KM’s 17 deadly sins

I found this in my archives, which comes from a Canadian Federal Government perspective in 1999.

Notice how many still ring true today – truly little has changed in nearly 2 decades.

The deadliest sins of Knowledge Management :   

1. Continuing to operate a hierarchical organisation
2. Fear
3. Placing a greater emphasis on technology than people
4. Not communicating enough on the issues
5. Not approaching Knowledge Management as a management issue
6. Not identifying the departments’ most valuable holders of knowledge and key innovators
7. Reluctance to distinguish between data or information on the one hand and knowledge on the other
8. Emphasising knowledge stock to the detriment of knowledge flow
9. Viewing knowledge as existing predominantly outside the heads of individuals
10. Not understanding that a shared context is fundamental to knowledge management
11. Paying too little heed to the role and importance of tacit knowledge
12. Disentangling knowledge from IT issues
13. Downplaying thinking and reasoning
14. Focusing on the past and the present but not the future
15. Failing to recognise the importance of experimentation
16. Substituting technological contact for human interface
17. Seeking to develop direct measures of knowledge

Although the original source for this is lost in the mists of time, numbers 8 through 17 are copied directly from the 11 deadly sins quoted by Fahey and Prusak (California. Management Review, Vol. 40 No. 3,), although number 12 may be as misquote, as the original is “Disentangling knowledge from its uses”, rather than “from IT issues” – both of which are a sin.