Page 63 - Volume_14

Jurnal PPM: Journal of Malaysian Librarians
Vol. 14, 2020

It is about setting triggers to remember what we know when we need to know. Human
or deep knowledge is highly contextual and needs stimulus to prod it out. Most KM
methods, tools and practices are about this. It is also the reason why Conversation,
Storytelling, AAR, World Cafe formats are effective knowledge sharing methods.

• In the context of real need, few people will not withhold their knowledge.
Only in the presence of strong distrust, most human beings are unwilling to share
knowledge when asked. Especially if the act of sharing would bring good to people
or cause. Almost always this context of knowledge sharing happens within a process
of value chain especially when the knowledge processes are embedded. Organising
knowledge sharing events to help everyone deal with the pandemic is one good
example of this. Another example is in a problem solving process.

• Everything is fragmented.
We evolved to handle unstructured fragmented fine granularity information objects,
not highly structured documents. We understand unstructured information better
when we make sense the meaning within our own domain or context. Our world has
been dealing with structured information within a structured system and we tend to
manage knowledge, especially tacit knowledge, as such.

• Tolerated failure imprints learning better than success.
We learn faster and better from mistakes that we have done. Yet, a lot of organisations
today avoid talking about mistakes.

• The way we know things is not the way we report we know things.
Not only the world is fragmented but for us, we are a creature that makes decision
based on patterns. Thus, we do not ask someone how he does something but instead,
we ask him to tell by way of story of how he does things. This is another reason why
storytelling is very effective in knowledge sharing.

• We always know more than we can say, and we will always say more than we can
write down.
This principle is basically the main reason why I personally failed in codifying tacit
knowledge into explicit in my last organisation. The best way to manage this is to
provide spaces and opportunities for people to come together and have deep
conversations. This is also the reason why we should not organise our conferences,
seminars and events in a too restrictive environment and structure.

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