From Knowledge Economy to Knowledge Ecology?

FEATURE ARTICLE

"From Knowledge Economy to Knowledge Ecology?
- IBM's David Snowden Maps a 'Third Way'
for KM at Open University Seminar"
By Andrew Everest

Monday 8th of July saw David Snowden, Executive Director of the IBM
sponsored Cynefin Centre for Organisational Complexity, acknowledged
KM 'guru' to governments, corporations and their ilk, deliver an
agenda-setting lecture at The Open University on the next generation
of Knowledge Management.

Entitled "Complex Acts of Knowing - beyond the baleful influence of
the 'tacit' and 'explicit' words", the lecture, hosted by the Open
University Library & BBi (Beds and Bucks Information), gave Mr Snowden
a platform to outline an iconoclastic 'organic' approach to KM.
Offering effectively a 'third way' for KM, his approach does away with
previous simplistic notions based purely on knowledge capture, and
focuses on employing and exploiting traditional human knowledge-
building instincts and behaviours. It conceptualises 'knowledge' as a
flow, rather than a confinable commodity, in need of channelling and
divining rather than control, and suggests use of a variety of
'pragmatic', sometimes unorthodox techniques to bring knowledge to the
surface. With references to channelling of flows and the unorthodox,
and a mysterious Welsh-/Druidic-sounding Moniker, one might have been
be excused for thinking this new 3G KM had something of the 3rd Age
about it!