Chris Collison and Geoff Parcell, in their recently updated book and CD, “Learning to Fly”, have what I believe is a paradigm shifting insight into our professional lives:

“You can’t manage knowledge. Nobody can. What you can do is to manage the environment in which knowledge can be created, discovered, captured, shared, distilled, validated, transferred, adopted, adapted and applied.”

What do you think? Can we still manage knowledge, or has technology stripped the power out of our hands and given it to anyone, anytime and anywhere? And if they’re right, what new role should we take?

I’ve been giving this a lot of thought and have come to the conclusion that we need to become any or all of the following:

• Knowledge Traffic Cops
• Translators of Techspeak into (whatever language the non-technical folks in your country speak)
• eKnowledge Librarians
• Mentors
• Coaches
• Tutors

We are no longer the gatekeepers of knowledge.

If anything, we are the bottlenecks, the place where all the people who need to learn and to know how to do, get put into line and told when and where and how they can access what they need today, right now.

I remember Instructor Led Training programs that had waiting lists of hundreds of people who needed a certification course but had to hold off on their careers until there was an opening for them to get to the knowledge.

I think we had the impression that we ‘owned’ the knowledge … back then perhaps we did.  But that’s no longer true …

What do you think?