knowledge

I've been pondering the concept of Knowledge Management (KM).  Experts in the field such as Dave Snowden have long been debating whether or not KM has outlived it's purpose.  Many people wonder if it ever had a real value proposition, as there are many large organisations who spent millions on KM, but received very little of the value they anticipated.  In part this is due to the unfortunate confusion of Knowledge Management with Information Management as well as the over-focus on IT and normative approaches such as Communities of Practice (COP) which have proven to be unsustainable in the long-term.

While reading recent newspaper reports regarding the crises these two companies find themselves in, one subject keeps coming up - shortage of skills.  Nationwide's airplanes are losing their engines, and Eskom has to implement load shedding due to (among other reasons) inadequate maintenance on their aircraft and power stations, which in turn is due to a lack of skilled technicians.

Shortage of skills is a common problem across the globe.  What compounds the issue in many South African companies is a short-sighted implementation of Affirmative Action, which led to skilled resources being retrenched with no succession plan in place to replace those lost skills.

We all know them, people who think that they are experts on a certain topic (in extreme cases on all topics!) when in fact they know very little.  I recently found out that there is actually a name for this - it's called the Dunning-Kruger effect which is defined as: "the phenomenon wherein people who have little knowledge think that they know more than others who have much more knowledge"

It's named for Justin Kruger and David Dunning who first demonstrated the phenomenon in a series of experiments, when they were both at Cornell University. Their results were published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in December 1999.

One of the Cognitive Edge methodologies that Sonja and I have found to be building up a nice head of steam in South Africa is ASHEN. The process of eliciting the Artifacts, Skills, Heuristics, Experience and Natural Talent in the Knowledge Transfer realm has been very valuable – especially when one considers the challenges of knowledge transfer across generational gaps.