Applied KM: On Making Informed Decisions

Applied knowledge management is a constantly evolving discipline and practice. Although everyone employs some form of knowledge to make informed decisions on a daily basis, the unique characteristic of KM practitioners is that they are constantly looking at ways to improve the way information is structured to form relevant knowledge to help others make informed decisions.

Informed decisions have a limited scope. Most of the time, it is based exclusively on historical information and limited to a forecast of how the future might look like. This is due to the fact that human beings do not possess omniscience and immutability (the two attributes that would definitely help us make informed decisions). Those of us who have had to make critical decisions have also had the experience of being dead wrong about our assumptions, most of us have had to live with bad decisions which looked, at the time they were made, like the best course of action to take, only to find that we missed a crucial element in the process.

What makes us so averse to making important decisions is the realization that we really don't know what we don't know. We try to build mechanisms that will innoculate us from the effects of our decisions as there are literally hundreds of factors that can cause those decisions to result in negative consequences that we did not consider.

This aversion results in increased stress levels especially when confronted with the need to make immediate decisions where you simply do not have the time to think things through well enough to make an informed choice.

Technology offers alternatives or solutions that help us make informed decisions quickly. Upon closer examination, however, it is a well-dressed facade that neatly clusters information into structures that fit how we want to see the information and not necessarily what we need to know.

How can we ensure that the choices we make today will not result in negative consequences in the near or distant future? The answer? We can't.

This is where the merits of applied KM comes into play. Applied KM is all about building systems and mechanisms that will allow members within a knowledge ecology to learn, grow, evolve, and share experiences that provides participants with a workable framework to turn negative consequences into constructive experiences.

As technology advances, as processing speeds increase, as storage becomes cheaper, and as communications become more affordable, the more people will be subject to the pressure of time. Instead of using the time to think (as technology helps us shorten the time required to gather data), most will almost certainly try to match processing speeds in making their choices. We must remember, that technology allows us to gather data quickly so that we can spend the time to apply our knoweldge to create new knowledge from the data technology provides us with.

Computers could have the potential of matching the processing power of the human brain, but it can never replace the human "being". "Being" is key to knowledge. Computers lack the capability of experience. The data fed into computers result from the experiences of another. As such, they are limited in nature.

Applied KM brings value back to the human being. Experience, culture, learning, communication, altruism, context, worldview, religion, family, perception, doubt, community, failure, emotion, intuition. All of these make human beings far more superior than the most advanced of computer systems.

Let us take the events that led up to the infamous 9/11 experience as an example. Every US official will agree that what failed was not the computer systems (and the US employs the best of the best in terms of technology) but the human side of intelligence. In my view, the real failure was in depending too much on technology and minimizing the value of the human side of intelligence. It is not human intelligence that failed. The failure is the result of too much dependence on technology.

This is true of most corporations around the world. They have developed a convoluted dependence on technology. Why? To reduce complexity. This perception is counter-intuitive. Human interactions will always be complex so allowing simple systems (even the most complex of mathematical equations are still simple when compared to how human beings think) to handle complex situations is simply un-intelligent and complacent. There are literally hundreds of thousands of potential contexts that any individual can choose to create and employ.

How then could you make informed decisions? Here are some principles:

First, embrace complexity. Complexity is part of life. The less we try to minimize it, the more we learn how to progressively deal with it. For example, have you ever been in a software development project where you found your team dealing with increased scope? This is due to knowledge progression. The more people learn, the more questions arise; the more questions arise, the higher the levels of complexity is introduced. Circumventing this process will only result in short-circuits.

Second, form a collaborative team. If two heads are better than one, five heads are still more effective than a terrabyte of data. Listen to experiences, entertain opinions, value intuition. Value being human.

Third, take the time to learn. Try not to pressure yourself to make decisions without an adequate understanding of context (or what has been coined as a 360 degree view) in multiple dimensions. Remember that the reason why you are being forced into making a quick decision is most likely due to a quick decision that generated the situation you are trying to solve. Never try to solve the problem with the same behavior or thinking that created it in the first place.

Fourth, when employing technology, design systems that are able to provide relevance through context at the user level and processes that will allow these contexts to evolve through collaboration and sharing.

Fifth, constantly subject yourself to new methods of learning. Unless the person analyzing information is capable of interpreting the same information in multiple ways, data will remain non-relevant and useless.

Remember, learners prepare the world for tomorrow.

Until next time.