When to learn from experience, when to learn from others

Favorite Learning from your own experience is a preferred option only when the cost of those experiences is low. Anyone can learn from experience. Even my dog learns from experience. Three times she has tangled with an electric fence (once even managing to clip herself to the fence with the

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Shared by Nick Milton May 21, 2019

The Synthesis step in KM

Favorite Individual bits of learned knowledge need to be synthesised into a common understanding. Synthesis [critical thinking skills] by Enokson, on Flickr Knowledge is incremental – it arrives as discrete learnings from experience. These increments of knowledge may be documented as lessons identified, best practices, blog posts, wiki pages and

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Shared by Nick Milton May 20, 2019

Why "knowledge management" is not an oxymoron

Favorite One of the arguments against the term “Knowledge Management” is that knowledge is an intangible and cannot be managed, therefore “Knowledge Management” is an oxymoron Photo from FlickrIt wasn’t Einstein that said this quote, it was William Bruce Cameron in 1963, but its still a good quote The argument is

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Shared by Nick Milton May 17, 2019

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