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.
Exactly !
Unfortunately, the enterprise KM system is a *HUGE* external warehouse, located further away from your own little storehouse...
This is key:
"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"
But there are two different components here:
1. "We need to capture information and lessons learned when they are fresh"
2. "(We need to) make that knowledge available to others when and where they need it"
There is a conflict between 1 and 2; you should capture it when fresh, but others won't need it at that point (or maybe ever; what *you* need to capture may often be unique to you and your job). Later on, when someone else actually need it, it may now longer be fresh, and they might not find it (and you won't remember where in the "warehouse" you stored it).
The key to personal knowledge management is being a buffer between "capture fresh information" and "sharing knowledge to others when and where they need it". You capture what *you* need, in your own words, in your own personal warehouse, and use it and refine it to fit *your* needs. Later, *if* someone else needs it (which is not always the case), you can share the fresh (because you keep it updated for yourself) knowledge to them (either directly, if demand is low, or in a general KM system if demand is higher).
My 2 cents on the future of KM:
- http://www.ppcsoft.com/blog/km-3.asp
- http://www.ppcsoft.com/blog/pkm-filtering-info-overload.asp
Great article !
Yes, KM Tools and KM Standards (of Culture and Value) will assist to expand the limit of Human Working Memory as KM Process Framework regarding KM as an access mechanism that can be used across any management tool type. Re our K-base http://delicious.com/mobeeknowledge/kmtools+kmprocessframework+kmstandards
Atle, thanks for perspective on how this relates to lessons learned. I call this dilemma the "Path A and Path B problem". Path A is reuse by the same team that generated the lesson to improve their work as they move forward. This is relatively easy once the lesson is identified.
Path B is tougher: to transfer the lesson across time and people and context so that others can and will find and use it in the future.
Because Path B is so hard, we each take the personal responsibility to save what we might need, and share it with others at their moment of need. as Md Santos did with his bookmarks :)
Thanks to you both for sharing. Carla
I do not consider this a dilemma at all.
The fact is that knowledge management has always, in mind, included this as one of the fundamentals and that their must be a bias toward reuse - or the capture effort was wasted - but FAST capture still must be built into daily use...
Short term memory limitations affect so much - retention of training drops to less than 20 percent on average in a few weeks. And almost all systems designed for delivering information have clearly failed to organize against the limits of our mind, the challenge of limited time, the volume of information, the priority of information, and more.
We distill little - so if we find something useful - what we seek is usually still buried. We do not train how to build succinct actionable information... so we get prose piled heavy with superflous backup and reference material.(which should be captured but differently) We have no systems for minimizing search results, so we get tons of it. We make little visual - because it is hard - though we are at least 70% visual. Time to read seems implicit in many systems - but it is time that we do not have.
Designing for humans has always been fundamental - but I struggle to find any systems that deliver. Of course, there are things that humans must do differently also - but motivating contribution and use is a function of the design. Path B(from Carla's note) is not so hard - but first you have to divorce from all the principles that deliver the bad systems we already have today.
I have made four systems now that make information findable quickly, usable quickly, changeable quickly, ... the problem is that we would rather sell current product than understand and solve the problems that matter. Describing the KM system as a huge warehouse far away - means you need to do more to close the gap. Because whatever that nugget was a minute ago - it is already gone - because it was not expedient enough in the midst of my work effort to also capture it.
We can't complain about the limits of our designs until we actually get the requirements right. We need to design work systems that maximize against the hard part - the human part - and quit simply putting commodity wrapper interfaces on databases and calling that a solution. Cognition, human limitations, and such - aren't we humans? Are we - the "thought leaders" - the slow learners?