Knowledge drinking fountain, or knowledge firehose

Favorite Too much knowledge is a bad thing. It’s better to drink from the fountain, than be hit by the firehose. Larry Prusak and Tom Davenport wrote in their classic book “Working Knowledge” that “Knowledge can move down the value chain, returning to information and data. The most common reason

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Shared by Nick Milton February 9, 2018

Wishful thinking – the inevitable outcome of "not knowing"?

Favorite The almost inevitable outcome of “now knowing what you don’t know” is wishful thinking. Even the use of benchmarks may not help. Wishful thinking is one of the curses of project management.  Any project team without a perfect knowledge of the challenges that they will face in a project,

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Shared by Nick Milton February 8, 2018

Feedback loops in the Knowledge cycle

Favorite Last week I described a “Pull cycle” for knowledge – let’s now look at the feedback loops in that cycle. You can find description of the cycle here. This is a cycle based on knowledge demand (unlike the supply-side cycles you normally see) and includes the following steps; The

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Shared by Nick Milton February 7, 2018

"Today we get married to Knowledge Management"

Favorite This post from the archives describes a strange statement from a client, and some of the thoughts it raised for me at the time. “Today we get married to Knowledge Management” That was the, shall we say, “unusual” statement made by the convener of a KM seminar that I

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Shared by Nick Milton February 6, 2018

"You are obligated to ask" – Elon Musk’s email

Favorite Even in the most progressive organisations, sometimes the boss needs to drive a “culture of asking.” Here is how Elon Musk did it. Image from wikimedia commons Musk’s email is quoted here, and seems to have been sent in response to a dissatisfaction with default communication and knowledge sharing

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Shared by Nick Milton February 5, 2018

Six legal ways for an organisation to acquire knowledge

Favorite There are 6 ways in which an organisation can acquire new knowledge  Davenport and Prusak (that classic of the genre, first published in 1998). give six ways of knowledge creation within a company (and by creation, they don’t necessarily mean “creation from nothing” – they mean acquiring that knowledge in-house). There

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Shared by Nick Milton February 1, 2018

The shrinking half-life of knowledge, and what that means for KM

Favorite Knowledge has a half-life, and that half-life is getting shorter every year. When John Browne was CEO at BP, he talked about “the shrinking half-life of ideas”. This always struck me as a very interesting concept; one which was fundamental to Browne’s approach to corporate KM. I have since found that

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Shared by Nick Milton January 30, 2018

The knowledge cycle as you have never seen it before

Favorite We are used to seeing pictures of knowledge cycles, but there is one cycle you never see, and it’s very important. You can find very many versions of the knowledge cycle, and they all seem to work the same way. They start with “Create” or “Capture”, and progress through

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Shared by Nick Milton January 29, 2018