Posted by Reilly Atkinson on December 09, 2002 at 15:31:16:

In Reply to: KM has two phases posted by rason on December 08, 2002 at 20:36:36:

Rason -- If knowledge was a commodity, like apples or books or computers, then your description makes some sense. But, of course, knowledge is not a commodity -- rather knowledge can be ephemeral or solid or suggestive or changing or context dependent or speculative or empirical or ... It is endless, it is finite, ancient and new,....

As I'm sure you know, knowledge management has been practiced for centuries -- nobody thought of the name "KM" until very recently -- those who came before us just did it, and so we have language, computers, public health, airplanes, frozen food, heart transplants, gestalt therapy, Mozart's music, Newton's -physics.

These early practitioners rarely worried about definitions or distinctions of or among data, information, or knowledge. In fact, it wasn't until the early 20th century, that scholars, researchers, and scientists began to question the limits ot knowledge -- Godel's Theorem, Bohr and Heisenberg's Quantum Theory,Einstein's Realtivity, and Freud's Theory of Mind (if you will pardon a non-standard name)raised hell with the then conventional notions of knowledge.

Any perusal of histories of science, or just history, directly indicates that the development, use, maintenance, and dissemination of knowledge has so many phases that the idea of phase it
self is of limited utility. That is, the predominant activity of most knowledge creators is "cut and Fit", "trial and eror", and is dominated by almost continuous feedback.

I have strong reservations on the business use of the notion "complex adaptive systems", so much in vogue these days. I'm sure others have put forth the idea that knowledge is a complex adaptive system -- constantly changing with many, many interrelated parts, and understandable only in metaphorical terms.Knowledge as a CAS makes a lot of sense to me.

Try reading Howard Gardner's "Creating Minds" or M. Csikszentmihalyi's "Creativity" -- they go way beyond any business literature I've seen on knowledge or creativity. Read any history of the period, say 1850 to 2000, that focuses upon technology and science and societal development.

Regards,
Reilly Atkinson

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