working with knowledge
As well as the normal range of knowledge tools and approaches, we’ve also found a few simple principles that can help with this:
1 | Make it personal | build individual information and knowledge literacy and reflective capacity. Get people involved, encourage them to participate and listen to what they have to say, even if you don’t agree.
2 | Think about repositioning and renaming knowledge management | relocate the project into the language and position in your organization where it will be taken seriously or tucked inside something else. For example, in some organizations you can get further by seeing it as risk management, which is regarded as being at the heart of the organization’s license to operate. In others you might break it into smaller chunks and slide it in through a change management or employee engagement progamme, or a move to new premises. Make your tactics as much part of the remit as your strategy.
3 | Strike the right balance between structures and flows | there needs to be enough clarity and containment for the skin round knowledge management to be very visible, without crowding the space so much that there is no room for it to breathe and be vital, lively and demanding.
4 | Go with the grain | beware of importing technologies, ideas and systems because they look shiny and new. Look within your organization to see what cultural resources and strengths you can build out from.
5 | Understand where you have come from | use your organization’s past to find the resources that will help you manage into the future, both in terms of values and mythology, and in terms of the long lessons that can slip from sight.
6 | Make space for surprise and chance encounter | have a conscious plan to find strange and provoking new spaces for conversations – through objects and collections, through place and personal reminiscence, through stories, ideas and images imported from elsewhere, or rediscovered from the archive.
