Knowledge sharing culture

Summary from NKM School pre-training course

Knowledge sharing culture is about making knowledge sharing the norm.

To create a knowledge sharing culture you need to encourage people to work together more effectively, to collaborate and to share - ultimately to make organisational knowledge more productive. But we need to remember a few things:

◦We are talking about sharing knowledge and information – not just information.
◦The purpose of knowledge sharing is to help an organisation as a whole to meet its business objectives. We are not doing it for its own sake.
◦Learning to make knowledge productive is at least as important as sharing knowledge. Michael Schrage in a recent interview said that he thought, “knowledge management is a bullshit issue” as “most people in most organisations do not have the ability to act on the knowledge they possess”.
◦Changing a culture is tough. Not only does it mean change – which has always been tough – it means seeing the world in a different way. It means revealing our hidden paradigms like the tacit acceptance that knowledge is power.

Elements

• exemplary leadership at every level
• celebrating successes of the organization
• provision of resources necessary for people to find the information and knowledge they need themselves
• clarification of the business case and value proposition in specific terms