How Can Knowledge Sharing Be Stimulated in Professional Service Firms?

Stimulating Knowledge Sharing

Context, a curious mind against the arrogance of certainty

The inspiration to write this paper came entirely from my Master’s class, namely from my colleagues and the materials we discussed. It seemed to me that reading academic articles followed by opinionated debates was somehow a parallel to watching one night’s football game and the following day’s breakfast talk. “Maybe if”, “but if indeed”, “however not”, “and for example Google…” made me question what my peers know tantamount to questioning what actually I know.

At the very final session, we discussed knowledge and its dissemination. I was really wondering whether I was the witness of an elegant display of meta-knowledge or taking part to an invisible implosion of sophisms. I had to pause. Ideas were borrowed from every field, knowledge was one thing and knowledge sharing was another, the article was discussing knowledge and we are discussing the article. The authors of the article had built on one of the broadest concepts reachable and framed it within a principle which could be science or a mere intuition. An almost electric dispersion and intertwining of ideas and levels of conceptualization took place and I had to contain it all for the sake of coherence.

Perhaps it was not the greatest idea to gaze at the core of the cyclone to really understand what its nature was about. Such a dive can be dangerous both literally and figuratively. I could see my professor indeed cautiously standing a few steps aside, and it helped me remember an essential notion, more than a buzzword for academic research, funneling.

With a calm sense of knowing, I thought I knew where I went wrong with my approach but then I could not help feeling that I was asked to embody one of the 10 blind men who were supposed to feel only one part of an elephant’s body in the attempt to understand the entirety of this animal.

How can knowledge sharing be stimulated in professional service firms?

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