KM – the lazy way to work?

We keep hearing that KM means more workload, but is it in fact the lazy way to work?

The quote about Knowledge Management being “the lazy way to work” came from a control room operative in a chemicals plant in the USA.

As far as this guy was concerned, if a problem arose at work, he would turn to the KM system to find the answer. If the answer was not there, he would ask his CoP, or pick up a phone and speak to another operative in another factory, and find their way to fix the problem. As he said –

“The lazy person will find the easiest way to do something, and if someone somewhere else has found an easier way to do something, I am going to incorporate it into my job”

We so often fixate on KM as making people’s job harder – of adding to the workload – and that may be because we start at the Supply end of the equation. We start by thinking about the effort required to capture knowledge, and we decide “this seems like a lot of effort”.

But if you start from the Demand side of the equation, we see that KM may actually be the lazy way to work.