Full Circle Associates

So just after I blog about Kahan and Blair's use of storytelling to identify CoPs, I wander over to Jack Vinson's blog and see Sharing Knowledge by Design. I then pop over to the article he references and find my temperature rising. I'm uncomfortable. My intutive antennae are saying WAIT, WAIT, it's a TRAP.

I'm worried that in our passionate evangelism for knowledge sharing, we are missing something. Here is how I commented on Jack's blog:

I got itchy when I read the Chrysalis piece for a few reasons. There are some very practical pieces of advice, but it rarely gets to the point of reality. It is high level and easy to say yes to, but hard to internalize and do. Here are a few examples.

1. It suggests you set up a community of practice by starting a mailing list. Uh, a mailing list is not a CoP and you don't just set up a CoP... it is a living breathing human group formation, not just a list of emails and some articles. (I know, overreacting here.)

2. It suggests that KM needs to be driven by leadership when we know in practice, that this is not that common and when really great knowledge sharing is happening, it often comes from the mid level down where people NEED the knowledge, not at the level where someone is collecting it for the organization. (I think I'm getting rebellious and starting to suggest that people should have KM initiatives and CoPs that are ground up acts of rebellion and spirit in an organization, not a task imposed from above!)

I'm getting worried that we are missing the point with our evangelism of knowledge sharing, creating lists and formulas. I'm not sure what I'm grasping at, but I FEEL it. I figured you could relate to that Jack!

When we gloss past the emergent, chaotic, messy nature of human knowledge sharing by reducing it to a set of checklists, I think we miss the point. KS is about our empowerment of each other to do what we want/need to do. We can talk all we want about tools and protocols, mandates and rewards. But what we are really asking ourselves to do is start to behave like a network brain, a hive mind. Not a bunch of individuals who are required to dump their knowledge into the pot. It is living. Negotiated. Messy. But very powerful.

I don't really know what the heck I'm talking about at an intellectual level. But I feel it in my gut and in my heart. Help me figure out how to talk about it. Help me find the intellectual roots of my discomfort.

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