Once upon a time, before knowledge was managed, and cause was still in a relationship with effect, I took a degree in Geology and Ecology. With this degree I had hopes of doing research and teaching children about how their world really worked. But the milk snatcher froze my soul and I was forced to move away to work for a Government that was hell bent on automating and re-engineering humans out of their machine.
Fully assimilated I helped reduce, standardise and simplify everything in our path then one day came across ‘Knowledge Management’ or ‘KM’ as we affectionately call it. KM is worshipped and reviled in just about equal measure. It is both dead and yet still full of life as the main topic of some of our longest running annual business conferences across the world. KM epitomises the term ‘living dead’.
My feelings about KM, in hindsight, are that there was too much focus on the knowledge and its flow. At an early stage I took an ecological perspective. Ecology is much more about the study of communities, their interaction with the environment and each other, which together bring about an ecosystem. Ecosystems are a still only a man made concept, infinitely nested within, and overlapping with, each other but probably the ‘best’ model we have to make sense of the present. Pinch your fingers together (if Apple haven’t patented the this thought process as well) , rise up and view this ecosystem and you can see the existing knowledge being shared, new knowledge being formed and as a result changes being made which impact on the entire ecosystem.
In the last few years I have become more and more intrigued about the more creative of these changes which we term ‘innovation’ and have purposefully (serendipitously?) moved into the business of teaching how to facilitate such creative change. I am currently developing a series of masterclasses which bring together all of the above including the latest thinking on storytelling, psychology and sustainability, more details on the tab above.
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Ron Donaldson, Knowledge Ecologist, 20th Sept 2012
