Category: Decision making

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ABIs Are Your Tools. They’re Not About Creating Art

(This post was originally shared on my LinkedIn Profile.)

For years (I’ve been working on this idea for 15+ years), when I mention arts-based interventions in KM conversations, I watch the same response play out. Eyes light up. Then — a gentle retreat. “That sounds lovely,” they say, “but we’re not really an arty organisation,” or “I work with a bunch of lawyers/engineers/accountants, they will never do this stuff”.

I understand the hesitation. We’ve been conditioned to think of arts-based work as something separate from serious business — creative indulgence rather than strategic leverage. But that’s not what ABIs are.

ABIs are tools. Specifically, they’re tools for doing the thing KM practitioners struggle with most: getting people to think.

In a world drowning in information and increasingly suspicious of what we’re told, our core challenge isn’t capturing knowledge, storing it better, or finding it when it’s needed. It’s reactivating the curiosity, critical thinking, and continuous learning that so many organisations have accidentally designed out of their cultures.

Here’s the paradox: you can’t mandate creativity. You can’t drive critical thinking with a policy. And you certainly can’t build psychological safety — the actual foundation of knowledge sharing — through process and conversation. These things live in the human layer, and they respond to something more subtle than corporate edicts.

That’s where creativity becomes a tool rather than a luxury.

When you ask someone to paint their response to “What does trust look like in our team?” you’ve created a constraint that forces novel thinking. They can’t fall back on corporate-speak. They can’t hide behind jargon. The unfamiliar medium — the act of making something — bypasses the rational filters and surfaces what people actually think and feel.

You’re not running an art class. You’re creating conditions for knowing to emerge.

ABIs work because they:

  • Disrupt habitual thinking. Familiar formats produce familiar responses. A different medium invites different pathways.
  • Create psychological safety through ambiguity. There’s no “correct” answer to a painting or a collage. That removes the performance anxiety that stifles honesty.
  • Make the tacit visible. The patterns in how someone uses colour, composition, or materials often reveal assumptions and thinking they hadn’t consciously articulated.
  • Invite full-system engagement. The hand, the eye, and the brain working together create a different quality of attention than sitting in a meeting watching slides.
  • Generate genuine conversation. When artefacts are at the centre — not abstractions — dialogue becomes richer, more grounded, and more memorable.

I’m not asking you to turn your people into artists. I’m asking you to consider: what if the tool you’re looking for to unlock knowing isn’t another platform, another framework, or another consultant-led workshop? What if it’s permission to engage your people’s creativity as a capacity rather than a personality trait?

Because here’s what I’ve learned: people don’t lose their creativity in organisations. They’re just trained not to use it where it matters most.

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The Automation Paradox: Why AI Makes Human Capacity More Valuable (Not Less)

(This post was originally shared on my LinkedIn Profile.)

We’re told AI will handle routine work, freeing humans for creativity and critical thinking. Sounds great. So why do leaders I speak with say their organisations feel less creative, not more? (Some have said they feel like AI is making them dumb.)

The problem isn’t AI. It’s that we’ve been systematically dismantling the conditions humans need to think, create, and judge well—and we did it before AI arrived.

The Post-mortem of Lost Capacity

Over the last 15+ years, organisations have optimised for efficiency: fewer meetings (no, we added more), faster decision-making (no, we added layers of approval), knowledge capture (no, we built systems nobody uses). The net result? Cognitive exhaustion. People are too busy processing information to actually think with it.

Add AI to this picture, and something shifts. Organisations realise they can automate tasks, but they can’t automate the parts of work that matter: understanding what problem actually needs solving, sensing when the data is misleading you, creating something genuinely new, making judgements that hold human values.

Suddenly, the capacity for critical thinking, intuition, and creativity isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s everything.

But here’s the trap: you can’t generate that capacity on demand. It requires conditions. Uninterrupted thinking time. Psychological safety to challenge ideas. Exposure to perspectives that collide with your own. Reflection. Sense and meaning-making.

