filter failure is not acceptable

Fake news. PR hype. Content marketing. Advertorials. Click bait. Propaganda. Doublespeak. Newspeak. Yellow journalism. Shock jocks. Post-truth. Spam. Phishing.

Digital information comes from all directions, and much of it from dubious sources or with the intent to misinform. Today, it is just too easy to create, replicate, and share digital information. As a result, we are enveloped in it. This is why ad blockers on browsers have become so popular. It’s why everyone needs spam filters for their email. Filter failure is not acceptable in the digital workplace. But neither is living in an information bubble.

The challenge for any organization dependent on knowledge is to ensure that implicit knowledge from those closest to customers and the external world informs the explicit knowledge that is shared throughout the company. Knowledge flow has to continuously become knowledge stock. Individuals practising personal knowledge mastery have to be an intrinsic part of organizational knowledge management. Knowledge comes from and through an organization’s people. It is not some external material distributed through the chain of command.

The explicit knowledge officially sanctioned by the organization is an emergent property of the implicit knowledge that is shared between employees. Without an underlying implicit knowledge flow, the explicit information bears no relationship to the lived reality of those in the organization. The chats, questions, and conversations between employees can be collected and refined to inform organizational search engines. Self-published works, like blogs, can contribute to official documents like white papers and brochures. Implicit and explicit information must be connected or the organizational knowledge base becomes a wasteland of useless documents. Is this your intranet?

Ensuring that people can find the right information leads to sharing better (or the best) information. This in turn helps everyone in the organization take informed action. Trusted relationships that enable open knowledge-sharing result in the entire organization making better decisions.