Interestingly, the majority of respondents indicated that their own knowledge creation process was an individual one.
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The Fragility of Knowledge
February 17, 2000
The Fragility of Knowledge
The other day while peaking my head out of the
closet to see what was going on, I attended a meeting about knowledge management. Sometimes as I sit and listen to the 1000th
discussion on knowledge capture, the rhythm of the words takes me and I have an epiphany of my own. Such was the case the other day and a new concept was born to me.
Listening to the discussions about creating and
capturing knowledge, I began to think about whether or not knowledge could break - an odd idea. You can't really hold knowledge. Therefore, you can't drop knowledge. Therefore, it can't fall and hit the floor with the resultant
shattering into thousands of individual pieces. Knowledge is an intangible entity. But if you can create and capture knowledge, can't you sometimes break knowledge, rendering it unusable? Or, perhaps, the knowledge, unknown to the
collector, may have already been broken when it was collected. My epiphany was that there might be an unmet need, and thusly an opportunity - namely a whole line of products consisting of labels, tee shirts, license plates, and
coffee cups with witty sayings such as, "Fragile, Contains Knowledge, Handle With Care." I realize that this tongue-in-cheek idea may be a little far-fetched, but I wonder if the metaphor will stretch enough to give us some insight
into the potential reasons for both non-functional knowledge repositories (knowledge repositories that are not used) and knowledge capture problems.
One of the common reasons given for non-functional knowledge management is
that the repository was built to hold knowledge that nobody uses. Unused knowledge becomes stale and even more unusable. Using our definition for knowledge, "that which enables you to do things," we would have to say that the
repository contents do not enable anyone to do anything. Indeed, we could say that the knowledge in the repository is "broken." It does not matter how the knowledge became broken – it only matters that the knowledge is no
longer useful because it has lost its enabling characteristic.
Assume that a certain naturally occurring plant can cure a certain disease, and that certain "natural" health practitioners know this. A subset of these
practitioners also know that the plant is no longer grown and the active ingredient cannot be synthesized. Although the knowledge concerning the use of the plant to cure the disease is still accurate, it is useless because of a
change in circumstances in the environment.
Collecting, eRecording, eCapturing, or maintaining broken knowledge is a waste of resources. Therefore, two things are important – the ability to recognize broken knowledge
and the ability to protect knowledge during the collection process so that it does not end up broken.
Collection With Breakage
Collecting knowledge is like being an archeologist. Stomping around roughly without care will
result in danger to potential knowledge artifacts. How is it possible to damage the knowledge you are trying to collect?
Let's assume you are collecting knowledge through an interview in which you record the knowledge you
need. When the interview is complete you decide to test the knowledge you have collected by sharing it with several individuals but the tests just are not working. What do you do? (How do you fix the knowledge?)
You return
to the knowledge source, and upon review you learn that you left out a most important aspect of the knowledge – namely where and how it should be used. What was missing from the original knowledge collection process was the context
or setting in which the knowledge was used.
Breakage during collection can occur for other reasons. The knowledge source may not be able to fully articulate the knowledge they have. This may be especially true in the case
of expert knowledge where the knowledge may be so ingrained that the experts can no longer identify discrete aspects of their knowledge.
Lack of cooperation may also contribute to breakage. It may be that an individual or
group from which you are trying to solicit knowledge is unwilling to share the knowledge. This may be especially true where the trust level is low or where the group believes that it must hold on to its knowledge in order to hold
onto its power. In either case, the transferred knowledge may be broken.
Other Kinds of Knowledge Breakage
Knowledge may break over time as the underlying information or data supporting the knowledge changes. This can
occur because of discoveries that modify or invalidate the knowledge or because of the lack of relevance as time progresses. For example, all of the knowledge associated with the flatness of the Earth, "broke" when it was
discovered that the Earth was not flat.
Another contributing factor of breakage is organizational change. If an organization has a directory of "who to go to for what", over time as the people designated in the
directory leave the organization or attain new positions, the directory breaks if it is not maintained in coordination with these changes.
Breakage can also occur through forgetting. Forgetting can occur at an individual or
organizational level. On an individual level, for example, it can manifest itself when an important ingredient is left out of a recipe. Preparing the recipe results in an unexpected product and a broken recipe unless the missing
ingredient can be remembered or discovered. In the organizational setting knowledge can be forgotten over time, through changes in personnel, through a lack of formal maintenance, or through carelessness.
Although
knowledge is a very valuable and fragile entity, I also believe it can be fairly resilient depending on how it is treated. Hopefully this discussion of how knowledge can be "broken", provides clues as to how knowledge may
be safeguarded and protected.
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The knowledgWORKS News is written in its entirety by Randy Kaplan and translated into readable English by Harriet
Trenholm. Suggestions for the newsletter should be sent to
