Rachel writes:
>Scott Lefton (slefton@world.std.com) expressed this situation succinctly
>as
>"We've got to kill oral tradition before oral tradition kills us."
>I thought that some of you who may be struggling with organizational
>memory, knowledge bases, and the like, would appreciate the sentiment!
In his book The City in History, Lewis Mumford observed that knowledge is
limited in an oral culture to what one person can remember. Because so
many organizations are oral, people are retained, almost trapped, to
preserve their implicit knowledge. I've found that models of different
types can help make knowledge explicit, almost without regard to the
formal correctness of the models. The act of making the knowledge
explicit is powerful, whether the knowledge, as modeled, can be applied or
not. If the modeling is based on solid conventions, people often enjoy
describing what they do, particularly when there is a playful aspect in
the modeling. Maybe the playfulness allays fears of having one's
expertise stolen along with one's job. Do these observations follow your
experience?
Con Kenney
-- ckenney@worldweb.net (Con Kenney)