Arkiv for emnet: Laurence Prusak

Laurence Prusak i Danmark

Som den opmærksomme læser af VidenDanmarks nyhedsbrev udmærket ved, kommer Laurence Prusak til Danmark—og optræder ved et VidenDanmark formiddagsarrangement den 23. maj.
Larry Prusak er en af de aller største inden for det område, der har fascineret mig og mange siden midten af 1990’erne: Knowledge Management, videndeling, videnledelse mv. Han har allerede i 1998 skrevet en af de banebrydende bøger om emnet: Working Knowledge. Bogen skrev han sammen med en af de andre guruer: Tom Davenport.

Selv om Larry Prusak kommer fra USA, hvor viden oftest uden store overvejelser pakkes ned i it-systemer, har Larry været en stærk fortaler for, at viden er noget andet en information, at megen viden kun vanskeligt lader sig kodificere og nedfælde i skriftlige eller elektroniske formater.
Lad mig gengive en historie, som Larry ynder at fortælle, når han holder foredrag om viden og videnledelse:

”I was on a baseball team
When I was in eighth grade. My class only had nine boys, so they had to put me on the team to have enough players. Because of an injury I suffered at birth, I was by far the worst hitter on the team. I couldn’t hit at all (though I could run and field).

My teammates gave me a hard time, of course: They were fiercely competitive and wanted every edge they could get. When my father saw how unhappy I was about the situation, he bought me a copy of Ted Williams’ The Art of Hitting. My father didn’t know much about baseball but he loved books, so it was the one thing he could think of doing to help me.

Ted Williams understood hitting as well as any man alive, and he tried to put what he knew into his book. I couldn’t hit, but I could read, so I read it twice — practically memorized it.
Result: I still couldn’t hit much. I made only a very modest improvement, perhaps based on a newfound confidence. Of course, I wasn’t very much of an athlete. But even if I were, I’d say that hitting can’t be taught by a book. The skills involved are to o complex and subtle, too internal; they can’t be expressed in words that can be put to much use.”

Larry Prusaks konklusion på historien er, at der er megen vigtig viden, som ikke kan gøres eksplicit i dokumenter og it-systemer, at mennesker ikke er maskiner.

Videnledelse handler derfor mest om, at bygge sociale processer, der sikrer deling af viden mellem mennesker—mellem eksperter og novicer, og først og fremmest om at udvikle en kultur, der værdisætter fælles læring.

Larry Prusaks synspunkt kan selvfølgelig diskuteres. Men det er et vigtigt bidrag i en tid, hvor viden næsten hele tiden gøres synonym med den information, der er så rigelig og som overvælder os dagligt, i sammenhæng med udviklingen af af internettet.

VidenDanmark ser frem til at kunne byde Laurence Prusak velkommen.