Most organisations have actively eliminated these conditions in the name of efficiency.

Where Knowledge Management Has Failed (And Why It Can Recover)

Traditional KM treated knowledge like widgets: capture it, store it, retrieve it. The assumption was that better information architecture = better decisions. It didn’t account for the human dimension.

We lost the messy, generative stuff: the conversations where ideas collide, the storytelling that embeds wisdom, the reflection that turns experience into judgement. We built systems, not cultures.

So, when AI arrived, organisations had already stripped away the human conditions for thinking. The software wasn’t the problem. The culture was.

Radical KM: People-First, Not Technology-First

This is where the work shifts. If human capacity for creation, critical thinking, and judgement is the competitive advantage in an AI world, then KM isn’t about technology adoption. It’s about designing the conditions that allow humans to do what humans do best.

That means:

  1. Making space for thinking. Not as something to aspire to, something that is structurally embedded in the systems. Protected time. Simplified information. Reduction of noise.
  2. Reactivating curiosity through exposure. Cross-sector conversations. Diverse perspectives. Learning that isn’t bounded by function. This is where intuition develops—through pattern recognition across domains.
  3. Creating safety for dissent and iteration. Humans refine judgement through being challenged. Organisations that treat disagreement as a threat lose their smartest people.
  4. Embodying knowledge differently. Not everything knowable fits in a database. Wisdom about how to navigate ambiguity, where to apply intuition, when the data is lying to you—these are often learned through story, conversation, and shared sense-making.

Using arts-based approaches to do all of this.

I know that last line raises eyebrows. But arts-based interventions—guided visualisations, drawing, painting, storytelling, reflection practices—aren’t luxuries. They work because they interrupt the efficiency mindset, create psychological safety, and make knowledge shareable in ways that pure information architecture can’t reach.

A facilitated drawing exercise doesn’t seem like “knowledge work.” But it’s creating the conditions where people actually think together instead of just exchanging information.

The Choice

You can treat AI as a threat to human work, and race to automate more. Or you can treat it as a signal: the human work matters now more than ever. Which means investing in the conditions that allow humans to create, think critically, and exercise sound judgement.

That investment starts with culture, not code. With people, not platforms. With how you design the rhythm and psychology of work itself.

Organisations that get this right won’t lose to AI. They’ll use it to do what it does—handle volume, pattern-match, optimise routine—while reclaiming the uniquely human work their people are actually capable of.

The question for your leadership team: Are the conditions in your organisation supporting human capacity, or eroding it?

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Stop Talking About Knowledge Management. Start Showing Its Impact

(This post was originally shared on my LinkedIn Profile.)

Your organisation doesn’t have a knowledge management problem. It has a credibility problem.

You can launch the most elegant KM programme, design the cleverest framework, or build the sleekest knowledge platform. But if nobody sees how it changes the way work actually gets done, they won’t care. And why should they?

The organisations that genuinely embed knowledge management aren’t the ones with the loudest programmes. They’re the ones where people notice that knowledge moves, decisions get made faster, and reinvention stops happening.

Here’s how that actually occurs in practice.

1. Anchor to outcomes, not terminology

Stop leading with “knowledge management.” Lead with the outcome your organisation desperately needs: faster decision-making, reduced reinvention, onboarding that doesn’t take six months, compliance that’s actually defensible, or customer responsiveness that beats your competitors.

The frameworks work behind the outcomes. Make them invisible. When a senior leader notices that new hires are productive in weeks instead than months, or that a decision gets made because the right knowledge actually arrived, they start valuing what made it possible. They just don’t call it “KM.”

2. Build credibility through small, visible wins

Don’t launch a programme across the enterprise. Pick one team—preferably one where knowledge clearly gets lost or repeated—and work with them quietly.

Document what changes: time saved, mistakes avoided, ideas that moved between people. Then let their story travel.

Peer testimony is infinitely more powerful than a pitch from the programme office. People trust other practitioners. They’re suspicious of consultants.

