Prusak revisits his 11 deadliest sins of KM
Stan Garfield has a scoop! Rather than just talking about Prusak & Fahey's "11 Deadliest Sins of KM" article from 1998, he has talked to Larry Prusak directly to get his current perspective. This is in Stan's weekly KM wrapup: 11 Deadliest Sins Of KM Revisited... is the "question of the week" along with several other topics.
In The Eleven Deadliest Sins Of Knowledge Management (California Management Review Vol. 40, No. 3, 1998, pages 265-275) Liam Fahey and Laurence Prusak list 11 errors made in the practice of KM:
- Not developing a working definition of knowledge
- Emphasizing knowledge stock to the detriment of knowledge flow
- Viewing knowledge as existing predominantly outside of the heads of individuals
- Not understanding that a fundamental intermediate purpose of managing knowledge is to create shared context
- Paying little heed to the role and importance of tacit knowledge
- Disentangling knowledge from its uses
- Downplaying thinking and reasoning
- Focusing on the past and the present and not the future
- Failing to recognize the importance of experimentation
- Substituting technological contact for human interface
- Seeking to develop direct measures of knowledge
Q - (to Larry Prusak): What are your current thoughts about your article "The Eleven Deadliest Sins of KM?"
A - (from Larry Prusak): I re-read the article in question (first time in 5 years) and find it holds up well. I'd rather not comment on the commentators but here is my take on the article's premises.
Larry's Stan also links to recent commentary about this article from Dave Snowden, Vivian Kaye, and me.
2 Comment(s)
said:
As always. Thanks for this, David.
My take on the tacit thing is that KM has spent too much effort making a big deal of the difference between Tacit and Explicit knowledge. There's the stuff we "know" and there is the stuff that we can write down or communicate in some way (via the plug in the back of your head).
One of the jobs we have in "doing" knowledge management is discerning where the organization is operating and where it should be operating. This guides us to likely solutions.
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"(1) Paying little heed to the role and importance of tacit knowledge
(2) Disentangling knowledge from its uses"
So I have got this stuff in my head, ideas, intuitions, different angles -- all kinds of stuff but when I come to describe it on paper it can get lost. There is no possibility of sticking a USB cable in my ear and then connecting to someone else's ear. We have to find a way of discussing it, playing around with the idea -- yes I like the idea of play rather than running it through a mass spectrometer on the off chance will find something meaningful and instead ending up with a shed load of metrics we have no idea what to do with. Then once we have the metrics we will need more analysis -- whoops, seems I got stuck in explicit -- how did that happen?
It's not easy this tacit stuff -- I mean my ideas are my ideas and you may not see them the same or hear them the same because you know something different. Yet you can add yours and between us we may find something better of explore something new.
But writing these thoughts, notions etc down doesn't always help -- so why do companies produce reams and reams and reams and reams of information -- no wonder the new measure of storage is called a terabyte -- it certainly brings terror and I'm sure it bites!
(2) disentangle -- I would if I could but I can't. Must be those wretched scientists determined to analyze everything -- now that reminds me of a really good (spot the modesty) piece of verse I wrote -- now I can't find it -- lost in the terabytes or probably stashed underneath the terrapin, but I've written to0 much anyway, been to explicitly explicit rather than explicitly tacit or is that tacitly explicit -- I'm overworking my neurons -- I'm having a Procter & Gamble moment -- do we need some kind of conditioner to disentangle all these loose ends? Perhaps we don't like dealing with messes?
Must away -- it's POETS day.