Here’s a word association game for you to play. What do the following have in common?
Capture Retain Harvest Extract Salvage Preserve
Not too difficult was it? They are all verbs associated with the processes by which we handle knowledge – particularly when faced with the (sadly all too common) challenge of organisations restructuring and downsizing.
When you think about it, none of those words is appealing.
I really don’t want to be captured or harvested. I’m told that fluid retention is both uncomfortable and unattractive; salvage carries the echoes of damage and disaster, extraction screams of dental surgery and exploitative industries, and preservation smells like formaldehyde. It seems to me KM could benefit from some communications and PR advice.
I think part of our problem stems from a blurring of what we mean by knowledge and information. When someone leaves a role, or an organisation there is a task to be undertaken to gather and curate their files, projects, reports, communications, contacts... that’s information gathering.
There is another, more important task to be undertaken, which is to help the person moving or leaving to elicit their hard-earned experience, rules of thumb, decision-making approaches, advice for their successor, recommendations, future perspectives, hopes and fears, responses to the questions of colleagues...
This is knowledge – and in order to be shared, it needs to be liberated – to be set free.
Now of course, the dialogue required to secure this freedom is by mutual agreement – as Dave Snowden said many years ago - “Knowledge can never be conscripted – it can only be volunteered.”
So when, as knowledge managers, we get to work with the volunteers, perhaps there is a way to reframe what we are doing in more positive, attractive language.
Setting knowledge free, liberating experience, surfacing insights and advice, creating a legacy, building institutional memory...
We have the keys to lock-in or set free - we just need to ensure that we are turning them the right way.