Universal Truths that Drive Knowledge Management
Produced by Steve Nathans-Kelly
At KMWorld Connect 2021, Robert Bogue, president, Thor Projects, discussed the factors that drive constant change in the knowledge management world.
"There are some universal truths that drive knowledge management. These are the things that we all know and sort of just accept, but we should articulate them here for a moment, just so that we're clear about why this constant change is a problem," said Bogue. "You see, knowledge is much harder to create than to share and reuse. You've probably got some old recipe book or cards, something that your grandma might have done. Now, somebody had to make that recipe, whether it was your grandma or one of her friends. These recipes are valuable because they tell you how to get a really good result—or hopefully a really good result—and you get the process. You didn't have to work through it. And, in fact, most of us today probably don't understand the interaction of yeast and flour and all that stuff. We just know if we follow the recipe, we get the right results."
Knowledge management is similar to those recipes. "It's just really knowledge sharing and reuse. Knowledge management, as we define it today, is really about how do we take the knowledge we have and reuse it—much like those recipe cards," said Bogue.
"Now, with those truths out of the way, we need to understand that no one can know everything about anything. This is the Dalai Lama or the 14th iteration, reincarnation of the Dalai Lama. And what he says about compassion. What he says about his world is 'I'm a simple Buddhist monk, no more, no less.' You ask him, 'Do you know everything about compassion?' Here's a guy that spends hours and hours meditating every single day. And he really is the vision of compassion in the world today. And he is like, 'No, I don't, I don't have it all. I can learn more from other people.' Well, so if you can't know everything about anything, well then no one can know everything about everything, right. That's simple logic, right. But here's the thing. We have to have knowledge management in the world that we're in because we're no longer in a world where someone could know everything."
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