Knowledge Matters™

Yesterday I blogged about time and knowledge management, so I suppose it was fate that much of my time was wasted today dealing with a “Help Desk”. Quite frankly I felt like I was the character Yossarian in Catch-22 , as I was constantly directed through never ending pointless process that was self-defeating and at times circular. It all began harmlessly enough with a simple request to fix a problem accessing the corporate Intranet. The same problem is also causing e-mail formatting errors, but at least e-mails can get through after displaying four error messages, which is merely frustrating.

The first mistake I made was assuming the “Help Desk” would actually be helpful, and the second was trying to be helpful myself. Foolishly I spent ten minutes getting screen captures of the errors and compiling a PowerPoint complete with commentary. I then looked up the e-mail address for the “Help Desk”, but found six possibilities! Politely I compiled an e-mail, apologised for sending it to all six addresses, and four error messages later it was in the system. And then the comedy, or should I say farce, began! ...

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It seems to me that knowledge management suffers from 4-pane achromatopsia. What the hell are you talking about I hear you say! Well achromatopsia is a congenital vision disorder characterised by complete colour-blindness, central visual acuity loss, extreme light sensitivity, and rapid involuntary eye wobble. To put it another way the unfortunate individuals with achromatopsia have a limited field of vision, have great difficulty keeping focus, and wear dark glasses most of the time which further restricts their vision.

What do I mean by 4-pane? It seems to me we have a love affair with quadrant models. I suggest all these models with their four panes provide restrictive lens, which rather than colour our world serve to make it a world of black and whites with some shades of grey! Models are an intellectual construct in artefact form that provide an abstract, formalised, yet simplified representation of a phenomenon. It is the simplification we need to be careful with, because simplification introduces “knowledge achromatopsia”. ...

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The United States Air Force lost a B2 Stealth Bomber valued at $US 1.4 billion because of a failure to transfer knowledge between pilots and maintenance technicians. The bomber crashed earlier this year at Andersen Air Force Base on the island of Guam. Apparently water distorted pre-flight readings in three of the plane's 24 sensors, making the aircraft's control computer force the B-2 to pitch up on takeoff, resulting in a stall and subsequent crash.

The official accident investigation found that the crash probably could have been avoided if knowledge of a technique to evaporate the moisture had been disseminated throughout the B-2 command. This technique was: ...

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It’s been a very interesting, challenging, and exhausting week. I had planned to do a couple of blog posts but instead got myself into a controversy on the actKM list . The controversy began with a post by Doctor Leoni Warne, on behalf of Doctor Elayne Coakes , with the simple request to “Please consider responding to the appended KM Survey”. A harmless enough and reasonable request you think, but how wrong you are! The controversy began in earnest with the sixth post, when David Snowden , the Alpha on the list, posted the following:

“Come on guys - we all know that these surveys are a game to get people degrees or for established academics to meet the performance criterial for publication in their Universities. In the main they have no value and arise from a perverted self-referential concept of research which is endemic in management and social science. However people's degrees and jobs are on line if they can't get them complete. Help them, fill it in (and random if necessary) but don't take it seriously”.

Now David has posted similar things in the past including comments along the lines of – “I tend to feel sorry for them and fill them in at random, or get my children to do the same. Given the lack of context on the questions random answers have the same validity as considered ones”. Knowing this I posted the following comment: ...

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In a recent post Patrick Lambe laments the lack of sharing of case study material by knowledge managers and knowledge practitioners. His post drew considerable comment both on the actKM forum and his own website. I like to think I am not guilty of this accusation. I have published all my papers and presentations on this website, and HolisTech® Pty Ltd also has a good number of papers and presentations for download. I also respond to every genuine e-mail I receive, but I digress. I sympathise and agree with Patrick’s assertion. As an example as an organiser for the actKM 2007 conference (which I later withdrew from) I posted a call for papers to 157 lists as well as other mediums to get just 12 papers! This I believe highlights an assumption about knowledge management, which I think is partially flawed.

Knowledge management is premised on an assumption of altruism and the willingness to share. But this assumption is not necessarily true. I think a missing component in the corporate literature on knowledge management, and for that matter the management literature, is discipline. It seems that as a society we are afraid of discipline because it conjures up images of corporal punishment. Yet I would say to you that ‘discipline is not a dirty word’! Indeed in 1918 one of Australia’s most famous generals and citizens – Sir John Monash - captured the meaning of discipline very well. He said: ...

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