David Snowden's Seven Principles of Knowledge Management

David Snowden posted an update to his three rules (heuristics) for knowledge management. He has expanded them into seven principles. They are good reminders of the principles of knowledge sharing. They provide a starting point to examine conventional wisdom on how humans learn and share knowledge. Since my experience in KM is that I forgot the essentials on a regular basis, I regularly remind myself to review them.

David's post, from Oct. 10, 2008 is a good place to begin.

His seven principles are:

• Knowledge can only be volunteered not conscripted. (Here is my take on this rule of thumb).

• We only know what we know when we need to know it. (Again here is my take on David's rule of thumb)

• In the context of real need few people will withhold their knowledge.

• Everything is fragmented.

• Tolerated failure imprints learning better than success

• The way we know things is not the way we report things.

• We always know more than we can say and we will always say more than we can write down. And here is my blog on this essential principle; you can't understand social media without understanding David's principle.
  

You need to read David's posting to get the full value of these principles. Without a regular dialogue on these principles, I find I am bound to repeat my past failures.