Category Archives: KM Thought for the Day

“The knowing-doing gap” is all about how organisations confuse intellectual activities (knowing) such as planning and reporting with actual progress-making work (doing). But what if there was a doing-knowing gap as well?

Getting to a state in which both ‘preparing to act’ and ‘prior art’ are part of project start-up critically means budgeting for these kinds of activities from the start, and creating the expectation of a somewhat more ‘tortoise’ rather than ‘hare’ approach in the early days of the project.

There could be other categories that we might consider adding to RAID to give us a RAID+ Log that more fully reflected the KM perspective.

There are two readings of the force of ‘engagement’ and ‘discretionary effort’, and there’s a more positive, qualitative flavour to them that I have always preferred – and this dichotomy relates to how we approach certain aspects of KM.

Here was an opportunity to embed some KM – in the sense of ‘guidance learned from experience’ to help improve performance in the moment, because it will be seen precisely at the right time

Give people a shallow, peripheral vision awareness of lots of things.

There’s still a great misunderstanding about what is information and what is knowledge. But perhaps information is to knowledge a bit more like sunlight is to sugar.

One sure sign that Knowledge Management isn’t embedded into the work is when it becomes an additional activity for ‘evenings and weekends’ – i.e. outside of the working day.

Moderating an online ‘all staff’ open conversation forum

There are quite a few consultants offering ‘KM strategy’, and I’ve done quite a few myself, both as a consultant for clients and as an internal KM functional head. But what kind of thing is a KM strategy and what should it be like?