Ignorance is Not Bliss!

  Knowledge Management   Lessons Learned  

I think one of the things that surprises me the most is how quickly--I write this just one week after the first anniversary--the tragic events of that day have faded from our collective radar screens. There was a ton of media hype in the weeks leading up to the anniversary, but since 9/11/2002, it's all been about Iraq and the purported "failure" of our intelligence operatives to have predicted and averted the tragedy.

Why did it happen? It just doesn't make any sense to kill more than 3,000 people--and it could have been a lot more--to teach us (not just America, but the entire Western world) some kind of lesson. How could the perpetrators be so misguided in their interpretation of the religion--Islam--they professed to be acting in defense of?

Perhaps more importantly, what should we--and here I'll limit my reference to the good-old U-S-of-A--be doing to reduce the chances of such a horrific act ever happening again?

As you might imagine, it occurred to me that it might actually be beneficial to look at his situation/problem from a knowledge management perspective.

No one can ever say for sure why 9/11 happened, but I firmly believe that a major contributing factor to 9/11 was a classic KM situation of too much information and data, and not enough context. The Al Quaeda and Taleban fundamentalists…

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