strategy – Entelechy

May 29, 2026September 29, 2026

Why Your Knowledge Management Strategy Needs the Arts

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

Most knowledge management strategies focus on systems, processes, and technology. But what if the missing piece is a scribble drawing?

Knowledge Work Has a Creativity Problem

We have built our organisations around efficiency metrics and linear processes — get from A to B to C in the most direct line possible. But knowledge work does not actually work that way. It requires curiosity, reflection, and iteration. It demands that people make unexpected connections, ask uncomfortable questions, and see the bigger picture.

Those capacities are not switched on by yet another technology upgrade.

This is the premise of Radical Knowledge Management — a framework developed to bring creativity and arts-based interventions (ABIs) deliberately into KM practice. The definition of KM at the heart of this approach is broader than the traditional one: rather than merely connecting people to documented knowledge, it focuses on enabling people to find and create the knowledge they need to do their jobs — including through continuous learning and new ways of thinking.

What Are Arts-Based Interventions?

Arts-based interventions are activities that use an artistic medium or discipline to improve a process or situation. In organisational settings, the most common artistic modalities include drawing, painting, photography, theatre, music, poetry, improvisation, and storytelling.

These are not team-building novelties bolted on to the end of a strategy day. Used deliberately, they are instruments for culture change, innovation, leadership development, problem-solving, and organisational transformation.

There are at least twelve use cases for ABIs in organisations:

Culture change
Innovation
Wellness
Getting unstuck
Sustainable leadership
Team building
Collaboration
Problem-solving
Amplifying learning
Transformation
Creating community
Employee engagement

Because of the interconnected nature of these activities, focusing on ABIs for one use case tends to positively affect the others as well.

Why ABIs Belong Inside Your KM Strategy

There is a tendency to think of creativity as a bolt-on — something for design or marketing, or perhaps for the occasional off-site. The argument for placing ABIs firmly within KM rests on something more fundamental.

Knowledge is created by people. It is intangible, complex, and deeply social. In our increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) world, the knowledge we most urgently need cannot be captured in a database. It lives in the capacity of people to think differently, collaborate across silos, and remain curious even under pressure.

ABIs directly support those capacities. They help people tap into skills and behaviours that formal education and career pressures have pushed into dormancy. They encourage people to get out of their comfort zones, see the bigger picture, and ask different questions. In doing so, they create new knowledge — and they shift organisational culture towards one that supports knowledge sharing rather than knowledge hoarding.

As Albert Einstein observed, imagination is more important than knowledge; knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world. Arts-based interventions are one of the most reliable ways to fuel imagination in the workplace.

The MAGIC-SH Framework

For organisations ready to take this seriously, the Radical KM framework provides a practical structure organised around the acronym MAGIC-SH:

S & H — Sustainable and Human. This is the foundation. ABIs make organisations more sustainable because they help people see the interconnectedness of things and develop sustainable leadership behaviours. They also reinforce the humanity of work — critical at a time when technology threatens to crowd out the very qualities that make people valuable.

The Nine Cs. The middle layer of the framework encompasses the concepts that ABIs develop and evolve:

Creativity — producing novel ideas and approaches
Collaboration — building the trust that makes real knowledge sharing possible
Communication — developing empathy and purposeful expression (improv theatre is particularly powerful here)
Content — shaping what knowledge is captured and how
Critical thinking — challenging the “that’s how we’ve always done it” assumption
Conversation — opening new avenues for dialogue and insight
Culture — shifting the organisation towards one that values learning and sharing
Confidence — building the self-belief to ask for help, try new approaches, and share imperfect knowledge
Change management — supporting the cultural shift that ABIs require

A, G, I — ABIs, Ideas, Innovation and the Guerrilla approach. These represent both the outputs sought (fresh ideas and innovation) and the practical approach recommended: starting small, positioning ABIs as experiments, and growing support iteratively.

