Knowledge Cafe on 15th Feb 2008

The Knowledge café which was held on the above date as a class session was to discuss about “The worst consequences that could happen as a result of No Knowledge Management”. This was not discussed only in an organizational point of view, but a much broader view which included social and personal point of views.
The café began to work by asking each team to come up with consequences that could happen when there is no knowledge management.

Suggestions and decisions in Group 3

I as a member in group 3 will be first focus on the ideas we came up within our team. The task was to gather ideas from each team member without discussing within the given time. So we came up with 32 ideas. The following figure shows a photograph of the ideas we suggested.

Figure 1: Ideas of group 3

Following were the considered ideas as bad consequences after the discussion among the team.

1. No interaction between employees
2. No knowledge storage
3. No communication
4. No training and development
5. No sharing of ideas
6. No documentation
7. No transfer of knowledge
8. Redundancy
9. No expression of ideas
10. No culture
11. No system in place
12. No rewards
13. No socialisation
14. Goal uncertainty
15. No innovation
16. No regulations
17. No process view
18. No technology
19. No quality assurance and products
20. No learning attitude

At the end of our discussions we came up with the most worst three things that could happen if there is no knowledge management.
1. No socialisation and culture (No interaction, communication and culture).
When there is no socialisation people will tend not to communicate or interact with other people. This may be able to bring down a whole civilisation or a culture.

2. No system (No storage, documentation, innovation, regulations or technology).
The word “system” stands as an overall of systems which can exist. For an example social systems, organisational systems, technological or information systems, etc. When there is no knowledge been transmitted or when there is no interaction the possibilities for a system to exist fails. There will be no knowledge pass on with generations in a social society or there will be no knowledge distribution in an organisation since there is no storage or documentation. So there will be no rules and regulations or no new innovations of technology. One of the main reasons for human begins to be more advance from other creatures in this world is the ability of better communication and knowledge distribution.

3. No training and development.
No communications meaning no training. People will loose the attitude and the interest to learn about something. Hence the development process in every aspect will fail.


Final general discussion

The following figures shows the main three worst ideas each team came up in the knowledge cafe.

Figure 2: Ideas of group 1, group 3 and group 2.

Figure 3: Ideas of group 4.

The ideas presented by each group were almost similar because every body had come up with same kind of facts (e.g.: no communication and no documentation).
Each group made a 5 minute presentation about the suggestions they made. There were few points elaborated at the end of the Knowledge management cafe. There should be some kind of a communication method to transfer knowledge or information. The employees in an organisation should have the necessary access to communicate with the relevant person directly rather than go through a hierarchy of people.
Finally I think the worst suggestions made by group 3 are the best of all the groups since it covers all the possible areas which are relevant to knowledge management without focusing on organisational or technical systems.