All Life Is Problem Solving

First, I think that true and false are terms we should apply to linguistic networks rather than single statements. Networks are necessary, because single statements generally assume a good deal of background knowledge illuminating the meaning of those statements. If the background knowledge is expressed in language also, we have a network of statements, and […]

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The over-riding problem with shifting from a “KM” orientation to a “knowledge sharing” one, is that the words don’t mean the same thing, and focusing on one or the other may well lead to different policies, programs, and interventions. Put another way, since “Knowledge Sharing” and Knowledge Management are not the same thing, it’s possible […]

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I think that most, if not all, current knowledge sharing programs do not distinguish those knowledge claims that are just information, from those knowledge claims that are knowledge, because they don’t know how to do so. And I also think that the consequence of this is that most, if not all, current knowledge sharing programs, […]

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IBM was not the first large organization to decide that “knowledge sharing” is an easier sell than “KM.” The World Bank preceded IBM in this move by more than a decade, long before the advent of Web 2.0 or Enterprise 2.0. The Bank decided to use”knowledge sharing” as the orienting idea in their knowledge-related program […]

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IBM has placed Knowledge Sharing in the news again, by announcing that it has “philosophically repositioned” its Knowledge Management practice around Knowledge Sharing. According to IBM’s Chris Cooper, “Management suggests control: control of process and control of environment. The sharing tag is quite important to us.” Of course, “Management” suggests control, these days, only to […]

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Introduction In my last post, I examined John Boyd’s OODA Loop framework and discussed its relationship to double-loop learning. I mentioned there that OODA was one of a number of similar Decision Learning Cycle (DLC) frameworks developed by various writers over the years, including my own Decision Execution Cycle (DEC) framework. In this post, I’ll […]

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  This post is about “safe-fail experiments.” The essential idea in safe-fail experiments was expressed well by Dave Snowden in this way: “I can afford them to fail and critically, I plan them so that through that failure I learn more about the terrain through which I wish to travel.” And again, in another place, […]

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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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  It’s now time to review Dave’s characterizations of the three remaining contexts and to comment on them. Again using the HBR article as the primary source for my discussion, the “complicated” domain is characterized as follows. Complicated — Expert diagnosis required — Cause-and-effect relationships discoverable but not immediately apparent to everyone; — More than […]

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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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