Building and Using Knowledge

Here is an interesting post by Dave Snowden at Cognitive Edge postulating his Seven Rules of Knowledge Management. In particular I am drawn to Snowden's Rule No. 7--

We always know more than we can say, and we will always say more than we can write down.

This is such a profound truism. The process of moving from mind to speech to written word involves moving through different media. And is in physical science this change in medium can result in signal decay. Unfortunately, this is a truism that should not exist, because there are writing tools designed to help capture knowledge and to help reduce the loss of knowledge.

The other rule I find intriguing is Rule No. 4--

Everything is fragmented.

Snowden postulates that humans are wired to deal with fragmented information in an unstructured environment and this is why we have problems working within the confines of highly structured documents. An interesting theory. I am trying to find more research on this topic. If true, then when I see my clients struggle with their document templates or engage in reviews best described as chaos I can just sit back, sigh, and say: "well they cannot help it, they are just wired that way."

All kidding aside, Snowden observations are worth keeping in mind whenever you want to plan a large collaborative project or map out work processes, especially documentation processes.


Originally published on our Knowledge Management blog