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Seven Knowledge Management Mistakes
By Michael C. Gilbert, December 2005
In our recent series of workshops on nonprofit knowledge management, we taught a session entitled The Logic of Learning, in which we explored the foundations of solid reasoning and planning for knowledge management projects. By way of illustration, we explored seven common knowledge management mistakes that we have seen recur in our own practice over the years. I would like to share those seven mistakes with you here.
1. Let's Go Shopping!
You know better than to go to the grocery store, informed by your hunger but without a list, either on paper or in mind. But we often do exactly that when it comes to the technology that supports knowledge management. What might be just as bad, however, is that when we finally do draw up a list, it is based not upon the menus and recipes that we have carefully developed to satisfy our hunger and our palate, but instead it's based upon the contents of the shelves in the store, the brands, the slogans, and the language of marketing.
It is very easy to end up making large lists of features available in various so called "knowledge management" applications and then end up using those lists as your framework for selecting tools and even informing your practices. In other words, the dynamics of shopping (selling and buying software), rather than the dynamics of learning, define what knowledge management is.
2. Taxonomy Too!
When we find ourselves having to navigate a very large volume of content, or helping other people navigate such content, we naturally turn to categorization as a tool. This is especially true when we need to touch on the same content more than once, because otherwise a chronological schema would work just fine. As a consequence, people with responsibility for planning knowledge management initiatives are especially interested in categorization.
At its best, categorization is a powerful tool for communication and learning. If two or more people agree on a category, then they can help each other learn things. That even applies to the same person using their own unique categorization scheme that is consistent over time: Their past self can help their future self learn things.
At its worst, categorization can get in the way of communication and learning. This happens under three conditions: (1) The categorization scheme or taxonomy is too rigid. (2) It is too idiosyncratic. Or (3) it is unsuited to the actual, moment to moment workflow of the participants. Ironically, each of these conditions happen all too often in knowledge management contexts.
The extreme version of this is where an intranet developer creates a cute taxonomy with custom icons and interface elements to go along with them, which constitutes the primary channel for access to documents. A less extreme, but far more common version is where organizations, in an attempt to distinguish themselves, develop idiosyncratic organizing schemes, when they might be better served by one or more that they have in common with peers.
3. Mixed Messages
Mixed messages occur in a knowledge management context when there are clear organizational benefits from a transition to a new medium, but either the organization's leaders may set conflicting examples or the technologies themselves may promulgate conflicting work methods. For instance, the organization may be committed to using an online, self-documenting collaborative space for certain discussions, but board members or the chief executive are the late adopters. Or there may be a clear understanding that the staff newsletter will be distributed by email and the web, but a paper version is still produced and the content is still designed with paper in mind.
Mixed messages are inevitable, but some are more damaging than others. It's less harmful when the consumption end of the knowledge management workflows are undermined, such as when someone looks something up in a paper directory, rather than in the new, up-to-date online directory. But it's much more harmful when a high leverage component of the production end of the workflow is undermined, such as whether communication is digitally documented in the first place or whether key metadata is added.
4. "Best" Practices
"Best practices" are frequently defined as techniques or methodologies that, through experience and research, have proven to reliably lead to desired results. But if you review the documents and web sites purporting to compile such practices in various fields, you will almost never find any rigorous method used to assess whether the practices actually do lead to desired results or whether they actually are "the best".
In place of genuine best practices, what we end up following are in fact the prevailing methods of respected practitioners. While there is nothing inherently wrong with that as a starting point for decision making, in reality it becomes the decision. With the professional safety of numbers or reputation, we end up jumping on a bandwagon.
5. Documental Illness
Why is a PDF document perceived as more valuable than an HTML document with identical content?
The human mind identifies things by their boundaries. This is obvious with visual and auditory cognition, of course, but it extends to the other senses and, just as importantly, to abstractions. We pay more attention to art that has a frame. We pay more attention to ideas that have a binding. A PDF is a kind of binding for an electronic document, separating it and framing it for our minds. Text and HTML have much weaker document frames and database queries don't feel like documents at all.
For the consumer of information, the benefits of having something be in the form of a document include that the contents are seen as more important and their consumption is set apart from other communication. For the producer of information, having to put something in the form of a document increases the effort invested and may bring design and presentation attention to bear as well.
Unfortunately, the concept of the document is not just a handy tool that gets used when it's needed and put aside when it's not. It is, in fact, an idee fixe that dominates almost every aspect of the field of knowledge management and shapes nearly every knowledge management project. The benefits described above become grossly dysfunctional when applied at a large scale, distorting requirements, eroding adoption, and driving up the transaction costs of learning.
6. Another Thing to Read
We all have too much to read and yet many knowledge management projects are either designed around the idea of providing more information or they are perceived as such because of their form and novelty. Rightly or wrongly, users often see new initiatives as yet another thing to read: another web site, another report, another email, another search tool.
Some of this is a matter of perception. And some is the result of the power of the document model to add weight to everything, including the burden of reading. But often it is a result of design. We invest more effort in scaling up what works than in scaling down what doesn't work. Because we can measure it, we place more design value in the number of resources and relationships, rather than in their quality.
7. The Work of Art
Donald Norman, the famous cognitive scientist who wrote User Centered System Design, Things That Make Us Smart, The Invisible Computer, and other books, is fond of criticizing attractive, but unusable interfaces by saying: It probably won an award.
Knowledge management is a learning endeavor and is therefore inherently process oriented, but knowledge related projects can easily turn into endeavors that express a goal of completeness. In a way, this is only natural. Academics struggle against this all the time, being far more rewarded for producing papers than for teaching students. We all like to be able to point to the object of our accomplishment, with professional and aesthetic pride.
This can often lead to a project being less a tool of learning and more a work of art. The sad thing about works of art, whether visual, literary, or technological, is that most of them are untouchable. That's the last thing we want in a knowledge management initiative.
The Tyranny of the Tangible
What all of these mistakes have in common, as their underlying cause, is something that I call the Tyranny of the Tangible. I have written about this in more detail elsewhere: Both technology and content are more tangible than communication and learning. This tangibility makes it both easier and more compelling for us to base our knowledge management design on their dynamics, aesthetics, objectives, and paradigms.
The strategic response to this phenomenon and the seven mistakes that are its common results is to develop a different design imperative based upon communication and learning goals. While it is certainly possible to make small adjustments and fixes in the process of moving to a new approach to requirements and planning, it raises so many questions that sometimes it's better to respond tactically at first. Furthermore, these mistakes can creep into even the best communication-centered projects.
A tactical response could simply involve making a dispassionate inventory of where these seven mistakes crop up in our various knowledge management projects. We can explore our options for mitigation, nurture those programs that have avoided these mistakes, and simply develop our mindfulness as an organization about what works and what doesn't in this fuzzy field we call knowledge management.
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