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Knowledge Strategy: Does Optimism Fit?

May 30, 2012 By Guy St. Clair

Anyone who knows me knows how I would answer that question. I tend to take a very optimistic view about most things (almost embarrassingly, according to some of my friends and colleagues).

So I was impressed with a recent post from Tristan Louis (Optimized Optimism). In his essay, Tristan defines opti­mized opti­mism by asserting that the most effi­cient way to han­dle a prob­lem is to “hang on” to the belief that the prob­lem can be solved.

It’s a useful point of view for knowledge strategists. Our working environment – like that of folks involved in start-ups – is more often than not like getting a new venture off the ground. In almost every organization there are people who just don’t see the value of focusing on KM, knowledge services, or knowledge strategy. Sometimes they’re in management (even among senior management), sometimes they are just fellow knowledge workers going about their daily routines. But almost always, when they do not share the knowledge strategist’s expertise and enthusiasm, once they open themselves up a little and learn about how managing the company’s intellectual capital relates to the company’s success, they start to come around. Not always, and often not very quickly, but they can (well, most of the time) be led, and when they do accept the validity of what we do as knowledge strategists, the larger KM picture changes for the company.

So I agree with Tristan that people who see themselves as opti­mists are successful because for them “their world­view is ruled by when, not if.” Following on that idea, Tristan even offers  a sim­ple exer­cise: “Take some­thing that you want to do if some­thing else hap­pens and change the state­ment by sim­ply replac­ing the if with when. All of a sud­den, your world stops being about an exter­nally con­trolled one to an inter­est­ing ques­tion: How will I make the when happen?”

Take a look at Tristan Louis’s Optimized Optimism. It will get you thinking.

And it will lead you – indirectly, I suppose – to another issue we’ve been thinking about, the tensions that come from trying to plan and implement needed actions for the short term. When we think about what’s needed in the larger knowledge strategy picture, about dealing with such issues as the overwhelming quantity of information and knowledge that must be managed – “big data” and all that – we see clearly that knowledge strategists are needed, to provide the solutions to problems that are chewing up corporate revenues.

At the same time, some of this can’t be rushed, a point taken in a recent interview I passed on to some of you last week. It was in Harvard Business Review, and in the interview, Adi Ignatius talks with Unilever’s Paul Polman (Unilever’s CEO on Making Responsible Business Work) about the larger topic of corporate social responsibility. In the discussion, however, we also get an enlightening look at how Unilever has changed it’s overall management framework. One result has been, as Polman puts it, “…an environment for our business to be a little bit more longer time focused. We abolished quarterly profits. We don’t give guidance anymore. We changed our compensation systems for the long term.” Naturally enough, Polman mentions that the change can’t be wholesale and it can’t be undertaken all at once (“we’re well aware that during that journey, there are some milestones that they can hold us accountable”).

Working in this new management environment gives Unilever (and its leadership) the opportunity to step back, to think about what has to move fast and what can be deliberated and studied and perhaps even tried out first, to see if it will work. It’s an interesting paradigm, what the folks at Unilever are doing, and it brings to mind something my students and I speak about all the time. We’re in the M.S. in Information and Knowledge Strategy program at New York’s Columbia University, and we’re continually wrestling with that balancing act, about how companies need information and knowledge strategists now, and yet – despite the fast-paced knowledge development and knowledge sharing (KD/KS) environment we’re working in – the focus must also be on on the longer-term value of designing and implementing a good, solid KD/KS process for the larger organization. So while we are needed to move into the jobs sooner rather than later, the work we do must – vis-à-vis Paul Polson – include designing and managing a knowledge strategy for the long haul. Flexible, yes. With identifiable milestones, yes. But the impact and the contribution to organizational effectiveness cannot be short term.

About Guy St. Clair

Guy St. Clair is the Series Editor for Knowledge Services, from Verlag Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin, the scholarly publishing house specializing in academic literature. The series subject is knowledge services, the approach to managing intellectual capital that merges information management, knowledge management (KM), and strategic learning, presenting and discussing new and innovative approaches to knowledge sharing in all fields of work.

