A springboard story Steve told at the 2005 NetHope Summit:
The Pakistan Story
“Let me give you an example of how knowledge management is working in practice. Just a few weeks ago, on August 20, the government of Pakistan asked our field office in Pakistan for help in the highway sector. They were experiencing widespread pavement failure. The highways were falling apart. They felt they could not afford to maintain them. They wanted to try a different technology, a technology that our organization has not supported or recommended in the past. And they wanted our advice within a few days.
I think it's fair to say that in the past we would not have been able to respond to this kind of question within this timeframe. We would have either said we couldn't help, or said to them that this technology was not one that we recommend, or we might have proposed to send a team to Pakistan. The team would look around, write a report, review the report, redraft the report, send the report to the government, and eventually—perhaps three, six, nine months later—provide a response. But by then, it's too late. By then, things have moved on in Pakistan.
What actually happened was something quite different. The task team leader in our field office in Pakistan sent an e-mail to contact the community of highway experts inside and outside the organization (a community that had been put together over time) and asked for help within forty-eight hours. And he got it. The same day the task manager in the highway sector in Jordan replied that, as it happened, Jordan was using this technology with very promising results. The same day, a highway expert in our Argentina office replied and said that he was writing a book on the subject and was able to give the genealogy of the technology over several decades and continents. And shortly after that, the head of the highways authority in South Africa—an outside partner who was a member of the community—chipped in with South Africa's experience with something like the same technology And New Zealand provided some guidelines that it had developed for the use of the technology. And so the task manager in Pakistan was able to go back to the Pakistan government and say: this is the best that we as an organization can put together on this subject, and then the dialogue can start as to how to adapt that experience elsewhere to Pakistan's situation.
And now that we have discovered that we as an organization know something about a subject we didn't realize we knew anything about, now we can incorporate what we have learnt in our knowledge base so that any staff in the organization anywhere at any time can tap into it. And the vision is that we can make this available externally through the World Wide Web, so that anyone in the world will be able to log an and get answers to questions like this on which we have some know-how as well as on any of the other myriad subjects on which we have managed to assemble some expertise.” – Stephen Denning, The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling, pp. 49-50.
Think about what this story says about collaboration and knowledge management to which we aspire in NetHope.
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