Communities of practice – managed or unmanaged?

Favorite Is the best approach to Communities of Practice a managed one, or an unmanaged one? There has always been a polarity of views between those who see Communities of Practice as something that should be allowed to flourish naturally and unmanaged, springing up as a bottom-up initiative in response

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Shared by Nick Milton August 16, 2017

Learning by Watching

Favorite There is only a certain amount you can learn by reading. Sometimes you have to go and see. Watcher, by woodleywonderworks, on Flickr With complex knowledge, there is more going on that can ever be documented, and (if it’s possible) the best way to learn is to go and

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Shared by Nick Milton August 15, 2017

Meetings about What, meetings about How

Favorite Not every meeting or every conversation involves sharing knowledge! Image from Wikimedia commons 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

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Shared by Nick Milton August 14, 2017

Why you may need more than one KM strategy

Favorite Complex organisations may be involved in more than one type of activity, and may need more than one KM strategy and framework. Two of the early activities in any Knowledge Management implementation are to develop a Knowledge Management Strategy (as we discussed yesterday), and start to map out a potential

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Shared by Nick Milton August 11, 2017

8 reasons why you need a Knowledge Management strategy

Favorite You need a strategy if your KM implementation is to be successful. Here are 8 reasons why. Implementing Knowledge Management without a strategy is a risky endeavour. As Sun Tzu is reputed to have said said, in “the art of war”, “Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory.

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Shared by Nick Milton August 10, 2017

How Best Practices work – an example from Sport

Favorite Best Practices are part of Knowledge Management, but sometimes misused. Here is an example of how they really work. Picture originally from here There is a lot of pushback in the KM world about the term “best practice”. In the discussion groups, we hear people saying “we don’t believe

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Shared by Nick Milton August 8, 2017

When collaboration does more harm than good

Favorite Collaboration is not always helpsful, and there are cases where it actually reduces your chance of success. The ideas in this blog post are from a very interesting paper by Martine Haas and Morten Hansen, who look at success data from bid teams to find out when collaboration actually helps

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Shared by Nick Milton August 7, 2017

Example KM role description – IAEA

Favorite Here is another example KM role description – this time for a Knowledge Managment Officer at the International Atomic Energy Authority. This is a pretty high level governance role for KM, and it is described here as follows: Main purpose The Knowledge Management Officer’s main purpose is to provide

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Shared by Nick Milton August 3, 2017