Perennial Questions in Knowledge Management

Anyone who has worked in or around Knowledge Management for a while has encountered the perennial questions.  Perennial questions are like perennial plants, they keep coming back.   These perennial questions around KM keep coming back because they are the wrong questions or they are questions for which there are no clear answers and the best answer is "it depends".

Here are two of these questions?

Is Knowledge Management dead, dying, being revived?  None of the above.  I would rather ask "What's happening in KM?"  It's constantly evolving to adapt to changes in the environment and in particular, to adapt to technology changes. The fundamentals of Knowledge Management are not changing and need to be brought back to the surface regularly. To some extent, technology is evolving to respond to new challenges brought about by technology advances.  We now have access to so much data and information that we need new technologies to process the data and information to use them.

Where does Knowledge Management belong in the organization?  The typical answer to this question is "it depends", as long as it's not in IT.  Based on my own experience, this is a question that cannot yield a complete answer unless it is asked slightly differently.  It also depends on what the top level of KM is?  If the top KM position is a relatively low level position, it won't matter where it is in the organization, it is buried.  Another aspect to this topic is the KM office/team's ability to work collaboratively with other key departments across the organization.  This may depend on the processes for strategic planning and annual work planning.  Organizational boundaries can become an obstacle to the development of a coherent comprehensive organizational framework for KM.   Therefore, to succeed, the KM team needs to be positioned such that a) its focus is strongly aligned with organizational strategies; b) its highest level staff is able to influence strategic decision making; c) organizational processes allow the KM team to work/collaborate across organizational boundaries. 

A related recent blog post from Enterprise Knowledge:  Where does KM leadership and governance belong (9/9/2022). 

Insight Management vs. Knowledge Management

I wrote about insight mapping in the previous blog because I came across the Insight Management Academy (IMA) website.  I was looking up "insight management". 

In some ways, insight management looks very much like Knowledge Management. In fact, I came across some definitions of insight management that were literally well-accepted definitions of knowledge management. 

If I were to try to explain the difference, I would say that insight management is a form of knowledge management that is very market-oriented, future-oriented, or forward looking. While Knowledge Management can take on many different forms in an organization, insight management is more focused. 

It is not focused on lessons learned or best practices.  It is looking at the latest, most relevant data and information available in the market and internally to make decisions; it is looking to innovate and bring new solutions to the market.  It is focused on competing ahead of the market.  It's asking "what are the solutions of tomorrow?" rather than "what has worked well in the past that we can repeat?" 

To say that insight management is not paying attention to lessons from the past is an exaggeration.  As a KM professional I do not mean to say that we should ignore lessons from the past.  Lessons learned should be a foundation, a starting point, but they are not enough and unless they are continuously updated, they become obsolete rather quickly.  For more on that point, "Best Practices are Stupid" is a good reminder that sticking with so called 'proven solutions' cannot lead to new solutions and new, evolving problems require new solutions.  

What is Insight Mapping?

 Insight mapping is the title of this blog.  Why?  What does it really mean?

First, let me clarify that this blog, which started in 2003, was not always named "insight mapping".  It's been called insight mapping since around 2017 I believe.  I had been working on variations of concept maps which we called either knowledge maps or conversation maps.  These were visual representations of Pause and Learn conversations held for NASA teams.  The Pause and Learn is the NASA equivalent to an After-Action-Review in many ways, but the process of mapping these conversations was rather unique to the Office of the Chief Knowledge Officer at the Goddard Space Flight Center.  

I learned the approach from the CKO there, Dr. Ed Rogers.  Then I evolved the approach by turning collections of individual conversation maps into a web of maps and therefore, a collection of insights.  The conversation approach itself wasn't changed and the first step of the documentation of insights in maps wasn't changed, but the way maps were constructed to be more easily aggregated into a web of map was new.  

At the time, I struggled to stick to a single name for the maps.  They were based on the idea of concept mapping, but reflected the flow of conversation rather than concepts.  They key elements were the takeaways of the Pause and Learn session, embedded in all the relevant contextual information. The key takeaways were a mix of lessons, recommendations, and insights.  In truth, most takeaways, which were visually indicated on the map, were important insights but did not readily lend themselves to being captured as lessons or recommendations.

It is only when I left NASA and worked as a consultant for a while, having more time to work on this blog, that I called it Insight Mapping and decided to rename the blog after it.  The insight maps included in the map section are not NASA insight maps, they are little illustrations of individual maps. 

