Chapter Twenty-OneMaking Knowledge Move
Jon L. Powell
My piano teacher once told me that one reason to play music for
others is that music not performed doesn’t really exist—if no one
hears it, it just sits there, notes in a book. Knowledge is a lot like
music. By its nature, knowledge is neutral—literally point mort
(“dead point”) in French. It just sits there, inert, waiting to be
discovered and acted on.
There are an infinite number of ways to orchestrate knowledge
management to get it performed and heard. However, to get knowl-
edge acted on—to make it move—requires another ingredient:
engagement. People who are engaged,defined as “in gear” or “com-
mitted,” are seekers; they are more interested in questions than
answers. They get turned on by discovery and turned off by being
lectured to. They also get turned off by clumsy orchestrations and
bad performances.
Early attempts to engage people through knowledge manage-
ment were a lot like looking through the wrong end of the tele-
scope—it’s a misuse of the tool, and the objective looks really far
away (if you can see it at all). The main problem was a focus on
documents. Specifically, converting hard copy to electronic format
and building electronic repositories of material. Similarly, most
knowledge management initiatives focused heavily on technology
in order to store and deliver these documents. And documents, as
inert as they are, don’t tend to foster engagement.
As Internet technologies (Web-based systems) became a more
standard technology infrastructure, the knowledge management
focus shifted from technology and digital content to people, human
interactions, and learning. We became interested in how people
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