Nicholas
Carr's recent book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains
touches on an issue that APQC has been grappling with for several years--namely,
that knowledge management is limited by the capacity of human attention, which
many claim is being damaged by digital immersion, or excessive exposure to
digital media.
One
thing that hasn't changed with the onset of the Internet is the capacity of our
short-term memories. According to research conducted by George A. Miller in the
1950s, an individual's short-term memory can hold only seven small "chunks"
of information at a time, plus or minus two. If you use memory tricks to expand
the size of each chunk, then you can increase the amount of information you can
recall later, but that doesn't affect how much is in your short-term memory at
any one time. It's still just seven chunks. No amount of technology can change
that limitation.
In
other words, your brain is like a big retail store. You have a massive amount
of room in the warehouse, which is your long-term memory and knowledge, but
there is very limited counter space, or short-term memory where conscious
thought can take place. Whether you are pulling stuff out of the warehouse
(using what you know) or shuffling things around on the counter (trying to
multitask), your limitations are far greater than you think. Your mental
counter space is small, and stuff is always falling off. You become aware of
this when you walk into a room and can't remember why you came (because some
other thought knocked the reason off the counter). And although multitasking
may save time, experts say it can be draining on your brain's resources. As Laura Vanderberg, assistant director of the Time Management
Consulting Program at Tufts University, points out, "It's 'mental counter
space' and there's only so much of it."
Why
does this matter to knowledge management? Because KM approaches should be designed
with the assumption that people can't remember everything they know or once
knew ("I don't know what I know until you ask me, and even then, I may have forgotten").
We need to capture information and lessons learned when they are fresh and make
that knowledge available to others when and where they need it. KM exists
because every employee can't know or remember everything, and our tools need to
recognize that fact.
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