M — Metrics. Measurement comes last — not because it is unimportant, but because defining metrics too early can constrain the very creative exploration that makes ABIs valuable.

How to Start: Two Practical Pathways

There is no need to overhaul your entire KM programme. Radical KM explicitly recommends starting small and iterating.

The Icebreaker stream begins at the individual or team level with short, low-stakes activities: a guided visualisation at the start of a meeting, a scribble drawing exercise during a workshop, an improvisational warm-up before a strategy session. These take as little as five minutes, but they shift the energy and engagement in the room, build psychological safety, and begin to normalise the idea that creativity belongs at work.

The Studio stream takes a larger, more structured approach — dedicated sessions, longer interventions, and formal integration into KM processes such as knowledge capture workshops, after-action reviews, or communities of practice.

In both cases, the implementation approach is the same: treat it as an experiment, start with early adopters, debrief afterwards, and iterate based on what you learn. Change management is essential — people have often been educated to believe that the arts are wasteful, and that belief takes time and consistent experience to shift.

The Hardest Part

The biggest obstacle to incorporating ABIs into a KM strategy is not logistics. It is the stories we tell ourselves about why we cannot — or should not — do it. What will my colleagues think? Are the benefits really there? Is this really my job?

Those doubts are understandable. Most of us had our creativity criticised or ignored somewhere around adolescence, and we learned to put it away as unprofessional.

But look around your team. Someone is doodling during calls. Someone uses role-play to prepare for difficult conversations. Someone plays an icebreaker game at the start of team stand-ups. The arts and creativity are already finding their way into your workplace — unconsciously. Radical KM simply asks you to be more deliberate about it.

The first time you try a scribble drawing exercise in a knowledge management workshop, you may be pleasantly surprised. The energy and engagement in the room shifts. Responses become more thoughtful and detailed. People make connections they would not otherwise have made. The knowledge that flows is richer.

A Final Thought

In a world shaped by AI, automation, and relentless change, the knowledge and capabilities that most need managing are the human ones: curiosity, resilience, empathy, imagination, and the willingness to keep learning. Those are not developed by better taxonomy.

They are developed through practice — and arts-based interventions are one of the most evidence-supported ways to practise them.

Your KM strategy does not need an overhaul. It needs a scribble drawing, and the courage to see what happens next.

May 1, 2026September 29, 2026

AI Won’t Replace Knowledge Management. It Will Finally Force Us to Take It Seriously

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

For decades, knowledge management has been the organisational discipline that everyone agreed was important and almost no one invested in properly.

We built SharePoint graveyards. We created knowledge bases nobody searched. We ran “lessons learned” sessions whose lessons were never applied. And when things went wrong — when the expert retired, when the project team disbanded, when the same mistake happened for the third time — we shrugged and called it institutional memory loss, as if it were a natural disaster rather than a preventable one.

Then came AI.

And suddenly, knowledge management isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s the foundation everything else depends on.

AI is only as good as the knowledge it can access

Here’s what the AI vendors won’t tell you in their sales decks: a large language model deployed inside your organisation will reflect the quality of your organisational knowledge. Feed it outdated policies, inconsistent documentation, and tribal knowledge that lives only in people’s heads — and you’ll get confident, fluent, wrong answers at scale.

The organisations rushing to implement AI copilots and knowledge assistants are about to discover something KM practitioners have known for years: garbage in, garbage out is not a technology problem. It’s a knowledge governance problem.

AI doesn’t fix broken knowledge ecosystems. It amplifies them — for better or worse.

The sudden urgency is real — and welcome

I’ve sat in enough boardrooms to know that the argument “we need to capture institutional knowledge before people leave” rarely moved budgets. Neither did “we’re duplicating effort because teams can’t find what exists.”

But “our AI tool is producing unreliable outputs because our knowledge base is a mess”? That one lands differently.

AI is creating the business case for KM that practitioners have struggled to articulate for years. Not because AI is a KM solution — it isn’t — but because AI makes the consequences of poor knowledge management immediately visible and commercially painful.

