Truth

Truth is like a butterfly. Colourful. Fascinating. Fleeting. And there are many fluttering in the garden.

You can focus and chase one all the way but still make space for appreciating a few different others on the journey. You can simply watch all of them enchanted by the apparent diversity. You can pick up a magnifying glass to study one and dive deep into it without letting it blind you to everything else......

Tidbits

There is surely a STRONG link between childhood memories & happiness as an adult. Re-experiencing things that once gave you comfort perhaps reconnects the nodes in your brain to bring you deja vu Happiness.

(Think of that nice song you heard plenty of times as a kid. The walk you had with Grandma in your village. The movie you watched with cousins and laughed your head off. I am sure this is the case even with the not-so-nice memories. Childhood experiences are so so critical.)

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We must invent a body sensor+audio device that'll boom out a context-sensitive quote or two when one begins to get angry. :-)

Imagine: You are about to scream at someone because they are slow on the uptake and this device immediately says in a deep and strong voice "Be kind to everyone - Dalai Lama" or something to that effect.

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What fills the huge gap between education and attitude or behavior? The gap that we rarely fill......! Inspiration, introspection, insight AND extreme effort! Sigh. E.x.t.r.e.m.e E.f.f.o.r.t indeed.

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Life sometimes delivers gifts that seem wonderful until you spot the hidden price tag that it has forgotten to remove......and your attention shifts elsewhere. ;-) 

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Simplicity is not how easy it is for the TECHIES to IMPLEMENT the solution! It is how easy it is for the USER to understand and USE the solution! A TV may have a million circuits embedded inside it, but at the end of the day, the knobs outside must be just enough and easy to operate. 

Experts and Wikipedia

It is hard to resist the urge to share something that is one or more of the following. Isn't it? 

• Inspiring
• Thought-provoking
• Humorous
• Positive/optimistic/hopeful 
• Paradoxical 

In other words, one feels extremely compelled to share things that fall into one or more of these categories.  It is harder to resist the urge if you love to write and enjoy, like the Master would say, spreading sweetness and light.

I was reading a thought-provoking article on Wikipedia and how it has changed the way we perceive knowledge creation and generation, wherein Marshall McLuhan is quoted as saying that technology can alter cognition (and to think we've been fond of saying 'Technology is only the enabler, folks').

Here are some extracts that I liked.

".....The place where an idea could be owned by a single person. One of McLuhan's genius insights was his understanding of how the shift from an oral culture to one based on print gave rise to our modern notion of the individual as the originaator and owner of particular ideas."

McLuhan foresaw. "If the printing press empowered the individual, the digital world empowers collaboration."

McLuhan's chief insights centered around the idea that technology strongly affects not only the content of culture, but the mind that creates and consumes that culture. He maintained that technology alters cognition itself, all the way down to its deepest, most elemental processes.

"It is not only our material environment that is transformed by our machinery. We take our technology into the deepest recesses of our souls. Our view of reality, our structures of meaning, our sense of identity—all are touched and transformed by the technologies which we have allowed to mediate between ourselves and our world. We create machines in our own image and they, in turn, recreate us in theirs"

In a traditional encyclopedia, experts write articles that are permanently encased in authoritative editions. The writing and editing goes on behind the scenes, effectively hiding the process that produces the published article. [...] Jaron focuses on the "finished piece," ie. the latest version of a Wikipedia article. In fact what is most illuminative is the back-and-forth that occurs between a topic's many author/editors. I think there is a lot to be learned by studying the points of dissent. [...]

Personal Knowledge Portfolio

1. Does this chart make sense? Please note that it is to be seen in the context of an organization and not just an individual. 
2. Does this consider/address at least the top few platforms and top few benefits?
3. Is there something wrong in this picture? For example, any block that is not in the appropriate place, in your opinion?
4. Any other feedback for improvement?

Libraries and KM

Some quick and immediate thoughts:

1. There is no substitute for a good - real, physical - library. Despite the Kindles and PDFs

2. Library professionals ought to adopt the latest technologies to make it easy for people to browse through catalogs and reading lists from their desktops. Sites like LibraryThing and Safari are good examples for sharing one's virtual bookshelf. This could be a part of the KM system

3. e-Formats of books are essential in certain situations and cannot be avoided

4. Library activities should be extended to allow people to have conversations, collaborate and engage in group-reading or thinking

5. With the onslaught of e-readers, I am not able to predict the impact it will have on physical libraries a decade from now. Environmental preservation may lead to people being encouraged to read books online rather than depend on print. 

