I do appreciate your point about establishing a rhythm and discipline, and sometimes people need to be encouraged (and supported, as Ron suggests) into this. We run regular capability development programmes for our clients, and we strongly encourage participants on our programmes to maintain learning blogs on a shared platform. We also provide support to help them blog. Some of them do, and do well, some of them just post once in a while and never really get into it, others will just drift by and comment, and others are completely passive.

I don’t think we could enforce a compulsory journaling of this kind. Different people have different capabilities, some people are more about action than reflection, others are much better at organising other people’s stuff, others are much better at face to face communication.

And corporate politics can always come into play – fear of saying the wrong thing, desire to say the right thing, writing anything, just anything so as to meet the mandatory daily target while developing a deep loathing of this “knowledge sharing” lark.

So while encouragement and good visible examples if fine for me, making blogging mandatory is a very dangerous slippery path in the wrong direction.

I see mandatory blogging as just creating another KM system that is not integrated into your normal workflow. (Obviously, I have incorporated it as part of my workflow.)

I would prefer team based blogs or wikis to manage projects or cases. “Put it in the wiki! Don’t send me an email!” Then, the team leader could make it mandatory.

I felt compelled to comment on your blog KM made mandatory?

Not only does the discipline of journaling improve creativity, but the discipline of writing, as an act, helps to organise, and sometimes, reorganise your knowledge. The very process of getting people to write down their learnings, as a discipline, adds greatly to the creativity and quality of knowledge.

As a knowledge worker, I think this discipline is not to be simply chosen, but should be taught as a key competence of knowledge working.

I accept David Snowdens comment, of course, as a principle, but in practice would you be happy to be driven around in a car by somebody who has chosen not to develop the competence through driving lessons and a test properly.

For me, effective knowledge workers need to be taught several new key skills, and blogging is one of them.

I say more about this in my blog
http://km-consulting.blogspot.com
and website
http://www.knowledge-management-online.com

Good luck, and keep writing!

Ron Young