organizational knowledge

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Please read this comment from Stan Garfield first:

Harold, that article appears to have been written using GenAI, with multiple errors. Here is one example (since corrected after I wrote to the author), that related to you:

“Meena Arivanantham is a knowledge management specialist at the United Nations Development Programme and one of the most experienced practitioners of knowledge management in international development contexts. She presented at the SIKM Leaders Community in May 2024 on sense-making in complexity, demonstrating the application of KM principles to the particularly challenging environment of large multilateral organisations working across dozens of national contexts simultaneously.”

Her correct name is Meena Arivananthan (not Arivanantham), she is not at UNDP, and she never presented to the SIKM Leaders Community. A GenAI tool seems to have partially taken this from the title of your February 2024 SIKM presentation on Sensemaking in Complexity.

Meena and Bruce Boyes pointed out errors by replying to the LinkedIn post linking to the article, as did I.

See the comments below.

A lengthy article on organizational knowledge and the people in the field highlights a number of common mistakes, all of which I have witnessed in my almost three decades of professional practice.

  1. Treating organizational knowledge as an IT problem. This is evident in the budget for the technology purchase compared to human implementation. The latter often has no budget.
  2. Focusing on explicit knowledge and ignoring tacit knowledge. This often comes in the form of offering a training course to cover the new knowledge of a system with no thought to helping people discuss how they will use the new system.
  3. Ignoring the need for trust in order to share knowledge. As I have noted for years, knowledge flows at the speed of trust. No imposed system will generate trust.
  4. Launching a KM initiative without visible leadership support. I have often seen organizational knowledge initiatives launched for the good of employees but with no engagement by executives. The lack of leadership by example dooms the project.
  5. Underestimating the knowledge loss that happens during workforce transitions. With knowledge loss not evident in the next fiscal quarter, executives often ignore its impact.

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clever and lazy

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On the last Friday of each month I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

The Four Classes of Military Officers (Or Office Workers): Clever, Diligent, Stupid and Lazy

Clever and Lazy: While most senior leaders will deny this classification, it applies well, and not just for the reasons cited by Hammerstein-Equord. These are the leaders who have the breadth of experience and depth of wisdom to ask the right questions, see the future for what it is, and make the right decisions under the greatest duress. They’re also renowned for finding the simplest solutions to the most difficult problems, and that drives a lot of people crazy.

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end of the line

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In 2014 I started the first of the online PKM workshops, based on a model of three activities per week over six weeks to be done as a cohort with a common start and finish date. I would be available to respond to participants and provide support as required, including video calls.

It’s now the end of the line.

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stupid humans

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I have yet to find a use for Generative AI and continue to read about all the problems arising from the major purveyors of these tools.

Drew Wilson provides dozens of examples of AI gone wrong in Drew Wilson was Right: Carney’s AI Push Leads to AI Hallucinations.

Leaving it all to AI and just expecting some magical money saving result that’s better than ever before is a recipe for disaster. It’s burned so many people as shown above and will continue to burn people. This no matter how many times people swear up and down that AI is ‘improving’ and ‘practically perfect’. It’s nowhere near that and requires human intervention.

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stop being an individual

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On the last Friday of each month I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

“Grab your pens and shovels, rabble rouser rebels. Take to the streets. Dig in for the long haul! Globally, communities of creative resistance are saying no to bullies. Artists and scientists, homemakers and caretakers, workers and kindreds in kindness and LOVE. — Unite. CREATE! Imagine. Fear not!” —Sheree Fitch

A new world is being born’: author Rebecca Solnit on the ‘slow revolution’ the far right cannot tolerate

A government can take away your rights, but no one can take away your belief in those rights. The first points of challenge to fascism are memory and history.” … “I often quote my friend Bill McKibben [the environmentalist]. We were sitting on a concrete floor at an activist space during the Paris climate treaty process [the Paris Agreement was adopted in 2015]. Somebody walked up and asked him a question he gets asked all the time. ‘What’s the best thing I can do as an individual?’ He said, ‘Stop being an individual.’ You may have your own quirky playlist and eye-makeup techniques, but you also have this solidarity. When you act, you act with others.”

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framing the narrative

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In smarter networks through better narratives, I noted that there needs to be a dominant narrative to counter “folks who’ve got nothing but conspiracies and medieval fantasies to base their arguments upon.” A new frame is required, not factual counter-arguments. This is how George Lakoff explains it, “1) Repetition strengthens the synapses in neural circuits that people use in thinking 2) Whoever frames first has an advantage 3) Negating a frame activates and strengthens it.” Basically, Lakoff states that whoever frames the narrative first has an advantage and that negating a frame only activates and strengthens it. So responding to trolls and conspiracy theorists, which we often feel compelled to do, only makes the buggers stronger — an understanding of my confusion.

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bet on solar not AI

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On the last Friday of each month I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

“Those who love how machines ‘think’ tend to think like machines themselves.” —Fiona Tribe

Software engineering in 2026 be like “we need you to be physically present in the office so we can replace you with AI” —Tilton Raccoon

“No, I don’t want an AI assisted experience. I want clean air, forests, and a future for the next generation.” —Greenpeace

Oh, sure—when *the company* automates my job and keeps collecting the profits, that’s “innovation,” but when *I* automate my job and keep collecting a paycheck, that’s “time clock fraud.” —Max Leibman

Gall’s Law: “A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.” —Antoine Buteau

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it’s political

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Everything is political — even the learning organization.

Peter Senge’s development of the fifth discipline has informed much of my work around workplace learning for three decades. Sheila Damodaran takes a deep look at this seminal book.

The Five Disciplines were not assembled aesthetically. They were assembled structurally — each closing a vulnerability left open by the others, each compensating for a failure mode observable in real institutions.

—Systems Thinking prevented local optimisation from masquerading as improvement.
—Personal Mastery prevented aspiration from collapsing under institutional pressure.
—Mental Models prevented inherited assumptions from hardening into policy dogma.
—Team Learning prevented the conversation from degenerating into positional defence.
—Shared Vision prevented purpose from fragmenting into departmental ambition.

Remove one, and drift begins.

Emphasise one at the expense of others, and imbalance follows.
—The Fifth Discipline at Thirty-Five — Lineage, Surge, and Scale

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“let the discourse rage without you”

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Joan Westenberg covers a lot of ground in the post the discourse is a distributed denial-of-service attack. I will try to summarize and highlight what I found of importance.

A DDOS is an attack on a web server in an attempt to overload it so it can no longer function. The case that Westenberg refers to is one where thousands of internet devices — not necessarily computers — were pointed at the website of security expert Brian Krebs. As a side note, I would recommend Krebs’ Mastodon feed.

Westenberg goes on to show that the online social media space has become a massive distributed denial-of-service — for our collective brains. There is so much information — not all fake news but a lot of false information shared by people — that vies for our attention and we cannot cope with it.

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a reversal to tribalism

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In 2017 — we need faith in the future — I wrote that we are stuck between the Market and the Network era — citing the TIMN model — with significant yearnings in certain sectors to go back to our insular Tribal ways. While the Tribal form may be comforting, its structure threatens the foundations of democracy. And I felt that we were stuck in a period similar to the early era of the printing press. Printed books enabled the Protestant reformation which flamed conflicts like the European wars of religion, and only many years later developed into the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment. A reversion to Tribalism in our times may result in a period similar to the tumultuous 16th and early 17th centuries in Europe.

With the continuing release of the Epstein files, it looks like the reversal to tribalism is in full swing.

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