personality and position—the programs they teach in, the task
forces they are on, the administrative assignments they take—
likely to infect others with what they pick up. They do an amazing
job of passing ideas around, bringing innovations along, and serv-
ing as the information lubricants of the organization. Organizations
can make an effort to identify switchboards and carriers and put
them in positions to acquire the relationships and knowledge that
become a resource to others in the organization. This is where
technology can be helpful, helping people find each other and
letting them communicate once they have done so.
This may not appear to be as systematic as more formal systems,
but I would argue that it is more likely to be effective. It seems log-
ical to want to categorize and structure information in predeter-
mined groupings so that as people need to know something, they
can look it up. There are numerous problems with this orderly way
of proceeding. As many have discovered, it is hard to induce busy
people to enter their knowledge into such systems. It is inherently
more difficult to determine in advance what knowledge will be
needed, let alone to put it in clear categories. If you have people
working on narrow, clearly defined problems, this wouldn’t be so
difficult, but in the knowledge business, things keep shifting,
projects and ideas migrate rapidly from one area to another, and
it is extremely difficult to know the exact categories in advance.
Malcolm Gladwell makes this point in reference to piles of paper
in the office.^4 He claims (and my own messy piles give validity to
his argument) that knowledge workers are constantly finding unan-
ticipated uses for information and cannot easily file it because that
is too static a system, which hides the information out of sight. Piles
make it possible to shift and recombine paper (information) and so
are inherent in the work of such people.
For knowledge sharing, another model is needed. I like to think
of serendipity, of ideas on the move, in a sort of Brownian motion.
Get people colliding with one another, and unexpected informa-
tion and relationships will emerge. The challenge is to get poten-
tially valuable people into possible collision and to do it in a way
that is appealing and not overly consuming of time.
LEADERSHIP ANDACCESS TOIDEAS 287