Knowledge Management Principle Five of Seven (Rendering Knowledge by David Snowden)
Tolerated failure imprints learning better than success. When my young son burnt his finger on a match he learnt more about the dangers of fire than any amount of parental instruction could provide. All human cultures have developed forms that allow stories of failure to spread without attribution of blame. Avoidance of failure has greater evolutionary advantage than imitation of success. It follows that attempting to impose best practice systems is flying in the face of over a hundred thousand years of evolution that says it is a bad thing.
Perhaps with fingers and matches, but I am not sure “failure imprints learning better than success” in knowledge management.
The perennial failure (as opposed to the perennial philosophy), the effort to create a “perfect” language, now using URIs, continues unabated.
The continuing failure to effectively share intelligence is another lesson slow in being learned.
Not that “best practices” would help in either case.
Should failure of “perfect” languages and sharing be principles of knowledge management?