Tom Davenport is right. Why not move past Knowledge Management and create something better?
This year one of my favourite football (soccer to our American cousins) players, Steven Gerrard, left Liverpool FC to play for the Los Angeles Galaxy. "Stevie G" was a one club player and he dragged Liverpool, players and supporters alike, kicking and screaming to major trophies. Between 2004 and 2007 he was at the peak of his powers; his performance in one particular FA Cup final being so good that it will forever be known as the Gerrard Final (first video).
But over the last 2-3 years my hero has been looking jaded. He lost a step and he turned into an opposition's joke - slipping at a crucial time in a pivotal game against Chelsea in 2014, that could have seen Liverpool win their first league title in over 25 years (second video). In 2015, with his playing time diminishing, he announced he was leaving Liverpool.
You can probably imagine
the social media implosion - how dare the owners of LFC allow such a legend to leave. It hurt suporters and provoked heated emotional debates betwene those who thought he was past his best and those who believe that he is still good enough to play for Liverpool.
Yesterday, Gerrard was unveiled as a Los Angeles Galaxy player. He is 34 and past his prime. He may have two good seasons with the Galaxy, but he will never be the player in that first video. In the future he will reinvent himself, perhaps as a pundit, perhaps as a coach or manager, but, as a player, he has tipped from a point of maturity into unstoppable decline. For now, he fits the Los Angeles Galaxy landscape. He no longer fits the Liverpool landscape.
So it is with Knowledge Management.
Tom Davenport recently wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal, asking, "whatever happened to Knowledge Management?" It is a good opinion piece, but it is also old news - for example, I was at a conference in Singapore where Dave Snowden said exactly the same thing in 2008. I have written many blogs over the last seven years saying a similar thing, my last being in March this year (No More Knowledge Management!).
Tom's article has divided opinion. Some have hoisted the main sail, ready to do battle for this dying concept, declaring growth in regions such as Africa and India. Unfortunately the unkind reality is that this energy would be better applied in working on better solutions for the future. I will agree that it is hard to know where we are in the KM lifecycle, but, given its history, I believe it is safe to say that it is on the "diffusions of innovations" downward slope. Similarly, I would argue that those seeing continued "growth" in KM are actually observing pockets of "laggards" - see the diagram below:
Quite simply, KM is on the decline and those arguing against this are fighting a losing battle. This is not to say that KM will suddenly cease to exist at the end of 2015, but it is certainly well past its peak. More than this, regardless of where a given person senses the KM lifecycle to be, the concept sits upon weak foundations (e.g. it should never have been placed in the domain of Information Management in the first place) and, regardless of how people wish it to be otherwise, it is coming to the end of its usefulness.
The question is, what comes next? KM will evolve into something new, the need is there, but what do you want it to be?
The need for organisations to develop capability in the areas of knowledge acquisition, curation, sharing, deployment and creation is more important than ever - see the Harvard Business Review research around AI technology and the emerging threat to various professions (e.g. accountants, with 96% certainty, will see redundancies due to the advancement of technology and automation).
You can disagree with this type of research - I do. I argue that the added value of human knowledge, skills, experience and behaviours informs enhanced judgement and inference that AI is just not in a position to deliver, in terms of decision-making and problem solving - but KMers have to face facts that there is a new "lean challenge" emerging, where there will be growing attempts to remove human waste (e.g. poor decision-making) from organisational systems. This brings with it unintended consequences, where the learning ground for high value knowledge workers could be sacrificed for short term gain.
The reality is that knowledge cannot be seen as an asset in the traditional resource, information based, view of the world. Knowledge as a value added resource is attached to human, intellectual and social capital, it is "activated" not by technology, but by people, who act as the firewall, in terms of availability and deployment. This is where "traditional" KM thinking has gone off the rails. If organisations want to improve resilience (agility), which is one of the main drivers for KM in the first place (adaptive capacity), then traditional, information led KMers have to engage with broader concepts of human behaviour, adult learning and resilience (sustainability). If this does not happen, it doesn't matter how many "laggards" attempt KM or create KM jobs, the cycle will be one of single-loop learning and the outcome will remain the same, failure.
There is no agreed "name" for what comes next. I have been promoting "Knowledge capability" for quite some time - the human knowledge, skills, experience, behaviours required to create personal and organisational agility. I do not expect people to agree with any given label, but I am also bringing people to understand the problems with KM and the need to create and accelerate into a space that better fits the VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous) landscape that their organisations operate in.
The bottom line? Knowledge Management is the past, what is your contribution to the future?
