stories to support knowledge work

In today’s information society, what to do about knowledge is one of the biggest, and most challenging, issues for all sorts of organizations.

The terms knowledge economy and knowledge worker have been around for 50 years or so, and knowledge-management, -economy, -worker, -sharing, -transfer, -exchange are all concepts that have gained currency over the past 15 to 20 years in many different settings. The trouble is, they mean different things to different people, who can often have passionately conflicting ideas not just about these, but about their relationship to information strategies and technologies too.

It’s easy to get lost in a forest of definitions, and hard to cut your way through the undergrowth and out to a clearing where the view is a bit clearer. With this in mind, our own shorthand is to think of it as knowledge xxx to help us get less drawn in to a distracting definitional ding dong.

At Sparknow we’re respectful of, and indeed have often contributed to, the benchmarks, standards and approaches that have been developed over 20 years or so. We refer to excellent resources such as the NHS e-library, Overseas Development Institute’s knowledge toolkit for humanitarian and development organizations, the EFQM standards in working with clients to structure approaches, and we draw on the full range of tools and approaches that have been developed over the years.

We’re also mindful that two years of research into knowledge transfer between business and cultural institutions in London, and in-depth work in settings like the Audit Commission, the World Health Organization and others, are providing us with sometimes uncomfortable insights into what can and cannot, should and should not, be managed, or even thought manageable.

Often it’s about making space for knowledge to be transferred or exchanged, rather than managing knowledge directly, and that can feel quite a bit more daunting. One client recently called this ‘cleaning the knowledge space’, and that’s a nice way to think about it.

If knowledge xxx is your thing, you might like to read about:

• knowledge and people
• our approach to working with knowledge.

Ideas around knowledge and what to do about it in a business, government or nation-building context are being challenged by the surge in social media, the arrival of tools like the iPad, and the sense that many organizational systems and interconnected networks are so complex that a tidy, controlled approach to knowledge management is a pipedream in the face of constant change, adaptation, fluidity, surprise and challenge.

photograph by JaredEarle