Nicholas Negroponte writes about Creating a Culture of Ideas. He points to various enablers of innovation, including:
- Embracing the diversity of a heterogeneous or interdisciplinary culture and its multiple viewpoints.
- Accepting risk and failure - we inevitably make some mistakes, so we should learn from them and not hide from them.
- Valuing imagination and iconoclasm as well as experience - not being stifled by undue deference to tradition.
- Collaborating and sharing ideas, in particular between people with different outlooks and backgrounds.
These and similar ideas are often quoted by senior management when they give their nominal backing to corporate KM. But somewhere between the rostrum and the boardroom, they lose heart. They buy in quick fixes and gloss over the deeper problems.
Organisations wanting to implement knowledge management often start out thinking they can legislate creativity into effect. Common barriers to KM include the opposites of Negroponte's enablers:
- Attempting to enforce a uniform corporate culture by management fiat.
- Avoiding risk, denying failure, concealing ignorance.
- Recognising qualifications rather than capability, paper rather than performance, hindsight rather than foresight.
- Stifling creativity by demanding answers rather than questions.
- Promoting self-reliance over trust and teamwork, my solution over our solution.
(Thanks to Tomalak's Realm for the link.)
11:17:41 PM 
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