knowquestion :: Stephen Bounds

Annotated slides from my recent presentation at the Ark Group Information Governance forum:

The post title says it all, really, but I want to put a stake in the ground on this one.

Every time there is a debate within a KM forum on knowledge, someone will say that "knowledge is a human thing". Or perhaps more specifically, they will claim a computer can't have knowledge. A computer can only hold information, it is the humans who programmed it who have the knowledge.

But in a world where we have

Sometimes, I think that people over-complicate the reasons why social media works. It's not some magical parallel universe!

However, the greater power of customers to communicate with other customers at great speed and low cost does now mean that false, inconsistent, or inflated claims by organisations rapidly get discovered. And similarly, positive experiences by customers of your services can and will be rapidly shared with their peers.

I have always been suspicious of altruism. Humans are capable of wonderful and unselfish acts, but when trying to determine the behaviour of an overall system, I think it's far more reasonable to expect that people will act to benefit their own interests.

Why? Three basic reasons:

• Local judgement. People understand and focus on their local situation better and in more detail than a more distant consideration.

As a generalisation, computer applications involving user interaction are either intended to augment human intelligence and activity, or to be a service that delivers a pre-determined capability for people. By analogy, it's the difference between an exoskeleton and a car.

In response to my article on holding back the tide of complexity, Lillian Oats asked: What's important about a resilient process?

It's a good question, but in some ways the wrong question to ask.

There is nothing intrinsically "important" about a resilient process but as our world becomes more complex, it is less and less viable to implement robust processes to solve problems.

Helga Nowotny made a ripper of a speech to the 5th Global Drucker Forum. Here's an excerpt of the edited transcript:

In a recent post, William Powell put forward the theory that culture is chaotic. I commented, suggesting that complex adaptive systems were a more appropriate starting point and hoping to start a dialog.

What defines a successful organisation?

The answer, of course, is "it depends". But it does amaze me that so many people assume that their answer is normatively better than others.

Let's wind back. Organisations are complex systems, but they are quite different from other social systems for two reasons:
(1) they are intentional, and
(2) they are created for a stated purpose.

Let's get something out of the way. A common fallacy about complex systems goes like this: If we could only observe all aspects of a complex system, we could predict its behaviour perfectly.

It's an easy trap to fall into, because in complex systems the chain of events leading to an outcome can be traced after the event. We see this all the time in coronial inquiries and other kinds of port-mortems. But despite the fact that complex systems aren't random, their non-determinism is fundamental.