Steve Barth | Reflexions

Why is knowledge management "personal"?

In a word, I think personal knowledge management is about citizenship. However, a client recently asked me to expand my definition to a paragraph:

Bringing your best to teams, organizations, communities, jobs and tasks depends on personal mastery of the values, practices, skills and tools required contribute your professional expertise to organizational learning and collective outcomes. shared sense-making, In practice, expertise is expressed through articulation and awareness, as well as interpersonal communication, and information literacy. Over the long term, a knowledge worker takes responsibility for the knowledge accumulated across his/her career and network.

Letter to a young client

Recently a new microfinance bank asked me to explain what knowledge management might mean for their enterprise, what it might look like, and how they should go about developing the capacity. A lot of my consulting in the past few years has been with economic development organizations—particularly related to microfinance. Learning and knowledge management are particularly powerful leverage points for microfinance institutions because growth is so rapid and so much of the activity is at the grassroots level. Here were 7 points that popped out of my head

Hiking Icehouse Canyon

We’ve discovered great new trails—less than hour’s drive from home—in Icehouse Canyon, in the Angeles National Forest above Claremont on the road to Mt. Baldy. The canyon runs east-west between steep ridges, so the shadows keep the air frigid and snow frozen. The main canyon, about 4 miles from trailhead to saddle, is rocky drainage forested with oak, big cone spruce, pine, fir and cedar. However, other trails climb hillsides and side canyons and there are peaks to bag beyond the saddle.

History’s Blind Spot

I caught the fascinating History Boys on cable, the film version of Alan Bennett's playwith the original stage director and cast. I liked the provocative and frequently contradictory views. I have always vehemently disagreed, for example, with the taboo on understanding causes of the Holocaust, which is summed up well by one of the characters: “To put something in context is a step towards saying it can be understood and that it can be explained. And if it can be explained then it can be explained away.”

But in these twilight days of the Bush presidency, when so many analysts are rushing to judgment, I have been mulling over this quip:

Our perspective on the past alters. Looking back, immediately in front of us is dead ground. We don't see it, and because we don't see it this means that there is no period so remote as the recent past.

There is so much work to be done (or undone), that it’s tempting to simply dismiss him as the worst president ever. But without a contextual—even provisional—narrative of how he came to stand at the center of history, we are so much more likely to repeat all the mistakes of the past eight years. And we simply can’t afford that.

Seeing the forest and the trees

A new study suggests that spending time in natural environments improves cognition more than in urban environments. Subjects tested better in terms of both memory and attention after walking in a park versus walking downtown. They suggest this is because the natural world is relaxing rather than stimulating.

I think it’s possible the authors understand little about “cognition in the wild” and perhaps need to get out more. The natural environment may be more pleasing, but it is clearly as complex as the urban scene for anybody who is paying attention. Their notion that there is a more coherent and less confusing pattern of stimulation, and that's the key to better performance, is interesting. But if you’re confusing complex with complicated, you aren’t likely to survive in either setting. I suspect the real reason you’re smarter after a hike is just the opposite. Seeing the forest and the trees requires both attention to and awareness of many more complex dynamics than we can consciously perceive. That's an ancient skill and renewing the practice undoubtedly helps us remember the problem-solving capacities we were designed for.