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