(This post was originally shared on my LinkedIn Profile.)
Last week I wrote about the research evidence that our obsession with efficiency and technology has eroded the social capital, trust, and genuine collaboration that make organisations actually work. The response told me the article landed somewhere real.
But a diagnosis without a direction isn’t much use. So this week I want to talk about what I believe a genuine response looks like.
It isn’t another tool. It isn’t a workshop. It isn’t a culture deck with better values on it.
It’s a fundamentally different way of thinking about knowledge — one that starts with people rather than platforms, and with meaning rather than metrics.
What conventional KM gets wrong
Most knowledge management programmes are designed to solve an information problem. Information is scattered, so we build a repository. People can’t find what they need, so we improve search. Expertise walks out the door, so we create a capture process.
These are real problems. But they’re symptoms, not causes.
The actual problem — the one the research keeps pointing back to — is that the conditions for knowledge to flow have broken down. Trust has eroded. Networks have shrunk. Cross-boundary relationships have withered. The informal conversations that carry tacit knowledge, the collegial curiosity that generates new thinking, the relational safety that makes people willing to share what they actually know — all of it has been quietly deprioritised in the name of efficiency.
You cannot fix that with a better taxonomy.
A different starting point
Radical Knowledge Management — the framework I’ve been developing and practising for over a decade — begins from a different premise.
Knowledge is not content. Knowledge is human. It is created through experience, shaped by context, and moved through relationship. It lives in people, between people, and in the culture that connects them. Any KM strategy that doesn’t start there is working on the wrong problem.
Radical KM is built on what I call the MAGIC-SH model: seven conditions that together create an environment where knowledge genuinely flows, where people are willing to share what they know, and where organisations develop the kind of collective intelligence that no platform can replicate.
Those conditions are Meaning, Agency, Generosity, Inquiry, Community, Story, and Humanity.
Let me walk through why each one matters in the context of the collaboration crisis.
Meaning
People share knowledge willingly when they understand why it matters. Not because they’ve been told to fill in the knowledge base, but because they can see the connection between what they know, what others need, and the outcome they all care about.
Efficiency culture strips meaning out of work progressively. It reduces contribution to task completion and measures value in outputs. Radical KM inverts this — it starts by building shared understanding of purpose, so that knowledge-sharing becomes an act of contribution rather than compliance.
Agency
Knowledge hoarding is almost never malicious. It’s usually rational. In environments where expertise equals job security, where being the person who knows something is a form of power, people protect what they know.
Agency addresses this by designing for genuine autonomy and contribution. When people have real influence over how their knowledge is used and recognised, the incentive structure flips. Sharing becomes generative rather than threatening.
Generosity
Generous knowledge cultures don’t happen by accident. They are built through modelling, through recognition, and through the deliberate design of spaces — physical, virtual, and cultural — where people are expected and encouraged to give freely of what they know.
This is directly counter to the transactional logic that dominates most organisations, where knowledge exchange is a negotiation and every interaction has an implied cost-benefit calculation behind it.
Inquiry
The collapse of cross-boundary weak ties that the Microsoft research documented is, at its root, a collapse of curiosity. When people work only within their immediate team, they stop asking questions of the wider organisation. They stop being curious about what’s happening elsewhere, what others have learned, what problems are being solved in parallel.
Radical KM designs explicitly for inquiry — creating the conditions, the habits, and the structures that keep curiosity alive across organisational boundaries.
Community
This is where the research evidence and the framework converge most clearly. Social capital is not built through formal programmes. It is built through communities — genuine ones, where people gather around shared interests, shared challenges, or shared expertise, and where the relationships that form outlast any particular project or process.
Communities of practice, done well, are the single most powerful KM intervention available. Not because of the knowledge they capture, but because of the trust they generate.
Story
Data informs. Story moves. The knowledge that organisations most need to retain and transmit — the contextual, experiential, relational knowledge that can’t be fully codified — travels in narrative.
Story is also how culture is sustained and changed. The stories an organisation tells about itself, about what it values, about who its heroes are, shape what knowledge gets shared and what gets suppressed.
Humanity
This is the frame that holds everything else. Knowledge management that forgets it is working with human beings — with people who have emotions, relationships, histories, and needs — will always fall short of what’s possible.
Humanity in KM means designing for the whole person, not just the role. It means recognising that psychological safety is not a HR initiative; it’s a knowledge infrastructure issue. It means understanding that the reason knowledge walks out the door is almost always relational, not technical.
Why this matters now
The organisations that will navigate the next decade well are not the ones with the best AI tools or the most sophisticated knowledge repositories. They are the ones that have invested in the human conditions that make knowledge genuinely flow — trust, relationship, meaning, and community.
The collaboration crisis the research describes is real. But it is not inevitable, and it is not irreversible. What it requires is a different kind of intervention — one that takes human beings seriously as the infrastructure of organisational intelligence.
That’s what Radical Knowledge Management is designed to do.