Seeing as tomorrow is a day for matchmaking, we're sending each of the potential "knowledge dates" a personalised electronic Valentine card like this mock-up - but with their photos.  (With apologies to Cilla Black and Leonardo!).

There's a lot of KM and networking insights to be drawn from Dating agencies...

Love hearts by Andrew Jalali

Typing 2.0

I was at the Henley KM Forum yesterday, and we had an interesting side-conversation about the increasing importance of touch-typing in today's world of multi-synchrouous chats, on-line swarms and text-based social media. How much of a business disadvantage will 30 wpm be vs 50 wpm in the future? (Or 35 wpm, then 15 seconds of correction, as it is in my case!). [My mum has even started emailing me to point out my typos on my blog and website!]

Will accurate speech-to-text interfaces replace it in the future, or should my children learn touch typing as a matter of urgency?

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-kLj__6mROQ]

Word association...

Funny what you come across when you search for yourself in Technorati (Narcissist? Moi?). Here's an unlikely post from Dr Grumble's blog, which picks up on the metaphors I used in a recent presentation to the NHS. Dr Grumble wasn't there, but he discovered the slides and blogged them anyway. http://drgrumble.blogspot.com/2006/12/tall-poppies-toppling-cranes-and-nudist.html

So now I'm tagged with nudist beaches and tall poppies. Looking forward to the spam that that will generate!

Well, here goes...

I can't believe I've waited this long before starting a blog.  Not quite sure why...  I guess I always felt that it was a bit  - well, narcissistic. But I was wrong. Wrong paradigm.  

It's more like finding yourself in a party that everyone else has been invited to...  about time I got out of the kitchen!