Knowledge and Human Stupidity

I came across this article - The basic laws of human stupidity - many weeks ago via Twitter (apologies, but I forgot who had tweeted about it. I think it might have been @beastoftraal). It took me a while to find some time to read the entire article as it is a pretty longish one. But believe me, once I started reading it, I just couldn't stop till I was done. It engaged me as much as a ball of thread might engage a curious cat - the whole experience was playful, interesting and thought-provoking. It delighted me, excited me, made me think, reintroduced me to the element of fun in Economics, and had me grinning ear to ear for quite a while. The article has flavours of social economics, psychology, human behaviour and humor. Obviously, I also attempted to relate these laws to the field of knowledge management. More on that later ;-) 


I immediately wanted to share it on this blog but then I kept procrastinating on the pretext of writing something around it rather than just sharing the raw link (for which we anyway have Twitter and FB). But I think I overestimated my creative potential. The more I think of it, the more I am convinced that nothing I can ever say will add value to the brilliance, constructive sarcasm and the subtle joy that the article exudes. It is a perfect essay that leaves no point unexplored and, what's more, every bit of the exploration that the author -  Carlo M. Cipolla - engages in is a total delight to read and contemplate. Trying to interpret or comment on it would be like commenting on, say, the Himalayas. Not easy at all, uh? 


I've become as big a fan of Cipolla as of Wodehouse! :-) It's a pity Cipolla doesn't seem to have capitalized on his sense of humor and awesome thinking to write as many books or 'stories' as Plum did.

From the article link....

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I cannot, of course, avoid saying how I relate this to KM. No, you can't kill me! Shut your eyes if you don't want to read anything on KM. Here's the thing - I think knowledge management's objectives are (or should be) to get people to see the merit of remaining in or moving into the "intelligent" quadrant (you must read the article to understand what I mean) and looking for mutual benefits as both a taker and giver of knowledge.  I think it is a good example of the intention to exhibit human intelligence, as referred to in the article, because it is about yielding a gain to yourself while causing a gain to others as well and, as we know, KM revolves around the combination of sharing, learning and collaborating (working together to achieve something). 


At the risk of sounding somewhat obsessed, pursuing Knowledge Management in its truest sense, I believe, will put us all - in due course of time - in the I (Intelligent) block and help the organization and society as a whole (even though sometimes it may seem like we are in the Helpless block whenever we come across Bandits who only want to use our material but not share anything that they may have created or discovered). :-)

S h a r e

I bet the world's progress as well as miseries - both - can be easily linked to the sharing of thoughts and ideas. Sharing is essential and noble but it must be a highly conscious and thoughtful effort. The people who don't share are perhaps not thinking enough or, simply, don't care enough. On second thoughts, they may be so distracted by the potential consequences of sharing - brickbats or bouquets - that they forget to share.

Hole in the Wall

Emergence. Self-Organizing Learning Systems. Children. Education. Knowledge. Collaboration. Plenty of lessons in there!

Truly Badly Madly

A thoughtful moment from my Twitter Timeline:

Pic Courtesy: Asterix, Obelix and Dogmatix - Google Images

I'm inclined to believe that 'real' knowledge & insight come to you only when you truly badly madly want them. Like everything else in life?

Science. Knowledge. Ignorance. Failure. Conversations.

One of the best articles I've read in recent times. Fascinating.  Hat tip to @Kirti

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Excerpts:

(Twentieth-century science philosopher Thomas Kuhn, for instance, defined normal science as the kind of research in which “everything but the most esoteric detail of the result is known in advance.”)

The lesson is that not all data is created equal in our mind’s eye: When it comes to interpreting our experiments, we see what we want to see and disregard the rest.

Too often, we assume that a failed experiment is a wasted effort. But not all anomalies are useless. Here’s how to make the most of them. —J.L.

1. Check Your Assumptions: Ask yourself why this result feels like a failure. What theory does it contradict? Maybe the hypothesis failed, not the experiment.
2. Seek Out the Ignorant: Talk to people who are unfamiliar with your experiment. Explaining your work in simple terms may help you see it in a new light.
3. Encourage Diversity: If everyone working on a problem speaks the same language, then everyone has the same set of assumptions.
4. Beware of Failure-Blindness: It’s normal to filter out information that contradicts our preconceptions. The only way to avoid that bias is to be aware of it.

