knowledge, manage or enhance?

My favourite book of all times, Erich Fromm's "To have or to be" split most what we do into two modes - "be" or "have".

He included, and I concur, learning and knowledge. How we approach it in two distinct modes.

It's the "know everything by heart" versus "real understanding".

One being useful in many school systems and their "repeat after me" exams, developing two legged versions of Google. The other being the one for creating solutions, innovate and cope with the real world.

For me an organisation is like an individual. So what does the organisation do?

Knowledge Management.

Gathering and organising documents, forms and reports. A distinct "have" mode. Little learning involved. Not much process involved.

"Knowledge acquisition involves complex cognitive processes: perception, learning, communication, association, and reasoning."

In other words, just gathering and organising is not enough.

Did I mention that knowledge is the Intellectual Capital and thus the true underlying value of any organisation?

Knowledge acquisition / enhancement / increase is all about process. Just like a kid goes out and climb trees and learning in the process, the firm must do things and capture the knowledge in that process. Then, kid off to school, add former learning and understanding, challenge that and associate the pieces.

The kid is focused on doing, the learning happens by doing as the action-result is captured simultaneously. That should be the focus within the company, that is how IT systems should be designed. Not "management" systems, but "do" systems.

Funny thing, as thingamy has started, or is discussing, some early pilot/proof-of-concept projects we tend to hit this issue all the time. Every organisation, big or small, have little snippets of processes that's run using e-mail and telephone. Ad-hoc issues; things that does not pan out as planned, a snippet of info gleaned in a bar, an idea that hit you in the morning shower, the call out of the blue. The seemingly banal stuff.

The immediate issue is the bits and pieces falling into cracks. Oops, forgot to answer the mail, my mobile was switched off, sorry was too busy, bugger me but I forgot to make a note.

So we look at that, real simple stuff indeed, easily fixed by creating some run-able and flexible processes.

Then we add some creative thinking when designing to allow capture and efficient use of what happens, a learning system as it is. Atomised objects (issue, solution, idea, thing) capturing what happens to them (like a football in a game) instead of forms and documents as event-reports, free tagging and linking instead of tree-structures organising coupled with dynamic report interfaces to allow play with the objects to find and understand relationships.
Relationships between objects being the core of true knowledge and understanding.

A non-managing approach to knowledge, it's knowledge building by process. Increasing intellectual capital every minute. Increasing company value every minute.

Kind of cool that little banal processes can become so important, or what?

Comments

[Rosie]

These comments have been invaluable to me as is this whole site. I thank you for your comment.