KM Freestyle

I have fielded a few queries on KM recently through work and social network, so I thought I would blog on some of the ideas out there that I like...

The traditional approaches irk me, I have found that then tend to focus on document or artifact management systems. Unfortunately, the information in these documents are highly codified and only have context for that experience. Dave Snowden is quite brutal on the production of these documents focussing on their retrospective coherence and the fundamental attribution error.

Personally, the thing I dislike about this form of KM is that the document is stored based on what it was related to and stored in that place and only linkable through that structure. Now I am aware that there are better systems out there and supposedly on their way into our work network. But is Sharepoint the silver bullet?

A completely integrated way of capturing experiences (and their meaning) as they occur is far more useful.

I have recently undertaken a job that will look at Organisational Health and Sustainability when I introduced the concept of using the AVT Comparison Workshop, it was joked by the client Could you put it into a Comic so that the Aircrew could read it?

I think the only risk is if it becomes too popular

Safety Management

I wasn't really very surprised to find out that someone else had been thinking about a narrative database in terms of Aviation Safety. My experience with the Defence Aviation Safety Database is that it gets very wound up over the details and processes. For example, a defective part requires a defect investigation; an insufficient publication needs an amendment. Apart from the occasional question of whether the support systems are sufficient to respond to a booming safety culture that reports every near miss and even the nearly near miss etc, there is the murky circumstances where there was not necessarily a root cause. So this sets us a scene that you have to report a safety event, it is expected to have a root cause or several and something has to be done about it. So apart from a spiralling process driven bureaucracy it becomes unattractive for a person to engage in the safety reporting and thus the system ceases to be useful.

A reasonable person could potentially see that the bureaucratic overheads of telling your story might actually prevent the lesson being learnt. I say this with knowledge of Sensemaker but are there ways of adjusting the micro-culture to talk about its failure and thus change the system we have into something more useful, from the ground up?

Just a thought

First of all, I am speaking without any authority at all (thank you Technorati)... but I thought it was basic that if you want a safe and undistracted workplace then you probably don't want to threaten the maintenance engineers' jobs.

Does Joyce know what he is getting into?