What we need are knowledge curators, not managers

The concept of “knowledge curator” has been creeping slowly from the back of my mind to the front over the past couple of years, and received a couple of jolts over the weekend that resulted in one of those elusive “aha moments”.

What we need are curators of knowledge,
not managers of knowledge.

First, I noticed the blurb “curated content from Flickr” when I used the Flickr module on a Squidoo lens.

Second was a quote from Liz Danzico (that I found via Signal vs. Noise blog).

A portfolio of work is a curated experience. … but oftentimes, a portfolio only contains final pieces, as applicants are overly concerned about presenting perfection. Polish doesn’t communicate process though, and therefore I’m left with only part of the story. Messy problems — and how applicants work through them — can show a great deal more in a portfolio than one finished, airtight solution.

I didn’t know it at the time,but this all started back in November 2005 with an article titled Technology makes it easy to ‘remember,’ the trick is learning how to forget, in which I wrote:

My early days in Knowledge Management included a lot of time developing, deploying, and getting people to use “knowledge repositories.” (At least trying to get people to use them.) … I finally realized one day that the problem has become not, “How do we remember all this knowledge that we’ve learned?” but rather, “How do we forget all this knowledge we’ve accumulated that we no longer need so we can focus on what we do need?”

I also noted a quote from the book The Trouble with Tom by Paul Collins related to the need to “eliminate” memories:

Memory is a toxin, and its overretention – the constant replaying of the past – is the hallmark of stress disorders and clinical depression. The elimination of memory is a bodily function, like the elimination of urine. Stop urinating and you have renal failure: stop forgetting and you go mad.

It was this latter quote that was in my mind last summer when, in The importance of forgetting,  I wrote about John Medina’s thoughts on the question of memory and forgetting in Brain Rules:

The last step in declarative processing is forgetting. The reason forgetting plays a vital role in our ability to function is deceptively simple. Forgetting allows us to prioritize events. Those events that are irrelevant to our survival will take up wasteful cognitive space if we assign them the same priority as events critical to our survival.

As I noted then, this is no less true in the organizational context of knowledge/concept work.

Simply capturing everything in document repositories and best practices, without the ability to forget – or supercede – any of it, takes up a lot of “cognitive space” that organizations could be putting to other wise good use.

The trick is figuring out how to forget, and how to figure out what to forget.