Meetings about What, meetings about How

Very often, when we are conducting our knowledge management assessment or benchmarking exercises, or designing KM frameworks for clients, we come across a confusion. This confusion is again a linguistic confusion about knowledge.

We might ask the client “what meetings do you have, which are dedicated to knowledge-sharing?”. Often they reply something like this; “we have project meetings every week – people share knowledge with me about their progress, and I share knowledge about their goals for the coming month”.

But is this really knowledge sharing? Is “telling people something” the same as “sharing knowledge”? Are Briefing and Knowledge Transfer the same thing?

The types of meeting described above are Project Management meetings, not Knowledge Management meetings. The difference between the two types of meeting is that the former deals with What (What has happened, What will we do) while the latter deals with How (How will we assimilate what we have learned? How will we deal with things in future?”).

Again this confusion comes back to the fact that the English Language has only one word for Knowledge while other languages have two; one for “Know-what” which deals with facts and information, and one for “know how” which deals with capabilities, learning and insights.

Knowledge Management meetings are the ones that deal with How, and which address building capability in the organisation, and transferring and building Know-how. Examples include:

• The After Action review meeting, where teams build their know-how about how to work together effectively;
• The Peer Assist meeting, where a team invites others to share their know-how of how to address a project or a problem;
• The Retrospect meeting, where a team discusses and documents what they have learned about how to best deliver certain types of projects;
• The Knowledge Exchange meeting, where people from many teams share their best approaches to certain issues, to determine the current best practice.