3. Make trust the visible difference

Here’s what I’ve observed: organisations that fail at KM typically have a trust problem they don’t know they have. Information gets hoarded. Knowledge is buried behind permission structures. Sharing is punished or seen as losing advantage.

You can’t recognise knowledge management in that environment because the conditions for knowledge to actually travel don’t exist.

The organisations I’ve seen shift? They model something different. Generosity. Honesty. The willingness to say “I don’t know” without it costing you. Inquiry before judgment. These aren’t soft skills. They’re the infrastructure that makes knowledge move.

And if you’re driving KM, you have to model them first.

4. Celebrate the human story, not the system

People don’t care about your knowledge base. They care that they’re not reinventing the wheel at 3 p.m. on a Friday, or that someone remembered a client context that completely changed the conversation.

Recognition happens when you celebrate the person who shared as much as the knowledge that was shared. When you tell the story of how an idea travelled across teams and landed somewhere unexpected. When you highlight the person who documented their thinking so clearly that six months later, someone else could understand the reasoning behind a decision.

Make knowledge sharing visible as a human thing, not a compliance requirement.

5. Make it a leadership conversation

KM recognition happens when your executive team starts talking about knowledge as how we work here—not as a project sitting in a corner.

This means asking leadership questions:

  • Are decisions documented in a way that the logic is actually recoverable?
  • Do people have permission to ask questions without it being seen as weakness?
  • Is failure treated as learning, or is it buried?
  • Do you privilege speed over understanding, or vice versa?
  • Does your culture reward knowledge-hoarding or knowledge-sharing?

These aren’t KM questions. They’re leadership questions. But they’re the ones that determine whether knowledge management actually takes root.

6. Measure what actually matters

Forget knowledge base articles indexed. Forget training completion rates. Those metrics measure activity, not impact.

Track what actually shifts:

  • How much faster are people becoming capable?
  • Are the same questions still cycling through support?
  • Do ideas travel between teams that normally don’t connect?
  • Are decisions getting revisited repeatedly, or is the reasoning clear enough that people move forward with confidence?

Be rigorous about it. “We saved time” is vague. How much? For whom? What else did they do with the time they reclaimed?

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: Recognition follows credibility, and credibility comes from solving real problems quietly and consistently.

The organisations that genuinely “get” knowledge management didn’t get there through programme launches and change management initiatives. They got there because someone in a position of influence—often a team leader, sometimes a practitioner—demonstrated that knowledge actually matters to outcomes. And that became the way things worked.

Stop announcing KM. Start showing what happens when knowledge moves the way it should.

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Three Often Overlooked Benefits of Arts-Based Interventions in Your Organisation

Three Often Overlooked Benefits of Arts-Based Interventions in Your Organisation:
1. Strategic Decision Making
2. Talent Management
3. Adapting to Technological Changes

You might be wondering how incorporating arts-based interventions into your organization can enhance these areas. Allow me to enlighten you.

Arts-based interventions (ABIs), when integrated into regular practices, unlock dormant skills and abilities that have been overshadowed by years of traditional education and societal expectations. Our conventional educational systems emphasize logic, rationality, rigid processes, and hierarchical thinking—a pedagogy centered around control, seeking the right answers, earning good grades, and perpetuating the past, rather than exploring and creating the future.

ABIs reignite our curiosity and playfulness, fueling a continuous desire to learn and evolve. They guide us to take measured steps, reflect on outcomes, and then take the next leap forward. By appreciating the interconnectedness of things, we start recognizing the significance of systems, networks, and connections.

Specifically, the utilization of ABIs enhances strategic decision making. When ABIs become an integral part of your routine, they enable you to see the bigger picture and the interconnected nature of things. They amplify curiosity, prompting better questions and uncovering more possibilities. ABIs facilitate diffuse thinking, enabling you to forge more connections and make decisions that align with strategic intent.