Modern science is populated by expert insiders, schooled in narrow disciplines. Researchers have all studied the same thick textbooks, which make the world of fact seem settled. This led Kuhn, the philosopher of science, to argue that the only scientists capable of acknowledging the anomalies — and thus shifting paradigms and starting revolutions — are “either very young or very new to the field.” In other words, they are classic outsiders, naive and untenured. They aren’t inhibited from noticing the failures that point toward new possibilities.

While the scientific process is typically seen as a lonely pursuit — researchers solve problems by themselves — Dunbar found that most new scientific ideas emerged from lab meetings, those weekly sessions in which people publicly present their data. Interestingly, the most important element of the lab meeting wasn’t the presentation — it was the debate that followed. Dunbar observed that the skeptical (and sometimes heated) questions asked during a group session frequently triggered breakthroughs, as the scientists were forced to reconsider data they’d previously ignored. The new theory was a product of spontaneous conversation, not solitude; a single bracing query was enough to turn scientists into temporary outsiders, able to look anew at their own work

But not every lab meeting was equally effective. Dunbar tells the story of two labs that both ran into the same experimental problem: The proteins they were trying to measure were sticking to a filter, making it impossible to analyze the data. “One of the labs was full of people from different backgrounds,” Dunbar says. “They had biochemists and molecular biologists and geneticists and students in medical school.” The other lab, in contrast, was made up of E. coli experts. “They knew more about E. coli than anyone else, but that was what they knew,” he says. Dunbar watched how each of these labs dealt with their protein problem. The E. coli group took a brute-force approach, spending several weeks methodically testing various fixes. “It was extremely inefficient,” Dunbar says. “They eventually solved it, but they wasted a lot of valuable time.”

The diverse lab, in contrast, mulled the problem at a group meeting. None of the scientists were protein experts, so they began a wide-ranging discussion of possible solutions. At first, the conversation seemed rather useless. But then, as the chemists traded ideas with the biologists and the biologists bounced ideas off the med students, potential answers began to emerge. “After another 10 minutes of talking, the protein problem was solved,” Dunbar says. “They made it look easy.”

When Dunbar reviewed the transcripts of the meeting, he found that the intellectual mix generated a distinct type of interaction in which the scientists were forced to rely on metaphors and analogies to express themselves. (That’s because, unlike the E. coli group, the second lab lacked a specialized language that everyone could understand.) These abstractions proved essential for problem-solving, as they encouraged the scientists to reconsider their assumptions. Having to explain the problem to someone else forced them to think, if only for a moment, like an intellectual on the margins, filled with self-skepticism.

Is Knowledge a Commodity?

When someone reads, listens, thinks, introspects, experiments, observes, tries various alternatives, watches underlying patterns in the long run, learns something the hard way and finally distills the entire experience into a few principles or a neat framework and shares it with the world, how long does it take the world to understand the merit in these principles or the framework? Actually, in the first place, what exactly does it take the world to understand it? How does it work? Is it a journey in the reverse direction for the world (learner)? Are such learnings looked at, more often than not, with complacency? Does the learner see the merit, sweat and insight the way it ought to be or blindly apply it depending on the trust he has in the source it originates from?

Aha, Eureka, Eurekaha

Nice discussion going on out here. Dive in if you are curious about Aha moments or Aa..ha! moments as I might refer to them :-)

Social Media...Nectar or Poison?

Life is such an irony at times! In other words, it is a totally paradoxical world whichever way you look at it.

Social Media and Networking was originally meant to deliver us from ignorance. We were and are being advised to stay in touch, keep running, reading, and having conversations so we will be able to make sense of this complex world. And many of us oblige obediently. Because we want to be in the know. We want to run along with the world and not be left behind. We email, we blog, we tweet, we facebook, we digg and we what not. Some of us have the stamina and bandwidth to manage more than some others....but, eventually, we are all exhausted by the constant bombardment. It becomes so tiring that we don't see/process something that's happening right under our noses. After all, how on earth can we practically keep up with billions of people and events that happen every time we blink? I've, more than once, pondered over the dilemma of having to catch up with too many things and the inability to focus on and get deeper into one of the many things that come to us from the ever-growing virtual world. It is, all in all, a chaotic and fragile web of distractions that we are stuck to or rather dangle from.

