Finding knowledge

Yet it seems that information-seeking must be one of our most fundamental methods for coping with our environment. The strategies we learn to use in gathering information may turn out to be far more important in the long run than specific pieces of knowledge we may pick up in our formal education and then soon forget as we go about wrestling with our day-to-day problems. (Donohew, Tipton, and Haney 1978, p. 389) The career and life winners of the future will be those people who know where to go to find information, can then process large volumes of it, and, ultimately, make sense of it by converting it into useful knowledge. As we have seen, finding knowledge in organizations is a complex phenomenon and there are many barriers that seekers must overcome. The previous chapters have been devoted to understanding KN. In this chapter I turn first to individual strategies that help people identify where knowledge might reside in a KN, what feedback seeking they use to determine others reaction to them, and how they might best forage for information. Management's role in KN becomes largely one of setting an agenda that specifies what critical questions need to be explored, and then facilitating and enhancing knowledge acquisition related to these issues by creating rich information fields. Individual strategies In general, the focus of the literature has been on how information can be provided to organizational members, rather than what motivates them to seek answers to questions they pose for themselves; the latter process has also been labeled knowledge sourcing (Gray and Meister 2004).