Dr Paul Krivinos was in Christchurch earlier this week, and he gave a seminar to the Christchurch chapter of the New Zealand Knowledge Management network on Establishing a Positive Climate for Knowledge Sharing.

I didn’t live blog his comments, but I took some notes. Here’s the main points:

• If you want to create a negative climate for knowledge sharing, there’s lots of things you can do. Eg, tell others that their ideas are stupid, disagree with them AND put them down at the same time. Paul showed the 2006 Superbowl commercial from Fedex as an example …
• Really listening to others is a key to open exchange of information, and thus knowledge management. We need to get all of the information onto the table.
• Being proactive is another key to information sharing (eg, vs. being reactive). Elements of this are supportiveness (giving credit to others), trust (others have no fear that you will shoot the messenger if they bring negative news), openness (willing to be candid with bad news), participative decision making (the “collaboration” piece), and an emphasis on high-performance goals.

During the discussion time, I commented to Paul that many of the areas he highlighted within the frame of reference of KM are ones that I would highlight within a frame of reference of collaboration. Thus the same building blocks of effective human interaction have positive outcomes for KM and collaboration.

I have to say, however, that my absolutely favourite part of the session was Dan’s interjections throughout the discussions. Dan asked “So what’s the relevance of KM going forward?”, and then based on what others said during the next 20 minutes or so, would pipe up and say things like “So KM is ‘leadership’?”, or “So KM is ‘collaboration’?” or “So KM is ‘marketing’?” Just as we were finishing, Paul talked about the challenges that the US space agencies are facing with a loss of knowledge as scientists leave, and also as historical documents can not be found. I leaned toward Dan and said, “So KM is ‘rocket science’!”

Many thanks to Paul for meeting with us all.