TABLE OF CONTENTS These are trying times for the field of knowledge management. Shunned by many as little more than yesterday s information technology trotted out in today s more fashionable clothes, KM has responded by evolving itself into two distinct, if not competing, schools of thought. Accordingly, many of us have begun to differentiate between first- and second-generation KM. [2] Second-generation KM emphasizes knowledge production in addition to the information codification and sharing emphasized by first-generation schemes. This emergent focus on knowledge creation points to a much higher value proposition for KM than has been proffered to date: the prospect of increasing an organization s rate of learning, and hence, its rate of innovation.
The advent of second-generation KM, then, can be seen as a convergence in thinking between the organizational learning and knowledge management communities. In effect, second-generation KM has emerged as an implementation strategy for organizational learning a practitioner s model for how to help organizations increase their capacity to learn, innovate, and adapt to change. Unlike its first- generation ancestry, second-generation thinking is more concerned with the emergence of knowledge, not just its mechanical application in practice.
In his well-known article entitled Teaching Smart People How to Learn, [3] Harvard Business School professor Chris Argyris described the difference between what he called single-loop and double-loop learning in the following way:
To give a simple analogy: a thermostat that automatically turns on the heat whenever the temperature in the room drops below...
