Here's another quote from the Peter Senge video I mentioned yesterday. He implied that - never mind arguing about the definition of Knowledge, we can't even agree on the definition of Management. He proposed this definition
'Being a manager means taking accountability for the work of others'
Now, this is a definition of a manager, rather than a definition of management, and we could extend it to say
Management is a system of assigning accountabilities, and ensuring people deliver against these.
I wonder what would result if we took that idea, and applied it to Knowledge Management? I was interested to try this, because for me, accountability is key to management, and accountability is seldom a concept people apply to knowledge*
Perhaps if we follow this train of thought, we could conclude
Knowledge Management is a system of assigning accountabilities for Knowledge, and ensuring people deliver against these.
That's a very interesting definition, and I think it could take us to some powerful conclusions, which I would like to develop further in another blog post, when I have clarified my thinking a bit more.
* However I think they should! One of the recent breakthroughs we made at BP was assigning clear accoutabilities within KM. Read more in our Dec 07 Newsletter
No comments:
Post a Comment