> From: Complexity and Management Mailing List
> [mailto:COMPLEX-M@HOME.EASE.LSOFT.COM]On Behalf Of John Mikes
> Sent: April 4, 2000 4:33 PM
> To: COMPLEX-M@HOME.EASE.LSOFT.COM
> Subject: [COMPLEX-M] New thread
>
> Hullo, beloved Complexifiers!
> (If anybody is still alive and listening)
> I have a new topic in this field, which drew lots of bull, but very
> little susbstance. People teach it but nobody can tell what?
> The topic is KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT - I know that will
> touch some nerves, bu I have it to ask:
> is there something knowable about it?
> What I mean is: first identify knowledge. Some equate it with the
> information (mgmt). It is not. Then: What kind of mgmt? teach,
> organize, present, hide, or - horribile dictu: apply?
>
> Is the topic restricted to established knowledge, or any?
> Accidental knowledge is hard to manage, if it is destructive.
> Business knowledge has to be up-to-date, how can one manage
> the newly acquired in view of the obsolete? Who is right?
>
> I wonder if there is some interest in this field.
>
> John Mikes
john,
this one's been done over a hundred times at least on this and dozens of
other lists. more to your point, there still isn't as much clarity on the
subject as one would hope for. personally, i believe we are only just
beginning to see the first glimpses of something that might deserve the
important-sounding title of knowledge management.
my take on it: all of what we call our universe is constructed through a
process of synthesizing what has gone before with what is going on now to
produce an understanding of what is possible in the future.
knowledge is--this is a mouthful and it scares the bejeezuz out of the
infotech cats--a synthesis that involves the pursuit of an understanding
of our experience of the world as constrained by the context of the moment
of our perceived need.
knowledge management isn't--reducing ideas and thoughts into bits and
bytes that can be quantified, categorized, stored and manipulated. that's
information management.
i believe that one cannot manage knowledge per se. the best one can hope
for is to manage 'for' knowledge. that is to say, to manage your affairs
in a way that is conducive to the emergence of knowledge.
knowledge is an act of human 'performance' ('human', for now that is) and
not a 'thing'. having said this, there's a general belief in our world
that if we 'organize' or otherwise order our affairs, these efforts will
lead to relative advantage for those who do so. this implies that the
thing we seem to want to call knowledge management is not so much a
functional discipline that is the domain of some arcane priesthood but
rather a basic skill that each and every human being is capable of
performing at one or other level of proficiency or competency.
contemporary shorthand for 'knowledge management': thinking.
i see it being as simple as that. to 'implement knowledge management' is
little more than applying the processes of organizing information,
assumptions, ideas and experience into a coherent basis for decision and
action. these processes are nothing less and nothing more than everyday
thinking.
to excel at thinking is to excel at knowledge management. what this
implies for the high tech industry is profound. instead of trying to coax
technology to do what we do--and forcing people to conform to the shape of
both machines and information in the process--it would be far more
sensible to focus attention on having technology support humans in doing
better what we have evolved to do in the first place: that is, of course,
to think.
this implies conjoining both humans and machines not in a literal sense
but through processes. human thinking is a process. human thought
processes do not occur as an orderly and predictable sequence of discrete
activities that can be identified and segregated. human thought processes
unfold in the development of a flow of meanings from which we discern or
construct our reality.
human thought processes are complex and dynamic while machine processes
are mechanistic and reproducible. each is suited to a different purpose.
machines are great for information processing. humans are great for
thought processing. each can benefit from the other so long as the means
of intermediation between the two is optimized.
almost all current so-called 'knowledge management technologies' continue
to optimize for information processing, forcing human users to assume a
substantially unnatural posture. it's time to look at life from the other
side for a while. it's time to address the interface, the 'zone' that
exists between humans and information technologies. if knowledge is an
act of performance, then, instead of developing technologies that can
think for us, why not develop technologies optimized for intermediation as
opposed to processing?
instead of focusing on knowledge management, we should be focusing on
knowledge media.
instead of artificial intelligence, why not create intelligence
augmentation technologies? our current worldview says that technology
should focus on amplifying the effects of brute force processing. the
machines are getting cheaper, faster and more accurate. in fact, they're
evolving rather to our advantage in terms of doing well those hundreds of
thousands of things in which humans don't or can't excel. to a certain
extent, our servitude to this mechanism pays off handsomely in terms of
what we receive in exchange. but when it comes to thinking, everything is
different. thinking isn't mechanistic.
i believe we're at a tipping point. i perceive we're at a place in the
continuum where if humans go much farther in assuming the shape of our
technologies--and especially our information technologies--the very idea
of what it means to be human is challenged.
thinking is the one thing that separate humans from all other lifeforms
we've encountered and been able to understand so far. that doesn't make
us superior. it just means that thinking is what we do. it's our raison
d'etre as a human race. it's the role we play in the dinner theatre of
the absurd that we call life, the universe and everything. if we somehow
coax machines to do our principle job for us, we'll become redundant. in
nature, there is no such thing as a leisure class. like a depleted skin
cell, we'll be sloughed off to be replaced by something newer, more
evolved and more in tune with the dynamics of the moment.
machines are not like humans and humans are not like machines. each works
differently, each does different things, each is better suited for some
things and less so for others. granted, we may see a time when carbon-
and silicon-based life are indistinguishable. indeed, we may have little
or no opportunity to influence this possible outcome. what troubles me is
not that you won't be able to tell the differences between them but rather
that neither will exist any longer, being replaced by some entirely new
entity emerged from their fusion. shades of the borg. (curiously, i see
'the borg' as a very apt metaphor for a not-too-distant possible future
that i take very seriously.)
thinking is what evolution has optimized humans to do. it could then be
considered that thinking is the highest order of activity that a human can
meaningfully pursue. why, out of all of the possibilities open to us in
this universe, would we choose to suborn the one thing that defines us as
human--the pursuit of knowledge--to technology. instead, let is shape the
technology to suit the needs of the human. humans don't need technology
that can do their thinking for them. but we could definitely use
something that helps us do our thinking better, faster and cheaper.
let the games begin...
cheers, arnold
--"Arnold Wytenburg" <arnold@originalthinking.com>
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