The value, however, was in having a large collection of maps and therefore a large collection of insights which were tagged based on an evolving taxonomy. Each emerging key topic would become its own map, gathering the [insert a topic] insights across 100s of maps. Thanks to a maze of hyperlinks embedded in the text of the individual insights, it was easy to maintain quick access to the context for an insight in the original conversation/insight map.  

Therefore, while the individual maps provided contextualized insights, the topic map provided insight into a topic by gathering all related insights into a single map.  

Conceptually, I still think this was very interesting.  In practice, the technology and level of effort involved in constructing the maps was just not sustainable and the skills were not easily transferable.  I suspect this could be revived with a different technological solution.  The concept of insight mapping and aggregating insights to generate valuable "insight" remains valid.

I was reminded of all this while listening to the Insight Management Academy (IMA) podcast: Transforming Insight. I just started the series.  The first podcast provides a useful definition of "insights" and "insight" .  Insight is the accumulated understanding built from many insights.  It's the bigger picture that emerges by connecting the dots, making the connections across hundreds or thousands of insights.  Individual insight maps highlight insights within the context in which they emerge.  Topic maps aggregate individual insights and make it possible to get "insight" into a topic.

The brain, expertise, and knowledge management

The brain undergoes rewiring after 40. No kidding. I would hope that the brain is constantly rewiring, but over time, the nature of the rewiring changes as we age.  And the employees within an organization who have the most expertise are likely to be over 40, the people who have decades of work experience, decades worth of learning, whether they stayed in one industry, one company, or they diversified their experiences.  These are also in many cases the people who are in the higher levels of management, making decisions. 

I came across this article:  The Brain Undergoes a Great Rewiring after age 40:  The aging brain is wired differently.  

"University in Australia swept through the scientific literature, seeking to summarize how the connectivity of the human brain changes over our lifetimes. The gathered evidence suggests that in the fifth decade of life (that is, after a person turns 40), the brain starts to undergo a radical “rewiring” that results in diverse networks becoming more integrated and connected over the ensuing decades, with accompanying effects on cognition."  https://bigthink.com/neuropsych/great-brain-rewiring-after-age-40/

The younger brain is partitioned and highly connected within the partitions.  It is building specialized networks.  The older brain is more connected across networks.  In the fourth and fifth decade of life is when you have the greatest within network and across network connectivity.  

The rewired brain is a function of the overall body's need to adjust to declining functions.  The body slows down and the brain needs to adjust.  Of course, exercise and a healthy diet can help slow down the decline.  I would like to think that continuous use of one's brain for intellectual pursuits is key to maintaining brain cells to.  By "intellectual pursuits" I mean more than sudoku and crossword puzzles, though.  My aging brain wants to connect things. Here we go:

How can emerging knowledge of how our aging brains are rewired impact how we understand expertise and knowledge retention in organizations?

A good understanding of how those brain cells are being rewired might also help put the remaining brain cells to good use and seeing where there might be some advantage to a widely-networked brain. In other words, while accepting the fact that one's brain is changing and decline is somewhat inevitable, perhaps a wiser brain is emerging.  Let's just assume this hypothesis is plausible, otherwise it's depressing.

Going back to knowledge management, how can we handle the knowledge of experts in their 50s and 60s, knowing that their neural pathways are changing?  Instead of thinking about it as declining brain functions, what are the strengths we can expect from broader connectivity among networks in the brains of the more experienced professionals in an organization?  

And are there any useful parallels between neuron networking in the brain and people networking in organizations?

A young brain is specializing within sections of the brain.  The equivalent in an organization might be specialized communities of practice.  They are building expertise within narrow knowledge domains but not connecting well with the broader system.  An older brain connects more across networks.  In an organization, the equivalent might be crosscutting networks that make much greater use of systems thinking and see how the narrowly defined communities of practice are or should be connected. 

To be more specific, the individual communities in a Yammer (enterprise social) network are the specialized segments of the organizational brain while the Yammer network itself is the more broadly integrated, aging brain.  The younger employees might feel more comfortable engaging in the specialized communities of practice.  The more seasoned employees might be at ease engaging across communities, or making the connections across the communities.

While this resonates personally, I can't say that I have any evidence that this is indeed happening.  Considering that the aging brain isn't very flexible, it makes it challenging to ask the so-called "experts" to engage in new ways, using new communications platforms like Yammer. Knowing that, how can we still leverage the aging brains' valuable expertise and strengths in seeing the bigger picture, the broadly networked picture, the whole system?