Don't Forget to Pack the Monkeys!

  Knowledge Management   Lessons Learned  

I was watching Toy Story 2 with my kids the other day and, as we always do, we watched the outtakes a dozen times. For those of who don't have the DVD, most animated feature films now include a series of outtakes as part of the special features. These outtakes are little clips of bloopers that might have happened in the filming of the movie.

One of the Toy Story 2 outtakes shows Mrs. Potato Head helping pack Mr. Potato Head for the mission to save Woody from the clutches of the Chicken man, Al of Al's Toy Barn. They show her stuffing everything but the kitchen sink in the opening in his back, including a pair of interchangeable angry eyes and also a bunch of plastic interlinking monkeys from the toy A Barrel Full of Monkeys.

At any rate this, believe it or not, got me to thinking about KM and, specifically, the difficulty of planning and managing KM programs. While the theory of KM sounds so simple--systematically create, share and apply knowledge to improve responsiveness, increase productively, develop competency and foster innovation--in practice KM programs are very hard to execute because their potential breadth is so large, typically having the potential to impact every single individual and organization entity in a business.

KM programs are most often either process or technology-driven: That is, they get started either because some…

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