So, when @VMaryAbraham tweeted a link to this article, I was amused. [I saw the article only because I happened to be catching up with tweets. Heh.]

Here comes more of the irony I referred to at the start of this post. I saw the tweet, read the article (for once I did not skim through but actually read the whole thing steadily), re-tweeted it to my circle on Twitter, bookmarked it on Delicious, posted it to my colleagues on our own internal equivalent of Twitter, posted it on the Indian KM Community website for feedback from other KMers and then headed over here to talk about it! Mother of all ironies, don't you think? [Could even be a mild form of schizophrenia ;-)]. And before I forget to mention, this was not a continuous process. I obviously got distracted by a dozen mails and plenty of tweets. [Mirthless laugh!]

Getting back to the article, the author starts off with the question, "What are the consequences of exposure to a constant, high-volume stream of media and information?" and goes on to answer it herself. She says - and I agree because it's quite logical - it reduces your attention span, makes you stupid, lazy, turn into a jerk, an annoying companion and gullible. She fortunately finishes the post with some suggestions on how to avoid the impact that addiction to SM tools could potentially have on us.

In the article Nicholas Carr is quoted as saying "Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski." I couldn't have put it better.

And I must now make the deadliest of confessions. I actually liked the pictures in the article and was chuckling at them (the kitten, the shiny things etc). They served their purpose and distracted me enough to be able to get back to reading the article as soon as I'd seen them. Speaking of which, it's high time I get your attention back on this post. Take a look at this pic and take a deep breath. Nice pic, right?

Calvin and Hobbes

But I seriously think that it is only the IT world that is so distracted and interrupted by social media tools. People in most other professions (especially the ones that don't involve staring at computer monitors and require the mobile phones to be switched off) are away from this chaotic web when they're at work. Makes me want to go away from IT and get into painting or something.

Which reminds me. Before I read the article under question, I actually ended up deleting a lot of pending RSS feeds that I was unable to catch up with for the past one month or so. I should, I suspect, feel relieved about having done that.

If you remember, I said I'd posted this article on the Indian KM community website. Just reaped the benefits of doing that. Even as I was busy writing this piece, I got to read another very useful article that @dineshtantri shared on the thread. This post's author puts it well too - "The speed with which information hurtles towards us is unavoidable (and it's getting worse). But trying to catch it all is counterproductive. The faster the waves come, the more deliberately we need to navigate. Otherwise we'll get tossed around like so many particles of sand, scattered to oblivion. Never before has it been so important to be grounded and intentional and to know what's important." Of course, there are times when we don't know whether something is important or not until we follow it through and, more confusingly, somethings turn out to be important only when we follow it through! It's a complicated world.

PS: I just traced this post (that is, MY POST) back to its beginning and re-read it and have this strange feeling that it is not a continuous post but a loose collection of thoughts from different parts of the brain. Does that reflect something? Eeeks. Scary. Focus. Meditate.

Freedom and Knowledge - What's the Equation?

Freedom is the only means to knowledge. Complete freedom to face the results/consequences of our actions. Adapted from here

This thought fascinates me. A lot of us love to blame others for what we go through (the unappreciated experiences). Is it because we are not 'given' that freedom or is it because we don't 'take' it? Tell me...

KM Quotes from NASA

KM Quotes from here - http://km.nasa.gov/whatis/KM_Quotes.html

"A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but a little want of knowledge is also a dangerous thing." Samuel Butler

"Be curious always! For knowledge will not acquire you; you must acquire it." Anonymous

"Discussion is an exchange of knowledge; an argument an exchange of ignorance." Robert Quillen

"I love talking about nothing. It is the only thing I know anything about." Oscar Wilde

"Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers." Alfred, Lord Tennyson

"Knowledge is a process of piling up facts; wisdom lies in their simplification." Martin H. Fischer

"Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness" George Washington

"Knowledge is only potential power." Napoleon Hill

"Not to know is bad, not to wish to know is worse." Proverb

"Perplexity is the beginning of knowledge." Kahlil Gibran

"Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance." Confucius

"The art and science of asking questions is the source of all knowledge." Thomas Berger

