The role of facilitator and knowledge management

Despite having worked in the field, I’ve never strongly identified with the discipline of Knowledge Management. Like many others I suspect, I find it’s a little amorphous. There are a broad range of thoughts on Knowledge Management, but there is no unanimous definition.

Interestingly, it’s listed under ‘Computer sciences’ in Wikipedia’s List of Academic Disciplines. That categorisation takes a very techno-centric view. I’ve tended to see it more as a interdisciplinary field, which as a generalist, is why I am drawn to it. But Dave Pollard recently wrote a couple of blog posts that have got me re-thinking—or at the very least clarifying—my position.

In KM2.0, Dave seems to take an ecological-centric view of KM, which sees the interaction of people, identity, knowledge and environmental factors as a complex adaptive system. I feel more closely aligned to this perspective, and with the types of initiatives he proposes:

… the seven most important initiatives of KM 2.0 are context-building, connection-building, and personal productivity initiatives — facilitating better, more informed conversations with the right people.

I also identify with, strive to become and hope to be part of what Dave elloquently identifies as the role of the facilitator in all of this:

… this network of practitioners is global, powerfully connected, and driven to be of use, to make a difference, to make the world a better place. These people are not in any sense like the old style of facilitation consultants, who took instruction from senior executives with a predetermined agenda and pushed participants to deliver on it. Even worse, these old-style arrogant consultants sometimes introduced their own ‘expert’ point of view into the discussion (usually to the detriment of all).

By contrast, practitioners of this new set of facilitation or ‘hosting’ techniques aspire to nothing more or less than to enable more effective conversations leading to peer-consensual decisions and self-selected follow-up actions.

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