Disobedience

Every now and then we struggle with clients who say something can’t be done within their organisation. They would never get permission or support from “them”. It’s even dangerous to ask “them”. Let’s just try to do this quietly without disturbing anyone, they suggest.

Unfortunately, if you’re trying to get any kind of large scale KM going, you can’t do it without “disturbing” people. At the end of the day, KM is not about what the KM team does, it’s about what “they” do out there.

So I was pleased to find this little gem of a post from Don Cohen from a couple of years back, about how a successful KM initiative started with an act of disobedience.

We have another client with a manager whom I would call flexibly stubborn. When one major initiative was rejected by senior management, where the more faint hearted might have just abandoned it, he took note of the sensitivities, went back and reworked it into a form that had fewer visible allergenic components, and gave it to them as a planned activity “for information”. Some important elements were dropped, but he made the judgment that they are currently unsolvable. At least something is getting done.

Now… how do we get knowledge managers to be more disobedient?

1 Comment so far

Alakh Asthana

Reminds me of Steve Jobs’ speech at Stanford, he said “Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

Its sad to see sometime that great ideas are thrown out of the window, few projects are executed because ONE person thinks it will work well.

Everything cant be democratic, however most of the time, everyone is so caught up with monotony, everyone is so worried about the ‘six monthly appraisal’ that we dont create value for all elements, and focus too much on shareholders.

If not hard-selling, disobedience is the next big thing for the next quartersmile)

Posted on December 04, 2008 at 09:11 PM | Comment permalink

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