After a long and dreadfull silence...

Dear Collabloggers,

After a long and dreadfull silence, many of you might be wondering if I gave up for good the idea of collablogging. But please don't ever consider that possibility again, as collabloggation (here and in other contexts) is a very important trait of my personality. The fact is that I was trying to cope with the cold and dark dutch winter, that really makes me quite depressed, taking all my energy and will to do lots of things I like. However, I now managed to gather some important insight that I'd like to discuss with you guys. In fact, I'd like to talk about two ethical problems that I believe to be in the heart of developing KM Systems with greater or lesser acceptance.

The first problem derives from the fact that humans have a tendency of believing in the existence of one universal truth. Although we (scientists) have the habit of proudly say that we base our conclusions on investigations and scientific proof, it is extremely common to find dozens of dogma (i.e. generally accepted assumptions, purely based on faith) in all fields of science. Who has not heard, for instance, a general statement such as “I do not believe in agents.”? This as many other affirmations of this kind are absurdities, since it is a fact that there is a big and very active research community working on the field of agents, besides companies and organizations that adopt them in practice. So, what is there to believe (or not)? And besides, please note that the term believe refers to faith, and not to scientific proof. This is a problem with KM especially because, in our view, there is no best practice for all situations. Each targeted setting and situation have specific characteristics, goals and constraints that should be analyzed before a KM System may be actually proposed and adopted. For example, while for one specific organization, an ontology-based content management system may be required, for another one, this may be useless and demand extreme overhead for workers without bringing the expected benefits. Hence, managers, researchers and knowledge managers should be both sensible individuals and critical thinkers, to avoid being caught by “hypes” and “buzzwords”, often phenomena in our field.

Following this big challenge, there is another, perhaps bigger one. People tend to be over excited about their own proposals and points of view. This happens with managers, knowledge managers, and especially with researchers. Researchers as ourselves have this weird tendency to place too much value in their own work. On one hand, this is nature, since they are constantly busy with that topic, so it generally influences the way they see the world, the choices of words they make in social communication, and even the way they relate to others and perform their day-to-day activities. On the other hand, a direct consequence of this is the fact that by getting too much accustomed with a specific topic, method, product, or point of view, they miss the opportunity to look at other possibilities around them. This unfortunate phenomenon, which goes in the opposite way regarding the creation of new knowledge and innovation, is more common than we can imagine. For instance, a research group may be so used to a software engineering method that one of their members has previously created that they think all processes and systems may be modeled using that method, so they do not bother to learn another one. And besides, they usually get into fierce arguments with researchers from elsewhere about the greatness of their method, in comparison with the others around, without actually spending enough time to learn or evaluate these other methodologies. This represents a great risk in our field for many reasons, but especially because: a) knowledge is dynamic by nature, and a solution that is good in one time is not good in another; b) knowledge is context dependent, so different people and organizations organize it, relate to it, and use it in a completely different way; and c) not only creating new knowledge, but unlearning old ones is an important part of KM, in order to guarantee knowledge communities to evolve.

So, do you have any comments about this? I am very, very interested in discussing these points, as I believe they are important ethical topics related to the KM field, and they may be able to trigger some kind of Nonaka & Takeuchi suggested creative chaos within our community.

Best regards,
Renata