Overview

Systems emerge as individuals decide how they can live together.

(Margaret Wheatley and Myron Kellner-Rogers)

Spreading a knowledge-sharing virus requires:

• much higher levels of co-operation

• personalizing a word-of-mouth campaign

• less fuzzy rhetoric and more real-life examples

• balancing the conflicting needs of security and freedom

• digging out the unsaid and unspoken.

Stimulating a team approach

Businesses are inherently political in nature, full of people seeking to serve their own agendas, views and needs. Sometimes business politics can help growth and success but, more often than not, it causes the opposite outcome where people spend more time infighting and protecting territory than sharing ideas and growing capability.

In many ways one could easily argue that winning the knowledge game has more to do with handling business politics than being at the frontier of best practice. This viewpoint strongly mirrors my observation that the knowledge game is highly political in nature and there is a strong connection between political influence, power and flow of knowledge.

So, how do we respond to business politics? It is my view that, instead of being deplored by such behaviour, we need to see politics as a natural part of life. Sure we may not like what we experience but, instead of being paralysed by what we see, we need to invest in more creative ways to inspire people to try a different code of behaviours, particularly by raising the levels of teamwork and shared purpose. We may not be able to...