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Discussing ChatGPT with the World Bank: Questions on research, knowledge management, bias and creativity

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      (Illustrative Image generated with Midjourney) On May 3, 2023, I had the pleasure to talk to the World Bank Group's Community of Practice on Knowledge Management about the opportunities that ChatGPT and similar tools present to the KM space. The group was exceptionally astute and came up with a number of very important questions that I believe are critical to reflect on. In the following, I am showcasing a few of them, along with my own thoughts that I articulated in the exchange: Question 1: I am interested to know if systems like ChatGPT can generate valuable new knowledge, i.e. combine lessons from a few past projects and suggest how should we approach the upcoming project? Generative models like GPT-4 will always build on existing bodies of knowledge, and therefore are (at the moment at least) better suited for a look into the past than as a tool for foresight or predictive analysis. However, as you suggest, we can ask it to combine information, theories, framew...
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The “Duh-test”, or what is not a lesson learned

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I was recently reviewing a number of texts which my organization collected from past projects and initiatives (some through an internal mandatory monitoring tool, others gathered as part of After Action Reviews or Lessons Learned Papers), which all meant to capture ‘lessons learned’ from specific experiences. And while these texts were not wrong per se, I realized that there seems to be a fundamental misconception what constitutes a good lesson, and what doesn’t. Here are a few typical examples of what we often collect as part of such lessons learned exercises: “Ensure that the [Team] Manager has excellent leadership, project and team management skills, understanding of programming and experience working in [the subject matter].” “Project outputs must be compatible towards project goals. Throughout the project there is a need for careful identification of project goals and outputs to ensure that they are compatible with each other. This can be only ensured through a consultativ...
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Going Back to Dave Snowden’s Seven KM Principles

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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...
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