KM, self-Knowledge, and Transcendence

I have been focussed on personal aspects of organisational behaviour because we need to understand ourselves before we can lead and manage others. Leadership in today’s organisation is about capturing people’s trust and belief, harnessing their professional capability, opening their imagination, and motivating their efforts with passion and enthusiasm for the cause.

To me, this is the essence of knowledge management – developing business environments where all participants can reach their personal potential and attain their goals. Participants is a general term that caters for organisations (the value network), groups (business units, teams, external interest groups, communities of practice), and individuals (shareholder, board member, employee, public).

How we develop this KM environment is a decision based on the particular context. Earlier beliefs surrounding KM centred on the use of repository-style technologies to gather, codify, store, distribute (push and pull), and retire or refresh “knowledge.”  (Actually, I would argue what is “managed” is data or information at best, but that is another post to be written!)

This approach was based on the notion of “quick wins” and “one size fits all”. Quick wins – because we thought we could miraculously trap and share “implicit” or “tacit” knowledge through “explicit” or “externalised” knowledge. The outcome was that we created a mountain of unstructured information (documents, emails, reports), all of which had dubious search-ability and reusability.

“One size fits all” in the sense that we thought we could apply the same principal to all business environments to yield a new organisational “homogeneity” with respect to knowledge. The outcome of this belief was a poorly adopted and scarcely-used, redundant set of expensive repository technologies that were nothing more than “glorified databases.”

You will note the early belief saw people as secondary in the process. Once knowledge is trapped, the technology takes over. Thus the firm’s value model was based on the premise that people were present to improve the technology and therefore, technology was more important than people. This is an “industrial” value model – where the knowledge is held by the technology and the people are seen as functional “necessities” that ensure the technology uses the knowledge efficiently (i.e., via repeatable processes that create mass-market products).

There is no doubt, business in-general has moved on from these primitive and simplistic notions of organisational wealth and value. As individuals, I hope we would strongly deny or support any notion of a “production line” where the technology is valued more than the people in our knowledge-based world.

However, I believe there is an “underworld” of beliefs that are strongly imprinted into our thinking that steer us subconsciously towards this industrial mindset. Let me give an example: We all have a preference for tangibility and we are even more attuned to some sort of quantification of that tangible. Therefore, it is relatively easy to make purchasing decisions which lead to increasing material assets. However, it becomes much harder to justify expenditures that do not have any material asset value.

Therefore, my purpose in focussing on exploring our own personal assumptions and dispositions as individuals, leaders, and managers is to better improve and prepare the “ground” in which next-generation knowledge management is cultivated.