Stepping Higher - Reflections on the Knowledge Age

In June this year I attended the International Conference on Knowledge Management (ICKM) 2022 which conveniently took place in Potsdam, right around the corner of my current home base Berlin. One of the highlights was the key note speech of David Snowden . David is of course always a treat to listen to, but in his speech intro, he once again summarized so succinctly some of the key aspects of what KM is all about, that I wanted to re-state them for myself. So here are his gold nuggets: 1. Knowledge can only be volunteered, it cannot be conscripted The sharing of knowledge is inherently a human behavior. Yet it only happens when we are intrinsically invested in the positive impact that the sharing of our knowledge has on the receiving end (because we want to help, because we get nice feedback, because we want to build relationship, because it might help ourselves in the future, etc.). If we are told by someone else that we must share a particular knowledge, there is automatically a

Why do organizations struggle to consistently achieve results in knowledge management (KM)? Every employee in an organization can testify to the various pain points that KM is supposed to address in organizations, and they usually acknowledge the helpfulness of some individual tools and methods, but almost all organizations struggle to put them into a coherent conceptual framework that explains when and why KM as a whole succeeds in an organization, and when and why it doesn’t. I suspect that one of the key reasons for this might be the failure to adapt the type of KM approach to the values and work conditions of the organizations it is applied in, as well as the values and life conditions of the workers that are the target of the KM initiatives. Whenever we ask someone in an organization what KM is really about, we get invariably different responses. Some will emphasize the structured organization of existing documents and information, the next one will highlight mandatory business

By Johannes Schunter What makes something integral? The term ‘integral’ refers to a worldview in the Spiral Dynamics (SD) model (developed by Don Beck, Chris Cowan and Ken Wilber based on the work of Clare Graves) that looks at various historic ways of seeing the world as each holding an important piece of the puzzle without being sufficient on their own. The tribal worldview thinks primarily in heroic win/lose power relations, the traditional worldview champions collective rules and absolute truth, the modern worldview pursues rational science, competition and personal success, and the post-modern worldview values community, global diversity and inclusion. An integral mindset then tries to integrate the strengths from each of these worldviews into an overarching and balanced whole. To learn more about what the Spiral Dynamics model is about, this website is a good start . In the following, I argue that as far as monetary technologies, financial assets or currencies are concerned,

COVID gave me a lot of extra time to think, and in the spirit of the title of this blog, I wanted to share some reflections about human knowledge that I am carrying within me for a while now. We all noticed how polarized our discussions on social media and offline have become, and they often crystallize along a right/left spectrum. To the majority in my circle of friends, the main threat to humankind consists of the destruction of its environment (pollution, climate change, biodiversity, etc.) and growing inequality and exclusion in all its forms (poverty, racism, sexism, etc.). To a smaller part of my personal circle of friends (but to many outside of it), socialism/communism and the suppression of free enterprise and individual liberties seem the primary threats of our time. The COVID pandemic brought this chasm to the forefront like even Brexit and the Trump election couldn’t. I would like to suggest a different frame about thinking and talking about these things (because clearl

Today the Knowledge for Development Partnership (K4D) initiative released an updated version of the ' Agenda Knowledge for Development ', which formulates 14 "knowledge goals" meant to supplement the UN's Sustainable Development Goals and strengthen the Agenda 2030 from a Knowledge Management perspective. The updated version includes one added Goal 14 ‘The arts and culture are central to knowledge societies', as well as 57 added statements (in addition to the 73 statements in the previous edition) from knowledge management practitioners in development across the world, including my own. I've already shared on this blog my reflections on the role that I believe Artificial Intelligence will play in Knowledge Management in the coming years , and I've re-iterated my view on this in my statement for K4D which is now featured under Part II of this document (page 84), "Statements on Knowledge for Development" next to the statements from 130

Innovations are driven by risk-takers. Part of UNDP’s role in innovation is to provide the space for risk-takers to develop and test their ideas. And it turns out that sometimes these are not individuals, but entire programmes! The Pacific Risk Resilience Programme (PRRP) covers the Pacific countries of Fiji, Solomon Islands, Tonga and Vanuatu, and takes an unusual approach within UNDP’s programme portfolio. Now in its fourth year, it didn’t exactly follow the standard programming approach in which a challenge and a development model is identified in the beginning, and a set of interventions is designed that would then be rolled out over the course of the next years, with clear activities and results prescribed for each year. Instead, PRRP didn’t actually describe the model or the interventions themselves at all. Instead, they let the model emerge over time by running sprints of interventions and evaluating them frequently, something that is known in the information technology world as