David Snowden has expanded his three rules to seven principles. Now I have to wonder if there are nine rules somewhere. And if there is One Rule to Bind them All. Rendering Knowledge (rules excerpted)
- Knowledge can only be volunteered it cannot be conscripted. [original]
- We only know what we know when we need to know it. [original]
- In the context of real need few people will withhold their knowledge.
- Everything is fragmented.
- Tolerated failure imprints learning better than success.
- The way we know things is not the way we report we know things.
- We always know more than we can say, and we will always say more than we can write down. [original]
The four new elements sound familiar from David's other writing. Taking time to think about these principles and the additional context David gives them, they begin to sound like common sense. Of course people learn from failures. Of course we build things from fragments of other things. But then why do we forget this common sense when building approaches to knowledge management? Maybe not so common?
p.s. Thanks, Tolkien.