Changing to learn, learning to change

We live in a rapidly changing world. The dynamics of these changes challenge us and often force us to rethink what we do and how we do it. Communication patterns are changing, within our organizations and with our partners. New technologies emerge. They pose threads and provide new opportunities to work differently. Life long jobs have been replaced by life long learning. Knowledge about clients, products, services and procedures walks out the door when our employees leave the organization and bringing new people up to speed is expensive. Client expectations change. As they use e-mail and instant messaging – note the words – they expect to get instant service. However, with the proliferation of products, services and their ever increasing versions, the complexity for our organizations to manage all these has grown exponentially as well and our employees are getting busier and busier. We need to learn faster. Quoting Arie de Geus, former head of strategy of Shell: ‘The ability to learn faster than competitors may be the only sustainable competitive advantage’ . There is a catch 22 here, because more and more our lead times are growing and we do not take the time anymore to capture and share what we have learned.

Knowledge about our organization is omnipresent. Our employees carry it in their head and we can only ask them to share it when needed. It is contained in our documents, our databases, our multi-media objects, our Intranet, our Extranets and on our websites. Knowledge can also be found in our processes, in our products and in the culture of the organization. Our clients, suppliers, contractors, collaborators and competitors hold knowledge about our organization, its products and its services. We live in a network economy. Unfortunately, knowledge is not only omnipresent, it is also fragmented. Even if we capture what we have learned, we often don’t know what we know. And quoting Dave Snowden: ‘We know more than we can say and we can say more than we can write down’ .

Knowledge management is not a silver bullet, a panacea for all. However, it can help us to work smarter and to learn faster. It can stop us from reinventing the wheel each time. It can reduce our vulnerability. It can help us to decrease the costs of current operations and to enhance revenues by doing new things. It supports us to achieve our goals and to realize our strategy.