photo credit: Vironevaeh

I’ve got a new pair of glasses, it’s not sunglasses, or those glasses with transition from lighter to darker color. Its brand is KM, and it’s given by NTU with its Master of Science in Knowledge Management course. And what does it do, it helped me to see things in KM perspective. The world is full of people, and each of them own potential resources to be managed, called knowledge.

Let me give you three examples, how something ordinary, that might have missed your attention could be seen from KM perspective.

As I shared earlier, I recently learned how knowledge can turn into information, and that happens when there is knowledge/information overload. That could happen with your pile of RSS articles, that could also happen a lot in other areas of your life. So what can you do about it? The answer is really simple actually, be different and stands out.

Not the usual yada yada

Google Toolbar

My first example is Google Toolbar, and its post-installation note. You always know that every software installation has come with its terms and conditions, something that we will simply skip and ignore. So how can we actually get user’s attention if there is something important there?

Google came up with some interesting text to get our attention, it says “Please read this carefully, it’s not the usual YADA YADA” I bet that now most if not all people will pause a moment and reading it.

Syltra Lee from Singapore Idol 3

The second example is the Singapore Idol contestant, Syltra Lee. She just got into the top 12, and here is a video of her song in the top 24, the one that got the “best performance tonight” award from the judges.

What’s interesting? It’s how she stands out. She might purposely make her hair a bit blonde, and the most interesting point is how she want to be remembered by the audience. “I want to be known as the girl with the guitar, and my strength is the guitar.” I don’t know about you, but it does capture my attention and made me want to see her performance more.

The Head First Series

Head First PHP & MySQL

This is a technical book combined with a child story book. Let me give you an example from Head First PHP and MySQL, a book that stands out from other PHP book. And why is that? The goal of the series is to create something easy for our brain to digest. They have a lot of pictures and pointers, a lot of space between texts, and maybe a very important feature of the book, it’s storytelling.

And that’s not the end, the story is made with full of exaggeration to help us grasp the concept better. The sample application was to make an alien abduction report, the two different technologies was arguing over a coffee, the security threat was an innocent-looking grandma. And those are only some samples of exaggeration in the book.

Interestingly, storytelling is also one practical idea that was taught in my Knowledge Management course. Why? because story is something that can easily stick to one’s memory.

Yes, knowledge management deals a lot with knowledge sharing, but rather than thinking that knowledge has to be presented in technical manner or points form, knowledge is actually better shared in a story, even better with something that sticks, something that make us grin, think, or smile.

All the best,
Robert