Knowledge Management is an oxymoron – nobody can really manage an asset which resides in the heads of employees, and is shared primarily through conversation.
What you can do, though, is: to manage the environment in which knowledge can be created, discovered, captured, shared, distilled, validated, transferred, adopted, adapted and applied. To create business value.
For creating an environment within which knowledge rapidly flourishes we need:
The right conditions. A common reliable infrastructure and an organization that is willing to be entrepreneurial.
The right means. A common model, tools and processes for learning.
The right actions. Where people instinctively seek, share and use knowledge.
The right leadership. Where learning and sharing is expected and role-modeled.
The methodology provides a number of tools, interventions and facilitation techniques to help organizations to learn before, during and after activities.
The benefits from these learning interventions can be multiplied if they are shared more widely as good practices – either through people-networks (communities), or through the capture and codification into regularly updated “knowledge products”.
Origin of the Knowledge Management method by Collison and Parcell. History
Originally derived by the knowledge management team of BP in 1998 from good practices in the US Army and other learning organizations, the methodology was published in 2001 in the book “Learning to Fly, lessons from one of the world’s leading knowledge companies”, Collison & Parcell. Once published, the methodology produced a community of practice – now in excess of 700 people from a wide variety of public and private sector organizations. In 2005 a new version of “Learning to Fly” was published to demonstrate the