To be knowledge managers we need to understand the real nature of knowledge

What really is knowledge? … and what is it like? … how does it behave and what are its properties?

First and foremost knowledge is the effect of experience, information and reflection on our minds. It’s the overall impression left by layer upon layer of incidents and ideas processes by the mind, as is written over each other, palimpsest-like.

That means that knowledge is generalised or abstracted from the particular …

… although knowledge spans everything from specific, discrete facts and propositions to – at the more mysterious end – gut feelings.

In the world of knowledge, less is often more.

Knowledge is generative; which means that it enables us to say, do and understand situations we’ve never seen before. It’s not like a hard-wired piece of circuitry that can only handle the finite possibilites programmed in.

Knowledge has the property of graceful degradation; which means that it doesn’t instantly fail for lack of data or capability – our knowledge always allows us to have a stab at understanding or attempting almost anything.

Knowledge is fractal in the sense that what may appear to be small, limited subjects can have immense internal complexity: it’s possible to know a very great deal about a very tightly-defined subject, or to have a more general knowledge across a wide range of subjects.

Knowledge is infinite in potential.

We don’t always know what we know or we can’t always access what we know:- think of ‘tip of the tongue’ phenomenon, which is where you know that you know something but just can’t remember it.

Knowledge is both active and passive – active in the sense of knowledge you regulalry use and passive in the sense of something you surprise yourself to discover that you know – as in suddenly finding you know the answer to a quiz question that you wouldn’t have expected to.

Knowledge is (as if) compiled – like compiled computer code in which the logic is no longer as easy to read because it’s been optimised for use: you can’t always say how it is that you know something or how to do something. When you first tried to drive a car you experienced cognitive overload with so much to do at once – – but later it becomes compiled and second nature: you do it almost without conscious thought.

Knowledge is often involuntary: you can’t stop your mind from learning from experience and changing its mental models.

The scope and depth of someone’s knowledge largely depends on their experience and reflection – being expert in one field doesn’t necessarily make one generally wise and an expert in others …

… although patterns of knowing are transferrable from one domain to another – so, for example, you may use your general knowledge of (say) food to deal with an entirely new cuisine the first time you encounter it.

Knowledge is often paradoxical!

Knowledge is not static but emergent – changing in ways we cannot always predict.  All knowledge is provisional and subject to change. And it will still be provisional after then …

Knowledge is personal and also social – due to the commonality of human experience and biology; and our social nature.

Therefore knowledge is subjective.

New knowledge is coloured or biased by already acquired knowledge.

Knowledge is not “for” anything but can do many things. It is multi-modal.

People talk about the tacit knowledge that is in heads vs. the explicit knowledge that is written down – but really they are not so separate and it is not a simple binary matter. 

Explicit documents convey tacit knowledge – the poetry is in the reading. The tacit is always there in the explicit.

Artefacts convey and contact tacit knowledge – – think of how archaeologists recover knowledge from small remnants of long ago.

This journey of understanding is essential, I believe, to nurturing the best that knowledge can do.