I learned something new today, which made the day a good day. Today I learned that knowledge happens too quickly to be written in a book. I also learned that knowledge is free. It freed itself some time ago, quietly it seems, there were no reports in the major papers and the stock market didn’t react. Where was it imprisoned you asked? What jail housed knowledge? Well at some point the prison was the institution; you fill in the blank, the corporation, publishing house, law firm, professional association, etc. They created the knowledge from soup to nuts. Came up with the idea, formed a committee to collect the thoughts, edited published and sold the knowledge. Want to know a secret? They didn’t even know the knowledge had escaped. But the knowledge is out, and growing at an incredible rate, faster than the institution could have ever have hoped for. It made me ask myself, what was holding knowledge back? After much thought I came to the conclusion that “perfection” was the villain. You see, it had to be “just right”. It’s a deep seated evil, with roots tracing back to 7th grade English. There, knowledge had a process, a very strict set of guidelines to follow. The myth has propagated through the ages…
Now the knowledge is happening in real time, nearly in sync with the events that create it. It’s happening in blogs, Wikis, social network sites and knowledge portals. It doesn’t wait for committee or editors. And it’s turning the establishment on its head. Once they get over the fact that knowledge escaped and “you can’t do that” isn’t an acceptable response, they are left with questions like: “How do we capture the knowledge and put it to work for our constituents?” Or, “What do we do when the knowledge is wrong?” This is my favorite, “What does this mean to the establishment that we built to create and house the knowledge?”
It’s a new world and in all that is happening some things are scary. What impact does this have on the knowledge worker? If we all jump on the knowledge freedom train will it somehow “cheapen” our knowledge and reduce its value? Do we risk overload; and how do we separate the right from the wrong? Even worse, can concerted attacks of wrong knowledge lead us to false conclusions and incorrect actions?
I learned something new today, which made the day a good day.
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