What Is a Knowledge Worker? David Weinberger David Weinberger (2000)

Here’s a definition of that pesky and borderline elitist phrase, ‘knowledge worker’.

A knowledge worker is someone whose job entails having really interesting conversations at work.

The characteristics of conversations map to the conditions for genuine knowledge generation and sharing: they’re unpredictable interactions among people speaking in their own voice about something they’re interested in.

The conversants implicitly acknowledge that they don’t have all the answers (or else the conversation is really a lecture) and risk being wrong in front of someone else.

And conversations overcome the class structure of business, suspending the organization chart at least for a little while.

If you think about the aim of Knowledge Management as enabling better conversations rather than lassoing stray knowledge doggies, you end up focusing on breaking down the physical and class barriers to conversation. And if that’s not what Knowledge Management is really about, then you ought to be doing it anyway.

Credit: David Weinberger

•  What Is a Knowledge Worker? A knowledge worker is someone whose job entails having really interesting conversations at work