Knowledge Management often speaks of knowledge flowing through organizations. This language makes knowledge appear as something that can be moved, stored, and managed like an object. A more useful view is to see knowledge as something that emerges in interaction, shaped by context, interpretation, and practice.
In the Knowledge Management community, “knowledge flow” is a familiar and widely used term.
It refers to how knowledge moves through an organization. When people say knowledge is not flowing, they usually mean that expertise is stuck in silos, lessons learned are not reaching those who need them, or insights are not spreading across teams.
The metaphor of flow suggests movement. Knowledge travels from source to destination. It passes through channels such as meetings, communities of practice, mentoring relationships, reports, digital platforms, and informal networks.
In this accepted sense, improving knowledge flow means:
- Reducing barriers between departments
- Connecting people who need knowledge with those who have it
- Ensuring that lessons from one project inform the next
- Making expertise visible and accessible
- Enabling faster organizational learning
Different schools within KM interpret this differently.
An information-centric view focuses on documents, repositories, and systems that allow knowledge to circulate.
A people-centric view emphasizes social interaction, conversation, and collaboration.
A process-oriented view maps knowledge along business processes, from creation to application.
A network-oriented view analyzes connections among individuals and identifies communication bottlenecks.
Across these variations, the shared assumption is that knowledge exists as a thing, something that can be created, stored, and moved, either deliberately transferred by people or systems, or even seen as moving of its own accord, flowing through an organization like a resource.
That assumption deserves closer scrutiny.
The Ontology Hidden in the Metaphor
To speak of knowledge flow is usually meant as a straightforward way to describe how knowledge moves, or is moved, through an organization. That basic idea is relatively unproblematic. The difficulty is that the metaphor is often taken too literally. It begins to suggest that knowledge behaves like water or electricity, as if something identifiable travels from one place to another while remaining essentially the same thing.
But knowledge does not behave like that.
When one team shares a lesson with another, the receiving team does not receive the same knowledge. They interpret, adapt, filter, and reconstruct it within their own context. Meaning is generated locally.
At that point, what exactly has flowed?
The metaphor preserves an object view of knowledge. It assumes that knowledge can be extracted, packaged, and transferred. Even the people-centric version often remains a softer transfer model. The pipes are social rather than technological, but the logic is still movement.
If knowledge is enacted, situated, and relational, then there is no stable entity moving through channels. Only interactions trigger new understanding.
The metaphor encodes an ontology. It treats knowledge as something that exists independently of the act of knowing.
Stability and the Illusion of Transport
The language of flow assumes some stability of content. Something must remain sufficiently intact to justify the claim that it has traveled.
But in practice, what moves across organizational boundaries is rarely stable knowledge. It is fragments, signals, documents, stories, and models. Their meaning depends entirely on the recipient’s frame and context.
What one group calls a “lesson learned” may be irrelevant or even counterproductive elsewhere.
If meaning is reconstructed each time, then flow may be the wrong image altogether. What is happening is not transportation but repeated local construction triggered by interaction.
The metaphor hides that labour.
Managerial Control and the Engineering Fantasy
The concept of knowledge flow also carries an implicit managerial ambition. If knowledge flows like water, then it can be engineered. Bottlenecks can be removed. Channels can be widened. Velocity can be increased.
This reinforces the idea that knowledge dynamics are designable in the same way as supply chains.
But knowledge dynamics are emergent. They depend on trust, incentives, identity, power, attention, and framing. They cannot be engineered in the same way pipes can.
When organizations invest heavily in systems to “improve flow,” they often discover that increased circulation does not produce deeper understanding. Downloads increase. Dashboards look impressive. Behaviour does not change.
The metaphor encourages a focus on movement rather than integration.
The Seductive Power of the Metaphor
There is a deeper problem here that is easy to overlook.
