When we have a lot of knowledge, we underestimate how hard it is to communicate this to people who don’t know.  This is called the “Curse of Knowledge” – a cognitive bias that leads to people trying to convey knowledge in bullet points, or in fuzzy statements which are meaningless to others, or by writing knowledge assets which are incomprehensible to the unknowledgeable reader.

The video below by Jeff Walker, the Sales guru, illustrates this cognitive bias in more detail. As the YouTube caption says –

Ever have an “expert” try to explain something to you, only to be left more confused than when you started? They’d forgotten how to be a beginner… and lost most of the ability to teach along the way… here’s how to not make the same mistake yourself.

The video is aimed at sales staff, for whom the curse of knowledge is just as much a barrier to communication as it is in Knowledge Management, but the message is the same –

You cannot communicate knowledge properly unless you account for the Curse of Knowledge. 

From the AFAC lesson management forum last week, this video below from David Oberhettinger, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, talking about lesson learning in their human and robotic space exploration program

David makes some interesting points, such as

• the need to dedicate individuals for lessons capture (although NASA allows engineers to submit lessons themselves, he says he has never seen this happen in 25 years)
• lessons need verification and quality control – particularly verifying the facts of what happened
• lessons recommendations need to be “infused” into procedures and training to ensure closed-loop learning. The key documents are the JPL design principles and the JPL flight project practices, which are built up over time from the combined and synthesised lessons
• weekly meetings of the lessons learned committee, for the past 35 years

Here are some interesting videos from Interpol on their approach (Project Stadia) to develop and share lessons and good practices on Event Security. As this site explains

“With our global network of experts, INTERPOL is ideally placed to serve as a centralized hub for research, design, planning, coordination and training to help meet this challenge, within a structure that assures high standards and quality. 

By bringing together good practices, successes and lessons learnt from member countries that have successfully hosted major international events, Project Stadia can help future hosts strengthen their own preparations with the latest knowledge and expertise”.

Overview

More details of the expert networks

Michael Roberts, INTERPOL Project Stadia describes a knowledge sharing meeting in Doha

Produced by KM4 Health, the video below is a really good basic introduction to KM in healthcare

The video below is from the USAID-supported Vrisshi project in India, funded to scale up advances in reproductive, maternal, newborn and child health (+ adolescents as well).

The video talks about a knowledge base, or collection of publications, that was created through the project for use by medical and health practitioners. You can read more about Vriddhi here.

The video below, from JD Careers Out There includes a legal knowledge manager talking about his role and career.

In this video, Ed Hoffman – ex-CKO of NASA talks about the role of the CKO, and the role of KM in major projects. This is an audio interview – the pictures on the video are a loop of screenshots of the major projects knowledge hub – so you could treat this as a commute podcast.

He covers key focus areas for the CKO in project-based organisations

• Engagement, particularly with risk and safety management as well as with knowledge
• Accelerated learning, especially from other organisations
• Conversation (what Ed calls “the sound of success”)

In the video below, Phil Karp, a Lead Knowledge Management Officer from the World Bank describes how he helps practitioners from around the world to share knowledge and lessons with each other. This is an excellent viewpoint into the role of KM in the development sector.

Phil Karp, Lead Knowledge Management Officer, World Bank from GRID-Arendal on Vimeo.

Here is a recording I gave of a talk to ISKO in Singapore, on the topic of “Selling KM”

Courtesy of Patrick Lambe

ISKO SG Nick Milton How to Sell Knowledge Management from Patrick Lambe on Vimeo.

A simple but effective definition of KM

I was moved to reprise this video, from 2009, in which I offered a simple definition of KM, because I was very pleased to see the same definition appearing in a speech this week by by Director Dr Haji Mohd Zamri bin Haji Sabli in Borneo.

The definition is

“‘Knowledge Management is the way we manage our organisation when we understand the value of knowledge’.