The Knowledge Argument

In the Moral Maze episode on climate change last October 13th, one of the witnesses mentioned a fact that struck me as relevant to what we do as knowledge managers. He pointed out that the attitude towards climate change is split as follows: 20 per cent of the population understand and believe the science of climate change, they are motivated and change their behaviour to help solve the problem; another 20 per cent, are complete deniers and think climate change is not real, so they ignore the issue; the remaining 60 per cent believe the science behind it, acknowledge the problem, but do not want to be bothered by it, so they just do not take any particular action. The recommendation stated by this guest was that public policy should then focus on that 60 per cent of the population, since the 20 per cent "believers" are already motivated enough and the 20 per cent "deniers" would be too hard to approach.

While numbers may slightly vary and the actual attitudes be more nuanced than that, I have lived first hand a similar distribution on when it comes to employees´ attitude towards knowledge management:

the 20-20-60. Some employees periodically contribute with their experience and content to the available platforms while some other do not see any need to change. Most of the employees and colleagues I have worked with, however, have always acknowledged the need for a better management of knowledge, more collaboration and an improved sharing of experience and lessons.

This majority are however not really willing to take concrete action (e.g. "what, a new tool?", "that now, with all I have to do?"), and most of the time for good reason. 

If knowledge managers have to prioritize their activities (and we do have to!), we should then target initially that majority in a way that is appealing to them, but how would that be? Of course, it is not an easy answer, though we can paint with a broad brush the main elements to take into account. That is, since most of that 60 per cent already support KM and see its advantages, we should focus on just making life easier for them. For example:

Finally, in that same episode of the Moral Maze it was mentioned that in order to bring attention to the problem, calling it "climate change" would not be appealing enough, that we should start calling it something eliciting a stronger reaction. This also made me think that maybe "knowledge management" is a boring term nobody cares about, and that we should do better. What other shocking names would you suggest for it?

 Two of the major accidents on the History of space science and technology are the ones of the NASA shuttles Challenger and Columbia. After some research, there is plenty of evidence tracing the cause to an ill-functioning information flow among key actors in the development of the shuttles.

The road to corporate digitalisation is extremely appealing. 

Long before I joined Computer Engineering, I was already very passionate of technology, and now, in my job as Knowledge Manager I find many elements that a technophile can desire:

I hear very often the following: “my goal in life is happiness, not wisdom”.

If your ultimate goal is happiness, then you have to be very clear about three things: what you mean by a goal, what happiness really is for you and third, how to achieve it. That is, without the proper knowledge, you cannot know if the "happiness" you arrive to at certain point in time is the happiness that corresponds to your ultimate goal or it is merely a "demo" version of what could lay far beyond.