Capture, share, apply, and grow the valuable knowledge inside your head and the heads of others

You suddenly get a flash of wisdom or insight. You want to remember it, maybe even share it with others.

You write it down. Only it ends up getting lost in a pile of notebooks, index cards, and “sticky notes” that even you would have a hard time finding.

The good news is, it doesn’t have to be that way. We’ll show you how to easily and habitually capture, organize and share your valuable “know-how.” And best of all, you can help others to do the same.

Image of an expert attempting to put what she knows into a diagram

If you’re involved in any of the following, you’ve come to the right place:

Knowledge Management

Chief Knowledge Officers (CKOs), Chief Learning Officers (CLOs), and other executives, managers, and practitioners responsible for managing expert and institutional knowledge

Content curation and authoring

Content authors, site owners and custodians

Coaching and mentoring

Subject Matter Experts (SMEs), small business owners and entrepreneurs, and anyone who has mastered a trade or craft that needs to be passed on to others

Knowledge doesn’t manage itself

Knowledge, both human and machine, needs curation. The speed and volume at which knowledge is created continue to accelerate at an ever-faster pace. This means that you and your organization need knowledge curation now more than ever. And there are serious penalties if you don’t bring this runaway expansion under control.

You’ve seen no shortage of tools and techniques for building knowledge bases and repositories. Yet the question remains, “How do I design, build, and maintain a body of knowledge that’s easily accessible by myself and others?”

Unfortunately, we’ve seen too many knowledge curation projects launched with great fanfare, only to quickly slide back into chaos. “We don’t have time for this,” is a common push-back. That’s because knowledge curation takes time and effort.

But the pain that results from not doing it keeps ratcheting up as the zettabytes keep piling on. That’s why we’ve put together an eBoK that makes the whole process easy, satisfying, and enjoyable!

Key steps in knowledge curation:

In this eBoK, you’ll learn how to:

Determine what knowledge is worth capturing and in what form
Share your knowledge with more people, even across different cultures and generations by bridging different world views, mental models, and learning modalities
Determine which tools and approaches to use for different types of knowledge, and how to integrate them into a single system
Vet the knowledge and keep it up-to-date
Make knowledge flow and grow, from a single individual to an entire community of experts and practitioners

Yes, Executive Management, there is a payoff

In organizations where we’ve implemented these changes, the results have been dramatic, even in slow-moving industries such as oil and gas, food and agriculture, and government. The following case example from one of our clients in the food and beverage industry serves as a brief illustration…

“Until recently, 90% of all reports were coming from a single department. When it came to deciding what information would be communicated, this particular group essentially ‘ruled the roost.’ After adopting the practice of knowledge curation company-wide, the contributions of other departments grew by over 300%. This resulted in faster and more frequent introductions of new and improved products in a highly competitive market. An added benefit was an 80 – 90% reduction in time taken to store and retrieve written reports.”

Making the right changes happen

Changes such as in the above example take dedicated, persistent effort, balanced with strong leadership. But as your organization’s critical knowledge becomes more easily accessible, it can be adapted and used by more people, resulting in:

Faster and better decisions
Improved ability to respond to “pop-up” problems and opportunities
Less time wasted repeating mistakes and “re-inventing the wheel.”

Best of all, your intellectual capital, which represents roughly eighty percent or more of the total value of most organizations, will continue to grow.

An e-Body of Knowledge about building and curating e-Bodies of Knowledge

We’ll show you how to take what you or others already know (even what they don’t know that they know), organize it, and put it into a digital format in ways that can be easily accessed and used whenever needed. We call it an e-Body of Knowledge, or “eBoK.”

Which is exactly what you’ll be using here on this site. You’ll be learning from (and even adding to) an eBody of Knowledge about building and curating e-Bodies of Knowledge.