All Life Is Problem Solving

Recently, in the actkm group, my friend Stephen Bounds raised the question of the relationship of KM to conflict in the context of a specific situation in which excessive conflict behavior within a project team was threatening successful completion of the project. This led to a pretty vigorous discussion and a great variety of opinions […]

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This discussion of John Tropea’s two blog entries of March 17th and 18th 2008, has turned into a series within a series. I guess that’s a measure of what happens in this blog medium. That is, if you feel like saying more about something, there’s always another blog tomorrow. No one can tell you that […]

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There’s remarkably little attention given to the discussion of how we ought to evaluate knowledge claims in spite of the fact that this issue is rather central to both knowledge processing and KM. I’ve argued for the importance of KCE in the past. Here I want to illustrate its importance with a critical take on […]

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In my last post, I asked why we in KM don’t write much about KM strategies. Here I ask the same question with respect to policies. Policies and strategies are not the same. A high-level plan for achieving strategic goals and objectives, and ultimately a strategic vision may include a number of policies. On the […]

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4) Another important point made by Dave in the podcast is that those looking to create a knowledge sharing culture are thinking about knowledge sharing from the wrong perspective. The problem is not to create such a culture, but rather to increase the connectivity of people, whereupon they will naturally share because the increased connectivity […]

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My last post commented on Dave Snowden’s primary argument against a National KM Center, discussed in “Emperor’s Chess Board: Pt. 1” and “The Empire Repeats.” In addition to this argument, however, in “The Empire Repeats,” he wrote of two themes that emerged in the actkm discussion on National KM Centers and “connecting the dots.” The […]

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  There are three interesting questions we’d like to take up in this part. — First, assuming that the approach taken by Cynefin, requiring sensemaking through first selecting the context type one is dealing with is appropriate, is the Cynefin framework complete enough as it stands or does it fail to identify important types of […]

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  In earlier posts, I discussed Dave Snowden’s Cynefin framework from the viewpoint of systems classification, offered an alternative to it, and then offered some critical comments. I did this because (a) Dave sometimes used the term “system” in describing one or another Cynefin “domain” and (b) a lot of the recent discussion on Cynefin […]

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  Rain, Steam, and Speed (J. W. M. Turner, 1844) In March of 2004, David Pollard served as the Star Moderator in the Association of Knowledge Work’s (AOK) Star Series. Many subjects were covered during the very fruitful exchanges of Dave’s tenure. One of my posts (message 1484) was a commentary on one of Dave’s […]

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In the opening blog of “All Life is Problem Solving,” I gave a general account of how problem solving occurs in living things including humans. But are organizations living systems, or, at least, are they like living systems in their problem solving patterns? How does organizational problem solving happen? In seeking an answer to that […]

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