Knowledge as an Action adding Value

This week I went to a presentation made by Prof. Milan Zeleny (Professor of Management Systems at Fordham University), one of the fathers of the Data Information Knowledge and Wisdom (DIKW) Hierarchy at the knowledge domain.

One of the interesting things at the presentation was vision of the difference between Information and Knowledge looking through another glass. For him, Information is the description of action while knowledge is the coordination of action. This way Knowledge is always tacit because once you describe it, it is Information. To be knowledge again, this information must be transformed into an action.

In my opinion this is a very interesting point of view because most of the time we see a lot of information available but nothing is done using it. When someone gets the Information and starts an action, then we can say that this person knows how to do something.

If Information triggering action builds knowledge, and if we can measure the value added (to external customers, to users, etc) by each action, than we can measure the value of the knowledge being used. Nowadays where the Information and Information Technologies are becoming commodities, as they are highly available, the knowledge, or in other words the coordination of actions using those IT and Information, can be the difference to add more value to the business.

Knowledge, Innovation and Wisdom are measurable, and then must add value to your business.

Regards,
Alex Lopes

High Impact Presentations training

Hi everybody,

Do you know how to open a presentation bringing the public attention to your speech and motivate them to do something at the end? Today I started a training about how to make a high impact presentation.

The training is going great. Only one day and I could feel how I improved my way of get the public attention, getting more confortable to speak, more organized and structured and making it a good experience not only one more presentation. The best part of today’s training was about how to open the presentation, using some techniques like mistery, asking questions to think about, making weird afirmatives that will impact and get everybody’s attention, etc.

Tomorrow there will be more exercises about how to open for questions, answer hard questions and also how to behave using voice levels and gestures while presenting something.

If you want to improve your way of presenting something, even in informal conversations, I’m sure that a presentation training is good not only professionaly but also for life.

Regards,
Alex Lopes

Knowledge Sharing as a continous process

Most of the time people see Knowledge Sharing as an overhead activity, completely out of scope, or try to pack it inside of a project or workshop to be done in some days or hours.
Knowledge Sharing should be much more than that, it should be a running maintain activity. If somebody needs something that you know, for the company is better if you expend some minutes explaining that then this person have to look for it, expend a lot of time searching and learning pieces of it in many different places.

Thinking about time expent, some minutes from people who knows are cheaper than many hours from people who doesn’t know and needs to buy this knowledge from nothing.

Thinking about medium term benefits, if you help someone with some expertize you have, this person will do the job better and faster, the results for the company will be better and it will come back to you and everybody soon. If everybody does that, the Synergy makes the benefit much bigger.

Here in Shell it should be considered “Enterprise First” behavior but some managers seems not to see the benefits of it and for the whole company, only worried about their specific “to do’s”, ignoring that everybody are multicultural and multi-knowledge people and maybe me or you know what somebody is looking for.

If you see somebody or something when you can use your knowledge to help, do it. It will be better to everybody! Share your knowledge, build this sharing culture, one day you will need and somebody will be there to give you the directions.

Regards,
Alex

Book "Sinergia" (Synergy) from Sergio Lins

Last week I received an e-mail from Sergio Lins, that was my professor in MBKM, offering his book named Sinergia (Synergy in portuguese). I had a look at some pages in his website and the book seems to be great. I'm very excited to start reading it.

The book talks about how to create, develop and keep the synergy, capitalizing the knowledge built in this process, not only in an Enterprise world but also personal and interpersonal.

Also some lessons learnt from consultants and executives that are investing a lot in Collaboration and Knowledge Management methodologies to improove the synergy in their business.

For the ones who speak portuguese, it is a very good book to read. I'm already waiting for mine to arrive.

Alexandre lopes