Today’s post is a little different than my last few, today I am wondering why all the lessons learned that I see for knowledge management initiatives are the same.
I have gone to lots of conferences, webinars, presentations over the years, always curious to see what other people are doing, how they are addressing their business problems with knowledge management. Always, there’s some new/interesting application of a knowledge management activity, and always the lessons learned are the same as I have heard every time before and I wonder as knowledge management professionals, why we don’t learn from the lessons of others, why we make the same mistakes as those who have gone before us?
Is is because before we did knowledge management we were doing something else? I know in my case this was true, I was doing ITIL consulting and project management, which evolved into developing a mentoring program and organizing intellectual property so that people could find and reuse it and from there into a full-blown KM program, but that was 10 years ago. In 10 years have we learned nothing? The field was much younger then, in a lot of ways, but I think KM initiatives start out the same now as they did then. Someone internally gets tasked with the job, the boss/sponsor doesn’t see it as particularly specialized or important, so the internal person goes off and does it with a minimum of direction and resources, and doesn’t stop to ask the question, “Has this been done before?” “Are there lessons I can learn from others so that I don’t make the same mistakes?” They do what they think is fantastic work, and it is, but then they present at a conference or webinar or other such forum because they have become true believers over the course of their KM project and want to share what they have learned.
This is a good thing, but wouldn’t it be a better thing if we as knowledge workers and knowledge management professionals stopped recreating our own wheel and moved it forward? Are we destined to constantly recreate the wheel because of the organizations we work for/in and knowledge management is simply just the next activity on the path of maturing the organization to a knowing organization?
Hi Stephanie
I think it is because people who own KM initiatives are human beings, and as prone as other human beings to rush in without “learning before”. So they reinvent the wheel yet again. That’s why KM is needed in the first place – to influence people to access and reuse knowledge, because it’s not natural human behaviour.
Personally I think it is highly regrettable. Those of us who have been working with KM for over a decade (since ’92 in my case, with BP for 7 years, then consulting) have a very well developed understanding of how KM implementation should be done, and it is really frustrating seeing people jumping in a repeating the mistakes from the past. The worst thing about this is that partial KM implementations, which deliver minor results then fizzle out, devalue KM, and spread a feeling that “KM doesn’t work”
But it does work, and there is a body of experience to explain how it can be made to work.
Interesting question and my own take on it is that perhaps everyone is repeating these lessons learned because they’re either not really lessons learned, or because many never bother to try to learn from lessons learned.
Think about it — if the typical so-called lesson learned includes “should have had senior buy-in” that’s not much of a lesson learned. That to me is more of a “duh” because having senior buy-in is more of a core requirement than a lesson learned. So if critical projects are started without covering a basic issue such as senior buy-in….well, “duh.”
The other side of the issue I think is that few actually bother to look at previous lessons learned or such before beginning. It is (as pointed out above) part of that “not invented here” cultural issue that I think has most teams thinking that whatever they are about to do is by far a better thing, a better approach, not like anything done prior to this, etc. I mean, seriously, when was the last time you heard someone say, “Hey, wait — have we read through the last after action reviews yet?” In many cases people can’t even find the applicable lesson learned in time to do anything with them.
I have hope for knowledge management — its proven itself over and over to be value-adding. Lessons learned? Actual mileage may vary…but more times than not, I believe — not so useful.