"The more extensive a man's knowledge of what has been done, the greater will be his power of knowing what to do." Benjamin Disraeli

"There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating; people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing." Oscar Wilde

"There is a great difference between knowing and understanding: you can know a lot about something and not really understand it." Charles F. Kettering

"There is no knowledge that is not power." Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Those that know, do. Those that understand, teach." Aristotle

"Those who have knowledge, don't predict. Those who predict, don't have knowledge." Lao Tzu

"To know and not to do is not to know." Proverb

"To know that we know what we know, and that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge." Henry David Thoreau

“A loving heart is the beginning of all knowledge.” Thomas Carlyle

“Abstract knowledge is always useful, sooner or later.” Robert A. Heinlein

“Alchemists turned into chemists when they stopped keeping secrets.” Eric Raymond

“All knowledge is connected to all other knowledge. The fun is in making the connections.” Arthur Aufderheide

“All knowledge is worth having.” Jacqueline Carey

“All men by nature desire to know.” Aristotle

“An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.” Benjamin Franklin

“As much as possible, to boost mankind's collective capability for coping with complex, urgent problems.” Douglas C. Engelbart

“Better is the enemy of ‘good enough.’” John Berg

“Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance.” George Bernard Shaw

“Collaboration equals innovation.” Michael Dell

“He who tells all that he knows, tells more than he knows.” George Harrison

“I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.” Albert Einstein

“I collaborate therefore I know.” KM World Magazine

“I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered at the White House - with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.” John F. Kennedy

“If a little knowledge is dangerous, where is a man who has so much as to be out of danger?” Thomas Henry Huxley

“If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance that we can solve them.” Isaac Asimov

“If knowledge is power and power corrupts, doesn't knowledge corrupt?”

“If knowledge is power, and power corrupts, and corruption is crime, and crime doesn’t pay... Does knowledge, in the end, leave you broke?”

“If things are not interesting in themselves, how can any amount of knowledge about them be?” George MacDonald

“If you don't like that idea, I've got plenty of others!” R. Buckminster Fuller

“Ignorance hates knowledge.” Death Star

“Ignorance is the curse of God; knowledge is the wing wherewith we fly to heaven.” William Shakespeare

“I'm looking forward to a world where the whole concept of ‘e-mail’ – a special mode of operation where everything is viewed based on discrete transactions – is replaced by a much more powerful way of viewing and sharing connected information in context.” Harlan Hugh

“Imagination is more important than knowledge, for knowledge is limited while imagination embraces the entire world.” Albert Einstein

“In a knowledge-driven economy, talk is real work.” Thomas H. Davenport and Laurence Prusak

“Information is not knowledge.” Albert Einstein

“Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful.” Samuel Johnson

“It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge.” Albert Einstein

“It isn’t what you know that counts; it’s what you think of in time.” Benjamin Franklin

“It’s the people, stupid.” Alan Kay

“Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do.” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“Knowledge and human power are synonymous.” Sir Francis Bacon

“Knowledge is experience; everything else is information.” Albert Einstein

“Knowledge is free at the library. Just bring your own container.”

“Knowledge is knowing that we cannot know.” Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Knowledge is like money: to be of value it must circulate, and in circulating it can increase in quantity and, hopefully, in value.” Louis L’Amour

“Knowledge is more than equivalent to force.” Samuel Johnson

“Knowledge is of two kinds: we know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it.” Samuel Johnson

“Knowledge is power, knowledge is safety, knowledge is happiness.” Thomas Jefferson

“Knowledge is power.” Sir Francis Bacon

“Knowledge of what is does not open the door directly to what should be.” Albert Einstein

“Knowledge shared is knowledge squared.” Microsoft

“Knowledge will forever govern ignorance” James Madison

“Knowledge, having irritated and stimulated our appetite for power, will lead us inexorably to our ruin.” Emile M. Cioran

“Knowledge, in truth, is the grate sun in the firmament. Life and power are scattered with all its beams.” Daniel Webster

“One's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.” Oliver Wendell Holmes

“People are difficult to govern because they have too much knowledge.” Lao-tzu

“Self-knowledge comes from knowing other men.” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“Sensory raw material, the only source of our knowledge … may lead us to belief and expectation but not [necessarily] to knowledge.” Albert Einstein

“The doorstep to the temple of wisdom is a knowledge of our own ignorance.” Benjamin Franklin

