The wisdom management is to manage collective wisdom which gains more knowledge that creates more wisdom. Knowledge is facts, information, and skills acquired by a person through experience or education; the theoretical or practical understanding of a subject. Wisdom is the insightful quality of having experience, knowledge, and good judgment; the inner quality of being wise. Does transformation start when wisdom is converted to knowledge or when knowledge is converted to wisdom? Is wisdom management as the same as knowledge management or wisdom management is a higher level of knowledge management? Many well-established organizations have information and knowledge management, how about wisdom management?
Knowledge-Insight-Wisdom Hierarchy: There is explicit knowledge – things people write down, things people can explain to others easily – and then there is tacit knowledge – the stuff that people know how to do but is not easily captured because it’s all in their head. Tacit knowledge is more akin to insight which is something where people have the experience, knowledge, and good judgment. Wisdom is the transformation of you into “A REAL YOURSELF” for which your knowledge may help you sometimes facilitates too, but you need to have an inner drive to demonstrate wisdom.
Wisdom must undergo a conversion to knowledge before it can be properly managed: Wisdom includes whatever knowledge we’ve acquired to this point in our lives and it incorporates experience, reflection, and questioning. it may seem intangible, but it is very real and valuable. True wisdom is definitely related to experience, directly or indirectly (via learning). But only if you have learned something from those experiences, and make it part of your inner-self, will your knowledge turn into wisdom.
Wisdom is the application of knowledge at right time: Knowledge is Information or experience; it is a collection of facts and raw data. What one does with the raw data requires wisdom. Wisdom is an umbrella term, at its best, it is the amalgamation of thought, analysis, planning, prediction of consequences, and so on. It is necessary to educate people to become aware of the many dimensions of any particular initiative. Depending upon the actual initiative, they may be the environment, labor relations, community relations, professional credentials of those involved, competitors, suppliers, distributors, regulators, etc. The wise person will consider the current and future needs of all of these constituencies when planning and executing the project. If these constituencies are all the same or better at the end of this project, wisdom will have been demonstrated.
The wisdom management is to manage collective wisdom which gains more knowledge that creates more wisdom: Understanding of wisdom in the data, information, knowledge, and wisdom spectrum is that wisdom is the application of knowledge to solve practical problems in daily life. See wisdom as a result of life experience or knowledge transcendence. Wisdom comes from making mistakes and learning from them (or from others mistakes), and so knowledge comes before wisdom and wisdom use knowledge. Then knowledge is the result of lessons we learned by exploitation of our wisdom! Less knowledge means less factual wisdom. As wisdom encourages to keep on gathering facts (knowledge). Knowledge without wisdom creates catastrophe; when it creates wisdom which gains more knowledge that creates more wisdom.
In some organizations, knowledge management and wisdom management are the separate coins that don’t need to be separate; for many others, it’s the same information-knowledge-wisdom continuum; either way, the goal of such management disciplines helps improve organizational change adaptability, idea adaptability, learning capabilities and overall business agility.
Knowledge Management
Information is the lifeblood and knowledge is the power of modern businesses. All leading businesses across the vertical sectors claim they are in the information management businesses. The information does not live alone but permeates to everywhere in the businesses, information potential directly impacts the business’s potential of the organization. Managing the information-knowledge lifecycle effectively becomes a strategic business capability. And there are different levels of information/knowledge system models to meet the business requirement at a different stage.
Experiential: Information management entails organizing, retrieving, acquiring, maintaining, securing, updating, distributing, sharing, publishing and finally archiving information. Many organizations still feel overwhelmed by the exponential growth of information. They are at the experimental stage of accessing information and exploring resource. But often lack a structured approach with the right talent to manage those soft assets and capture its business value effectively. The pitfalls might include, they do not understand what raw material they have to play with, or they do not apply the worthwhile evaluation to reveal the inherent value of information; or even worse, they do not understand why they should do these things in the first priority.
Transitional: More organizations are accumulating the experience at the transitional stage, become more fluent in managing information, analyzing information, refining knowledge and expressing ideas. The effort of valuing information independent of its association with the related tangible seems to be difficult, if not futile, exercise. Information/ knowledge are fluid, they cannot be managed like those other hard assets. More attention needs to be placed on the conditions that allow information/knowledge to flow and generate value rather than try to manage (“control”) knowledge like it is a thing that can benefit from that type of intervention. Perhaps you should first work to identify how information is associated with the valued tangibles of your businesses; your products and your resources; like information flows in business processes for example, then its own value will become readily apparent and quantifiable by association. There is the art to figure out the pattern and capture the business insight, and the science to managing information lifecycle systematically.
Transformational: From transitional to transformational is a leapfrog for improving information/knowledge management maturity. Organizations need to have Information Management strategy as an integral element in the business strategy, in order to manage information lifecycle -processing information, synthesizing knowledge; capturing insight, shaping foresight, and abstracting wisdom seamlessly. It determines the strategic objectives, their risk appetite for achieving them, identifies and assesses the risks and make sure it’s all joined up. Perhaps in some organizations with low digital IQ, there seems to be the “expectation” that if you have a great business in one place and it’s working ok, and then knowledge, ideas, solutions, and advice will easily transfer and that piece of the jigsaw will fit snugly into somewhere else. In less complex situations, one can see how this easily works. However, organizations become more complex than ever, knowledge needs to be facilitated and managed more systematically to reach the transformational stage.
Motivational: Information Management is not just about information or process, often people are still the information master. Hence, gaining perspective, garnering attitude, and motivate people to frame the right problems, and provided an information-based solution is the ultimate goal of achieving information value and practicing knowledge power. It is important to cultivate the learning culture that has awareness and understanding of the importance of learning, plus setting a new behavior expectation for active knowledge participants. A cooperative communication framework like social network permits to share knowledge and create common models that evolve themselves naturally like an organic organism. Briefly put, Knowledge Management needs to be well embedded into the key business processes to shape a culture of learning, motivate people to become more informative, insightful for improving the overall decision effectiveness and organizational maturity. It actually extends to the culture of the company – how the collective mindsets and behaviors of the organization become digital ready for opening the new chapter of the growth cycle.
Innovative: The ultimate goal of effective information/knowledge management is to keep mind flow, idea flow, and therefore, business flow. Organizations can work toward a knowledge ecosystem view that incorporates the virtual aspects of the knowledge system, innovation, and intuitive behavior. Collaboration to harness the ideas and ingenuity of your staff cannot be nor should be controlled. Because at the end of the day what you want is companies that are capable of mobilizing all the ideas, experiences, capacities of everyone in the company and partners to adapt to ever-changing challenges. Knowledge can become the commodity shortly, but creativity is always fresh, from one good idea to the next great idea, companies must compete by creating the corporate cultures and ‘labs’ with fertile ground for new ideas to sprout, and blossom to achieve significant business values.
Information/Knowledge Management is the management with knowledge as a focus, involves the use of technologies and processes with the aim of optimizing the value that is generated, and with the goal to improve organization’s collective learning capabilities. To quote Peter Drucker, knowledge is the most valuable commodity. It couldn’t be truer in the digital era. On one hand, the fresh knowledge can be captured from the abundance of information; on the other hand, it doesn’t take long for that knowledge to become a commodity due to the rapid changes. But information flow can further streamline the idea flow and stimulate collective creativity which can catalyze business growth and build business competency. Information/knowledge management is a differentiated business capability and plays a crucial role in running a high-performance business.
2 thoughts on “Concept of Knowledge Management and Wisdom Management”