spite of severe traffic or bad weather. She wasn’t describing com-
pany policy. She was giving an uninterrupted, virtuoso demonstra-
tion of what she had invented and changed in order to get her
customers to their destination. I’m sure her supervisor had no idea
of any of this new knowledge she’d been creating on each bus ride.
Yet this bus driver is typical. People develop better ways of
doing their work all the time, and we also like to brag about it. In
survey after survey, workers report that most of what they learn
about their job they learn from informal conversations. They also
report that they frequentlyhave ideas for improving work but don’t
tell their bosses because they don’t believe their bosses care.
Principles That Facilitate KM
Knowledge creation is natural to life, and wanting to share what we
know is humanly satisfying. So what’s the problem? In organiza-
tions, what sends these behaviors underground? Why do workers
go dumb? Why do we fail to manage knowledge? Here are a few
principles that I believe lead to answers to these questions.
Knowledge is created by human beings.If we want to succeed with
KM, we must stop thinking of people as machines. Instead, we
must attend to human needs and dynamics. Perhaps if we renamed
it “human knowledge,” we would remind ourselves of what it is and
where it comes from. We would refocus our attention on the orga-
nizational conditions that support people, that foster relationships,
that give people time to think and reflect. We would stop fussing
with the hardware; we would cease trying to find more efficient
means to “decant” us. We would notice that when we speak of such
things as “assets” or “intellectual capital,” it is not knowledge that
is the asset or capital. People are.
It is natural for people to create and share knowledge.We have for-
gotten many important truths about human motivation. Study after
study confirms that people are motivated by work that provides
growth, recognition, meaning, and good relationships. We want our
lives to mean something; we want to contribute to others; we want
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