KM – managing container, or managing content

Favorite KM can be addressed in two ways – managing the container in which knowledge is carried (the people or the documents) or managing the contents held in that container. Image from wikimedia I blogged last week about “fuzzy statements” and how these need to be avoided if knowledge is

Read More
Shared by Nick Milton December 10, 2018

How to talk to the business about KM

Favorite Communicating KM to the business requires using business terms, not KM terms. Knowledge Management is not an end in itself, it is a means to an end, and the end is a more efficient, effective and productive organisation. The senior and middle managers in your organisation are not interested

Read More
Shared by Nick Milton December 7, 2018

The curse of knowledge and the danger of fuzzy statements

Favorite Fuzzy statements in lessons learned are very common, and are the result of “the curse of knowledge” Fuzzy MonsterClip art courtesy of DailyClipArt.net I blogged yesterday about Statements of the Blindingly Obvious, and how you often find these in explicit knowledge bases and lessons learned systems, as a by-product of the

Read More
Shared by Nick Milton December 5, 2018

The curse of knowledge, and stating the obvious

Favorite The curse of knowledge is the cognitive bias that leads to your Lesson Database being full of “statements of the obvious” There is an interesting exercise you can do, to show how difficult it is to transfer knowledge.  This is the Newton tapper-listener exercise from 1990.  Form participants into

Read More
Shared by Nick Milton December 4, 2018

14 barriers to lesson learning

Favorite Lesson learning, though a simple idea, faces many barriers to its successful deployment. Here are 14 of them. I posted, back in 2009, a list of 100 ways in which you could wreck organisational lesson-learning. These were taken from my book, The Lessons-Learned Handbook, and represent the many ways

Read More
Shared by Nick Milton December 3, 2018

What is the value proposition for a community of practice?

Favorite The whole purpose of community is enabling people to help each other. Vkw.studiogood [CC BY-SA 4.0], from Wikimedia Commons The primary vision of Community is a group of people who help each other.  This might be an Amish community raising a barn, pooling their strength and skills to help

Read More
Shared by Nick Milton November 30, 2018

A community site does not build a community

Favorite There is a common fallacy, that creating a SharePoint site creates a community of practice. In reality it seldom does. Photo © Oxymoron (cc-by-sa/2.0) I posted a couple of days ago about why some Communities of Practice die young. One common cause of early Community die-back is when a well-meaning person

Read More
Shared by Nick Milton November 29, 2018

22 KM success factors and 22 KM failure factors

Favorite It’s always good to cross-check our KM programs against lists of failure and success factors. Here are two pretty comprehensive lists. Two of the most popular posts on this blog are “Top 7 tips for Knowledge Management Success” and   “Top 7 reasons why Knowledge Management implementations fail.”  I

Read More
Shared by Nick Milton November 27, 2018

4 reasons why communities of practice can die young

Favorite It is not uncommon for communities of practice to start with passion and intent, and to fade away and die out over a period of months. Here are 4 possible reasons why. Image from wikimedia commons I have just been reading a very interesting article entitled The Rise and

Read More
Shared by Nick Milton November 26, 2018