What if the knowledge doesn’t walk out of the door every night?

We’ve heard this saying many times that knowledge “walks out of the door every night”*. The point, of course, is to stress that knowledge is primarily a people thing.

Well, in a traditional 9-5 workplace-based organisation, yes, that knowledge did walk out of the door every night. And eventually it either died or became otherwise incapacitated, retired or left your organisation – and all of this is the starting point for all kinds of proposals about KM.

So, thinking more broadly than just “every night”, and thinking about people leaving or retiring, and maybe leaving aside death or other incapacity for now, what if the knowledge doesn’t leave when the people leave? Where does that provocation take us?

I like this kind of thinking. Had I been there when this famous phrase was first uttered*, and indeed whenever I have since heard it coined, my thought would inevitably be, because this is just what I do, “suppose it doesn’t?”. Then what?

One direction this leads is everything to do with separating the knowledge from a dependence on those people – ‘capturing’ or embedding it in some way, usually the default being to get it written down, which, as we know well, is a pretty poor option.

But this #KMTFTD is about the other path – admitting there’s a dependence on people for their knowledge, but severing the necessity for them to be within the boundaries of the organisation. Where does that take us?

Bob Buckman told me [in person] about keeping retirees close and holding get-togethers for them so they were still “in the network” and could be called on for favours, with rewards. And of course we have alumni networks – but how well engaged are they with the knowledge aspects versus the other reasons they exist, such as to re-recruit someone back, or turn an ex-employee into a customer?

We should be thinking about how to use ideas like this; that people have relationships with people more than with organisations or alumni programmes (so who are the leavers still connected to?), about parting company on the best relations, and so on. There’s a role for KM here.

* _{At least Google Answers attributes this to Kevin Abley of Cap Gemini “Conference on Knowledge Management, London, November 26 1998” http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview/id/458948.html – I may well have been there! But you’ll find similar passim}