Dave Snowden of Cognitive Edge  reminded the 300+ audience that knowledge managment (KM) has really only been around for 10 years or so, the same as the Internet — so early days still.  Fundamentally, we only know what we know when we need to know it — something triggers a memory.  The way people know things in the field is different from how they describe it in an interview.  As Dave always says, “We know more than we can tell, we can tell more than we can write.  Knoweldge has three focuses — experience and practice, stuff that we can tell (engineers through stories), stuff we can write down which is limited and takes time and effort to do.  The bulk of knowedge  is in experience and narrative.  Social computing tools are now available to  support.

Aside, stopping smoking has stopped a number of natural story telling, narrative, pathways for sharing knoweldge.

Dave talked about:  sense-making — How do we make sense of the world so we can act in it?; complex adaptive systems (order systems constrains agent behavior and innovation; chaotic systems are unconstrained)   — are likely constrains the system and the agents co-evolve to create another system which is unpredictable.  He then told his wonderful amusing stories about childrens birthday parties (12 year old boys and 15 year old girls) which are great metaphors for his points around early signal detection, disrupting patterns, distributed cognitiion, etc.

And congrats Dave on receiving the Academy of Management’s Award for the best article by practitioners — and article which Dave wrote with Mary Boone which was published in Harvard Business Review, Nov 2007, Leader’s Framework for Decision Making.  To hear more about this join their workshop at KMWorld & Intranets 2008, Monday September 22nd in San Jose.