Broaden your scope!

Collaborative Networking is most often associated with knowledge management. Immediately all the doomed KM projects spring to mind and it is perceived as old wine in new bottles. First of, KM is for a large part a ‘contradictio in terminis’. Knowledge is not something you can manage directly; knowledge is a unique combination of information and experience that resides within people. So at best what you can manage is information, people and the sharing of experience between them. When by KM, people mean that knowledge is to be governed as a strategic asset, it becomes interesting for us. If knowledge is a strategic asset, who is to actually govern it?

Almost all KM projects have been top-down and micro managed, pretty unsuccessful I might add. The actual actors, the practitioners who use the knowledge, have rarely been involved in setting up KM solutions. These actors form social structures (networks!) to share information and experience within their field of expertise, because almost any field has become too complex for any one man to fully cover. In a sense they are already governing their own field of knowledge. Most KM projects ignored these social structures to their ruin. This is where Collaborative Networking comes in, to support this governing process and give the means to direct the knowledge and energy of a network to the actors themselves. To define the field they are responsible for, to support the social structure, interaction, capture of interesting communication (stories, cases) and to support an infrastructure to store and share information, methods and tools and to learn together.

Without top down commitment however, this will be as doomed to fail as the original KM projects. Top management is needed as a facilitator; to put in place the support structures, the reward structure, the infrastructure, etc. We help directors put a value to the networks within the knowledge field(s) they are responsible for. We help them define those fields from a strategic view point, we help them to understand, appreciate and direct the performance of existing networks and have the actual practitioners of non-networked fields of knowledge create new ones for them. This is done by benchmarking networks and potential networks on their social, human, creative and financial value, by monitoring their progress and by giving directors the means to ensure they do not fall below minimal thresholds for these values. We help pick the fertile combination of knowledge and available practitioners and help directors grow new opportunities through innovation, agility and a broadened scope.