knowledge and people
It’s often best to start a knowledge programme with the stories.
When we’re working on a project whose name begins with the word ‘knowledge,’ the first thing we do is find out what the terms mean, often by looking for personal stories, or collective episodes that give clues to what’s important and can be explored through tools such as:
- critical decision interviews
- anecdotes circles
- narrative mapping.
We build the picture up from the raw experience, and use this process to help people think through what they’d really like knowledge xxx to mean in the day-to-day working practices of individuals, as well as in the collective approaches of their organization as a whole. Systems, structures, protocols, rules and processes are important but structures they must be aligned to a good grasp of how to create, deepen and reinvent the relation between individuals and the your organization’s purpose and build lateral connections within and beyond the boundaries of the organization.
This can mean being willing to ask some disturbingly simple questions about what the organization stands for, where it is going, and how the feelings and facts of the circumstances can be brought to bear on the journey ahead.
In ‘Sense-making in organizations’, Karl Weick talks about the resourceful organization as being one that is able to talk about itself in vivid words, entertain many points of view. Handled well, a decent knowledge xxx strategy and framework will make room for your organization to understand itself. And by understanding, give itself choices in going where it wants to go.
