KM is Shallow, Insular and “History”

image

Grant Campbell over at Boxes and Arrows has written what has to be my current top contender for Blog Post of the Year. He’s writing about three common flame-war starters in the information architecture (IA) community, the accusation that information architects are shallow dilettantes, exclusive, and already passe. But his reflections can just as easily be applied to KM. Here are three hard-hitting snips (just replace his “IAs” with “knowledge managers” and see how it feels:

SHALLOWNESS IS GOOD

“Here’s a suggestion to begin with: recognizing your shallowness is perhaps the most profound act of your intellectual life. It’s the recognition that you’re mortal, that you’re busy, that you’ve got to survive in a cruel world, and that there’s more to read, more to write, more to think about, and more to solve, than you could ever possibly manage in your lifespan. I suspect that most of the standard disciplines begin with this recognition of shallowness… I sometimes wish that IAs were more shallow, that they were less insistent about staying at that giddy nexus where your small activities resonate across the entire networked world… I sometimes wish we were less eager to leap from visualization to facet analysis to web analytics to information scent to pace layering before I’ve even had a chance to look at the menu. What some people would call shallow, I would call a fear of being shallow, which translates into a frenetic inability to calm down… What’s more, this inability to relax and be shallow is a formidable barrier to IA curriculum development. A field has to have patches of stability: areas that stay constant, not because the world is constant, but because people are sufficiently mule-headed to insist on not changing.”

image

INSULARITY IS GOOD

“IA professes to be a field of practice, and aspires to be a field of study. As a field of practice, it has no great need to define an intellectual foundation of its own; as a field of study, it can’t live without one. If IA is a field of practice, it simply needs to combine ideas wherever they can be found into a set of practices and skills that others find useful. If IA is a field of study, it requires a distinct field of discourse, with both canonical and resistant texts, multiple voices, and a constellation of methods of inquiry. As a field of practice, IA can lift whatever it wants from philosophy, computer science, architecture, graphic design and library science; as a field of study, IA must appropriate and redefine those things into a common discourse. I, for one, believe that developing that common discourse is a good thing. But imagine how it looks to outsiders. Those of you with children probably know how hard it is to watch them learn to do something you know how to do very well, and how overwhelming the temptation can be to rush in and fix things that you know will go wrong… It’s hard for experts in the fields that feed into IA to sit back and watch us stumble around, and probably harder still to watch us leap ahead unexpectedly, often at the cost of some unquestioned dogma in the parent field. And it’s hard for IAs not to snap with irritation when someone pipes up with phrases like, “you’re doing it wrong, you know.” ”

image

HISTORY IS GOOD

“Underneath all our usability studies and frameworks and paradigms and swimlanes and facet categories lies a core conviction: if you’re going to present complex information effectively, you’ve got to stop and think about it. You have to insist on your right to stop and think. That’s not easy to do, when a chorus of voices is telling you that you’ve missed the boat, and that the world has moved on. It’s even harder to persuade an organization to do it, when its leaders are afraid of becoming history.”

Now go read the whole thing.

0 Comment so far

Commenting is not available in this weblog entry.

Comment Guidelines: Basic XHTML is allowed (<strong>, <em>, <a>) Line breaks and paragraphs are automatically generated. URLs are automatically converted into links.