KM here means knowledge management. What does KM have to do CT analysis? Well, actually, a lot. Dave Snowden explains:
So what do I mean by the idea of fragmentation? Well, it’s simple really: The more you structure material, the more you summarize (either as an editor or using technology), the more you make material specific to a context or time, the less utility that material has as things change. For years now I have asked this question at conferences around the world: Faced with an intractable problem, do you go and draw down best practice from your company’s knowledge management system, or do you go and find eight or nine people you know and trust with relevant experience and listen to their stories?
With the odd exception (generally IT managers who have just spent a few million dollars putting a best-practice system in and think people should use it), everyone goes for the stories. So why for the last decade and more have we focused on chunking up best practice? These days I add a few references to the way I and others use blogs to link and connect to insight and learning. Increasingly unstructured material, blended in unexpected ways, provides a richer source of knowledge.
Over the last decade as I have worked on homeland security, we have had the chance to run some experiments that show that raw field intelligence has more utility over longer periods of time than intelligence reports written at a specific time and place. In other experiments, we have demonstrated that narrative assessment of a battlefield picks up more weak signals (those things that after the event you wished you had paid attention to) than analytical structured thinking.
I think there are two reasons for those findings. First, we live in a world subject to constant change, and it’s better to blend fragments at the time of need than attempt to anticipate all needs. We are moving from attempting to anticipate the future to creating an attitude and capability of anticipatory awareness. Second, we are homo sapiens at least in part because we were first homo narrans: the storytelling ape. Dealing with anecdotal material from multiple sources and creating our own stories in turn has been a critical part of our evolutionary development.
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