Fresh KM eyes?
February 12th, 2009[ General ]
Some notes from a paper I’m writing here at Brainpark…
In his book Notes On The Synthesis Of Form, Christopher Alexander talks about architecture as form, context, and ensemble:
“The form is a part of the world over which we have control, and which we decide to shape while leaving the rest of the world as it is. The context is that part of the world which puts demand on this form; anything in the world that makes demands of the form is context. Fitness is a relation of mutual acceptability between these two. In a problem of design we want to satisfy the mutual demands which the two make on one another. We want to put the context and the form into effortless contact or frictionless coexistence.”
Applying this to knowledge management (KM), traditional KM has focused almost solely on the form, ie the resulting documents we have control over. They’ve ignored the context. As Alexander explains, it’s the context that stresses and places demands on that form. Forms don’t fail in isolation, they fail because of the demands of a context. We need a new view of KM that’s aware, and understands the concept, of context and strives for fitness between form and context.