Friday 22 April 2011


It's wrong to be right


wrong
Being effective in knowledge management requires a degree of humility.

The knowledge management culture change described here, needs everyone to be open to the knowledge of others, and to be open to the possibility (maybe even the probability) that someone else probably knows more about any given topic than you do. Certainly when you look at the totality of knowledge in a community of practice, that's almost certainly bound to be greater than the knowledge of any given individual.

So the expert needs to let go of "always being right".

The expert needs to realise that although they know a lot, they don't know everything. They need always to be open to learning more. If they think they are always be right, then they are wrong!

The role of the expert in KM is not to know everything, ant not to be always right, but to be able to access and assimilate new knowledge as quickly as possible, and to be able to reliably assess the impact of new knowledge. They need to know all the context, and to be able to fit new knowledge into it.

The expert needs to know that they are not always right - that their knowledge is provisional and partial - but they need to have access to the best provisional knowledge, and to make this available to others.

The humble, learning expert is a massive asset in KM.

1 comment:

Luis Suarez said...

Hi Nick! Welcome back! Hope you enjoyed the vacation and everything! What a great blog post! I thoroughly enjoyed and I am surely glad you have shared across, since it would be a good entry point for those considered "experts" on realising that, just like all of us, they, too, have got limitations and they may not always be right.

In fact, they should embrace and rejoice about being wrong, too! Check out this blog post I put together yesterday which touches based on a recent TED Talk by Kathryn Schulz, where she talks about the topic of "On Being Wrong". Very inspiring and thought-provoking altogether! :)

18 minutes worth while watching through...

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