“The goal of education is the advancement of knowledge and the dissemination of truth.” John F. Kennedy

“The great end of knowledge is not knowledge, but action.” Thomas Henry Huxley

“The greater our knowledge increases the more our ignorance unfolds.” John F. Kennedy

“The only reason [groupware is] worth the effort at all is that it's inevitable.” Susanna Opper & Henry Fersko-Weiss

“The only source of knowledge is experience.” Albert Einstein

“The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.” Albert Einstein

“There comes a time when the mind takes a higher plane of knowledge but can never prove how it got there.” Albert Einstein

“To be conscious that you are ignorant is a great step to knowledge.” Sir Benjamin Disraeli

“Trust is the bandwidth of human communications.” Karl Erik Sveiby

“We know accurately only when we know little; with knowledge doubt increases.” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“We must know; we will know.” Hilbert

“What you know you know. What you don’t know, you don’t know. This is knowledge.” Confucius

“Where knowledge ends, religion begins.” Benjamin Disraeli

Individual Learning to Organizational Learning

Someone asked a question that is probably very key to the existence of Knowledge Management. “How do we convert individual learning into organizational learning?”. It could surely have been the root cause why KM was conceived and is now being pursued seriously within organizations. KM is not only about individual learning and competency development but also about converting it into something that the entire organization understands and can act upon. It exists on the premise that each of us learn different things and have our own unique strengths. When many of us come together to accomplish a common goal, we can only do things a lot more effectively and efficiently due to the pooling of knowledge, skills and expertise [provided we genuinely want to contribute and avoid herd mentality and are open to learning from others]. But how easy is it to convert individual learning into organizational learning? It, admittedly, is a very complicated affair. And whatever can be achieved can anyway be done so only after years of effort and passion.

A very quick response to that question would be:

• Mentoring and coaching
• Shadowing (You let the knowledge-seeker shadow the 'expert' and watch and observe what he/she does rather than just restrict it to focused conversations and training sessions)
• Communities focused on collective thinking and learning
• Tools and utilities that you find on the Internet these days - allowing you to share your bookmarks, videos, articles, notes, ideas, book-reading habits, friends and so on. [Which basically means you begin to understand how individuals learn, from where they get their material, who the connect with and learn from, how they think etc]

Takes me back to my previous post on Calvin and Hobbes wherein Calvin wants to learn to be a Tiger and Hobbes tells him it is instinct and cannot be taught. Calvin’s retort is to look up the topic of Tigers in the Encyclopedia. The result of that exercise is anybody’s guess. So, there’s clearly a limit to what one can do to convert individual learning into organizational learning….

No Ideas or Too Many Ideas?

I am going through a strange phase right now. I seem to have tons of thoughts and ideas on what to post about on this blog but I don’t seem to be able to sit down and convert them into full-fledged and satisfactory posts. Not writer’s block. Some other block. Don’t know what. End result. I have a whole bunch of small bits and pieces of papers and post-it-notes lying around in my room and at office…with topics and thoughts I need to ponder over. The brain, meanwhile, stoutly refuses to put up with all the stress. Says it can’t have too many unfinished ideas floating around. Let me see what I can do about that. Just praying that the brain lasts till such time I figure out what thoughts to discard, what to keep and convert into something sensible and so on. Like it so often happens, when you have too many things to talk about, you are so confused that you give up and go back to a repetitive thing that you are most comfortable with, at the risk of appearing like a person who can speak of nothing else. So, here come the one and only awesome 6-year-old boy and stuffed Tiger pair, Calvin and Hobbes, again!

Check out the third box. Sounds like a KM paradox, don’t you think? How can Calvin become a Tiger is the question. Hobbes rightly says that’s instinct and can’t be taught. Calvin says he’ll look up the Encyclopedia (replace that with Wikipedia or what-not). So, will that solve Calvin’s problem? It will make him more knowledgeable about Tigers but it will not make him a Tiger! What? Calvin will always be Calvin and Hobbes will always be Hobbes. Like I said, I just have too many thoughts running around in my head right now. So, I don’t think I have what it takes to calm down and drill into this thing till I see some light at the end of the tunnel. But it’s intriguing and thought-provoking and calls out for some intuitive thinking or perhaps just plain analytical thinking. Good enough for KMers to lose their sleep over it, actually. Think about a parallel in your organization and you’ll know what I mean. Maybe, I’ll manage to clear the mist in my brain and come back to expand on this theme. If you happen to have any bright ideas, be my guest!

