Originally answered Apr 12, 2017

Knowledge shared is knowledge squared.

Knowledge management doesn’t happen until somebody reuses something.

Carl Sandburg: “Everybody is smarter than anybody.”

Michael Polanyi: “We know more than we can tell.”

Karl Popper: “All life is problem solving.”

Bernard Lonergan: “One cannot play fast and loose with what one knows to be true.”

Imre Lakatos: “No degree of commitment to beliefs makes them knowledge.”

Thomas Kuhn: “The answers you get depend upon the questions you ask.”

Dave Snowden:

  • “Knowledge can only be volunteered it cannot be conscripted.”
  • “We only know what we know when we need to know it.”
  • “In the context of real need few people will withhold their knowledge.”
  • “Tolerated failure imprints learning better than success.”
  • “The way we know things is not the way we report we know things.”
  • “We always know more than we can say, and we will always say more than we can write down.”

Lew Platt: “If only HP knew what HP knows, we would be three times more productive.”

Larry Prusak: “If you have one dollar to invest in knowledge management, put one cent into information management and 99 cents into human interaction.”

Carla O’Dell:

  • “Put knowledge where people trip over it.”
  • “KM is there at the teachable moment.”

Bob Buckman: “Don’t be afraid to share what you know, because you know it better than anyone else!”

Chris Collison and Geoff Parcell: “You can’t manage knowledge — nobody can. What you can do is to manage the environment in which knowledge can be created, discovered, captured, shared, distilled, validated, transferred, adopted, adapted, and applied.”

Kaye Vivian: Good KM Quotes

Verna Allee:

  • 12 guiding principles
  1. Knowledge is messy. Because knowledge is connected to everything else, you can’t isolate the knowledge aspect of anything neatly. In the knowledge universe, you can’t pay attention to just one factor.
  2. Knowledge is self-organizing. The self that knowledge organizes around is organizational or group identity and purpose.
  3. Knowledge seeks community. Knowledge wants to happen, just as life wants to happen. Both want to happen as community. Nothing illustrates this principle more than the Internet.
  4. Knowledge travels via language. Without a language to describe our experience, we can’t communicate what we know. Expanding organizational knowledge means that we must develop the languages we use to describe our work experience.
  5. The more you try to pin knowledge down, the more it slips away. It’s tempting to try to tie up knowledge as codified knowledge-documents, patents, libraries, databases, and so forth. But too much rigidity and formality regarding knowledge lead to the stultification of creativity.
  6. Looser is probably better. Highly adaptable systems look sloppy. The survival rate of diverse, decentralized systems is higher. That means we can waste resources and energy trying to control knowledge too tightly.
  7. There is no one solution. Knowledge is always changing. For the moment, the best approach to managing it is one that keeps things moving along while keeping options open.
  8. Knowledge doesn’t grow forever. Eventually, some knowledge is lost or dies, just as things in nature. Unlearning and letting go of old ways of thinking, even retiring whole blocks of knowledge, contribute to the vitality and evolution of knowledge.
  9. No one is in charge. Knowledge is a social process. That means no one person can take responsibility for collective knowledge.
  10. You can’t impose rules and systems. If knowledge is truly self-organizing, the most important way to advance it is to remove the barriers to self-organization. In a supportive environment, knowledge will take care of itself.
  11. There is no silver bullet. There is no single leverage point or best practice to advance knowledge. It must be supported at multiple levels and in a variety of ways.
  12. How you define knowledge determines how you manage it. The “knowledge question” can present itself many ways. For example, concern about the ownership of knowledge leads to acquiring codified knowledge that is protected by copyrights and patents.
  • If you don’t have a way to tell your story other people will make it up for you.
  • Transformation happens one darn person at a time.
  • Conversation is the cellular level of knowledge creation — and the most ignored.
  • You cannot administer a network you can only serve it.
  • Meg Wheatley said, “You cannot fight a network with a hierarchy.”
  • Larry Prusak said, “Knowledge is in groups — not individuals.”
  • Winston Churchill said, “The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.”
  • Tom Peters said, “Heavy lifting is out; brains are in.”
  • Steve Denning and his colleagues Michel Pommier and Lesley Shneier:
  1. Knowledge sharing is essential to economic survival
  2. Communities of practice are the heart and soul of knowledge sharing
  3. Virtual community members also need physical interactions
  4. Storytelling ignites knowledge sharing

See also:

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Stan Garfield

Knowledge Management Author and Speaker, Founder of SIKM Leaders Community, Community Evangelist, Knowledge Manager https://sites.google.com/site/stangarfield/