Zoek*ster - bespiegelingen

Bespiegelingen over werk

Kennismanagement
In 1998 schreef ik een reactie op een stuk van Yogesh Malhotra, de oprichter van Brint, een Amerikaans instituut voor kennis-management:. Zes jaar later sta ik daar nog steeds achter. Het oorspronkelijke artikel heeft als titel: Knowledge Management: Need for a More 'Human' Perspective?

Mijn reactie
I want to respond to the "human-aspect" of which you speak. One of the things I have great difficulty with when hearing and reading about knowledge management, is the fact that it seems as if it is possible to speak about knowledge as something seperated from the human mind. The term in itself is strange: how can you manage knowledge. We can't even manage people (manage as in: controlling). Knowledge - in my view - should not be seperated from experience, actions, intuition, insight, irrationalities etc. Knowledge & experiences is not somethinng from the mind alone.

There is body-knowledge, soul-knowledge, heart-knowledge. Yes, even in the workplace! I can understand why people are fond of the notion of putting so-called knowledge in databases, intranets etc. It makes the world neat and categorized and systematic. And we all need that from time to time. We all do it in our minds. But it does ultimately not explain the complex world around us. Because in the end, the world can not be explained. Only in part.

In my opinion knowledge management is a non-issue. As far as I understand it, in large organisations we first make it impossible for people to talk to each other, to gossip, to really get to know eachother, to get to trust eachother. We do that by emphasising efficiency, cost-effectiveness, rationalising processes and procedures, by promoting job-hopping, by cutting out the history (libraries, archives, older people who have been with the company for ages) etc. Then, when we notice that maybe there are setbacks to these policies we do not think but we automatically start "managing, re-engineering etc". Notions from a mechanistic world. All we have to do is take away some of the barriers that we have put up in the first place.

I feel that for every solution there should be a genuine problem. You sit back and think about this problem (often when you think too long, the problem has disappeared, which is nice) and only after that you try to solve it. Knowing that often we don't know if we analysed the problem correctly, therefore knowing that we do not know for sure that our solution was what solved the problem. We are not God. So we should be humble about our abilities to control the world around us. Which is not the same as not trying to. I am grateful for many inventions. It is nice to have water from the tap.

Applied to knowledge management. I hear nobody talking about real, heartfelt problems. Most projects seem to start with: "Let there be Knowledge Management". So what is the problem here, is there a problem and for whom, and if there is a problem why not ask the people who have the problem, what they themselves would do to solve it. I am pretty sure that only very few people would answer: have a database or create a best-practices-database etc. Most probably it will be something different, depending on the person or group of persons. My own deeper understanding of things comes from reading (online or on paper), talking, and getting unsettled occasionally, sometimes bordering on crisis (i.e. losing control: a new software program, a new project, new colleagues, new friends etc.). Then after a while I find a new balance and I tell myself: I have really learned something.

As for my background: I have trained as a teacher (some understanding of learning), psychiatric nurse ( some insight in the irrationality of myself and patients), information & documentation (introduced me in the world of collecting, structuring and maintaining data and information). I have been a (organisational) consultant for 10 years now. My keywords are: people and fun. All the rest is instrumental.

Zijn reactie op mijn reactie
Re: Knowledge Management: Need for a More 'Human' Perspective?