Learning to Fly - What is knowledge management?

Upcoming events:
16/5/05 Chris Collison at the Gurteen "Making Knowledge Work" conference
4-5/7/05 Geoff Parcell at Ark Group's "Knowledge and Content Management UK"
June '05 Geoff and Chris at Legoland - Learning to Fly workshop and Innovation Masterclass

What is Knowledge Management?

We once heard knowledge management likened to herding cats. Stop for a minute and imagine yourself
in a large room - or even a field - full of cats, trying to herd them towards one corner.
Not going well, is it?

So if you can’t herd cats, how could you get them to do what you want? You might suggest providing scratching-posts, saucers of milk, warm fires and balls of wool - components that go to make up the right environment.

That is exactly the view we take when thinking about knowledge management.

You can’t manage knowledge - nobody can.
What you can do is to manage the environment in which knowledge can be created, discovered, captured, shared, distilled, validated, transferred, adopted, adapted and applied.

In order to create an environment within which knowledge rapidly flourishes we need:

•        the right conditions: a common reliable infrastructure and an organisation willing be entrepreneurial;
•        the right means: a common model, tools and processes;
•        the right actions: where people instinctively seek, share and use knowledge; and

• the right leadership: where learning and sharing is expected and role-modelled.

Start with the way your organisation operates: People and teams agree a set of goals, and then use knowledge to deliver against their targets, ultimately creating value. So where do you begin to intervene with knowledge management?

Let’s focus on the "using knowledge circle. What if you could inspire your organisation to learn before, during and after any significant activity. Simple learning processes like peer assists, retrospects (post project reviews) and after action reviews make their contribution here, and help to elicit new knowledge - knowledge which would have remained in the heads of the individuals concerned.

All this learning activity needs to be connected to some kind of knowledge "bank"; in order to learn before doing, you will want to make a withdrawal - and when you have lessons learned to contribute, you’ll need to make a deposit.

That’s where the ability to capture and distil knowledge becomes important. But that’s not the whole story. You can’t capture everything, so it’s important to link to the people and network who hold key knowledge an insights, and to encourage them to own and update any knowledge which is made explicit - captured as information.

Surrounding this model is the environment or culture within your organisation, which is critical to get started and sustain knowledge-sharing. This will be reflected in the right leadership behaviours, and the way in which KM becomes embedded into core processes so that ultimately it becomes an "unconscious competence".

How are you doing?

Why not download our KM Self assessment and see how you’re doing against a set of key measure including:
KM Strategy, Leadership Behaviours, Learning Before, During and After, Networking and Capturing Knowledge.