How Long Should Knowledge Last?

By
Darcy Lemons
on October 15, 2008 Comments (0)
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I recently had the privilege of speaking at the second annual Southern California KM Forum. I met many great people there and learned a lot about their various KM programs and activities. One presentation in particular sticks out in my mind. Given by Charlotte Linde from the NASA Ames Research Center, it asked the question: How long should knowledge last? One month? One year? Five years? Ten years?

Charlotte illustrated her question with the example of NASA's new mission to return to the moon (Constellation). No one realized after the last mission in 1972 (Apollo 17) that it would be 35+ years before we returned again. Much of the knowledge of that mission has not been lost, per se, but mislaid. Some of it is in documents in boxes in people's garages. Some only resides in the brains of the individuals who worked on the mission. Some is recorded on videotapes or saved in programming code that we no longer have the technology to read or decode.

NASA probably is not alone in this quandary, although the agency's story may be more well-known than any other. It's likely that many organizations with R&D functions have stories of tools, technologies, drug compounds, etc. that were ahead of their time and shelved until it became viable to revisit them. Did the organizations appropriately capture knowledge related to how those things were developed or discovered? If the organizations needed to put these shelved projects into development and bring them to market tomorrow, could it be done? Conversely, if the organizations suddenly needed to bring an old technology out of the mothballs, could they do it? For example (and it's a simplistic one), what if we as a society suddenly decided that we needed to give up cars and trucks and return to the horse-drawn carriage? Would we still have the knowledge to build the carriages? (I warned you, it's a simplistic example--but one I thought most of us could relate to.)

Charlotte's question about the lifespan of knowledge caught my attention because it dovetails with research we're doing here at APQC on "knowledge for the future." One of the questions we're asking is: How do organizations determine what knowledge will be needed for future organizational success? To date, much of KM's focus has been on retaining and transferring critical knowledge--knowledge we know we need today and will need in the immediate future because it applies to our organizations' current processes, products, and services. But what kind of strategies and techniques are organizations using to identify the knowledge that will be needed five, 10, or even 15 years from now?

Discussions about the lifespan of knowledge (i.e., the knowledge life cycle) are nothing new. However, as I previously stated, those discussions are usually centered on knowledge needed over the short term. How do you identify the knowledge necessary for your organization's future success, and how long should you plan for that knowledge to last?

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