In terms of talent management, ABIs foster teamwork, communication, and collaboration. They inject fun and enjoyment into the workplace, reducing stress and boosting resilience. ABIs also empower individuals to solve problems more effectively, enhancing employee engagement and reducing turnover. Moreover, they contribute to the development of leadership skills and core transferable skills such as communication and critical thinking, while nurturing personal growth.

Lastly, ABIs help individuals adapt to change, be it technological advancements or other shifts in the landscape. By bolstering resilience and adaptability, ABIs cultivate flexibility and curiosity, enabling employees to seamlessly incorporate new technologies and ideas into their work.

Does all of this sound like some sort of magical solution? Well, ABIs indeed possess these remarkable qualities and more. We have long underestimated the potential of our brains, focusing excessively on the analytical side while neglecting the importance of balance between analytical and creative thinking. It’s time to rectify this imbalance and unleash the full power of our minds.

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Radical KM, Published Article

One of my articles on Radical KM has been published by the GfWM (Gesellschaft für Wissensmanagement) or Society for Knowledge Management here in Germany as part of a collection of articles celebrating the 20th Knowledge Camp. You can download the PDF or read it online, here.

I have another version that will be published in 2021, it’s a bit longer, and a third version that I keep adding to, and which is heading towards being a book, although it has a long ways to go.

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It’s Time for Knowledge Management to Evolve

There is no value in knowledge management, the value is in the learning and experience.

When I started out in knowledge management 20+ years ago, I defined knowledge management as the people, processes, and technology that allowed people to have the knowledge they needed when and where they needed it. It encompassed all three of people, process, and technology, not one or two of those things, and technology was an enabler, not the goal. Change management was a significant component as was having a strategy, working cross-functionally, and involving the various users and stakeholders that were involved and affected by what we were doing.

These ideas still hold true, but there has been a significant shift, because over the last 20 years what has become important isn’t finding the knowledge that has been written down and somehow codified, it’s not even about finding the person who knows what you need to know—although again, these are still useful and necessary, they are, however, not enough.

With the pace of change, and the constant evolution of what we know, as well as the uncertainty and, dare I say, chaos, that exists in our lives today—whether work life or personal life, what is necessary for knowledge management is knowing how to learn; knowing how to question; knowing how to discover.

Knowledge is no longer as static as it once was, and it has become increasingly context sensitive. We need to have the confidence to jump into the void and figure out what we need to know. That can, in part, be through referencing explicit knowledge, or finding the tacit knowledge, but it is increasingly through trial and error. Using what’s we know as a launch pad and iteratively discovering what works in our given situation.

Knowledge Management in 2020 is not about big programs and investments in technology, it is about how to take what you know and get started, discovering what you need to know as you go, one step at a time. The investment is smaller, and you’ll get there faster and more sustainably if you adopt these behaviours.

Knowledge management isn’t knowledge management, it’s continuous learning. It’s flexibly pivoting to adjust to a new environment, a new context, a new set of circumstances. It’s not being stymied by change, it’s embracing it. It’s experimenting to learn new behaviours and techniques and transferring those skills to new areas.

We do this through not just knowing, but through doing/making/experiencing, and, most importantly, through playing and engaging both the analytical and the creative.

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Transformation Through Creativity

I have 3 courses/programs released into the wild, the theme through all of them is: Transformation Through Creativity. Details follow

1. Transform yourself:
A Creative Pause: mindfulness through art https://coursecraft.net/courses/z9269
Do you crave a pause during the day to re-energise you and bring you focus? A Creative Pause: mindfulness through art gives you that pause. We will lead you through creative activities that will bring you back to the moment and give you that break you need.

2. Transform your meetings:
Creative Activities for Virtual Work
https://coursecraft.net/courses/z921g 
Would you like to learn some ice breakers to improve the experience in your online meetings? “Creative activities for virtual work” will teach you seven ice breakers that will make your meetings more engaging.

3. Transform your organisation:
Applying Creativity to Business
https://www.realisation-of-potential.com/acb/
Applying creativity to business engages the whole person, thus enabling the development of solutions to transform your organisation.

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What do I Do: the box I fit into

What do I do?