That’s not a crisis. That’s an opportunity.

What AI actually makes possible

Used thoughtfully, AI tools offer genuine advances for knowledge work:

Surfacing what exists — AI-powered search can finally make organisational knowledge findable, cutting through the folder structures and file naming conventions that defeated traditional search.
Capturing tacit knowledge — Conversational AI can assist in eliciting and structuring knowledge from subject matter experts in ways that don’t require them to become writers.
Reducing the burden of contribution — One of the biggest barriers to knowledge sharing is the effort it takes. AI can lower that friction significantly.
Connecting dots across silos — AI can identify relationships between knowledge assets that no human would have the bandwidth to spot.

None of this happens automatically. All of it requires human judgement, governance, and strategy to work.

The human element isn’t optional

Here’s where I’d push back on the more breathless AI narratives: knowledge is not just information. It includes context, relationship, experience, and meaning — the things that make information useful rather than merely available.

AI can retrieve. It cannot always discern. It can summarise. It cannot always judge what matters. It can generate. It cannot replace the wisdom that comes from having lived through something.

The organisations that will succeed with AI-augmented knowledge management are those that treat the human and the machine as partners — where AI handles the retrieval, synthesis, and surface-level generation, and people contribute the judgment, the curation, and the culture that makes knowledge genuinely shared.

The moment KM has been waiting for

I started my career arguing that knowledge management deserved more strategic investment. I’m still making that argument — with AI more executives are “getting it”.

AI has done what years of best practice frameworks and maturity models couldn’t: it has made knowledge management urgent.

That urgency is an opening. The question is whether organisations will use it to build something sustainable — genuine knowledge cultures, sound governance, human-centred practice — or whether they’ll bolt AI onto the same neglected foundations and wonder why the results disappoint.

The technology is ready. The case is made. Now comes the harder work.

April 10, 2026September 28, 2026

Your Organisation Has a Knowledge Management Problem. It Just Doesn’t Know It Yet

(This post originally appeared on my LinkedIn Profile.)

Ask most people what Knowledge Management means and they’ll mention a chatbot. Or a FAQ database. Or the system the contact centre uses to answer customer calls faster.

They’re not wrong. That is KM. But it’s one room in a very large house.

And while everyone’s focused on that room, the rest of the house is quietly falling apart.

The contact centre problem

Contact centre KM is visible. It has vendors. It has metrics. It has a clear ROI story — faster handle times, fewer escalations, happier customers. There are software platforms built specifically for it. Conferences dedicated to it. Entire consulting practices around it.

So when organisations say “we have KM,” they often mean “we have a tool that helps agents answer questions.”

That’s not KM strategy. That’s knowledge delivery at one endpoint.

What’s happening everywhere else

While the contact centre is meticulously managed, here’s what’s happening in the same organisation:

A senior leader retires and takes twenty years of institutional memory with them. Nobody captured it. Nobody thought to.

A project team spends three weeks solving a problem that another team solved eighteen months ago. The solution existed. It just wasn’t findable.

A proposal goes out with assumptions that contradict positions taken on a previous engagement. The left hand didn’t know what the right hand had written.

A new hire takes six months to reach full productivity because the knowledge they need lives in people’s heads, not in any system.

None of this shows up in a contact centre dashboard. All of it is a knowledge management failure.

The invisible KM problem

Contact centre KM is visible KM. It has a home, a budget, and a team accountable for it.

Everything else is invisible KM — the organisational knowledge that lives in people, relationships, past work, and institutional memory. It has no home. No owner. No metrics. And so, no urgency.

Until someone leaves. Until a bid is lost. Until a mistake is repeated. Until the organisation realises it keeps reinventing the wheel because nobody was minding the wheel.

KM is a whole-organisation discipline

The international standard for KM — ISO 30401 — doesn’t mention contact centres. It talks about strategy, culture, learning, leadership, and governance. It defines KM as a management discipline that helps organisations create, retain, share, and apply knowledge to achieve their objectives.

