Two thought-provoking links in Dennis Kennedy today ("Toward Knowledge Management 2.0") and yesterday ("Denham Grey Rethinks Knowledge Management").
Of many themes and thoughts about the past, present and future of KM, these links reminded me of my own early experiences of KM and a catalogue of "KM Shorts" (either one page or very few page stand-alone PowerPoints and MindMaps) I have assembled over the years, which I use when helping law firms with issues surrounding their own KM practices and knowledge sharing culture.
In particular, when looking critically at law firms and the willingness by which lawyers share know-how or know-who with each other, Dennis Kennedy's references to Dave Snowden remain as apt today as they ever did.
Snowden’s basic tenets of KM, which I have described in my slides as "Fundamental Laws" about knowledge sharing, go to the very essence of the culture of a law firm. Yes we can persuade. Yes we can cajole. Yes we can choose to beat the lawyers. But, at the end of the day, lawyers will only volunteer what they want to, and that may well be very inferior grade knowledge in the hands of others.
Secondly, since we can always know more than we can tell, and tell more than we can write down, do knowledge and information management worker activities within law firms on managing documents account for too high a percentage of the overall annual budget of time and human resources? Witness here the interesting work being done by Allen & Overy under the driving influence of head of KM and professional support lawyer, Ruth Ward, whose article last summer in Inside Knowledge is cross-referenced and available on Human Law under “Allen & Overy lead the way on internal blogging and wikis - Do you want to know how?”.
Thirdly, if we only know what we know when we need to know it, should knowledge and information professionals in law firms re-appraise the balance of time they spend on templates and precedents in the traditional sense? Do we need more readily re-usable knowledge assets, which act as stimuli to individuals to prompt and cause them to know what to do next? These stimuli could just be lists of questions, or storytelling parables, or video clips of knowledgeable people in action. The potential list is endless.
Moreover, these stimuli will be different if the person being stimulated has not previously used that knowledge, as opposed to stimuli for the original author of that knowledge, who is being reminded or remembering that he or she can use that knowledge again.
Presumably, one of the human reasons why individual lawyers horde 1,000s of pages of papers from past transactions or matters in their personal offices is that they want to be surrounded by triggers to re-use parts of those papers sometime in the future.
But, of course, at the time they make their transaction bible, or whatever else they keep as an aide memoire, they do not actually know whether they will ever use bits of it again, until the time comes, which may never come.
Ruth Ward from Allen & Overy sums up this tension between managing documents and other forms of knowledge, in her Inside Knowledge article mentioned above, when she introduces the subject of social media and professional services:
“However, the traditional legal KM model has focused more on documents – acquiring them and storing them – rather than on people, putting them together and leveraging their know-how. It is this shortcoming that Allen & Overy’s KM strategy was devised to address.”
We are truly in a period of “rethinking” many things, not just KM.