Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

This is what I find to be the biggest obstacle to managing knowledge in an organization.

Knowledge management is pretty simple: when someone learns something, record that information. When someone else needs that information, they don’t have to learn it again for themselves. The expense of learning is not repeated.

I have tried to do knowledge management since the early 1980s (no one called it knowledge management back then). The great majority of knowledge management efforts fail. In my experience, the reason is simple:

job insecurity

What I know, what I know how to do, those things make me valuable to this organization. If my knowledge is stored and available for other people to use, what use am I? I am expendable.

Silly thought? Maybe, but people believe this thought and act accordingly. They don’t participate in the knowledge management efforts. They would rather repeat knowledge-seeking exercises that costs tens of hours of time. They are paid to be at work, so they are paid.

Why work yourself out of a job?

Want a knowledge management program? Find a way to ease the job security fears. That isn’t easy, but I find it is worth it.