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

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Conversational Leadership is closely related to Knowledge Management. Let’s look at that relationship.

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Knowledge Management has been around since the mid-90s and has evolved considerably since then. Nancy Dixon, in her article The Three Eras of Knowledge Management from 2017, describes that evolution.

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

All three eras are intertwined and are evolving.

My view on the structure and evolution of KM is like Nancy’s, except I talk about four levels of KM rather than three eras.

KM activities such as governance, policies, standards, metrics, and the like, which 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 such things as encyclopedias, patents, process, and how-to information that is 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 is about Information Technology (IT), databases, intranets, SharePoint, document repositories, record management systems, and the cloud.

I include big data and machine learning at this level.

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

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

Strictly speaking, 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. It is about peer-to-peer learning tools such as peer assists, after-action reviews, and communities of practice. It is also about 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, then it would be included in this level.

This second level is primarily about people and conversation and only a little about IT. For the vast majority of 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, implementation.

The need for improved sensemaking and decision-making is vitally important in today’s complex world where our old methods are failing us.

This level is firmly about people and conversation. It has almost nothing to do with IT. It is, unfortunately, still an emerging field of KM that few organizations engage in 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 and influence and work with other people, especially those in authority, is power. You can have all the knowledge in the world, make perfect decisions but 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 not so much about technology, sharing, or sensemaking. It’s more about human psychology and behaviors. If we don’t understand ourselves, we don’t know what motivates us. If we don’t understand each other’s emotions, fears, hopes, and aspirations, even the best KM strategy will fail. We need to understand better what it means to be human – human complexity.

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

Conversational Leadership

We live in an increasingly hyper-connected world, which has resulted in massive complexity, which in turn has led to a volatile, unpredictable, confusing, and ambiguous place to live. We face many challenges because of this complexity, not just in business but at personal, family, societal, and global levels.

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

Conversational Leadership is about appreciating the transformative power of conversation, practicing leadership, and adopting a conversational approach to the way we work together in a complex 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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The real value of Conversational Leadership is not in “Knowledge Sharing,” which is rarely strategic — it is the strategic processes of “Sense-Making & Decision Making” and “Working Together” — critical 21st-century skills.

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•  Knowledge Is Not Power Our ability to influence people is power

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