Over the last 10 years or so I have found an ever increasing conflict spiralling around how knowledge management has been spun . It is one more way of large organisations extracting from people, and is spinning viciously away from prior constructs I loved including Drucker's knowledge worker (resplendent in connecting people learning and empowering service) and designing human relation systems in which action learning curves web around contexts so that future competences multiply value. To keep myself (nearly!) sane, I have found it useful to map 5 levels of learning in one. I mention this here because I expect that with any learning phrase our conversations are criss-crossing through the 5 levels but they often go across purposes if each different conversant is talking about a different level. Even though the 5 levels are simple, integration by context gets very detailed. If someone or group has time and energy to want to map a context, email me at C.M.Macrae.72@cantab.net meanwhile briefly the 5 contexts each of which can repay exponential dividends like all learning curves are
K1 what the individual learns - note when I look at scope conversations, I believe most people are starting here; it is relevant to note when we get to K3 all auditing systems in current use are designed around maths governed to destroy the integrity of K1
K2 what groups learn- this can be a team, a community, a social network; a web as a structure of open interconnections; group learning advances around qualities such as collaboration and hi-trust over time being communally valued more deeply than competing alone
K3 is a single organisational system as governed by whatever rules and measures that organisational typology standardises, audits every cycle
K4 is what vision actually gets sustained by a whole global market sector over the years (no lesser brain than Bill Gates confirms the 7 year itch - less than you expect to change happens compounds in 3 years, much much more gets structured in 7 years but for each global sector is it leading to best for the world or worst for the world; can a sector that makes one accidental crossroads mistake (even where there was current knowledge to make a certain decision) ever turn round in a
Litigious
world? - look for example at the 21 crisis market sectors I list at http://exponentials.blogspot.com It's not obvious that many of these are compounding better futures for people; and one reason for this is the inconvenient truth that ever global sector has its biggest extraction/environmental risks that gets externalised onto an uknowledgeable or non-transparent society (often on the other side of the world) unless all the big players of the sector are help collaboratively and transparently responsible for this deepest risk - corporate social responsibility can never go any where under current stockmarket valuation rules if we don?t have global sector responsibility. Shareholder value analysis (the operating maths in use) is nothing to do with the interests of society, of the next generation, of pensioners to be or other sustaining investment practices, it should be called speculator value analysis
K5 is how local societies develop- do we want every child to be born into a sustainable global village? ultimately this is not about prayer but the practical challenge of peoples everywhere standing up collectively to recognise that national only short-term sound bitten governance cannot sustain a connecting world. WE wrote this in 1984 and as far as I know (from 22 years of debating networks) it's map gets truer every day even as powerful public servants get more in denial that they need to change http://www.normanmacrae.com/netfuture.html
What I am trying to say is very unpopular with certain professions, who have globalised to suit their own business cases shredding the licences of trust to monopolise over rule-making that societies originally gave them in good faith. There is no way I can pull punches here as several of the professions of management have lost their Hippocratic oaths to truly and fairly serve people's interests. And sadly so much of academia is boxed in by its own separation publications that what I as a simple mathematician could mean by mapping trustworthy economics of abundance systemically does not seem to be a subject being studied on this planet. Since the spreadsheet came in we have been ruled by the perfect maths for destroying knowledge work and action learning and integrity of the 5 levels of learning at contextually enriching levels.
Buried at the heart of this crisis is the old science fiction dilemma: do you believe technology's future is smarter than people or people's intelligence connections innovate what technology cannot. Oddly at least 3 mathematicians answered this question decades ago because they foresaw we'd need it one day : Einstein, Turing and Von Neumann. Each proved that human relations systems have qualities of resolving conflicts that machine logics never can. Trouble is to achieve the greatest action learning the human race is capable of you need to connect such constructs as:
recursion, eg the 12 time you integrate a web site it can be more interesting that the first as long as you have kept the option to link back though earlier webs some of which will be more useful for new learners than the integrated understanding of those who have been their on all 12 cycles of the communal development
human relationships systems : the day when I could alone know even 1% of what might connect together to be a best for the world innovation is long gone; so beyond what I know who I know and whom trusts me to share what they know is actually how I believe we should be educating kids, far far away from what individual exams measure
future exponentials compound consequences that will be worse for all constituencies over time the more you fixate solely on separating historic quarterly performances (what you measure does not only explain what behaviour you will get but what compounds)
network =system*system*system transparency where boundary silos and assumptions buried in separate systems compound global risks
oops, too long- sorry! -actions 1) questions; 2) if you want to map a context of most interest to you at any stage mail me; 3) for 22 years I have wanted to keep public broadcast media open so that it can connect the nest of interpersonal learning network media -absent of a better idea for people stand up for world service, join us here http://www.pledgebank.com/bbcgames