SLA 2008 – Knowledge Management at the Core: Facilitating Knowledge Sharing (Monday, June 16)
Wow, this session was so interesting! Dave Snowden, a UK-based KM guru and founder of Cognitive Edge, gave a funny, engaging 90-minute talk on the human side of KM, incorporating neuroscientific principles and debunking some common misconceptions about why KM works or fails. The points that really stood out to me were:
- Knowledge sharing is only ever voluntary and CANNOT be conscripted
- People need to be able to trust the people they share their knowledge with. The mentality is one of fear: “If I share my knowledge, and it doesn’t work, I’ll get blamed. If I share it and it does work, that person will take the credit for it.”
- Knowledge is highly contextual. We only know what we know when we need to know it.
- The way we describe how we do things is completely different from how we actual do things.
- Three main types of knowledge:
- Things we only know by doing – muscle memory – this is why the Master/Apprentice training program for trades is the most successful knowledge sharing and transfer program in the history of the world.
- Things that we can tell by a story – bringing memories to the forefront; rehearsing – narrative-based
- Things that we can actually write down
- Most management theories are based on the manufacturing sector, which is based on closed systems. Those practices don’t work when put in an open system.
- Human brains are masters of pattern recognition, not information processing.
- You can’t replicate success by imitating. For example, the CEOs of the world’s top 10 companies all golf. This doesn’t mean that if you golf, you’ll be a top 10 CEO, too.
- The idea of the “elevator pitch” says something about a culture: that you must be able to sum up a complex theory within fifteeen seconds.
Snowden also went on to describe how Liverpool Museum found a successful way to have museum visitors give meaningful, useable, accurate feedback. I urge you to listen to Snowden’s podcast and check out the slides from this session – the sound quality of the podcast is not great, but it’s worth it. The slides contain the famous “basketball video” – amazing!