Dr Adil Najam is an Associate Professor of International Negotiation and Diplomacy at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University, USA. He holds a Ph.D. in International Environmental Policy and two master's degrees from MIT DrNajam is also a board member of various international and national organisations, including the Pakistan Institute for Environment-Development Action Research (PIEDAR).
He is a visiting Fellow at the Sustainable Development Policy Institute (SDPI, Pakistan and an Associate at the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD), Canada
Q. What is your point of view about 'Knowledge Management'?
A. Let me be blunt. Knowledge Management (KM) is the latest jargon, the latest fad, the latest buzzword in a very long list of jargon, fads and buzzwords that the NGO community has borrowed from the world of business. But let us also be clear that like all jargon, fads and buzzwords, the reason that it has gained such popularity is because there is something in the very essence of the term that is exciting and inviting and which contains an essential truth within it that everyone can identify with, even when they cannot exactly define it.
If you strip away the jargon and try to understand it in the most honest and direct way then, quite simply, the idea behind KM is that one of the most valuable assets that an organisation has is the knowledge - the information, ideas, memory, attitudes, skills, experiences, relationships, etc, that is embodied within the personnel, procedures and the products of the organisation.
This, of course, is a beautiful and very powerful idea. It was true well before some consultant coined the KM phrase and will remain true well after this phrase has been replaced by the next development fad.
Let me also add here that the idea has come to the development discourse directly from the business world. Within the business world, the idea was a direct outgrowth of the emergence of a so-called 'knowledge economy' that has been propelled largely by information technologies. For example, there is a very clear tendency in the business world to convert information into knowledge and knowledge into assets.
This tendency is clearly seen in the rapid increase in the number of patents that have been filed in the last ten years. So, if you go to a business school they will tell you that KM is the process through which organisations generate value from their intellectual and knowledge-based assets; often by sharing of knowledge among employees, departments and even with other companies in an effort to devise best practices.
It is important to note that the business definition of KM says nothing about technology - although KM is helped by technology (specially information technology), technology by itself is not KM.
Q. We find the term 'tacit knowledge' often in KM literature. Kindly demystify this term for our readers.
A. Knowledge managers usually talk about two types of knowledge, explicit knowledge which is more precisely and formally articulated easily codified, documented, transferred and shared (manuals, procedures, product literature, computer software, etc) and tacit knowledge which is subconsciously understood and applied, difficult to articulate, developed from direct experience and action, usually shared through highly interactive conversation, story-telling, shared experience. So, explicit knowledge is what I can find in your publications, on your webpage, in your documents, in your data base, in the studies you have done or articles you have written.
Tactic knowledge - which to me is far more important -is things that you know (and sometimes these are things that you do not even know that you know) because of who you are and the experiences you have had. For example, because you have been living in Karachi you probably know where to get the best nihari. Living in Boston, I do not know that and I can probably find this out only by tapping into your tacit knowledge that (hopefully) comes from the fact that over the years you have relished nihari at lots of places and developed an understanding of which is best.
Let's take another example to demonstrate why I think tacit knowledge is often more important than explicit knowledge for development issues. As a professor teaching development at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, I might have a lot of explicit knowledge about things that have been written about the AKRSP, I might even know a lot about evaluations that have been done of its programmes.
It is even possible that I have read more of this explicit knowledge material?. than someone who has been working as field staff with the AKRSP for the last seven years. However, no amount of reading papers or even doing field research can give me the very nuanced tacit knowledge of the 'lay of the land' that a field operator for the AKRSP can have. They will know, for example that there was a landslide recently near one of the villages. This is not inconsequential. In fact, this knowledge can be critical. Or, they will know the history of personalities in a particular village.
There will be entire libraries of tacit knowledge - layers and layers of fabulous wealths of knowledge - that will reside in their head. Moreover, even if they do have 'information' on certain things, they will have a tacit 'feel' for things that will allow them to make reasoned assessments. All of this is tacit knowledge.
And as you can imagine, this becomes key for develop-ment organisations and their knowledge management and specially for NGOs.
Q. How is this concept being applied to development and to NGOs, specially in Pakistan?
A. First, it is quite clear that the concept is being pushed into the development field by international development consultants and donor agencies. Unfortunately, it has been pushed mostly as better 'information management' rather than as true 'knowledge management'. Hence, you see a lot of focus on informational technologies, on data generation, on information systems, on information access, etc.
Indeed, the worst proponents of KM sometimes sound like salesmen for software companies. Maybe I am being unfair here, but I worry that once again we will take a powerful concept and lose its essence by highlighting only one aspect of it. While the information (even m aspect of KM is important, it is not the most important aspect.
What is most critical in the concept is the notion that what makes development NGOs special is not just that they can do things at the local level that other development actors cannot; what is truly important is that they can know things about the local level (because they can be closer to the ground and are small and nimble enough) that other development actors cannot. Hence, the real value and advantage of NGOs in the development process is not in what they can do, but in what they know.
This, of course, is a revolutionary idea; and one that many (including many NGOs) may find troubling. But if it is true, then NGOs become 'knowledge organizations', or what I have been calling 'policy entrepreneurs' in my writings for over ten years now. In fact, I would argue that NGOs are knowledge organizations' even more than businesses or government because their essential purpose is to give voice to the marginalised and the essential value they bring to the development discourse is the claim that they know something about what the marginalised want, which other development actors do not know or seek to ignore.
Q. What are the key best practices adopted by international development sector institutions in the area of KM?
A. The unimaginative way to think about KM isto reduce it to IT and emails and world-wide web and data and information. Unfortunately that is what many international consultants and donour agencies are trying to sell. Frankly, I find this uninteresting and potentially dangerous (as it distracts precious resources away from more important priorities). The much more important and interesting way to look at it is to look at KM as a means to identify the knowledge assets of an organisation and recognise that this is the most important resource and product that it has.
