Share your story! Participate in the Knowledge Management Impact Challenge to help identify the measures that matter for Knowledge Management

Measuring the impact of knowledge management is a hot topic in international development circles and many of us are trying to find ways to effectively measure and demonstrate the results of our investments in knowledge and learning to understand how these investments help us achieve our development objectives faster, more effectively, more efficiently, and/or with greater impact. We all know that there are no simple answers or one-size-fits-all approaches but there is increasing consensus that we need to work together to address these challenges by asking ourselves difficult questions and exploring the context of emerging solutions.

IKM-relevant? Annual programme meeting, days 2 and 3

After exploring and discussing (on day 1) the various pieces of research work that have been undertaken in IKM-Emergent until now, the second day of the workshop started with a world café and continued with a ‘birds of a feather session’ (a marketplace / less-open space method) where we explored some ideas for the end of the programme and a potential IKM-Emergent 2 programme. The last day of the programme put us in action planning mode around crucial activities.

IKM-convergent? Annual programme meeting, Wageningen, day 1

A while back I blogged about the IKM-Emergent programme and its tendency to dispersion.

The programme has evolved since then and a number of things are coalescing on this first day of the all-peeps IKM-Emergent  workshop (which brings together the three working groups, but also a number of new guests that are working on issues related to IKM-E and/or that will be working for the programme from now on).

IKM participants getting their heads around common issues

Around the MandE table: a cooking lesson?

Much has happened since Simon and I started working on this paper about the monitoring and evaluation of knowledge management (M&E of KM, see original post here) and the cooking lesson continues, for us anyway and hopefully for you too, as in this case there are not too many cooks!

At the M&E cooking class, there's never too many cooks (Photo credits: vår resa)

On the KM4DEV mailing list, there has been a useful exchange on this topic of M&E of KM and this has triggered more reflections on our side to approach this paper. By the way, special thanks for Sarah Cummings, Roxane Samii and Patrick Lambe for getting this discussion going!

Simon just introduced in a blogpost one of our suggested theoretical models to address the different paradigms (what I profanely refer to as ‘world views’) on knowledge management, offering a spectrum from positivist to constructionist and from cognitivist to social learning).

In this post I’d like to share a refined version of the framework that we would like to offer to your scrutiny. This framework will eventually include a series of questions helping to crack the nuts for the M&E recipe, but for now let’s focus on the recipe itself.

Methodological paradigms of the M&E of KM

I’ve been working on a small section of our paper on the monitoring and evaluation of KM (see Ewen’s earlier blog) and wanted to share some emerging ideas. The section is attempting to communicate IKMs epistemological perspective by introducing two dimensions (originally described by Chris Mowles in his comments on Ewen’s blog): the perspective of enquiry and the perspective of knowledge held by the evaluator (monitor). This is fairly abstract at the moment but do let me know if this is (1) accurate (I’m not a philosopher or even a social scientist) and (2) useful…

Monitoring knowledge (management): an impossible task?

It isn’t an impossible task to monitor/evaluate (M&E) intangibles, knowledge or knowledge management (KM), but it requires a series of tough choices in a maze of possibles. This is what Simon Hearn and myself are discovering, trying to summarise, synthesise and build upon the two M&E of KM papers commissioned earlier, as well as the reflective evaluation papers by Chris Mowles.

We are still at the stage of struggling very much with how to set the ballpark for our study. So this is a good opportunity to briefly share a blogpost I wrote recently about this very topic, and to share some preliminary thoughts. If we get to engage your views it would certainly help us to get going.

Questioning the IKM-Emergent pointers en français : Mais de quoi parle-t-on ?

A belated post but a lot happened in the last six or sevent weeks.

At the dawn of that period was an interesting moment of organising an entire day for the Francophones, generously sponsored by IKM-Emergent as a testimony of its will to walk its talk on the multiple knowledge’s – or shall I say les connaissances multiples?

Meta-analyses of organisational strategies for KM

The first issue of the Knowledge Management for Development Journal to be published by Routledge (Volume 5, Issue 1, 2009) has now appeared, focusing on the subject of KM in organisations. Guest editors of this issue comprised Ewen Le Borgne, Catherine Vaillancourt-Laflamme and Ivan Kulis. The issue has been produced in the context of the Information and Knowledge Management Emergent Research Programme (IKM Emergent)

Managing “le savoir”

The date is set: 5 October 2009, in back to back with the annual KM4DEV event, the first cobbles on the road to a francophone community of practice on learning for development will be paved, in Brussels the modern Babel tower!

For Complex Development Problems: We Need Bridging Leaders

This afternoon I saw in CNN how residents in Fargo, North Dakota pulled themselves together to protect their town against rising floodwaters by piling sandbags over threatened dikes.

Knowledge management (KM) is about achieving effective group action. During crisis situations — when a common threat is publicly visible and cause-and-effect relationships are known to everyone — effective group action follows easily. In complex development contexts, effective group action can happen if there is a leader who can see (better than most people can) and lead through three kinds of complexity:

• Dynamic complexity: when causes and effects are far apart in space and time, and therefore less publicly visible;

Generative complexity: when the future is difficult for most to predict, or is likely to be unfamiliar or different; and

Social complexity: when people who are affected or who should take action do not share similar assumptions, beliefs and interests.
(Source: Adam Kahane’s book “Solving Tough Problems: An Open Way of Talking, Listening and Creating New Realities,” Berrett-Koehler, 2004)This type of leader is called a bridging leader.