I am interested in your distinctions about ‘big,’ ‘little,’ and ‘personal’ KM. A practice that I have often touted as the cheapest and, perhaps, most efficient KM practice is something we learned from the U.S. Army: Continuity Folders. In our context of doing knowledge management in civilian organizations, if you think of this idea in its most literal sense, it means keeping a literal folder with notes from After Action Reviews related to a particular work process and pulling them out each time you are about to plan the next piece of action. Voila! Knowledge Management.

The reason this notion sticks with me is that we tend to focus on sharing knowledge with others. But if the definition of a lesson learned is not just that behavior changes, but that thinking also is refined and better results are produced, the first “customer” for an insight should be your own team, where the lesson is most likely to be most easily applied. After two or three times around the learning cycle, an insight becomes more robust and shareable.

So I think the ‘little’ idea of a Continuity Folder holds a great deal of power to create knowledge.