So, the uninteresting 'informational' approach will ask whether an NGO has a web-page, whether its employees use email as a frequent mode of communication, whether it has a good database on whatever it works on, and so forth. These are all nice and important questions.
And all these things are part of KM. However, as I said earlier, these are not the most important part of KM. A much more profound view of KM would ask how the NGO defines its own most important strengths, its most prized assets; and if the answer is that the organisation views the experience of its employees, the strength of its networks, its own ability to tap into the reservoirs of knowledge (traditional as well as experiential) of the communities it works with... if these are the things that the organisation values then it is a good KM organisation. Give me any examples of an international NGO that you consider to be exceptional, representing 'best practice' in whatever it does, and I will bet that it is an organisation that is good at KM, irrespective of how it handles 'information management.
Take Grameen in Bangladesh, or Centre for Science and Environment in India, or Campfire in Zimbabwe, or any other example you want and you will find organisations that treated the knowledge that was embedded within their own staff, their networks and the communities that they worked with as their most important asset. What is the most important asset that Grameen has? It is not the number of its members or the amount of their savings.
It is the knowledge that Grameen has accumulated and nurtured about the needs, the motivations, and the aspirations of the poor (specially poor women) in Bangladesh. It then uses this knowledge - not just the information, but deep and profound knowledge - as leverage to create a set of savings programmes that meet those needs, that respond to those motivations, and that fulfil those aspirations. This is what knowledge management is really about. Whether Grameen has or does not have a good web-site then becomes irrelevant.
Q. Are there any good local (Pakistani) examples where KM is being utilised and to what extent and in which sectors/themes?
A. Sure. Some of our examples are not just good, they are great. Take the Orangi Pilot Project, for example.
The greatest asset of OPP is not the infrastructure that it has helped build over the years. The greatest asset is the relationships it has built with the community it works with. Those relationships allow it to gain insights and knowledge about the community. It also allows it to bring together the knowledge contained within the experiences of the community with knowledge (technical as well as managerial) from the outside.
But what makes it work, in my view and in the language of KM, is that OPP can not only tap into all these various sources of knowledge but recognises that this knowledge is an institutional asset. I remember the very first time I met Doctor Sahib (Dr Akhter Hameed Khan) and he explained to me how the real job of the development practitioner was not to provide the right answers, but to ask the right questions. You see the entire OPP enterprise a dear effort to recognise knowledge as an organisational asset. For example, this is an organisation that pushes its workers to develop a deep understanding - a deep knowledge - of the community they work in.
It rewards workers who do so, discards those who do not. This is what real 'knowledge management' is all about. In my view OPP is much more of a knowledge management organisation than an infrastructure management organisation.
If you want another example, look at the AKRSP. Look at how it invested from its very beginning in creating what I would call 'knowledge networks' between the communities, its filed staff and its research staff. When I look back at what AKRSP has achieved and ask myself what is its most valuable asset, the answer is not measured in the number of villages it has served or projects it has undertaken.
The real answer is in how it has 'managed' the knowledge that it was able to tap though its deep relationships with the community, through the experiences of its local field staff, through its national networks, through its international resources, and most importantly how it 'managed' all this knowledge to advance our understanding of how community development could happen. It is interesting that AKRSP has only very recently had a website of its own, but in my view it was always a 'knowledge organisation'. I have interviewed Shoaib Sultan Khan Sahib many times.
I do not recall him ever using the term KM, but the vision he always describes of what the AKRSP was designed to be and became was very much a knowledge organisation. After all, at its very core community management is really a challenges of 'knowledge management'... again, in the profound sense of the term and not as the fad issue of better email or WebPages.
Q. How can Pakistani NGOs benefit from the concept of 'learning organisation' and what are the major challenges?
A. The major challenges really, is that the NGO sector in Pakistan is entirely donour driven. That means that it is forever driven by an external agenda. A very well-meaning agenda, but an external agenda. More than that it is a very fickle agenda. Development fashions - certainly donour fashions -change very fast.
Every time a major donour sneezes, the entire NGO sector in Pakistan has to realign its priorities and learn new jargons. One day it is public-private-partnerships, another day it is knowledge management. As I said, all of these are wonderful concepts. But well before we have time to adapt them to our conditions and apply them in reality, some international consultant (someone like me, really) comes up with a new term, a new idea and we are pushed to apply that.
You can never be a learning organisation if you are not an independent organisation.
Unfortunately, our NGO sector is not really independent; certainly not in the financial sense. While it is great that donors are generous to NGOs, and I hope they will remain so, the ultimate challenge from NGOs is to become more financially sustainable. This will happen through domestic fundraising, through the creation of domestic NGO philanthropy, through the cultivation of paid memberships, through sponsorship schemes, etc.
Once you have these you will actually get more 'learning organisations. Again, take a look at the NGOs that are 'learning organisations' - you have OPP, you have the Edhi Trust, you have LRBT, you have the Citizen's Foundation, you have the AKRSP - what is common in all of them is that they have stable funding mechanisms that they have some control over. If you are following the development fashions of fickle donors with a beg-ging bowl, you can never be a learning organisation.. You can only be a blind follower of ever-changing whims and of ever-changing jargon.
The idea behind KM is that one of the most valuable assets that an organisation has is the knowledge - the in formation, ideas, memory, attitudes, skills, experiences, relationships, etc, that is embodied within the personnel, procedures and the products of the organisation.
This interview was conducted via e-mail Courtesy NGORC Journal.
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