Stepping Higher - Reflections on the Knowledge Age

To get to Part 1 of this blog post,  click here . Do you hate PowerPoint presentations? Well, you probably have endured a lot of gruesome slides throughout the course of your professional life. But despite the usual wisdom that PowerPoint slides for presentations should be avoided whenever possible, I actually think that some well-crafted slides presented in the right context can be a very good thing. In fact, there are a number of slides that had a very positive impact on me in my knowledge management career. I treasure them because they manage to bring complex concepts to the point and often communicate an entire lesson’s worth of insight just with one diagram, graph or image. Here’s a list of ten powerful slides on knowledge management that have influenced me, which I am posting in two parts ( for Part 1 click here ). See for yourself whether you can get some inspiration from them. 6. The Innovation Adoption Curve The innovation adoption curve by sociol...

Do you hate PowerPoint presentations? Well, you probably have endured a lot of gruesome slides throughout the course of your professional life. But despite the usual wisdom that PowerPoint slides for presentations should be avoided whenever possible, I actually think that some well-crafted slides presented in the right context can be a very good thing. In fact, there are a number of slides that had a very positive impact on me in my knowledge management career. I treasure them because they manage to bring complex concepts to the point and often communicate an entire lesson’s worth of insight just with one diagram, graph or image. Here’s a list of ten powerful slides on knowledge management that have influenced me, which I am posting in two parts ( for Part 2 click here ). See for yourself whether you can get some inspiration from them. 1. From KM incompetence to competence © by Chris Collison and Geoff Parcell This graphic is taken from Chris Collison’s and Geoff Par...

I am excited to see more and more initiatives that tap into the wisdom of corporate or public crowds to shape priorities for specific policy agendas. Just recently, different units in my organization called on staff to submit ideas how to improve their business processes, and let all colleagues vote on them to determine which idea would get most traction and support. This is a great way to improve organizational efficiency while involving those affected by change in an actual change process. At the same time, the success of the Rio Dialogues showed how crowdsourcing policy recommendations and public voting on them can increase legitimacy of inter-governmental negotiations. This new model of public engagement during a United Nations summit received praise from participants as the “the most inclusive process in the history of global summits” (Josette Sheeran, VP of the World Economic Forum), and opened the door for similar approaches in defining the successors of the Millienn...

This is the most terribly written book that every public administration practitioner should read. Well, I should rephrase that :-) This is a must-read for people working in public administration, but it takes a bit of suffering to get through it. Luckily I was helped by the fact that 340-pager was made available to our business unit for free, combined with a strong incentive by my boss to get familiar with its concepts as our unit prepares for aligning itself with its main message: That we as public administration practitioners “ are called upon to serve the public good and the collective interest in the face of increasing complexity, uncertainty and volatility ”. And only by shifting our strategies, systems and minds towards a framework that balances public policy with civic engagement as well as government authority with openness and collective power , are we able to face the challenges of public administration in the 21 st century. Developing a framework for public a...

During the last three years, I have been working in a small team at UNDP's Knowledge Management Group working on a number of KM initiatives such as connecting UN agencies with regards to KM topics, supporting UNDP's communities of pratices on development topics related to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and on establishing the social collaboration platform " Teamworks " for UNDP and its partners. I am therefore quite proud that UNDP as an organization has now received the prestigious "Column of Knowledge Award 2012" by Knowledge Management Austria (KMA) in Vienna, Austria , for its “outstanding efforts and achievements to promote the idea of knowledge societies”. The UNDP website features a respective article here , quoting the Managing Director of KMA, Mr Andreas Brandner, highlighting “UNDP’s role in connecting UN Organizations with Knowledge Management" and in particular emphasizing  Teamworks as “the most promising knowledge management...

Many of you know that I work for the United Nations, but usually I don't talk so much about the specific UN-nature of my work as my thoughts regarding Knowledge Management can have a live by themselves, regardless of whether I work for the UN or not. As of late, however, my team was working on a project which is so interesting (and still very much KM-related), that I definitely want to share it here. I need to give background information though... 20 years ago, all UN nations met in Rio de Janeiro to discuss for the first time as part of a world summit issues around sustainable development: the idea that we as societies and economies need to develop without jeopardizing the health of the planet and the development of future generations. This July, 20 years later, the  Rio+20 UN Conference on Sustainable Development  will review the status of the world and progress made, and discuss further measures. In preparation to this conference, the go...

Yesterday, I was serving as resource person for knowledge management on a “One-Day Forum on Exemplar KM Practices in Regional/Global Networks” hosted by the Southeast Asian Ministers of Education Organization (SEAMEO) , an inter-government organization among 11 Southeast Asian countries which was inviting organizations like WHO, ILO. UNISDR, CGIAR and UNDP to share their knowledge management (KM) experiences. One of the questions the online audience asked was “ What are the key success factors for implementing knowledge management in an organization? ” Now this is a big one, which probably deserves its own book! I asked the participants to take my comments with a grain of salt, as was just writing from the top of my head the first ideas that came to mind. Incidentally, I often experience that the first response to a question is often the most genuine one, so I’m just gonna share what I wrote without any filter, knowing that itwill be far from giving a complete picture of all possi...

In her Harvard Business Review article “ Why We Use Social Media in Our Personal Lives — But Not for Work ” from February 16, Tammy Erickson claims that the conditions under which we use social media in a personal and an organizational context are entirely different, and therefore should lead to massive challenges in getting adoption for Social Media solutions within enterprises. I must say, while Tammy makes some valid points (e.g. that internal platforms are usually less user-friendly than public tools), I find many of her arguments somehow missing the mark, which leads me to formulate a thorough critique of her article here. First of all, I cannot agree with Tammy’s sharp differentiation between use of social media in our work and our personal lives. This feels as odd as claiming in the early days of the telephone that the phone would be less useful for business than it is for personal use, or saying the same about email in 1990. What’s more, the lines between personal and profe...