Management by Talking About

Favorite Part of the way you manage issues such as risk, safety and knowledge, is by creating times and processes for talking about them. Steven Denning, at the Ottowa Knowledge Management summit a few years ago, said that the learning capacity of an organisation is directly related to it’s ability

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Shared by Nick Milton May 15, 2019

Learning from the enemy

Favorite When seeking analogues for KM, learn from the organisations which are best at KM, not just from the organisations you like Image from wikimedia commons I delivered a training course a couple of months ago for a development organisation, using a whole set of example and case studies to

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Shared by Nick Milton May 13, 2019

Why don’t our governments learn?

Favorite A reprised post from the archives, which seems even more apposite in this time of governmental disarray. Image from amazon As part of my holiday reading, I read a book entitled “The Blunders of our Governments”, by Anthony King and Ivor Crewe. Initially I feared this might be heavy

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Shared by Nick Milton May 10, 2019

Why Dialogue is at the heart of Knowledge Management

Favorite Dialogue is the engine behind Knowledge Management – it is the primary means by which Knowledge is shared and absorbed. We often assume that connecting people together will lead to better knowledge exchange, but connecting wires doesn’t necessarily make a circuit. You need a way of ensuring conductivity as

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Shared by Nick Milton May 9, 2019

Find out how much difference Knowledge makes to performance

Favorite Do you want to know how much difference knowledge makes to performance? Here are some experimental data. Based on the controlled experiment that we call “Bird Island“, we can tell you that Collecting, discussing and re-using your own team knowledge can make a 40% difference to performance Using knowledge

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Shared by Nick Milton May 8, 2019

KM – the lazy way to work?

Favorite We keep hearing that KM means more workload, but is it in fact the lazy way to work? Lazy Drinker by Saul Soto on Flickr The quote about Knowledge Management being “the lazy way to work” came from a control room operative in a chemicals plant in the USA.

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Shared by Nick Milton May 7, 2019

KM in the Golden Age of Navigation

Favorite Here’s another old post from the archives, looking at how KM was practiced 600 years ago in Western Europe. Henry the Navigator at the helm Uploaded by leoglenn_g on June 1, 2011 The golden age of Navigation was a golden age of knowledge management, and offers several lessons to KM today. 

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Shared by Nick Milton May 3, 2019

Pendulum swings in KM, and how to avoid them

Favorite The problem with Dualism in KM is that it leads to pendulum swings in terms of focus. Here is how to avoid this. Image form wikimedia commons There can be quite a lot of Dualism in KM – seeing KM in terms of two mutually exclusive opposites which require

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Shared by Nick Milton May 2, 2019

The relative maturity of KM in various industries

Favorite One of the interesting results from our 2014 and 2017 surveys of KM was to compare KM maturity against different industries. Our Knowledge management surveys in 2014 and 2017, responded to by over 700 knowledge managers world wide, asked (among many other things) about KM maturity, in two ways:

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Shared by Nick Milton May 1, 2019

Having the time to halve the time

Favorite KM is an investment of time to save even more time. Image from wikimedia commons Here is an extract from a conversation last week. Me: Can you give me any examples where the Community of Practice could add value?Client: At the last meeting we identified one of these –

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Shared by Nick Milton April 30, 2019