Amy Gahran (“writer, editor, trainer”) has a weblog called Contentious: News and musings on how we communicate in the online age. Last week she blogged a piece titled: Arranging Ideas: Knowledge Management in Human Terms and it speaks directly to a leaders and business owners who keep a weblog. (I found her blog via elearningpost, which in turn I found from Lee Lefeever’s Common Craft.)
In my book, knowledge management boils down to arranging ideas. In other words, I prefer to view this as a real human process, not a technological or abstract one… I see the process of arranging ideas as comprising three core tasks:
- Recording your thoughts in useful, creative ways that yield even more interesting ideas, context, and insights.
- Organizing and storing your thoughts with tools that help you easily retrieve, juxtapose, compare, or combine specific ideas.
- Sharing your ideas and observations with a select group or the world in a way that encourages and enables further mixing, matching, insights, and creativity. (Actually, the “sharing” part is optional, since it’s possible for knowledge management to be a strictly individual matter. Still, I think sharing ideas is generally desirable.)
The result of this process is what I call structured thoughts – ideas, observations, and insights that are organized within a system that both gives them rich context and makes them easy to find, use, and share.
