Wednesday 27 July 2011


Experience Management continued


In this blog post, I talked about Experience Management, and how this could be aligned with content management to form part of knowledge management.

I published a simple flowchart to illustrate this, and received a few comments from people suggesting that the flowchart could usefully be extended.

Here's the extended version. I have included the elements outlined in red, which represent the feedback loops. It is these feedback loops that deliver the continuous performance improvement that KM seeks to drive.

  • Firstly, action leads to performance. Better knowledge results in better decisions, better actions and better performance.
  • Secondly, reflection and analysis of that performance is needed, before an organisation, a team or an individual can crystallise their experience from that performance. I am sure you are aware of the distinction between the person with 20 years experience, and the person with one year's experience repeated 20 times. The difference is that the former reflects, analyses and learns, while the latter repeats their mistakes.
  • The loop from performance, through reflection and analysis, identification of experience, improved knowledge, better decisions etc is the feedback loop that drives continuous improvement.
  • Allied to this, of course, is the collection of performance data. Without the data collection, there would be no record of performance improvement, and no knowledge of which experience delivers the greatest value.
  • Then I have put in a short arrow from Experience to Information, representing the codification step that sometimes takes place. Not all experience needs to be, nor can be, codified into information, but some of it can.
Although this flow chart lacks the simplicity of the previous version, it is useful to show the feedback loops, because those are the engines that drive performance through learning from experience, and which accelerate the learning curve.

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