A knowledge manager's musings

Space and reflection

Last week, Victoria and I met Mohammed Khalid, executive partner at Gartner (I love how that rhymes), and tucked the first interview for the Knowledge Manager’s Journey under our collective belt. Which is lucky, because despite meeting at Carluccio’s and being surrounded by beautifully prepared pasta, our conversation took off at such a rate that we completely failed to order any food.

Before joining Gartner, Khal was global head of knowledge management at the British Council and head of IT services at the Qualifications and Curriculum Agency. He is clear that despite being a technology aficionado he is driven by what it is, culturally, that makes us share and collaborate.

Looking back, it wasn’t my most structured of interviews, but it was fabulously fluid and kept returning to one theme in particular: our diminishing space and ability to reflect or assimilate.

“When you go to a conference, what do you want to get out of it,” he asks (the interviewer/interviewee tables had clearly turned by this point). 

Having organised and attended many events over the years, I’ve known the answer to this for a while: I want to get out of the office and into an environment that lets me listen to and discuss what others are doing. I want to stumble upon what I think of as knowledge nuggets: those ‘aha!’ moments and flashes of clarity that elude me while I’m at my desk. And while I do take notes and collect clever charts, it’s those nuggets I really take with me.

But why does a windowless basement make things click?

We’re all time poor and have to deliver more with less. Knowledge workers must prioritise: do they bring in sales and deliver client work, or try to recall how to use self-service knowledge tools?

In a world of back-to-back deadlines, meetings and cost-reduction initiatives, it’s not hard to guess the order of things. Throw in making time to reflect on what you’ve just learnt on a project or heard at an event, I’m pretty certain you’ll find that towards the bottom of the list.

Khal’s involved in the Gartner Symposium and helps clients build their agendas. “If their days are jam packed, I tell them to take something out so they can assimilate what they’ve heard.” I’m sure few people would argue with this but many struggle to justify it as a valuable use of time.

We’re also learning to live with new volumes of information and attention-seeking technology. As Khal points out, our concentration spans are shortening. Sitting on a tube or plane is one of the few times we are completely cut off from communication. This can send some blackberry addicts into a mild panic, but I’m among the people who love the time without calls, emails, news alerts, status updates or instant messages elbowing their way into my line of sight.

I left the restaurant wondering how we resolve this and started scribbling these thoughts on the Metropolitan line on my way to a friend’s book launch.

At the British Library, Mark Stevenson was in conversation with Michael Brooks, author of 13 Things That Don’t Make Sense, about what he’d learnt during his round-the-world trip interviewing scientists, politicians, technologists, farmers and many others for his book, An Optimist’s Tour of the Future.

Knowing Mark well and having helped read chapters of his book as they flew from his keyboard, I shouldn’t have been surprised at the parallels with my lunchtime conversation. Fumbling for a notepad about half way through I jotted down:

We need to re-build the skills required for critical thinking

• Before we can bring about change we must be able to imagine the future
• Narrative and story, not technology, will bring about change
• We have greater access than ever to information and knowledge, the question is whether we know how to use and filter it
• We need a renaissance in scientific thinking. And for this we need information-handling skills.

How do we give ourselves thinking space? How do we re-build these critical thinking skills? It seems obvious that they’re desperately needed, but I don’t see an obvious solution. I’m hoping this becomes a thread in future conversations and interviews for the Knowledge Manager’s Journey, it feels important.

I’ll post this on the Sparknow blog later this week

Photo credit: Tim Higgison