Pic Source: gocomics.com

Discovering KM....The Journey matters more than the Destination!

I think I love being questioned (by someone who is eager to learn or someone who seeks a sincere debate in order to get to the truth or someone who is serious about understanding other perspectives). More often than not, a good question and the way in which it is posed awakens my mind and urges me to seek the answer(s) within....much more sincerely than otherwise. It becomes an obligation of sorts.

So, this morning, I found a fundamental question staring me in the face and it was, luckily, one of those occasions when my mind responded and the answer (or is it 'my' answer?) just flowed. I'd love to know what other KMers who happen to read this think....!

Question on the KM-India Community:

Why we still "discovering" the answer for what is KM and what it can do?

1. Why we could not get the grip on KM to institutionalize KM in the organization - that makes it difficult (and unnecessary) to pull the plug on KM.

2. Why it is difficult to convince the top [management] even today?

3. Why we are still fighting what is knowledge and what is not?

Like I mentioned, my answer just flowed...which probably means it was simply a knee-jerk 'reaction'. So, I don't think I've answered the question word-to-word. There is still a lot left unanswered. I'll come back to this post and add anything else that may be relevant once the discussion on the community progresses and other perspectives begin to trickle in.

Here was my knee-jerk reaction to the question(s):

I may be wrong (on second thoughts, I don't think I am wrong :-D)...but something tells me that this is the case in every field. Things keep evolving. New people bring new ideas...thoughts and perceptions change...debates ensue. Product vendors fight their own battle and introduce their own ideas. Academics try and influence people with their own approaches and theories. The more abstract the field the more such upheavals and changes. It probably takes a decade or so for people to arrive at a common understanding and have the 'basics' in place. But no subject worth its salt will remain unchanged for long...new concepts, theories, technologies, and objectives will obviously force us to re-examine our understanding of what is appropriate (as opposed to right and wrong).

Having said that, I am inclined to believe that KM has now reached a stage wherein there is a significantly 'common' understanding of what it is all about....but how we articulate it may differ and what dimension of it we focus on may depend on the context and situation we are in.

PS: I have no clue what the trend is in terms of the time that subjects take to evolve into a stage where the foundation is extremely strong....maybe it does not really take as long as a decade for subjects that aren't so abstract?!

Can Knowledge be a Disadvantage?

Consider these scrambled thoughts:

A contestant in a musical show sings a song with a lot of passion in front of two experts who are listening to him with the intention of judging him. One of the judges is aware that the singer is not formally trained in the genre that forms the theme for that particular round but is also familiar with the overall strengths and the general potential of the singer. The second judge, meanwhile, knows absolutely nothing about the singer except what the latter exhibits in the performance under question.

The passion with which the singer performs is something that the average listener is able to relate to and appreciate. But how do you think the judges will respond? Would the judge who has knowledge of the singer's background be subconsciously biased against his performance? Would this judge subconsciously focus on the technical drawbacks of the performance rather than its 'total soul'? Subsequently, would focusing on the technical gaps alone result in the judge calling it just a 'good' performance while the other judge is likely to label it as an 'awesome' performance? What impact does such knowledge have on decision making? Is it good or bad?

Is this another variant of the 'curse of knowledge' popularized by Chip and Dan Heath?' Taking a tangential leap from there...is this one of the reasons why spiritual leaders advice us to 'just be' rather than think, analyze or dissect what we observe? Does worldly knowledge prevent us from just being? Would a person with a good balance of worldly and spiritual knowledge know both - to just be and to become?

Serendiptiy on a Social Media Leash

I wrote this post
Re-visited the Wikipedia page on Swami V, on an impulse
Re-discovered the Vivekananda Study Circle @ IIT Madras and their E-group
Realized that there are students who are deriving inspiration from Swami, then read some more quotes...
Which in turn inspired me to do a Twitter Search on Swami
...Discovered a random Tweet that linked to a high-profile trust with a wonderful vision for the future...like the one I was dreaming of when I wrote the post!

The horse has been led to the water (on a Social Media leash)....is it thirsty enough to stop and drink rather than focus on running its usual race and be left high but dry (Pun intended. No, I don't mean high and dry)?