Explicit Knowledge Categories Jim McGee offers a must read 4 categories of explicit knowledge:
- Sharing Answers
- Sharing Questions
- Sharing Practices
- Discovery/Innovation
This kind of segmentation is invaluable. Besides defining the categories, he identifies their key management issues.
It might be a little out there, but I can't help but offer a 5th, maybe as a category and at least as lens for viewing potential use of the categories -- Revealing Conflicts. Some of the best tacit knowledge is made explicit through debate, the socratic process of people taking sides on an issue. When I have a decision to make, lets say on how to do something like define an incentive compensation issue, access to answers helps offer options. Questions offer some considerations, but are likely not in context with the answers I am considering. Practices, as Jim points out, lack context as well.
Information and knowledge has no value until it informs a decision. Until then its just an option. You exercise both the option of consuming the knowledge at the cost, or premium, of time to read it and hard costs of acquiring it. The problem arises if you base your decision on categories of explicit knowledge that are "Pros," you skew your mental probability distribution of the outcomes of a decision to one side. If, however, "Pros" are balanced by "Cons" the distribution will be more balanced. Pros and Cons together also define the context for an issue at one point in time.
But the problem with using conflict as an asset is that many cultures purposely avoid it, will not document it and will even bury it. Unfortunate, because the best answers, lessons and context come from healthy debate.
11:20:13 AM 
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