I am just back from KM World and was amazed that so many of the presentations were about how some organization has implemented SharePoint. SharePoint has become so ubiquitous that, at KM World, Knowledge Management seems to have become equated with implementing SharePoint repositories and communities!
I want to push back a little on that. Learning in an organization happens when teams or workgroups take the time to think together about what is occurring within their purview and then to consider what needs to be changed or strengthened – when they have human-to-human conversations aimed at improving their own work. Only after they have reflected together and figured out what they need to do next, is it useful to seek out the ideas of others. A document in a SharePoint repository or a question/response on a community forum can certainly spur the imaginations of team members about what might be possible. But help is most useful when a team has identified a problem. Without the first step of reflecting on what is needed, documents are just “nice to know.” A document in a repository is not knowledge any more than a book on a shelf is knowledge. Knowledge is created and resides in the minds of human beings.
Even when a document in a repository is a good match for a team’s need, a second kind of human-to-human conversation is required for learning to take place. A team does not learn from reading a document about what some other team has done. The successes of others have to be translated to fit the tasks and culture of the receiver’s environment. Copy and replace never works! When the receivers of new ideas function within a context that is different from the one the document was written about, translation is required.
Although the receiving team can do some translation on its own, they lack the knowledge of the reasoning behind the actions of the other team, for example, what they tried that did not work, what they thought about but did not execute on and why. There is so much more a team knows than they can put in a written in a document or an online response to a question. (We know more than we can write!) Translation is most effective when it is a conversation between those that wrote the document and those that want to use that knowledge. Through conversation the receiving team can learn what conditions made the other's success possible, for example, the level of team experience, size of the team, management support, time frame, and culture. Human-to-human dialogue is invaluable in figuring out how to modify what the originating team did so that it could work in a different environment. Joint translation is a learning process that significantly benefits the receiving team. But, as often, it is also learning for the originating team because in explaining what they did, they come to a more complete understanding of their own work.
At the next KM World, it would be great to hear presentations on how teams figured out what they learned from a project and how they thought through what changes they needed to make on the next project, based on that learning; how often they reflected on what they were learning and who they involved in those discussions; in what ways those reflections changed the way that they worked. It would be great if KMer’s focused on innovations in learning from experience, rather than just getting reports into SharePoint. It would be great to find out how a team talked through what they hope to learn on the next project, as well as the outcome they wanted to achieve. That way they could continually improve their work processes and get better at what they were doing. It seems like we have become so focused on “sharing” that we have forgotten that KM is primarily about learning. SharePoint Can’t Learn, only humans can.