Creative tension at KM Asia 06

The key schools of thought were on show at KM Asia. Complete with the schoolyard bully, the new kid on the block and the wise old sage teacher.

A few topics raged for debate during the conference: Do I need a senior sponsor to succeed or should I focus on people in the field? Should I try to place an economic value of knowledge in the organisation?

By the way there was no debate about should I connect or collect – there was consensus that knowledge collection has failed. In it’s place, “narrative” is the new capture: create an ecosystem of blogs and wikis, argues Dave Snowdon, and people will collaborate because it is in our DNA.

David Hallilwell from DLA Piper asked "is Dave Snowdon actually a mad Welshman". He confessed to preferring the Tom Stewart school, which considers the value of intangible knowledge assets.

Keynote Professor Leif Edvinsson tells us about a number of opportunities and challenges opening up in the future: how do you create a sustainable knowledge city? The city of Ragusa thrived for hundreds of years without an army, by ensuring they had the best intelligence of their time. What could we learn from them?

Dr. Alex Bennet implemented possibly the largest KM program ever for the US navy. Navy’s decision to move from command and control to one with empowered decision making in the field required huge improvements in KM. Faced with thousands of stakeholders - each with a legitimate stake in resisting the transformation of the Navy – Dr. Bennet’s team succeeded in achieving significant change. They achieved this through strong commitment from the top and an innovative approach, ensuring that the field decision makers defined what knowledge was critical to them to support decision making.

Niall Sinclair believes that “Stealth KM” is the best way to succeed. “Stay below the radar” he says. “NO!” responds Jerry Ash, I have seen people lose their jobs trying to run KM this way.

Thomas A. Stewart comes with enormous credibility, being the editor of Harvard Business Review. He reminds us that all businesses are knowledge businesses – the salient challenge is to understand how we should harness our knowledge to achieved sustainable competitive differentiation.

Colin Henson from Arup gave us a great practical perspective on how people and engagement-focussed collaboration can ensure that lessons learned in one place can make a real difference elsewhere. One example was an engineer in the UK with excess vibration in a bridge there tapped into specialised skills from around the world to solve the problem. And don’t forget that if engineers don’t have a problem they will focus on creating one for themselves to solve.

Jerry Ash told us about how in his career he has learned from the masters of KM methods that have been found to achieve great outcomes for the business. HP's own Stan Garfield featured in the talk for his achievements in implementing what made sense for the business at the time, which was knowledge capture and reuse. Given the shift in HP to connect not collect it could be time for an update to his presentation.