APQC, one of the most respected research bodies in the field, frames KM across five pillars: strategy, process, content, culture, and technology. Technology is one pillar. The contact centre sits inside technology. That’s a lot of building left unattended.

The questions that reveal the real problem

You don’t need a formal audit to see where your organisation’s invisible KM is failing. Just ask:

What happens when your most experienced person walks out the door?
How long does it take a new hire to become genuinely productive?
How do you capture what worked — and what didn’t — at the end of a major project?
Can you find your organisation’s best thinking on any given topic in under five minutes?
Do your teams build on each other’s work, or do they start from scratch every time?

If those questions make people uncomfortable, that’s not a contact centre problem. That’s a knowledge strategy problem.

What to do about it

Start by separating the tool from the discipline. Contact centre software is a tool. KM is a discipline that applies across every part of an organisation — from how you onboard people to how you run retrospectives to how you capture competitive intelligence to how you make expert knowledge accessible to everyone who needs it.

Then look at where knowledge is genuinely at risk. Who are your critical knowledge holders? What happens when they leave? Where does important knowledge live that isn’t written down anywhere?

You don’t need a massive programme to start. You need someone asking the right questions. And you need leadership that understands that knowledge isn’t just a contact centre asset — it’s the organisation’s most valuable and most under protected resource.

The contact centre KM is working fine. That’s not the problem.

The problem is the illusion of coverage it creates. The belief that because one type of knowledge is well-managed, the rest is too.

It isn’t. And the cost of that gap shows up slowly — in turnover, in repeated mistakes, in lost bids, in the quiet erosion of things that once worked.

KM done well is invisible too. You notice it in how fast people find what they need. In how smoothly transitions happen. In how teams learn from each other rather than around each other.

That kind of KM doesn’t live in a single tool. It lives in how an organisation thinks about what it knows — and what it can’t afford to lose.

January 5, 2026September 29, 2026

The Magic in the White Space: why what we can’t measure what matters most

(This post originally appeared on my LinkedIn profile.)

We’ve optimised ourselves into a corner.

Somewhere along the way, we started measuring everything. Click-through rates. Response times. Conversion metrics. Engagement scores. Customer lifetime value. Net Promoter Scores. And in doing so, we forgot something fundamental: people aren’t data points.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how our obsession with technology and analytics has made us deeply, painfully transactional. Every interaction has become an opportunity to capture, quantify, and optimise. We’ve replaced conversations with touch-points. Relationships with customer journeys. Trust with sentiment analysis.

The cost? We’ve lost our ability to think holistically. And we’ve forgotten that the most important things that happen in organisations—and in life—happen in the spaces between the things we measure.

The Tyranny of the Measurable

There’s a management axiom that gets trotted out with alarming frequency: “What gets measured gets managed.” It’s usually attributed to Peter Drucker, though he probably never said it in quite that way. Regardless of its provenance, we’ve taken it as gospel and built entire industries around it.

But here’s the problem with making measurement the centre of everything: we start to believe that if something can’t be measured, it doesn’t matter. Or worse, it doesn’t exist.

Consider what happens when everything is reduced to discrete, measurable transactions. We stop seeing patterns. We stop understanding context. We stop recognising that the person on the other end of that support ticket is the same one who attended our webinar, recommended us to a colleague, and has been quietly championing our work for years. Their “customer journey” looks like a series of disconnected events in our CRM, but their actual relationship with us is something far richer—and far more valuable—than any dashboard can capture.

Strategic thinking requires us to hold complexity. To see connections that don’t fit neatly into a spreadsheet. To value things we cannot easily quantify—like loyalty, goodwill, institutional memory, and the trust that accumulates through countless small moments of being seen and valued.

What Lives in the White Space

In design, white space—the empty areas around and between elements—isn’t wasted space. It’s what makes the rest of the design work. It provides breathing room, creates emphasis, and allows the eye to rest. Without white space, everything blurs together into noise.

