How Much Knowledge are You Sharing?

A few years ago, my colleagues at the UCLA Center for the Art of Performance presented an exhibition of great ideas.  They invited members of the campus community to submit ideas that would change the world.  The selected ideas were all blown up on posters and featured in a display in the lobby of Royce Hall.  I was honored to have two of my submissions accepted and blown up on posters and displayed.  I can't remember the first of my ideas (I'm still looking for it), but the 2nd one had some potential:

"How much Knowledge are you sharing versus how much are your hoarding?  How many lives would you change if we all focused on sharing for one week?"

I have a confession to make. I have a fixation with knowledge.  I'm driven by the concept of knowledge management and sharing of knowledge.  I'm fascinated by the way that organizations share their knowledge throughout their organization.  How does one part of an organization know what other parts of the organization know?  How does your organization keep track of knowledge? How do you know that someone has actually received and utilized the knowledge you shared with them? And, how does your organization share knowledge?  How do you know that other people know?

I often ask people these questions about their organizations and I'm amazed to discover that the number one knowledge dissemination and storage tool is............Email!  Remarkable, given the fact that it was never designed to be a search engine for thousands of messages.  Yet, most organizations share knowledge by emailing it to their members.  10,000 emails in your in box (yes I did read them) need to be searched every time you're looking for some shred of information.

How does your organization share knowledge?  When I worked at the front desk of my Residence Hall, we had a log book.  We would come to work 15 minutes before our start time.  Our job was to read through the log and find the last time we had initialed the log (marking where we "left off" or the last time we worked).  We then read everything up to right now, and then initial it again.  A brilliant way to both disseminate knowledge (to me) and let others know that I had read what had occurred since I last worked.  This saved my supervisors and fellow workers from having to ask the question "Did Heller know about the change in operating hours?"  Since they saw my initials on Saturday and then saw my initials on Wednesday, they know what I have acknowledged I'm supposed to know.

How does your organization distribute information and store knowledge?  How does it know that people have the information they need to function effectively?  

And most importantly, Are you sharing  knowledge with other people in your organization that will help them and your organization?  

The future of your organization depends on you.  Are you playing well with others and sharing?