Discussions in the knowledge management community have increasingly questioned the validity of methodologies and technologies that purport to enable organizations to externalize and codify the tacit knowledge of experts. Dave Snowden (of Cognitive Edge) is a cognitive scientist who argues that KM efforts to systematically convert tacit to explicit knowledge have failed. Snowden does not assert that there is no possibility of a meaningful practice of KM. He sees any effective KM implementation having to leverage how humans actually make sense of their experience.

In March 2007, Snowden and his associate, Gary Klein, made an interesting set of presentations to a KM organization centered in Singapore. The duo explains their approach in helping shape a software application intended to aid Singapore in analyzing risks that nation may encounter.

After reviewing the video clips of their discussion, I recognize that Snowden and Klein not only do not regard best practices and certain other KM mainstays as achieving meaningful KM, they don’t see such practices as having any relevance to how humans actually seek or use knowledge. Being somewhat of a KM initiate, I find their claims both intriguing and disturbing. (Snowden even trounces Chomsky’s claims of the influences of deep language structures!)

Actually, Snowden’s ideas are quite exciting and refreshing. Anyone who reads across the literature on KM comes to recognize that truly robust and persistent positive outcomes are not common. I had informally attributed the dearth of impressive outcomes to poor KM implementations, but Snowden provokes me to consider that there may be fundamental errors among the central claims of traditional KM. I have been more impressed by the outcomes of the more ethnographically oriented approaches, and this seems to align with some of Snowden’s statements regarding how people have evolved to pay attention to stories (narratives). I realize that I must look more closely at the cognitive perspective on KM.

In any event, much of what I am in the process of planning to implement in my organization falls more within the domain of information management than of KM. I do see the potential for my organization to become much more intelligent, but I am not interested in instantiating methods or tools that will end up becoming a field of dreams with no baseball team. It seems reasonable that a learning organization would be one that figures out how to leverage the ways that people actually make sense of the world. A few information-oriented software applications are not going to supplant millions of years of perceptual and cognitive evolution. Methods and tools, to be effective, should take advantage of human cognitive tendencies.