The Four Levels of Knowledge Management The relation between Conversational Leadership and Knowledge Management

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Knowledge Management has evolved since the mid-90s, shifting from managing information to building collective knowledge. The challenge lies in adapting KM practices to meet today’s complex needs. A four-level framework can provide a structured approach, helping organizations move from information management to supporting agency and communityship.

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[KM} has existed since the mid-90s and has evolved considerably since then. Nancy Dixon, in her 2017 article “The Three Eras of Knowledge Management,” describes that evolution.

• Era 1 – Leveraging Explicit Knowledge
• Era 2 – Leveraging Experiential Knowledge
• Era 3 – Leveraging Collective Knowledge

All three eras are intertwined and evolving.

My view on the structure and evolution of KM is similar to Nancy’s, except I discuss four levels rather than three eras.

KM activities, such as governance, policies, standards, metrics, and related elements that form part of any systematic approach to KM, apply across all four levels.

In my definition, knowledge only exists in the human mind—anything written down or stored in a computer is information. This includes encyclopedias, patents, processes, and how-to information, often referred to in everyday language as knowledge.

Let’s look at these four levels.

Knowledge Management

1. Information Management

Reports aren’t knowledge.

Credit: Peter Senge

The most basic level of KM is ensuring that people have access to relevant, timely, high-quality information. It is about the centralized capture, categorization, tagging, storage, and distribution of information. It is about books, papers, and reports, increasingly in electronic form. This KM level concerns Information Technology (IT), databases, intranets, SharePoint, document repositories, record management systems, and the cloud.

I include big data Big data is a field that treats ways to analyze, systematically extract information from, or otherwise deal with data sets that are too large or complex to be dealt with by traditional data-processing application software. and machine learning Machine learning (ML) is the scientific study of algorithms and statistical models that computer systems use to perform a specific task without using explicit instructions, relying on patterns and inference instead. at this level.

For some organizations, this is all there is to KM.

One fundamental point often not given the consideration it deserves is the quality of the information used for sensemaking and decision-making. The video series The War on Sensemaking by Daniel Schmachtenberger powerfully highlights that our information ecosystem is heavily polluted. Little information can be trusted to be of sufficient quality and not dangerously misleading.

This level is not Knowledge Management; it is Information Management. If you see KM as about making better decisions, it is clearly predicated on having high-quality, just-in-time information.

2. Knowledge Sharing

Sharing knowledge is not about giving people something or getting something from them. That is only valid for information sharing.

Sharing knowledge occurs when people are genuinely interested in helping one another develop new capacities for action; it is about creating learning processes.

Credit: Peter Senge

Knowledge Sharing is the second level and is sometimes known as peer learning. It is about people sharing their knowledge, peer-to-peer learning tools such as peer assists, after-action reviews, and communities of practice, and making personal knowledge explicit through activities like blogging and populating wikis, and then sharing this information.

Although formal training/education is not generally seen as part of KM, if it is, it would be included in this level.

This second level is primarily about people and conversation, and only a little about IT. For most organizations, KM stops here.

3. Sensemaking, Decision Making, and Innovation

Sensemaking, decision-making, and innovation comprise the third level of KM. We can have perfect information, but this does not necessarily mean that the information is well understood or that we make good decisions. This level is about bringing people together using group conversational tools such as Knowledge Cafés to make sense of new technology, an emerging competitor, or a new regulation, and subsequently making better-informed decisions and innovating wisely.

It is also about strategy formulation and implementation.

Improved sensemaking and decision-making are vitally important in today’s complex world, where our old methods are failing.

This level is firmly about people and conversation. It has almost nothing to do with IT. Unfortunately, it is still an emerging field of KM that few organizations engage with today.

For all our knowledge, we have no idea what we're talking about.

We don't understand what's going on in our business, our market, and our world.

Knowledge Management shouldn't be about helping us to know more. It should be about helping us to understand.

So, how do we understand things? It's through stories that we understand how the world works.

Credit: David Weinberger

4. Agency and Communityship

People often say that knowledge is power, but knowledge is not power—self-motivation, genuine commitment, and the ability to act on knowledge, influence, and work with other people, especially those in authority, are power. You can have all the knowledge in the world and make perfect decisions, but you do not have the power to act. We need to help each other develop agency.

I think "knowledge management" is a bullshit issue. Let me tell you why.

I can give you perfect information, I can give you perfect knowledge and it won't change your behavior one iota.

People choose not to change their behavior because the culture and the imperatives of the organization make it too difficult to act upon the knowledge.

Knowledge is not the power. Power is power. The ability to act on knowledge is power.

Most people in most organizations do not have the ability to act on the knowledge they possess.

End of story.

Credit: Michael Schrage

The second part of this level overlaps to some degree with agency, which is communityship – a word coined by Henry Mintzberg.

The idea that underpins communityship is that everyone in a community – an organization being a community – should see leadership as a practice and not as a position of authority. Every one of us can choose to lead.

This KM level is less about technology, sharing, or sensemaking and more about human psychology and behaviors. We don’t know what motivates us if we don’t understand ourselves. Even the best KM strategy will fail if we don’t understand each other’s emotions, fears, hopes, and aspirations. We need to better understand what it means to be human—human complexity.

Few, if any, organizations take agency seriously, and even fewer understand the concept of communityship.

Conversational Leadership

We live in an increasingly hyperconnected world, which has led to massive complexity. This complexity has led to a volatile, unpredictable, confusing, and ambiguous place to live. Because of this complexity, we face many challenges, not just in business but also at personal, family, societal, and global levels.

We can better address this complexity by taking responsibility for the changes we want to see in our organization (or the world), practicing Conversational Leadership, and transforming how we “interact and converse with each other.”

Conversational Leadership is about how we respond to the complexity of the world we’re living in. It’s about taking responsibility for the changes we want to see, and recognising that none of us can do that alone.

By practising leadership through dialogue, we bring in different perspectives, we listen, we question, and we learn and think together. In this way, dialogue becomes the means by which we create the possibility of a better world.

Credit: David Gurteen

Conversational Leadership is a new mindset, skillset, and toolset for designing, convening, and holding conversations, especially strategic ones.

A strategic conversation has the potential to influence the future direction of an individual, an organization, a community, a society, or the world.

Credit: David Gurteen

Conversational Leadership plays a fundamental role in all of the above levels of Knowledge Management except the first, “Information Management.” It effectively underpins all of KM. It is a core KM capability – the capacity to hold meaningful, quality, impactful conversations.

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To make the most of Knowledge Management, go beyond information sharing. Embrace practices like sensemaking, decision-making, and supporting agency. Conversational Leadership can guide your organization to adapt, innovate, and strengthen communities. Start by identifying areas for growth and gradually integrating these practices into your daily interactions.

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