It’s great when you tell people that you have expertise in knowledge management – it sounds impressive. But the reality is that everyone is an expert in knowledge management. It’s a matter of realising this, and creating conscious thought processes around knowledge management that make it sustainable. Our key focus today is on capturing success stories and lessons learned that are a critical part of knowledge management.
Making knowledge management part of how we work is part of learning. Learning is an iterative process – we learn best when we mess up. We often forget our own best success stories and how we got there. Here are some key elements on making knowledge management part of how we work:
- Consider how knowledge forms part of your everyday work. Everyone has and/or works with knowledge. How do you come about knowledge in your work? Where does your knowledge come from? How do you capture this?
- What are your and/or your organisation’s best success stories? What made them successful? How? What were the enablers? Barriers? Can you seek to capture these success stories for replication?
- What are the ones that didn’t work out well, but many lessons were learned? What made them less successful? What did work well, didn’t work well? What can be learned from this, and how can this be avoided in the future?
- How is knowledge captured in your work and/or organisation? Do you have review processes in place? What do you do with this information once it is captured? How often and when do you re-visit it?
- How do you make capturing and learning from knowledge of success stories and lessons learned an iterative part of you, your team, and your organisation’s learning processes? How do you build people, processes, tools and methods to keep this alive?
As the world speeds up and more processes are performed by machines, the one value humans continue to bring to the world is knowledge. We learn from what we do (or sometimes we don’t learn) and its important to develop knowledge management to help us build more success in the future and avoid repeating mistakes.
Asking reflective questions is important; we need to consider how knowledge forms part of our everyday work. We must know our organisation’s best success stories, what were the ones that didn’t work out well, but lessons were learned; how knowledge is captured in our organisation; and how to create sustainability for knowledge management for the future.