With Barrie Levy, Guy  is the author of The Knowledge Services Handbook: A Guide for the Knowledge Strategist (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020). He is also the author of Knowledge Services: A Strategic Framework for the 21st Century Organization (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016). [Note: Go here for the free PDF version of this book: https://bit.ly/3msI27V. ]

Guy is also the author of Knowledge Services: Five Free Webinars from Guy St. Clair, available to anyone who wants to learn more about knowledge services. The webinars are offered at no charge.

Guy’s other professional writings are listed in SMR International’s corporate website, at SMRShare. 

Comments

  1. Guy St. Clair says

    May 31, 2012 at 2:24 pm

    Posted by Paul T. Jackson at the Special Libraries Association LinkedIn Group:

    I developed one of the library programs for a state prison; expressed by the Corrections Association Accreditation Committee as “second to none” primarily because I was often reminded by my inmate clerk with his comment, “Why not?” when I would express, “If I/we could, I would do thus and so…”

    TRIZ is also the process of finding the optimum solutions, and has been developed for businesses, not just engineering. And if you read the book Ambient Findability by Peter Morville, one can only hope everyone continues to be optimistic.

    A more recent book (2nd edition,) Webbots, Spiders, and Screen Scrapers; a guide to developing Internet agents with PHP/CURL by Michael Schrenk suggests a possible solution to finding, analyzing, and/or collecting pertinent information. With Librarians often concentrating with collecting, storing, and tutorials on how to search the Internet using the limited browser, this is a bit of fresh air for some of us. Whether or not one would have to learn PHP/CURL as some have HTML, there have been and are web sites that will do these sorts of things for you…such as trackrates.com and websiteoptimization.com.

    Guy responds:

    Thanks for that good reply, Paul. Very helpful and happy to pass along your suggestions to SMR’s readers (and to my students). Thanks for sharing with SLA members.

    Reply
  2. Guy St. Clair says

    May 31, 2012 at 2:30 pm

    Posted by Brian Murphy at the Knowledge Managers LinkedIn site:

    I agree whole heartedly.

    Seeing the glass as half full frames the potential to search for ways to fill it up.

    Seeing the glass optimistically as empty frames that you must protect what you have. To move ahead often means making & learning from mistakes and optimistically seeking to fill the glass. However if you never move you will have no resilience and a willingness to try the new things that will lead to new possibilities will not emerge and your glass will stay the same.

    Guy responds:

    Well put, Brian. And it’s that staying “the same” that we knowledge strategists are required by our organizations to do. It’s an awesome responsibility but one I find most knowledge managers and knowledge strategists (at least the ones I come in contact with) embrace enthusiastically. Thanks for that thoughtful response.

    Reply
  3. Guy St. Clair says

    May 31, 2012 at 2:35 pm

    Posted by Simon Price at the Knowledge Managers LinkedIn Group:

    Implementing a knowledge strategy relies heavily on having an optimism bias and as Bryan indicates helps develop resilience. Being optimistic for me is about belief structure which dicates the behaviours you demonstrate. Optimism also makes decision paralysis less likely as your tend to act, reflect, learn and move on. Great question.

    Guy responds:

    Good perspective, Simon. And I like it that you link one’s belief structure with the behaviors we demonstrate. Sort of combines optimism with honesty, doesn’t it? And that, to me, is a critical connection for those of us who work in the knowledge domain. Appreciate your cogent point of view.

    Reply
  4. Guy St. Clair says

    May 31, 2012 at 5:48 pm

    Posted by Jens Øjvind Nielsen at the Knowledge Managers LinkedIn Group:

    How often have we seen change projects fail to deliver value? Very often.

    Changing of behaviour in the short run without forced mechanisms to stop the old behaviour is “not” possible. Viral Change is though a way i.e. demonstrate behaviour, let the follower lead, let the next follower lead as well and you might have started a sunami buttom up – if it is fun, beneficial, challenging, rewarding etc.

    Find a business problem to solve by KM with the attention of top management.

    Guy responds:

    Thanks so much, Jens, for putting in perspective a process that is sometimes attempted as a complicated process. You put forward a practical, straight-forward perspective. I like the sequence you outline. Thanks for sharing with SMR’s readers.

    Reply

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