Zapped by KM!

I'm psyched!

Benc, Donna and I were super lucky enough to be invited to the KM 4 Dev conference, held at the ADB. It was an awesome event because it gathered all the best and brightest Knowledge workers, practitioners, experts and trailblazers from all over the world! We got to interact with people from all kinds of industries who are into knowledge management, learned from them, and best of all, networked. It was a tiring 2-day event, but definitely one that was very enriching!

It was tiring because your brain was constantly in high gear. You absolutely had to walk around and walk up to people; you had to make yourself known, know what they did and use all of that knowledge to act--the core of km. hehehe

But the experience enriched me so much because I met so many interesting people: Dr. Abdulnasser Minkar from the Islamic Development Bank (who was such a character, and such a wise, wise man), Dr. Thomas Menkhoff of the Singapore Management University, Rory Chase of Teleos, and so many other KM practitioners. It was mindblowing!

What should be mentioned is the unique way in which the whole event was conducted. It was a mix of fora, workshops, seminars, poster sessions, and open space technology. EVERYTHING, and I mean, everything was interactive...in that you were encouraged to speak, to share and to learn. This definitely created a fecund environment for knowledge management to take root and grow. The great paradox of this was we didn't need technology at all to do km. All we needed were simple tools: pens, paper, stories. That's it.

I liked the workshop because everybody there stoked the fire of km: openness. Each person there was open to ideas that in turn generated innovation and solutions. And those innovations and solutions were applied to all sorts of issues: managing personal time, how to help the poor and disadvantaged in the Himalayas, how to improve work in development organizations, how to make good decisions in the Central Bank, and so on.

It was positively Zapping!

On the last day of the event, we had a closing activity. The facilitator asked us to finish this sentence: What struck me most about the KM4Dev forum was...

I said, it was how important and pivotal a role communication plays in knowledge management. It was a recurring issue, but no one had specifically addressed it. The effective transmission and transfer of knowledge (whether tacit or explicit) is based largely on how well one is able to communicate. But because many of the experts are mostly scientists, managers, statisticians, technical specialists, not all of them could feel the importance of effectively "packaging" the knowledge to make it palatable and dummy-proof for the rest of us mortals. It is important to know how to communicate, and I think that's one thing I know I can contribute to KM.

The next forum will be in the Netherlands. Hahaha, good luck to us. But I will never forget these last two days, which may have, in my opinion, just made me make one of the most important decisions in my career!

Post script: Kudos should go to the ultra hard working team of the Knowledge Management Center (ADB) headed by Daan Boom, ADB's Principal Knowledge Management Specialist. There may have been some snafus, but they were hardly felt. That's how fun, engaging and efficient the whole event was. Congrats, KM Center!