I get asked this question all the time; for years I have been asked this question. At the beginning of my career I could say I was an accounting student, or an accountant, and people understood this. However, the more education and experience I got, the more difficult it became to say precisely what I did. 

When I became self-employed, I used to say that I did knowledge management consulting, and I did, but people (mostly) didn’t understand what that meant, so I tried to explain. I could give examples of projects that I had done and the impact that it had had, and they sort of understood, but not really. They smiled and nodded and we moved onto another subject.

I have been self-employed for 16 years, my consulting practice has changed and evolved, the “how” of what I do has changed. I now incorporate artistic methods/thinking into what I do (the truth is, they was there all along, I just didn’t have a name for it, much like the agile, and design thinking practices I incorporated in to my methodology, without having a name for them either). But, honestly, no one cares about the “how”, they care about the results. 

What are my results? 

I stop you from failing with your big, unwieldy projects and programs. Your big, cross-functional, cross-organisational initiatives, that don’t neatly fit into a box. Those initiatives that have lots of stakeholders, lots of moving parts, lots of conflicting objectives. They have technology, they have processes, they have people.

Examples: One organisation recognised an ROI of 165%, while another was prevented from throwing out a million dollar (Cdn) IT investment and starting over.

In the current environment, these projects are called digital transformation, and up to 95% of them fail. When I first started, they were mostly called knowledge management, and somewhere around 50% of them failed. Certainly, one of the first KM projects I did had failed twice previously under different project managers, and I came along and did it using an iterative, collaborative approach (what might be called agile and design thinking now). Not only did I have a successful pilot with 100 people, but eventually had almost 7000 people using the platform, which increased to 10,000 on the momentum of what I had started even after I left the organisation. 

Since going out on my own, I have helped other organisations do this—well, at least the ones that trusted me. There were some that were uncomfortable with my cross-functional, collaborative, iterative approach, and so shelved my work, which is their prerogative. 

My success is built on experience, trial and error, persistence, collaboration, communication, curiosity, critical thinking, leadership, and a willingness to admit that I don’t know the answer but I’ll find out. There is no course that teaches these things, only experience. 

Courses and certifications teach theory, they teach best practices. But as anyone who knows about best practices will tell you, best practices are dependant on the organisation, the situation, the culture, the people, the technology, and the processes. Best practices from one situation/organisation will not necessarily give the same results somewhere else. 

Experience takes best practices and asks the question, how do we take that and make it work here, in this environment, with this technology, with these people?

What do I do?

I ask the questions, and I successfully plan and execute big, unwieldy projects.

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Boxes I Fit Into

I have written/spoken a few times lately about how I don’t fit into a box, and that’s true, I fit into many boxes, based on my education, experiences, and areas of expertise. Here is a list*, in alphabetical order:

Abstract Expressionist
Accountant
Agile Implementer of Solutions
Analyst
Artist
Author
Big Picture Seer
Business Analyst
Business Process Analyst
Business-Technology Aligner
Catalyst
Challenger of assumptions
Change Manager
Chaos Organiser
Coach
Collaborator
Communicator
Community Builder
Connector
Consultant
Creative
Critical Thinker
Culture Changer
Decision Maker
Design Thinker
Digital Transformer
Executer
Facilitator
Financial Analyst
Follower
Gamification Consultant
Human’s First Advocate
Implementer
Influencer
Information Technology Process Consultant
Innovator
ITSM Master
Knowledge Management Expert
Knowledge Manager
Leader
Learner
Listener
Manager
Marketer
MBA
Mentor
Networker
Organiser
Painter
Planner
Problem Solver
Process Analyst
Process Designer
Process Thinker
Product Manager
Program Manager
Project Manager
Public Speaker
Questioner
Realiser of Potential
Sales Person
Solopreneur
Strategist
Strategy Developer/Creator/Implementer
Taxonomy Developer
Teacher
Team Builder
Technology Person
Technology Requirements Analyst


*I reserve the right to add to/edit this list