Bridges To Knowledge: A Blog by Barry Camson

5 Helpful Tips: To Avoid Searching For Knowledge In The Same Old Places

How can you ensure that the knowledge you are getting is enabling you to successfully respond to the challenges of today and tomorrow?

A dilemma that I imagine many of us deal with is how to avoid coming up with yesterday's solutions to deal with today's challenges. There is certainly a tendency to build our solution to today's challenges on knowledge and approaches developed to deal with past situations. How can we position ourselves to take a forward-looking view of challenges and seek out contemporary knowledge?

People, Cultures and Context

Every once in a while, I stumble across something which appears to be just a simple part of daily life but which turns out to still be quite profound. What I "stumbled" across most recently was a group conversation which again showed me the power of a cross-cultural group to arrive at and understand the deeper meaning of knowledge.

All of this occurred when I recently delivered a presentation to an interesting group of Knowledge Management professionals. My topic was the transfer and absorption of knowledge across cultures. As I usually like to do when dealing with this topic, I showed up with several examples of music designed to be familiar to some and quite unfamiliar or even strange to others. For me, music is a form of knowledge and also knowledge which strongly reflects its cultural context. I like to say that the content knowledge of music is integrated with its cultural context.

Behaviors of Cultural Mindfulness

Encountering knowledge of someone from another culture can be exciting as well as challenging. We often don't know what we don't know and as a result the knowledge that we "hear" can be a distortion of the knowledge that the other intended to share. When interacting with a person from another culture or visiting another culture (even if it is only in the next neighborhood), it is easy to miss the nuances and meaning of the behavior of others. When someone is inviting you to stay for dinner, are they just being "polite" expecting you to say "no" or are they offering you the gift of their hospitality in which case a refusal could be seen as an insult.

Collaboration Then And Now

Is the practice of collaboration the same today as it was ten years ago? Will it be the same next year or the year after? I am coming to the conclusion that "yes," in fact, collaboration is different today and will be different next year as well. How it is different and how to make explicit that difference is the challenging part.

Collaboration remains a major key to our existence as a living and working society. It has become more a part of daily life. What is different is the path to collaboration.

Transparency and Openness in Government

In my work with a variety of Federal Government clients over the last several years, I have noticed the desire for more transparency and openness at many organizational levels. Organization leaders and members have become aware of the negative impact to organizational operations and morale when important decisions impacting the organization are handed down without setting out cogent reasons or made without some forum for input, clarification and feedback.

I am heartened by President Obama's "Memorandum For The Heads Of Executive Departments And Agencies" which sets out his goals for a more transparent and open government. The President stated, "We will work together to ensure the public trust and establish a system of transparency, public participation and collaboration." The initiatives by the Obama Administration are very timely for organizations that already recognize the improved performance and organizational well-being that can result.

Experience As A Teacher In Improving Knowledge Management

When I was first asked by the Knowledge Lab at the Defense Inteligence Agency (DIA) to develop and deliver a workshop on Cross-Cultural Knowledge Management, I was told of the importance of making the workshop experiential. Rather than utilizing stand-up training in which participants are lectured to about sharing knowledge across cultures, they wanted something that would provide unique experiences to people that would advance their learning and improve their future actions. The ultimate workshop did just that. It provided a variety of experiences to people that helped in a deep way to improve their skills in the realm of what I call sharing and absorbing knowledge across cultures.

The experiences in the workshop were developed to respond to issues identified in our data gathering in DIA as well as in a number of other US intelligence agencies. This post will refer to specific issues identified in the diagnosis, the experience that people gained at the workshop and how those experiences have enhanced knowledge sharing and absorption capabilities among participants.

A Bifurcated Relationship

The integrated focus on content and personal interaction in traditional collaboration is changing to a more bifurcated focus in a Web 2.0 environment where sharing content and personal interaction can exist separately. This has ramifications in terms of what are appropriate actions to support collaboration in a Web 2.0 environment.