What will be relevant in future?

One of the things we seek to do in KM is identify knowledge that is created or gained in one experience, at one time and in one place, and make it available in future, or in other places that it might also be useful. But do we really know what will prove to be relevant in future? And what can we do that is the likely optimum amount of effort to expend when in truth it could all turn out to be wasted?

The dilemma here is that the perfect model of any system is no less than the system itself. To somehow identify, preserve and signpost all the new knowledge created in a project, for example, might take anything up to the same amount of effort again. It might even take an infinite amount of effort and, in principle, be an impossible endeavour: We’re still finding new things to say about the works of Shakespeare hundreds of years later, after all, and the cumulative analysis effort spent on this pursuit must be some huge multiple of that which The Bard himself ever spent writing them in the first place! Nor is this an unusual case: any kind of inquiry into a critical incident is likely also to take up far more time than the original events ever did. It’s a bit like the expanding effect of making explicit that which was tacit. So don’t doubt the potential to soak up effort here.

I think there are some guidelines we can give – and, whilst they cannot be guaranteed to represent the absolute sweet spot for effort input vs return output, I do think they make sense and also represent probably an improvement on the usual case.

Firstly, if you know that a subject, whether it’s a know how, a know that or a know who, is strategic and core to your organisation’s capabilities, strategy or operations, then it’s clear that you should do something about that to make sure that anything new, unusual, innovative, or that validates or disproves a key hypothesis, should be addressed. For our key capabilities, did we learn something new about how to do that thing; did we develop new static knowledge that we really ought to flag and join to our body of knowledge and make practitioners aware of? This ought to be normal, although the danger here can be that we just continually collect ‘more of the same’.

Secondly, and maybe even more so, when the capability or subject is new to you or generally emerging perhaps you should do even more to make sure you adopt the learnings. In this area there is the caution that not everything that is novel, or even that people think at the time (the adherents and proponents esp.) will be the ‘next big thing’ – not everything like that will actually turn out to be worth it. But if we really are trying to learn about a new area then we should probably put some effort into identifying what we have learned and making sure it’s available, accessible and reusable by those who come after.

But then there’s everything else – the hidden part of the iceberg, I say, because the little micro-routines and micro-solutions and micro-discoveries that individual team members made as they went along will, yes, remain in their minds, but are likely invisible to anyone else. And it’s unpredictable whether these little lightbulbs will ever become relevant. What to do? Here’s my advice:

First, leave a human/social trail – tell people. Some of them will ask for more information and that may be a clue that this thing is useful. Others may well remember and either one day when it suddenly is relevant to them, come back to you, or they may tell someone else.

Second, leave a digital trail, and here it’s all about very simple things like giving a file a name and a title that conveys what it is to some future person who might be looking for exactly that thing: “Good example of a stakeholder engagement plan” sort of thing.