she looked at me blankly
It was October 2004 and I’d just left the world of publishing for corporate life at a global insurance broker. Enjoying a few drinks at a party in Clapham I was chatting to a uni friend I’d not seen for years.
“How’s the magazine going?” she asked.
With a big grin on my face, I told her that I’d recently handed it over to a new editor as I’d accepted a role at Aon in its knowledge management team. She looked at me blankly.
I’ve had the two questions that followed posed to me many times since then. The first is pretty straightforward to deal with.
“No,” I replied. “Not the energy company. It’s a broking and risk management firm.”
The second has never been simple to answer and I still find myself taking a deep breath as I throw myself into it.
“What’s knowledge management?”
It’s taken me some time to refine my response. I don’t want to cause fellow party goers to fall into a jargon-induced coma nor do I want to be labelled ‘the one not to sit next to at the dinner table’.
The only approach I know that works is to volley a question back: “What do you do?” Then it’s easy. Business development, architect, pharmaceutical research, IT project management, journalist, jet engineer, teacher, fireman. Once you have a context you can explain what we do.
People’s reactions are great. I’d say 90% of the time their eyes widen and they tell you exactly how much they need someone to do the same in their organisations. Occasionally, you get the eye rollers who give a soft snort and dismiss you as another corporate five-minute wonder.
But it hasn’t been a fad, not unless fads can last well over a decade. You could debate when knowledge management started for the next ten years, but in my mind it was the mid-1990s when companies began to take it seriously with a major groundswell at the turn of the millennium.
And that’s what I’m here to map. Fifteen years in the making, how has knowledge management evolved? What does a typical knowledge manager look like? Are there specific attributes we all share? From where do we draw inspiration? And how on earth do we make it work?
With Sparknow, I’ll be plotting this journey through the stories of the people who have shaped it. And while I do so, I’ll be learning how to use the many narrative research techniques that have given Sparknow the reputation it rightly deserves.
By the end of it, we’ll have a collection of stories, using all manner of media, that we hope will not only be useful as a resource but also show the value our approaches bring. And if you’re interested in my reflections and musings along the way, I’ll be sharing them here.
Find out more about our project.
Also published at http://blog.sparknow.net/post/2809929987
