Action research into knowledge gardening

Thanks for putting this piece on knowledge gardening out there! I've read it and found it very accessible and well-put... It says many things that I have been saying (or trying to say) in the organisation where I'm working on an organisational change process in very succinct ways! I think it also helps a great deal in simplifying the way I can view my own role within the process!

I have a few things to probe:

First: there appears to be some noise around the idea of wisdom management with a lot of people not sounding very convinced about the idea (e.g. here). There seems to be a special fear around the idea of having wisdom experts (which some people find a little bit pretentious - and, I think, understandably so)... However, what you have expressed in your paper seems to take us beyond this issue, by attributing wisdom to the network and the processes at work within it:

"A wisdom system emerges when the network becomes conscious, and becomes the guru. The wisdom system contains high-level insights harvested from ordinary conversation between extraordinary people. Culled from all kinds of conversations, these are nuggets that we wish to remember, not because we need this factual piece of knowledge in our work, but because what we touched on is a life-affirming, foundational principle that needs to be part of our collective wisdom."

Still, I wonder what the AoH community feels about all this... Are we wisdom experts - what does this really mean? What is the reaction about and what do we feel about it?

Secondly: I have found myself wondering about 'different ways of knowing'. I recently followed some links and found myself reading the web pages of an anthropological linguist who described a completely process-based language that lacked the fragmentory 'thing'-based way of knowing of most 'modern' languages. (Various papers can be found here). So, where does 'different ways of knowing' fit into the bigger question of knowledge gardening? Are there different ways of knowing outside of these indigenous cultures? What would be an appropriate metaphor (within the knowledge gardening framework) for understanding this?

Thirdly: I am working with a field-based, Indian, non-profit organisation which works with predominantly tribal communities. Almost all the field staff and the communities - even many of the office workers - are either completely uncomfortable in English or know too little to use it effectively for handling 'knowledge gardening' level interactions... There is also a divide between young, outsider 'professionals' (usually only around for the short-haul) and old, local 'field workers' (old timers)... As can be easily imagined, all is not peachy between them. In any case, as I read through the paper, I found myself wondering about what kind of an organisation we would have to be in order to become a collective of non-digital knowledge gardeners... The whole thing ends up looking more like a knowledge jungle... but there must be ways (perhaps indigenous ways?) of navigating jungles that can reveal the 'garden within the jungle'??? I think I raise much of this because the whole KM field seems to be very entangled with IT (e.g. we talk about hyperlinking) and I find myself wondering just how important IT is for all this!

Any thoughts on the above from anyone would be much appreciated! I recognise it might fit better on a blog but it came up here all the same.

Thanks,

Andre