Managing Knowledge

Managing Knowledge

"All media are extensions of some human faculty -- psychic or physical. The wheel is an extension of the foot; the book is an extension of the eye; clothing, an extension of the skin; electric circuitry, an extension of the central nervous system. Media, by altering the environment, evoke in us unique ratios of sense perceptions. The extension of any one sense alters the way we think and act -- the way we perceive the world."

Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, The Medium is the Massage (sic), (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1967), p. 26.

What Can We Know?

Before going into how we manage knowledge, maybe we ought to take a look at ourselves. What makes us tick? You know, get out a species microscope and watch us strutting around, sleeping, eating, drinking, filing things and procreating. Well, sure. No subject too large. What are we? Why do we have so much trouble getting along? As genomic research increasingly reveals, we are separated from our fellow creatures by less than we once imagined, or might have wished for. Once we thought we were different from all those other creatures. There was a time not long ago when we imagined ourselves to be a maker and user of tools, and uniquely so. We thought this defined us. We were THE CREATOR of tools. This idea of ourselves, this notion of Man-the-Tool-User lasted for nearly a century, right up to the moment some one noticed a chimp breaking off a branch to retrieve ants from an ant-hill. Not that man isn't a tool-user and tool-maker of the first order. Think about some of our tools: clay tablets, printing presses, TVs, computers, hard drives, and atomic bombs of one kind or another. The list is staggering, but perhaps our tools are only by-products of somethi...

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...he U.S. who, like Dr. Richter, possess both the know-how to make a nuclear weapon and the "fudge-factor" -- the memory of last minute tweaking and intuitive short-cuts that made some of the nation's 1,000 or so nuclear weapons tests work.

"Nuclear-weapons design was then [when Dr. Richter was a young apprentice Ph.D. at Los Alamos] taught in a kind of medieval apprenticeship. Dr. Richter hung around one or two bomb designers to see how they did it. 'You worked for those guys until you didn't need them anymore,' he says. "The quicker you did that, the quicker you could do more things on your own." 4

What's needed in any organization is a way to capture the "fudge-factor"; to save and store what was said and done and acted upon outside of formal documents and procedures -- a way to manage not just explicit documents and events, but tacit events and actions as well.