Organisations have white space too. It’s the corridor conversation that sparks an unexpected idea. The coffee break where two people from different departments discover they’re working on complementary problems. The offhand comment in a meeting that someone remembers six months later and applies in a completely different context. It’s the trust that accumulates not through formal processes but through countless small moments of showing up, following through, and treating people as whole human beings rather than inputs in a workflow.

None of this fits in a spreadsheet. None of it shows up in your quarterly metrics review. And yet—ask anyone where their best ideas came from, and they’ll almost never point to a scheduled brainstorming session or a formal innovation programme. They’ll tell you about a conversation. A chance encounter. A moment of connection that couldn’t have been predicted or planned.

This is where the magic happens. And we’re systematically eliminating it.

The Efficiency Trap

In our pursuit of efficiency, we’ve optimised away the very conditions that allow innovation, creativity, and genuine human connection to flourish. Every minute is accounted for. Every interaction has a purpose. Every meeting has an agenda and a hard stop.

We’ve mistaken activity for progress and transactions for relationships.

The irony is profound. We invest millions in innovation programmes while simultaneously creating cultures that leave no room for the unstructured thinking that innovation requires. We talk about the importance of relationships while treating every customer interaction as a data point to be captured and processed. We celebrate “human-centred design” while building systems that reduce humans to behavioural patterns and conversion funnels.

You can’t build a relationship in a transaction. You build it in the space between transactions. In the follow-up that wasn’t required. In remembering what matters to someone. In showing up consistently, not just when the metrics demand it.

A Different Way of Seeing

So how do we measure the magic that happens in the white space?

I think the uncomfortable answer is: we don’t. Not directly, anyway. The white space is where serendipity lives, and serendipity resists quantification. That might be precisely the point.

But that doesn’t mean we’re helpless. It means we need to shift our focus from measuring the magic itself to measuring—and deliberately cultivating—the conditions that allow magic to happen.

We can ask different questions. Do people have unstructured time to think and connect? Are there spaces—physical or virtual—where unexpected collisions can occur? Is there psychological safety to share half-formed ideas without them being immediately evaluated against KPIs? Do we reward relationship-building, or only task completion?

We can notice the outcomes, even if we can’t trace the path. Innovation doesn’t announce its origins. But we can ask: where did that breakthrough actually come from? When we bother to trace these things back, the answer is almost never “the innovation committee met and decided.” It’s “I had a conversation with someone in a completely different department” or “I remembered something a client mentioned offhand three months ago.”

We can listen for stories instead of statistics. Narrative is how humans have always captured what metrics cannot. The organisations that understand the value of white space are the ones that collect and share these stories deliberately—not as marketing material, but as genuine organisational knowledge about how value actually gets created.

The Human Imperative

This matters more now than ever. As artificial intelligence takes over more of our transactional work—answering routine queries, processing standard requests, analysing data at scale—what remains distinctly human is precisely the stuff that happens in the white space. The intuition. The empathy. The ability to hold ambiguity and see connections across domains. The relationships built on genuine understanding rather than algorithmic prediction.

If we continue to optimise humans out of the white space, we’ll have nothing left to offer that machines can’t do better. But if we recognise that the white space is where our uniquely human value lives, we can build organisations that amplify rather than replace what makes us irreplaceable.

Technology should serve relationships, not replace them. Data should inform human judgement, not substitute for it. Efficiency should create space for what matters, not consume every moment in pursuit of marginal gains.

An Invitation

Perhaps it’s time we measured what actually matters—even if that means accepting that some things can’t be measured at all.

What would it look like to run an organisation that valued the white space? That deliberately protected time for unstructured connection? That evaluated leaders not just on what they delivered but on the relationships they built and the conditions they created for others to thrive?

What would it look like to approach each interaction not as a transaction to be completed but as a relationship to be nurtured? To see the person behind the data point, the story behind the metric, the magic behind the measurement?

