Brent MacKinnon's List: Knowledge Transfer

"But you can't use any of this to make them learn. You can't make them understand. Understanding is a voluntary act. It is the act of a free person, inhabiting a world in which he or she can interact with a stimulating and diverse environment, creating a rich fabric of what we would call thoughts, feelings, emotions, hopes, fears, and all the rest of it. Understanding and learning are the results of a life-long process of experience and growth. You can present the things you think are important and should be valued, but people must accept these for themselves. Freely."

"I'm going to use an oversimplified example from electricity to make a point. I still think there is a deficiency in the personal knowledge management model being discussed in various quarters. Let me see if I can tease it out with the following discussion.

Harold Jarche points to a diagram Silvia Andreoli adds to his last post on personal knowledge management. Here it is:"

"Connecting with people and innovative ideas is more important than ever. To my mind, in a world where new and interesting ideas can come from anywhere, true value is found by breaking through the silos of sector-only or country-only knowledge and relationships. In such a world, it is not about the number of people you know or the mountain of business cards you collect, but rather about the depth and authenticity of the relationships you build and sustain, the depth and maturity of the connection you have with one another, and about valuing and nurturing the free flow of ideas."

"This week, a few related knowledge management (KM) articles crossed my path and I’d like to weave them together.

Here’s a model that shows how KM has progressed over the past 15 years. Nancy Dixon discusses three eras of knowledge management as moving from Explicit Knowledge (document management) to Experiential Knowledge (communities of practice; expertise locators) and now to Collective Knowledge (social media). This post and Nancy’s previous ones, are well worth the read as a primer on KM."

"The Three Eras of Knowledge Management - Summary

I have posted lengthy descriptions of each of the three eras of knowledge management and here I have made a brief summary of all three. I have also made substantial changes to the third era in this post. If you would like to view each era in more detail just click on the heading of that era in this post.


Since the term “knowledge management” came into popular usage, there have been three significant changes in how organizations have thought about their knowledge. Each successive era has expanded the type of knowledge that organizations considered important without eliminating the need for and use of the previous type of knowledge. "