Applying Snowden's Narrative Technique to Conduct Project Debrief Within the British Council: An Exemplar of Knowledge Management Project

Abstract

This paper begins with a review of knowledge management (KM) literature, which highlights the problem that KM is interpreted in many different ways. This is due to the fact that different authors make different assumptions about the nature of knowledge and the nature of knowing. Up until the mid-1990s, knowledge was defined as a "thing". In the late 1990s, there was a call to define knowledge not as a "thing" but as "flows". The theories of Dervin and Snowden belong to the latter school of thought and are reviewed here.In the British Council, the design of knowledge management projects is informed by theories and research in the discourse of management, communications studies and information science. In particular, the work of Dervin and Snowden has shaped our knowledge management journey. This paper presents a specific example to provide in-depth insight on how we have designed a project debrief workshop that is informed by Dervin's sense-making theory and Snowden's complexity theory.