The magic is in the white space. It always has been.

Maybe it’s time we stopped trying to fill every inch of it with something we can count.

January 19, 2016

Importance of a KM Strategy

Why do I need a knowledge management strategy? Why can’t I just implement some technology and be done with it? Why can’t I just implement Communities of Practice or Lessons Learned and be done with it?

I hear this sometimes from managers who want a quick fix, who are under a lot of pressure from time and resources (money and people).

The answer is, you can. I have worked with many organizations that have done just that, jumped in with both feet and “just done something”. I am usually there to fix it. Fix the technology because no one understood what it really needed to do to support knowledge work within the organization; fix the process because no one understands it and it’s not aligned with the rest of the activities in the organization and it’s created extra work for already over-worked staff.

Why do you need a strategy?

Would you jump in the car and set out on a journey of 5000km/3000miles without having some idea of where you were going and how you going to get there? Making sure that you had selected the right vehicle to get you there in time and a map to help direct you along the way?

A KM strategy does just that. It helps you figure out where you’re going, and the things you need to do along the way, the processes you need to support you and that need to be supported.

That’s not to say that you won’t make adjustments along the way, just like a friend of mine who drove from Toronto to Vancouver in September 2015, who ended up “detouring” through the United States, so that she could see some different sites, but she still knew where she was going and when she had to be there by—she made it with time to spare.

Isn’t that what you want from your KM strategy? To know where you’re going and how you want to get there, to meet the goals and objectives of the organization?

Why would you put a toaster over in the car for your trip, when you really needed a camp stove?

Why would you choose one technology because “everyone else is” when another technology is cheaper and better meets the needs of the organization because it requires less customization than the more popular software?

Isn’t it time you created (or updated) your KM strategy?

November 15, 2014

Published: Designing a Successful KM Strategy

Advance copies of our book, Designing a Successful KM Strategy are now available from our publisher, Information Today, Inc.

It will officially be published in mid-January, so if you buy it before that, you get 40% of the regular price.

I did a workshop based on the book at KM World, on Nov 4th, that was well received, as well as a couple of book signings–it was great to talk to everyone about the book and how it can help them regardless of whether they are just starting with KM or at a point where they are re-evaluating their strategy after implementing KM for a few years.

Information Today has also made a chapter available for preview, you can access it here https://books.infotoday.com/books/Designing-a-Successful-KM-Strategy/Making-the-Case-for-a-Knowledge-Management-Strategy.pdf

Nick (my co-author) also has some helpful links up over on his blog at https://www.nickmilton.com/p/blog-page.html

I hope you enjoy it. Be sure to get in touch if you have any comments or questions.

September 18, 2014

Designing a Successful KM Strategy

I guess I have been busy, it’s been 6 months since my last post. One of the things that I have been busy with is finishing the book that I have co-authored with my Knoco colleague, Nick Milton.

Nick and I have written and book called, “Designing a Successful KM Strategy,” it’s being published by Information Today, Inc. Advance copies will be available at KM World, where I will be doing a workshop based on the book (Workshop W4) and a book signing.

I’ll post a link to their website once it’s available for order.

Also, I’m doing a second workshop at KM World called, “W14: Sparking Innovation: Creative KM,” in case any of you are interested in that.

March 21, 2012

Knowledge Management Mentoring

Would you rather learn how to implement knowledge management rather than have a consultant come in and do it for you?

I have just finished a project where I mentored/coached the main person on the client side through the creation of a Knowledge Management Strategy. She was knowledgeable and had, in fact started a strategy but got stuck. I have to say I enjoyed the experience, I wasn’t sure at first how it would go, and certainly it took longer than it would have if I had just done the work, but in the end she has a strategy that she can sell to management and she feels comfortable with how and why it was developed that way.

A win for all, I’d say.

I’m thinking I need to do more of these types of engagements, so watch for announcements.