Knowledge is a verb

mrG — Thu, 14 Aug 2003 10:11:30 -0400

Dave Pollard has posted a review of two views of knowledge as an innovation driver and presents these two papers as opposing views where a truth may lay between them, but I'm wondering if they are truly opposing, or if there is a common key to the interpretation of each that makes it consistent with the other.

The Rosetta-stone I see is summed up best in one of the side-comments Dave placed on the pro-KM study:

Innovative organizations have a cultural bias against re-using information, which greatly mitigates much of the value that what we currently call KM can bring to such organizations.

This is echoed again only a few points down the line:

Because of the importance of cross-functional and trans-organizational collaboration in innovation, social capital (know-who) -- not structural capital (know-what) -- is their most critical component of intellectual property

But what if the knowledge in KM is not a library of dead trees like the bonfire fodder back in Alexandria, not a thing to be captured, containerized, catalogued? What if the sort of knowledge that engenders innovation is more properly perceived as a verb, a process, a knowledge about the current affairs, a finger on the pulse of what's happening and who?

This view is consistent with the failure of document management systems as catalysts for innovations, it's consistent with the uselessness of old knowledge (because social dynamics change) and it's consistent with the relative success of social software in this role, and the enthusiastic reception social communications systems usually receive.

This also illustrates my distinction between the 'management' in KM as being better set as the 'management' in Forest Management (ie a process of fostering sustainable growth) rather than as the 'management' in Middle Management (ie a set of policies, rules and procedures intended to cover butts with paper trails).

Here's a practical test of my theory: Ask your colleagues which they'd rather do, go with you to the library where the two of you will spend hours pouring over books, journals and papers in search of a new idea, or if they'd rather go with you to a leading conference where you'll lunch with interesting people, chat with fellow exhibitors and interact with an endless stream of conversations.

Thus there's no contradiction between these two studies, but rather both are a glowing endorsement of social software: Both find dead knowledge is largely landfill and fuel for the recycle bin, and both find that the key to innovation is really in strategies like "knowledge-in-context- through-connectivity" which I might loosely translate into human as "knowing who knows who knows what".

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Knowledge is a verb