You cannot make people smarter.
Curiouser and curiouser! raises some unresolved Klogging issues:
- Klogs can overlap with existing formal systems - does klogging means that the same thing is not reported in formal way?
- Decentralised klogging vs. organisational trends to control.
- Does klog makes it easier to control you?
- As klogs are not really secure, could you post anything anything sensitive?
- Are big-KM vendors missing the point?
I love this issue popping up again and again: how control and formal structures can coexist with natural informal networks. I'm not sure that I want to tackle the whole issue, but at least I want to look at the learning side of it.
[from my PhD proposal] Learning is best described by the metaphor “you can lead horse to the water, but you cannot make it drinking”, or as Joseph Kessels says “you cannot make people smarter”. Even in the case of formal learning an organisation does not have control over employee’s brain and heart, so in order to benefit from employee learning, companies have to find the way to support and encourage it without full control. The author believes that the answer lies in supporting interplay between individual and organisational needs by relating and integrating employee-driven informal learning and organisation-driven formal learning.
[Mathemagenic]
» Thanks to [DG] for putting me on to Mathemagenic.
"You cannot make people smarter."
I believe this to be true. However I also think that:
- Not every organisation believes that, e.g. the amount of money spent each year on training that doesn't work.
- Not every organisation cares how smart it's people are (no matter how much they spend on investors in people logos)
All that downsizing. All those drives for efficiency at any cost. They have created environments of paranoia and hostility where there is no interplay between individual and organisation.
My fear is that klogging will only thrive in organisations that are healthy, and that there may not be enough of them. Or, worse, that klogging will thrive as a control mechanism imposed by insecure and fearful management. I don't want to be a part of that.
[Curiouser and curiouser!]
The question of whether you can make people smarter or not isn't the point. That suggests that only smart people can benefit from knowledge management or other initiatives? I don't think that's the point, although I've been known to be less than smart about things myself over the years :).
I think you absolutely can demonstrate and be a model for behaviors that are more effective than others. That it happens rarely in formal training or that some organizations pay only lip service to learning are secondary issues.
There are lots of issues tangled up under the broad rubric of knowledge management or knowledge sharing. That's one of the reasons that progress has been so difficult to make. Weblogs in general, the notion of klogs (whatever we end up calling them), and the recent discussions going on in blogspace are all contributing to my developing a much deeper understanding of the issues.
It's Alan Kay's old point - point of view is worth IQ points (the actual number being in dispute as is the relevance of raw intelligence to the discussion). Maybe it's a philosophical point. For me, if you're still alive, you're learning. If you're learning, you're at least potentially getting smarter in some practical sense.
Granted most organizations do a piss-poor job of helping people learn intelligently (I include schools as organizations in this context). That doesn't mean that those organizations and those individuals who can do it should quit trying.
As for insecure and fearful managements, I suspect that the market will take care of them for us although perhaps not quickly enough. Call me a Pollyanna, but I think healthy organizations dominate statistically and economically. But as the norm, they are less visible in places like the media. We seem to be much more inclined to see and hear stories of trauma and problems than ones of normalcy and health.
4:39:57 PM 
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