Knowledge Management at the core

Even though I couldn't get into a breakfast meeting this morning (the km breakfast sold out weeks ago) I did squeeze into the KM at the core presentation by Dave Snowden. The topics presented were great and turned much of what I knew about KM on its head, as well as put things into much better focus. I'm going to have to do much more research before I can really discuss many of the concepts discussed and verify how useful they could be but here I hope to display some of the notes that I took. Dave presented ideas so simply that it almost seemed too easy.

First Dave spoke about not using the usual KM terms of tacit vs explicit knowledge. He said that what we can write down is a very small part of what we know. Instead we can look at ways to improve and influence outcomes and decision making through managing "attractors" that are positive and disrupting the negative attractors. His stories were all great metaphors that allowed easy comprehension of some of these very complex topics and often brought about a 180 degree shift in how one can think about management techniques. Incidentally, the entire presentation should be viewable as a podcast at http://www.cognitive-edge.com/ although I don't see it yet.Here's my photo of the event, so you can see what it looked like.

Many companies are trying an ordered approach to knowledge management when really they should be using something that fits into their environment which is probably more complex or chaotic.

Some other topics for more more discussion later:

• No company has ever been successful following the best practices of another company, ie. just because all successful ceo's play golf doesn't mean your company will be successful if you play golf
  
• Analogies of ordered systems to traffic lights vs the apparently more effective design of an intuitive roundabout
• using "good practices" in situations where there are multiple answers, as using "best practices" only works in ordered systems where there is only one way of doing things
• improving weak signal detection (using common techniques only autistics and people that aren't paying attention spot a gorilla) ... really
• practice "ritualized dissent"
• depending the the environment different km techniques may work, best practices, good practices, emergent, novel
• taxonomy is similar to taxidermy
• moving from fail-safe to safe-fail
• predictive markets are not the "wisdom of crowds"
• there are no deep structures in knowledge, we redefine the same words each time we use them
• and a nice little trick - in order to test a liar, get them to tell their story backwards.