Humor Me

  Knowledge Management   Lessons Learned  

The brain, right? KM is all about building and maintaining the organizational brain. It's about capturing information and making connections and communicating, all key functions of the brain as we know it. In fact, as I look back on my musings of the past 12 months, I have to acknowledge that a number of my articles have used the brain metaphor, at least in part.

But the other night, while watching the new PBS special Red Gold, The Epic Story of Blood, I had an epiphany: Maybe an equally good anatomical analog for knowledge management--or at least for a KM system (KM itself is a process, not a system)--is the heart and the circulation system.

To appreciate this new perspective, we first need to take a step back and look at that thing we're trying to manage--knowledge.   Knowledge is undoubtedly one of the key "humors" of any organization. Hippocrates, the pre-eminent physician of antiquity, postulated that--similar to the four "elements" that make up the physical world (earth, fire, air and water)--the body was comprised of four humors (blood, phlegm, black bile and yellow bile), and their proper balance was essential to the body's well-being. Knowledge is certainly, in my humble opinion, the most important organizational humor. Other key organizational …

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