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Talking the Talk: The Language We Use When We Speak about Knowledge Sharing

January 17, 2011 By Guy St. Clair

As we move deeper into the new year, let’s review some of the terms we use when we speak about knowledge sharing. In the corporate environment these days, we’re all pretty much agreed that organizational effectiveness is largely dependent on the quality of knowledge sharing practiced throughout the organization, with the ideal being some level of success in the establishment of an enterprise-wide knowledge culture.

It doesn’t matter much what type of organization we’re affiliated with (although at our company the focus these days seems to be on organizations in the for-profit sector). Any organization must – if it is to achieve its stated mission – deal with knowledge and knowledge sharing. The better the organization manages knowledge and the knowledge-sharing process, the more successful it is going to be.

Which leads to the (by now) somewhat old standby:  knowledge management (KM).

Of course I’m being facetious in making that allusion to “old,” but we are starting to hear talk these days about how KM is becoming somewhat “dated” and how some of our original thoughts about KM don’t exactly match what’s required for the modern workplace. So I hear some colleagues speaking about how it’s time to move to the next stage of the KM life cycle, and that might be the case. After all, we started bringing KM into the management arena about a generation ago (or perhaps a little further back), and in organizational management as in everything else, progress is defined by what we take on as well as by what we assign to – in Mr Drucker’s immortal phrase – “planned abandonment.”

While I’m not suggesting (at all!) abandoning our KM principles and successes, I’m very aware that Mr. Drucker warned us about how we all – simply as human beings – have a natural tendency to cling to earlier success and to forget or sublimate the need to throw out what is no longer of any value or use. And with respect to KM, I do hear people wondering if it is not time to move to a second “stage,” if you will, of knowledge management  (I’ll have more to say about what we might call “the new KM” in an up-coming post).

For now, though, let’s think a little about the language we use when we speak about knowledge sharing in the larger organization. We begin by defining KM.

Some time ago I began playing with this little task, and I soon discovered that defining KM is an almost impossible task. There are as many definitions of KM, it seems, as there are people attempting to define KM.

Perhaps that’s because for many people the concept itself is just too difficult, just too vague to make sense. And certainly during the first ten years or so of working with KM, as a concept knowledge management just wasn’t being accepted by a lot of people who were supposed to be working in this much-talked-about discipline.

Why?

One explanation is pretty clear: For a concept to gain acceptance (especially a concept connected to the workplace), people have to understand what they are doing and what they are talking about when they describe what they are doing. In this case, describing knowledge management turned out to be a very real barrier to organizational acceptance. People just didn’t know what they were talking about, and for many people, the idea of managing knowledge is simply not possible. For some people, KM as a function is simply out of the question. We cannot  manage knowledge, as Larry Prusak and Tom Davenport – two of the early leaders of KM – put it, “no more than we can manage love, or honor, or patriotism, or piety.”

What people really needed to do was to figure out how to work with knowledge. Indeed, working with knowledge became a valuable construct for those who wanted to take an organization’s intellectual infrastructure to a higher, more effective level. That was how Prusak and Davenport described knowledge management, and with them we began to think of KM as simply working with knowledge.

Of course. It makes so much sense when we think of it that way, doesn’t it? And when we do that, when we think of KM as working with knowledge, we can then think of KM as a way of working, a function that helps us manage explicit, tacit, and cultural information in ways that enable all stakeholders to re-use information to create new knowledge. Or, put another way, we can think of KM as an established atmosphere or environment in which all of us in the workplace recognized knowledge development and knowledge sharing (KD/KS) recognized as essential for the achievement of the corporate mission, for organizational effectiveness.

When we begin to think about KM this way, it really isn’t such a complicated concept, is it?

Tagged With: KD/KS, KM/Knowledge Services, knowledge development/knowledge sharing, knowledge sharing, organizational effectiveness, Peter F. Drucker, The Knowledge Culture

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. Debra M. Amidon says

    January 17, 2011 at 5:58 pm

    You pose a thoughtful query for the beginning of the new year…

    My own work on knowledge assets began in the 80’s where we focused on the innovation system – how ideas are created, exchanged and applied into products and services to meet market/client needs. One cannot really ‘manage’ knowledge; but we CAN manage the environment within which knowledge is put into practice.

    This operates on 3 economic levels: the level of the enterprise (profit or not for profit; small, medium, or large); the level of the national economy; and the societal level. The management technology is the same.

    Peter Drucker wrote that ‘Innovation is the one competence needed in the future…and the ability to measure the performance thereof’ (paraphrased).

    So for the last 2 decades, I have sought to understand something called – ‘Knowledge Innovation’. You can find an outline of the recent thinking in an article published in India: http://www.entovation.com/press-room/A%20Knowledge%20Innovation%20Kaledioscope.pdf.

    In the graphics, you will find:
    – The evolution from KM to Knowledge Innovation
    – The migration from planning into innovation strategy
    – A P7 Blueprint how to manage from purpose to prosperity, and
    – The 15 value capital drivers for performance.

    Tell me…are we on the right track?!

    Reply
  2. guystclair says

    January 17, 2011 at 7:32 pm

    From Jim Grant via the LinkedIn Knowledge Management Group:

    I am reminded of the cartoon of the two cavemen standing next to a huge, dead woolly mammoth with a spear sticking out of his side. One caveman says to the other, “Write down that spot”.

    In any organization there are specific, repeatable processes that need to written down so that anyone can remember “the spot”. However, there are things in the heads of experienced, intelligent people that are less specific or repeatable that are every bit as important. Knowing who those people are and how to encourage them to share their experiences with a new layer of employees is every bit as important to the ongoing success of the organization.

    Reply
  3. guystclair says

    January 17, 2011 at 7:35 pm

    Thanks, Jim. Like the caveman cartoon reference.

    Reminds me of the story of the plumber who charged a big fee for tapping on a pipe to get things flowing again. When the client observed how simple the process was, he objected to the fee and asked the plumber to justify it.

    “Simple,” the plumber said, “I knew where to tap the pipe.”

    OK. Perhaps not quite analogous with our KM work, but close.

    Thanks for the good response.

    Reply
  4. Adrian Walker says

    January 17, 2011 at 8:05 pm

    The following may be of interest — Knowledge Curation in Executable English — Social Media that Computes over Data and Explains the Results.

    You can Google “Executable English” to find this, or go directly to http://www.reengineeringllc.com .

    Shared use is free, and there are no advertisements.

    Reply
  5. guystclair says

    January 18, 2011 at 10:58 am

    Thanks for the recent comments. Agree with (and appreciate) reference to Mr. Drucker and innovation. Absolutely. For any organization – whether it’s a business or any other group that’s come together to accomplish – the focus on innovation and, particularly in this day and age, on accelerated innovation – is critical.

    Thanks, Debra, for the references. I will certainly check out that link, and I’m sure most of our other readers will do the same. This exchange is truly our own example of knowledge sharing, isn’t it?

    Reply

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