If you let your sense of time be guided by Madison Avenue, then by January 5 we are well into the New Year, and Christmas is long since past. Even the after-Christmas sales are old news at this point.
But the Madison Avenue view of life is not the only, or even the best, view of life. There is an alternative view according to which January 5 is not merely a day that occurs after Christmas, but rather is the 12th day of Christmas. According to this approach, Christmas is not a day, but a season. It is commemorated by the English carol, The Twelve Days of Christmas. While the particular identity and meaning of each of the gifts may vary according to different sources, the underlying point remains the same: Christmas does not begin and end on December 25.
So why does this matter for knowledge management professionals? Aside for providing an excuse for additional gifts, it also serves as a timely reminder that things are not always as they seem. While one perspective (in this case, the Madison Avenue perspective) may be telling you the main event is over, looking at things from a different perspective (in this example, the Christian liturgical calendar) suddenly reveals that the festive season rightly should continue for much longer than you might have expected.
Similarly, in our work it is too easy to declare events or projects a success or failure and then turn our attention to other things. But have we actually fully explored and understood what happened?
- Have we drawn all reasonable lessons from our experience?
- Have we found useful and effective ways to share our learning with others?
- Have we improved our systems and processes to reflect that learning?
- Is our decision-making better because of that learning?
- Have we squeezed every last drop of juice out of the experience?
The job of knowledge management professionals is to make the system work better — not to condemn the system, our colleagues and ourselves to making the same mistakes over and over again. However, if you treat your projects or matters as one-off events — like Madison Avenue treats Christmas — then you miss a golden opportunity to derive the fullest possible value from each experience.
In 1984, the PNC Bank established the Christmas Price Index by calculating the cost in present-day dollars of actually giving someone each of the gifts enumerated in the carol, The Twelve Days of Christmas. The cost in 1984 dollars of giving one set of each of the gifts was $12,623.10. The “true” cost of Christmas (i.e., giving as many sets of each gift as indicated by the repeated lines of the song, that is 364 items) was $61,318.94 in 1984. By comparison the cost in 2014 of one set of gifts was $27,673.21 while the cumulative cost of the gifts as repeated was $116,273.06.
While PNC has provided this fun new tradition (as well as a game and other resources for children) to help show the cost of the 12 Days of Christmas Approach to gift giving, I’m not aware of any data that show the true cost to KM professionals and their organizations of their failure to spend the extra time to wring every possible lesson out of every experience.
While the 12 Days of Christmas traditionally end on January 5 (according to the western liturgical calendar), I wonder if a KM calendar should extend them to the entire year? After all, can we or our organizations afford not to take advantage of every gift of learning that comes from experience?
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Just for fun, here are two of my favorite new versions of the carol:
Straight No Chaser
Bob Chilcott’s arrangement:
[Photo credit: Wikipedia]
Above and Beyond KM 