Since 1998, Macroinnovation Associates' founder, Mark W. McElroy, has been deeply involved with efforts at the Knowledge Management Consortium International (www.kmci.org) to develop a set of industry-standard reference models and practice guidelines for KM. Out of this work has come a powerful new vision of organizational performance as something which follows from 'knowledge processing.' In other words, the quality of knowledge production and sharing in a firm (what we call 'knowledge processing') has everything to do with the quality of business performance.

But what really made KMCI's work unique in the field of knowledge management was its adherence to principles taken from organizational learning and adaptive systems theory. According to this body of thought, organizations are social systems in which people tend to self-organize around the production, diffusion, and use of knowledge. From a knowledge manager's perspective, this changes everything, because it tells us that we're dealing with systems that already happen to produce and share knowledge in their own endemic ways.

Next was the recognition that not only do people in organizations tend to self-organize around knowledge processing and use, but that patterns in their behaviors tend to emerge as they do so -- the same patterns! -- a vivid display of what complexity scientist Stuart Kauffman refers to as, 'order for free' -- no management required.

Armed with these insights, a new vision for knowledge management rapidly emerged. According to "The New Knowledge Management," the purpose of KM is to enhance knowledge processing, not create it. In organizations, the behaviors of interest are already 'in there.' Moreover, the behaviors are global in scope -- knowledge processing is a whole-firm affair. Our job is to liberate and strengthen these processes such that innovation becomes a truly enterprise-wide affair.

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