How to Capture Knowledge Without Killing It

"As Orr's study shows, executives who want to identify and foster best practices must pay very close attention to the practices as they occur in reality rather than as they are represented in documentation or process designs. Otherwise, they will miss the tacit knowledge produced in improvisation, shared through storytelling, and embedded in the communities that form around those activities. Does that mean process has no importance in this context? Of course not. But the processes that support how people work should be deeply informed by how they already work—not imposed from above by process designers who imagine they understand the work better than they actually do. Armed with a sense of what really happens on the ground, it's possible to design processes that prompt improvisation rather than ones that are blindly prescriptive."
http://hbswk.hbs.edu/pubitem.jhtml?id=1733&sid=0&sid=0&t=innovation
Excerpted from the article "Balancing Act: How to Capture Knowledge Without Killing It" in the Harvard Business Review, May-June 2000 by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid.

Theatrum Mundi-Fundamentalist Version

"For nearly two decades, I've been writing now and then about the shortcomings of the conventional journalistic definition of "objectivity" as purportedly value-free neutrality. I've noted its philosophical and practical limitations, and proposed a counter-standard, biblical objectivity: Since God knows the real nature of things and we do not, we should as much as possible -- given our position as fallen sinners -- to try to see everything through the lens of the Bible."by Marvin Olasky, Human Events Online

Failure of Imagination

"Communications aren't a problem when you're only talking to yourself." p360 A Failure of Initiative

Not a Bell Curve

"The difference between genius and stupidity is that
genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein

The Web

"The net is like a huge vandalized library. Someone has destroyed the catalog and removed the front matter, indexes, etc. from hundreds of thousands of books and torn and scattered what remains..."Surfing" is the process of sifting through this disorganized mess in the hope of coming across some useful fragments of text and images that can be related to other fragments. The net is even worse than a vandalized library because thousands of additional unorganized fragments are added daily by the myriad of cranks, sages, and persons with time on their hands who launch their unfiltered messages into cyberspace."

Michael Gorman, "The Corruption of Cataloging" Library Journal 120 (15 September, 1995):34.