Wisdom Management

Wisdom is documented everywhere. Billions of books have been written by man, not to mention articles, blog posts, letters, memos… do we need any more? All this wisdom is now at our fingertips, a search phrase away.

Except it isn’t. With so many trees, we don’t see the forest. There is probably written guidance for every situation you are in, advice to make our lives infinitely meaningful, turn us all into billionaires and achieve our highest purpose – but we don’t find it. If we do, it’s because we actively look for it. And whatever it is we are reading, there is always the opportunity cost that we could be reading something else, something more effective.

And so we float – inside of an information highway, not knowing what to read, what path to follow, which activity to do next, and why we are even thinking about this in the first place. We have no sense of purpose, and if we do, we’re not sure if it’s the right one. We don’t know, and so we just give up.

To combat this, we naturally create structures – we apply to university programs where there is a clearly define program, with clear hoops that we must jump through; we find jobs where we must achieve certain challenges, and again, where there are clear goal we must achieve. These determine our actions and create some sort of singleness of purpose.

But our life is still a mashup. Every day we “find ourselves” in conversations; We read books, articles and blog posts that “catch our attention” or somehow find their way into our inbox. It is as if we were to press the “random article” button on Wikipedia. We float about our lives spinning and turning, topsy-turvy by random knowledge particles that hit us in all directions.

Is there a better way?

To a certain extent what I described above is unavoidable. It is a fact of life in the 21st century that we are overloaded by opportunities and conflicting values. Time is continuous, our lifes is a progression of sequential events, but our mind races from one thing to another. We all have ADHD: we cannot truly multi task because we can only have one thing at our attention at a time, and so our timeline looks like a Microsoft Project schedule segmented into trillions of tiny task bars in succession, as we move from one item to the next in an alarming frenzy.

We are faced with the challenge of choosing how random our choices will be. We can decide to let it float, or we can decide to channel our purpose, and pursue the actions that we pre-determine according to a plan.

Some people may say that they are quite satisfied with the current situation – either they already have enough singleness of purpose, or they are surfers. They like to surf through life on whatever wave arrives.

Others feel a lack of purpose. They want meaning! they want their actions, deeds and even thoughts to amount to something, to mean something, to make a difference, even if it is for the sake of their own personal happiness. Being a floater simply makes them miserable!

What is the reason for this desire? I think it has something to do with achieving our dreams. Some people are away-from motivated – that is, they like to spot problems and put out fires.  These are the surfers. Others are toward motivated – they have a vision of an end result – and they strive there. Close your eyes and try to see which type you are. It’s OK to be either one or have elements of both. Which one do you want to be?

So for the second category of people, you need to ask an important question:

How do I achieve singleness of purpose?

To answer this question, let’s ask a few more questions:

What actions do I need to take to achieve this kind of singleness of purpose?

What plan do I need to design?

What do I need to choose to read, listen to, which lectures to attend, which people should I turn into my mentors and teachers?

These are the real questions you should be asking yourself – they will lead you to your answer. They are about bringing “Knowledge Management” (and management in general) into the realm of your personal life: create objectives and visions; draft plans; and carry them out. Let’s call it Personal Wisdom Management.

In other words, the answer is to ask yourself questions! Lots of questions – and then to go about answering them. Instead of clicking “random article” on Wikipedia, go to your favorite article and follow its links. Start with the quesitons above. Try to answer them. You will see that they will lead to more questions. Answer them as well. You will notice that these questions put you on a straight path – a journey of discovery. It will feel like riding one of these lever-propelled cars on a train track, achieving amazing speeds. You’ll get to zoom through the world towards you destination with mindblowing speeds and knife edge percision!

You’ll still face forks in the tracks – decisions you’ll have to make along the way. But your goal – your destination – the answer to the questions you ask yourself – will guide your decisions and will tell you which way to turn along the way.

Corporations have been struggling with implementing communities of practice – the lack of organizational structure and employee loyalty to their own work prevented from Communities of Practice from being effective from a managerial perspective.

However, the key to CoPs success is to utilize discussion forums for teams working onto the same goal, and the discussions forums / wikis were used as a tool to do work. Under such circumstances, the employees learned in the process, as a side effect of their completed work.

KM is hard to implement in an established organization, because of cultural issues: people are unwilling to share and are protective of their knowledge.

But this is not so in a startup: when starting a company anew, a KM culture can be developed from the very beginning.

In a new organization, people can enter with the precondition that all work (documents, presentations, etc.) done is posted up on the company wiki for all to see. This way, there are no secrets (save for some sensitive information such as passwords and financial data) – when it comes to the knowledge that fuels the business, everyone shares with everyone from the start.

I’d like to found, or be part of, such a company.

Turns out, there is a Knowledge Management Institute out there, and it even offers an online KM Certification, for only US$2,995! Isn’t that something?

I wonder who is behind this institute. Who started it? Is it a private enterprize? A brillian business idea? How does having a KM certification allow for acquiring a KM job? I signed up for their free membership, and they emailed me this promotional video: http://www.kminstitute.org/cms/video1/player.html

One way to see KM is bringing the classroom into the organization, and turning your employees into students and teachers. Not that this hasn’t been done in the past, but if we were to put it simply, what would be the difference between the two other than terminology?