All Life Is Problem Solving

There’s a good reason why The Black Swan is a best seller. It’s written in a very lively style with great narratives, literary images, and vivid terms and phrases. Nassim Nicholas Taleb (NNT) talks about scalability, non-scalability, Extremistan, Mediocristan, the fallacy of silent evidence, confirmation error or platonic confirmation, epistemic arrogance, future blindness, the lottery-ticket […]

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Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s (NNT) The Black Swan is a “best seller,” and therefore may be having a certain influence on our thinking in many fields including Knowledge Management. From the viewpoint of KM, The Black Swan isn’t about what we know, or about what we know we don’t know, but rather is a book that […]

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Dave Snowden, whose work I’ve often discussed here, recently filed this post which really speaks to me. I think it’s right on the money, and is about both KM and politics, and also complexity and measurement. I’ll look forward to the next one, Dave.

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It’s interesting to look at torture as practiced by the Bush Administration from the perspective of Knowledge Management. In this case, from the perspective of the three-tier model. Let’s begin with the process of an interrogator trying to retrieve “knowledge” from another person. That’s a particular kind of knowledge integration called searching and retrieving (how […]

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In my last two KM blogs, I’ve analyzed the relationships between KM and conflict, in the context of seeing problems, making knowledge, and integrating knowledge. This post will extend the analysis to the top-tier of the Three-tier model, Knowledge Management activity itself. I distinguish three major top-tier categories of KM activities. These are activities: I) […]

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In my last KM blog, I analyzed the relationships between KM and conflict, in the context of seeing problems and making knowledge. This post will extend the analysis to integrating knowledge. I classify knowledge integration activities into four categories: knowledge and information broadcasting (KIB), searching and retrieving (S and R), teaching, and sharing. All of […]

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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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In this post I’ll complete my analysis of Dave Snowden’s seven principles of Knowledge Management. — “Tolerated failure imprints learning better than success. When my young son burnt his finger on a match he learnt more about the dangers of fire than any amount of parental instruction cold provide. All human cultures have developed forms […]

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Dave Snowden, whose views I blog about from time-to-time, yesterday offered “a certification rant,” in which he said: “Just to make it clear, I have no objection to people selling training courses in KM. I have no objection to people developing specific approaches and certifying or accrediting people to practice those techniques, that’s something we […]

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Every once in awhile the issue of the relationship between Organizational Learning (OL) and KM comes up as an issue. It happened a couple of weeks ago in the actkm group. Here’s my take on the issue. First, a lot of what one thinks about the relationship depends on how one views OL and KM. […]

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