For many people, “knowledge flow” is one of the first concepts they encounter when introduced to Knowledge Management. It is intuitive and accessible. It helps them see that knowledge matters, that it needs to move, and that organizations suffer when it does not.
In that sense, the metaphor does useful work.
But it also does something more subtle and far more consequential.
It encourages people, from the very beginning, to think of knowledge as a thing. Something that exists in its own right. Something that can be captured, stored, moved, and managed.
Once that way of thinking takes hold, it goes deep. It shapes how people understand knowledge long before they question it. It becomes the default frame.
Later, when we say that knowledge is enacted, situated, and relational, that it emerges in interaction rather than existing independently of it, this can be surprisingly difficult to grasp. Not because the idea is inherently complex, but because it conflicts with an earlier, deeply embedded assumption.
The metaphor has already done its work.
This is one of the challenges in the field of Knowledge Management. We introduce people to the importance of knowledge using a metaphor that misrepresents its nature. And once that representation takes hold, it is hard to dislodge.
The result is a persistent tendency to treat knowledge as an object, even in approaches that claim to move beyond that view.
“In the daytime, the sun travels across the sky. By evening, it is tired, so it goes down behind the hills to sleep. During the night it rests, and in the morning it rises to begin its journey again.”
For a young child, this matches what they see. The sun appears to move. It disappears. It returns. The story is simple and easy to understand. A proper explanation would only confuse them.
But it is wrong.
If an adult still believed this story, their understanding would be distorted. Navigation, seasons, and planetary motion, all of which would become harder to grasp because the foundational image is wrong.
The metaphor works at one level and fails at another.
This is the risk with many metaphors in Knowledge Management, whether we speak of knowledge as a substance that can be captured, stored, controlled, or made to flow.
Such language may help KM students grasp something quickly. But if they mistake the metaphor for an explanation/reality, it fixes the wrong image in place. What helps them initially later limits their understanding.
We should not be teaching adults simplified stories like the ones we once taught children.
Circulation Is Not Learning
The assumption that more flow equals more learning is rarely examined.
Documents can circulate widely and remain unread. Communities can meet regularly and reinforce existing assumptions. Cross-functional forums can generate noise rather than insight.
Learning depends on interpretation and application, not on circulation alone.
If knowledge is a difference that makes a difference, then the decisive question is not whether something moved, but whether it changed practice.
Flow measures movement. It does not measure transformation.
Rethinking the Frame
A more radical move would be to question the metaphor entirely.
Instead of imagining knowledge flowing, it may be more accurate to think in terms of coordination, alignment, or co-creation. Instead of transfer, think interaction. Instead of movement, think emergence.
From this perspective, what organizations need is not better pipes but better conditions for meaningful interaction.
Conversational Leadership
If leadership is enacted in and through conversation, the implications are significant.
What is often described as knowledge flow is, at ground level, people engaging with one another. They question, interpret, challenge, and make sense of situations together. Understanding develops through that engagement.
Knowledge does not flow through conversation. It is generated and regenerated within it.
Conversational Leadership is not a role or a position. It is something we do. It shows up whenever we take responsibility for the quality of the conversations we are part of.The task is not to accelerate movement but to shape interaction. Not to push content faster, but to open space where differences can be noticed, explored, and worked with in practice.
Once seen this way, the language of flow begins to look less like a helpful metaphor and more like a constraint on thinking. It frames the challenge as transportation when the real work is relational.
Changing that frame changes the problem itself.
We should stop trying to push knowledge around and pay closer attention to how we work and talk together. If we focus on interaction, interpretation, and application, we are more likely to see real change. Small shifts in how we engage may matter more than any system we build.
Posts that link to this post
- Classical vs Relational KM From transactions and content to interaction and meaning
In-person, 7–11 September 2026
Warbrook House, Hampshire, UK
We are living and working in conditions of uncertainty, complexity, and rapid change. This week-long workshop with David Gurteen and John Hovell offers a space to practise Conversational Leadership as a shared, lived experience.