Posted by Dilip Bhatt on November 11, 1999 at 04:36:27:

In Reply to: Re: KM dressed as Learning posted by Randy Jordan on November 03, 1999 at 23:25:40:

Hi Randy

Excellent post, enjoyed reading your perceptive. Few comments

Great observation about technical and the non-technical and the barriers related to it. As you said technical minded have a problem engaging non-techies into their frames of reference, certainly in terms of strategy development but also in terms education. I believe technologist (not all) have a short tolerance span. They expect the non-techies to have a some fundamental knowledge but techie issues and most non-techie I know could not careless. But of course the situation applies in reverse too, non-technical minded would not necessary engage with the technical minded, due to fear of technology, lack of understand why technology is needed…. etc. I am a firm believer that each domain needs to educate the other and that’s is an ongoing process, its about a marriage where two parties can cohabitant and learn about each other.

(Please no flames, about the tolerance span, not meant as a criticism but simply implying that whatever ‘community’ we belong too, its hard to belong to another with equal knowledge and experience, unless one is very bright and has the mental capacity to handle vast amounts of information. Clearly there are people that can handle it but I am sure a few like me whom certainly can’t.)

Certainly in this day and age, knowledge workers the non-techies in particular are expected to posses some level IT literacy. So we need the technical community to teach and pave the way for us non technical minded to harness the technology to improve our daily working lives but in the context of day to day activity, not technology for the sake of it.

The gut feelings you mentioned is an interesting idea and no doubt a valuable emotional output. It’s the gut feelings generated in organisation that are the future products of tomorrow, new processes, new services that will be in place someday. We need to encourage these gut feelings, harness them and evaluate them. The corporate instinct, which most organisations has, typically is based on a gut feelings that CEO had one day. The most successful CEO has this talent of evaluating the gut feelings and turning the good gut feelings into a strategy. I believe we need to encourage staff in organisations to experiment with ideas and validate. Tom Peters even coined the phrase ‘skunkworks’ (not sure if I spelled it right) just for this activity. Which again get us back to the fundamentals of a learning organisation.

Thanks again for your thoughts…..

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Follow Ups:

• Re: KM dressed as Learning Reilly Atkinson 14:14:26 11/11/99 (2)
  • Re: KM dressed as Learning Dilip Bhatt 11:35:32 11/15/99 (0)
  • Core competencies & rigidities Denham 14:46:06 11/11/99 (0)

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