The Ivory Tower – Knowledge Management

Once upon a time a land where there was an Ivory Tower. In this tower lived a community of experts in various subjects, they were known as the Wizards.

Near the tower there was a palace where lived a King and his court. It was known in those days to be a righteous king and bringing prosperity for all.

Surrounding the Ivory Tower and the palace, there lived all people, let’s call them Serfs, who were usually happy and worked for the support and contributions that made to the reign and were returned in improvements in the community.

However, there was a problem with the harvest that year. With the fear of a serious problem of trade and even food supply, they went to the King, who then called the Wizards community to give a solution. The Wizards did a study and gathered all the knowledge about the issue. They prepared an audience and explained in lengthy presentations to the Serfs, everything that had to be done.

But the result was not very good because there was a gap between the needs of Serfs, and knowledge exposed by the Wizards. Time passed and the problem worsened.

So, the king called the group of Troubadours (we could call them here NetWisers).

The NetWisers were known to work with non-traditional information, which existed not only in academies, or in most traditional best practices. They really did not waste any source, and so examined how the other kingdoms solved their problems. Thus, they were known for building the information together with all the actors of the problem, and not “own” information and “transfer it” when necessary, but analyze it and present it together with its source. The NetWisers were detached, so to speak.

A group was formed, which examined external information on a large scale, formal knowledge of the Wizards and special knowledge that was not being tapped into the solution — the pragmatic knowledge of Serfs. The NetWisers did not have a special reputation for expertise or even wisdom, but they had a method, a technique for producing new knowledge.

We could say that this knowledge already existed, but like so many reigns, needed a very long time to spread and to validate. The great advantage of NetWisers was to provide a certain democratization, or rather, a certain expropriation of information. They approached different groups, aroused some suspicion, it was true, but the much greater volume of information made them masters as problem solvers.

Perhaps by not dispensing help from no one, they were accepted and began to be used for complicated troubleshooting, where an unusual knowledge was needed.

It was a paradigm shift, but the kingdom realized that something was happening with KNOWLEDGE. It went on to be dispersed, to belong to a large group. It went to have a higher risk of use, since the responsibility for authorship decreased, and all NetWisers brought new knowledge at any time. But then it was as if each Serf, Noble or Wizard could know less individually on average, but the reign strangely became wiser. It was as if wisdom had migrated to  the own kingdom, when was native of individuals.

Over time, everyone in the kingdom would become NetWiser, and the reign soon returned to prosper.