Knowledge Management Flies in the Face of Voltaire’s Wisdom

“Is there anyone so wise as to learn by the experience of others?”

This statement by Voltaire succinctly captures the folly of knowledge management (KM) efforts in modern corporations.

KM aims to codify knowledge and extract it from individuals into reusable forms like knowledge bases and best practices. But as Voltaire knew, true wisdom does not come from borrowing and reapplying others’ knowledge. Real learning requires personal experience, subjective insight and action.

Decontextualised knowledge lacks the nuance and application needed to become practical wisdom. Voltaire recognised that surface-level learning from third-party experiences is next to useless. Truly wise people develop expertise from their own situated challenges, mistakes, and reflections.

Knowledge management tries to shortcut this deep experiential process. But in doing so, it strips away the contextual relevance that gives knowledge its value. Codified knowledge fragments lose the hard-won complexity born of experience.

Worse still, KM can actually impede expertise development by diverting focus away from hands-on learning. The promise of leveraging pre-packaged knowledge is an illusion. Fostering real expertise requires hiring talented people into a supportive environment, and enabling them to learn through experience.

Heed Voltaire’s wisdom – there are no shortcuts to wisdom. Avoid the mirage of knowledge management. Focus instead on expertise developed through hands-on experience. Subjective insight cannot simply be extracted and downloaded. Management might choose to empower people to learn deeply from their own unique journeys. This is the path to true knowledge and competitive advantage. The folly of “learning from the experience of others” was exposed long ago.

{This post also serves as an additional chapter for my book Quintessence.]