Stepping Higher - Reflections on the Knowledge Age

In knowledge management (KM), explicit knowledge – what’s written in documents and stored in files or other forms of media – has often had a bad reputation, and for good reason. Over years, KM has wrongly focused on documents and was busy building databases and repositories, when – as David Snowden put it – it shouldhave been focusing on connecting people instead . This preference is understandable. After all, explicit knowledge is just the tip of the iconic knowledge iceberg. Below the surface lies implicit knowledge, thoughts in people’s heads, rich with context and application insights, and accessible only through relationships and trust. However, I believe what we have been experiencing in 2023 with Generative AI marks a significant shift that could see explicit knowledge get its long-awaited moment in the sun. The Limitations of Content-focused KM and the Rise of AI Traditionally, KM never succeeded to fully leverage the knowledge that’s supposedly „stored“ in all the document