KM Techniques

Book

This 134-page A4-size book contains detailed guidance on how to apply 24 practical approaches, methods and tools for: (1) sharing knowledge; (2) facilitating knowledge transfer; (3) capturing knowledge and; (4) learning activities.

It is intended to support our KM Method Cards but can be used independently of them. The techniques in this book were selected because of their usefulness in supporting three very common areas of work where knowledge transfer, capture and learning are important:

  • Iearning and knowledge capture through projects, activity cycles and case based work
  • promoting peer collaboration, networking and communities across workgroup boundaries
  • identifying, eliciting, representing and transferring expertise

This book will be valuable to knowledge managers, community facilitators, KM activists, project managers, trainers, or anyone who wants to develop a portfolio of different techniques to support knowledge transfer. Note that we also provide training in many of these methods).

How-To Guides

This is a short guide to getting started with an expertise knowledge audit, to help you figure out where the critical (and vulnerable) areas of expertise and experience are.

Posted on 23 November 2007

Articles

Knowledge Management practice is heavily preoccupied by the problems, processes and technologies associated with explicit knowledge transfer. However, much of the most important knowledge to organizations resides in the heads and abilities of people, and is extremely difficult to transfer. This article reports on a research project that was focused on using practical techniques for eliciting and representing a particular form of complex, tacit knowledge described as “knowing as sensing”. It outlines the processes and methods used in the project to build realistic, complex and ambiguous case studies for businessmen who want to acquire greater sensitivity to the China business environment, using the input of experienced China hands. A technique for facilitating the final stage of knowledge transfer, internalisation, is also described.

Posted on 1 March 2006

Videos

This video is taken from a workshop on how to plan an expertise and experience-oriented knowledge sharing programme, given by Patrick Lambe on 2 October 2007. It has been edited to remove client specific references and some additional explanatory material has been inserted where the workshop group held discussions or practical activities.

This video gives an introduction to starting up communities of practice filmed at a workshop conducted by Patrick Lambe on 3-4 October 2007. It has been edited to take out client specific information, and excludes some of the practical workshop activities.

Knowledge-Enabled Project Management

This video was filmed on 10-11 October 2007, at a two-day workshop by Patrick Lambe of Straits Knowledge on how to build KM practices into project management. The client specific details have been edited out, and explanatory segments have been inserted where the practical workshop activities would have covered the ground in the workshop itself.

This speeded up 2-min video with a tabla drums soundtrack covers a 2-1/2 hour workshop with anecdote circles, tagging of anecdotes by participants, clustering of tags, and production of theme statement and archetypes. This techniques is a modified Cognitive Edge facilitation technique developed by Dave Snowden for getting insights into the emergent perspectives of a group. It is designed to disrupt dominant perspectives shaping the output, and to allow groups to interpret their own narrative material. We use this technique eg in organisation culture analysis, in customer perception analysis, in programme evaluation.

Posted on 12 December 2013