Human Experience Should Guide Organizational Knowledge Management and Sharing

By Zoe

In structuring organizations, we have an opportunity – and a duty – to ensure that  infrastructure supports nimble, actionable, and accessible knowledge management and sharing with the communities we serve. 

One cause of the CDC’s botched pandemic response was knowledge management and sharing gone wrong, causing the CDC to fall short of its mission to increase the health security of our nation. The way the CDC is responding to the series of failures over the last three years, with a comprehensive organization reorganization, will likely exacerbate knowledge management and communication shortcomings.  The CDC’s ongoing failures - things haven’t improved dramatically in the Monkeypox response - are a result of flawed systems and not the people working within them.

In fact, in thinking about solving knowledge management and sharing challenges, we would do well by focusing on people. Whether we are responding to a global pandemic, deciphering the composition of matter from the sun, or building a roadmap for healthy schools, we should start by asking ourselves how our knowledge management systems speak to the human experience?  How do scientists, product developers, and educators’ expertise and lessons learned generate these living bodies of knowledge? How do we look to community feedback to inform this knowledge?

Working within any system presents an opportunity to learn together, share successes, and build on the knowledge - tacit and explicit -  that already exists. This is where the CDC should start.