Knowledge is personal, manage it that way

Thirty years ago I was the Chief Knowledge Officer of Diamond Technology Partners, a consulting firm attempting to blend the perspectives of Accenture and McKinsey. Leveraging what we knew was the essence of the value we created for clients. With a total headcount at the start of 25 people, the title was more aspirational than practical.

Things got tougher as we grew to over 1,200 professionals over the next six years. The technology couldn’t do what we thought it needed to do. There were no playbooks for how to do knowledge management. Half of what we did had never been done before. We tried programs and practices with variable success.

One of the central challenges was persuading our consultants to share what they knew with one another. The consensus in the field at the time was that sharing was the problem to crack.

Pondering the question of what made knowledge sharing hard led to one of those shower moments where insight happens. Were our consultants hoarding their knowledge to preserve their rank and status? What incentives could we offer them to part with what they had learned for the benefit of the organization? Did we need to find more altruistic individuals who would share because it was the right thing to do? Could I be doing something to set a better example of what good knowledge sharing looked like? Had I done anything recently that was worth sharing more widely? What, in fact, had I learned recently that was of any interest or value?

I had found the culprit!

Knowledge sharing was failing because I wasn’t sharing knowledge with myself. Socrates had it right after all. Know thyself.

It’s hard to share what you don’t know that you know.

The starting point for effective knowledge management in organizations needs to be knowledge management at the personal level. If you are a knowledge worker, effective personal knowledge management matters regardless of whether your organization cares.

In the last several years, we’ve seen a surge of interest and attention to the problems of personal knowledge management. The technology environment has become more welcoming and robust. There are organizational barriers that continue to make this harder than necessary. Organizations still favor standardization and control in ways that clash with the needs of individual knowledge workers. This will resolve over time.

If you are an individual knowledge worker, you should be thinking in terms of your own PKM needs and environment. You may need to work around organizational limitations. Persevere. The improvements in your effectiveness will buy you degrees of freedom in enlightened organizations. If not, your organization may be less enlightened than you’d like.