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November 29, 2005

Smart vs. Dumb

Here's a thought: what's the difference between dumb and stupid? Dumb is when you're wrong and you don't know it. Stupid is when you're wrong and you do know it. If you're right and you don't know it, are you smart?

This looks like it leaves organizations with only one out of four options to deal with reality: when you're right and you do know it.

Managing knowledge has a lot of sex appeal now, but managing dumbness has been around for a while.

There's the infamous "Need to Know Basis" -- applied to the occasions where for the thinking done by the audience in question, more is less! It features the speech, "Take my word for it, you don't want to know!" This cool bit of judo, or Enlightened Dumbness, is a vital tool to have when the smart thing to do is to lower the risk of increasing the risk. How parental!

Back out on the streets, there's the ecstatic expletive "Stoopid!" -- applied to something so self-evidently excellent that in order to not notice, you'd have to be unconscious or ... stupid. (Although, you wouldn't be "Dope!" because when you're Dope you are pretty much Stoopid, only probably just for the moment instead of endlessly like Stoopid things are.) This is the label on that box that those "best practices" keep arriving in from all those other companies... The fine print says, "Take my word for it!" Admittedly a weak form of self-evidence, but what a great excuse to not have to know something else.

Enter "knowledge management." A discipline dedicated to the twin goals of enlightened dumbness and informed ecstacy. An environment where most of what gets known is the things that are the best to know. An important new model of organizational execution. A rave.

A rave? Spontaneous formations of virtual communities... built around certain ways of expressing or celebrating a theme, counting on targeted just-in-time communication of information from sources whose credibility is based on the channel they use to transmit -- but whose channels are spontaneously formed through the content itself.

Gossip.

This is a good thing?

The conventional organization is based on distributing (pushing) responsibility for what you're aware that you know. But how are you aware of what you know? Well, you're told.

Ironically, the knowledge-based organization is based on taking (pulling) responsibility for what you're aware that you don't know.

Oh! You mean Research.

Does this make an organization smarter?

It probably doesn't make the organization smarter unless the research itself is well organized.

A perfect example of what organizes research is requirements. As with a rave or a community of gossip, a knowledge-managed organization has a characteristic feature of the requirements already being globally acknowledged. The problem for most organizations is to communicate requirements globally without them losing their context. This communication often can be accomplished only just-in-time, so pending that the organization has only latent knowledge. In responding (with research) to requirements, the organization discovers what it knows.

In this way we can see that the distinctive contribution of KM to the organization is that is helps the conversion from being unaware of what you know to being aware of what you know. The key to making the organization smarter, though, is to have better requirements established.

The complementary problem to solve is the one of moving from being unaware of what you don't know to being aware of what you don't know. But assuming this is accomplished, ending with requirements being established, its value quickly drains away unless KM follows up by driving response to the requirements.

A final observation to make about knowledge management is this: management is a discipline that cycles attention to something from a concept and design (i.e., research) stage to development, deployment, control and assessment stages. Over extended periods of time, the most competitive advantage of leveraging knowledge progressively moves from the control point in the general management cycle of attention backwards towards the concept point.

(To be continued.)

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at November 29, 2005 2:47 PM

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