At a certain level of maturity, knowledge management stops being a question of tools or even strategy. It becomes a question of practice.
Most senior KM professionals reach this realization after years of effort. Frameworks are in place. Governance exists. Platforms are funded. And yet, something still feels fragile. Knowledge flows unevenly. Some communities thrive while others remain silent. The organization knows more than it can use, and still less than it needs.
This gap between intention and reality is not accidental. It reflects a deeper misunderstanding of what knowledge actually is inside organizations.
Moving Beyond Knowledge as an Object
Much of traditional knowledge management is built on an object-based view of knowledge. Knowledge is treated as something that can be captured, stored, classified, and reused, much like an asset on a balance sheet.
This view has practical value. Without codification, organizations cannot scale learning across time and geography. But on its own, it is insufficient.
Scholars of knowledge as practice, including thinkers like Brown, Duguid, and Cook, remind us that knowledge is inseparable from action. People know by doing. Meaning emerges in context. What works in one situation may fail in another, even when the information looks identical.
Senior KM leaders recognize this tension instinctively. They see beautifully documented lessons learned that are never reused, while informal conversations shape critical decisions. The issue is not a lack of content. It is a lack of connection between knowledge and lived work.
Knowledge Lives in Social Systems
Socio-technical theory offers a useful lens here. Organizations are not just technical systems supported by people. They are social systems enabled by technology.
When KM strategies focus primarily on repositories, taxonomies, and workflows, they optimize the technical system while neglecting the social one. The result is predictable. Knowledge exists, but it does not move.
Knowledge sharing depends on relationships, identity, and trust. People share what they believe is safe to share. They reuse what they trust. They ignore what feels imposed or disconnected from their professional judgment.
This is why communities of practice remain one of the most resilient KM mechanisms across industries. They align with how professionals already learn. Through conversation. Through shared problem-solving. Through narrative rather than instruction.
A KM strategy that ignores these social dynamics may scale information, but it will never scale understanding.
Sensemaking Matters More Than Storage
Karl Weick’s work on sensemaking is particularly relevant for mature KM environments. In complex organizations, the challenge is rarely access to information. It is interpretation.
People are surrounded by reports, dashboards, and documentation. What they struggle with is making sense of it in time to act. Sensemaking is inherently social. It happens through dialogue, comparison, and reflection.
Effective KM strategies therefore create spaces for interpretation, not just storage. After-action reviews, retrospectives, knowledge cafés, and peer exchanges are not secondary activities. They are central to how knowledge becomes usable.
Senior KM audiences often face pressure to justify these activities because they do not look efficient. Yet they are where meaning is constructed. Without them, repositories become archives rather than resources.
Strategy Emerges From Practice, Not the Other Way Around
One of the most persistent myths in KM is that strategy must come first. Define the strategy. Then design the system. Then drive adoption.
In practice, sustainable KM strategy often emerges from successful local practices. A team finds a better way to share insights. A community develops norms that work. A region adapts KM to fit its culture.
Wise KM leaders observe these patterns and scale them thoughtfully. They do not impose uniformity too early. They recognize that coherence matters more than consistency.
This aligns closely with complexity theory, which suggests that in adaptive systems, control is less effective than guidance. KM strategies that allow for experimentation tend to survive longer than those that attempt to design everything upfront.
Power, Identity, and Knowledge
Another dimension that senior practitioners understand, but rarely discuss openly, is power.
Knowledge confers influence. Expertise shapes decisions. Visibility affects careers. When KM initiatives ask people to share what they know, they are also asking them to renegotiate their professional identity.
This is why resistance to KM is rarely about laziness. It is about perceived risk. Who benefits from my knowledge being visible? Who controls how it is interpreted? What happens if it is challenged?
Strategies that acknowledge these dynamics tend to be more effective. They frame knowledge sharing as professional contribution, not extraction. They recognize authorship. They respect context. They allow disagreement.
KM that ignores power dynamics becomes performative. KM that understands them becomes transformative.
The Role of Leadership in Knowledge Practice
Leadership commitment to KM is often discussed in terms of sponsorship and funding. At senior levels, the more important role is behavioral.
Leaders shape knowledge culture through what they ask, what they reward, and what they ignore. When leaders ask for lessons learned and visibly act on them, knowledge feels consequential. When leaders rely on informal networks while promoting formal systems, credibility erodes.
In global organizations, this signaling effect is magnified. People watch how knowledge moves at the top to decide whether it is safe to share below.
A KM strategy that gets used is one where leadership behavior aligns quietly and consistently with stated intent.
Accepting Impermanence
Finally, mature KM practice accepts that knowledge is never finished.
Taxonomies age. Processes evolve. Expertise shifts. What mattered five years ago may be irrelevant today. KM strategies that chase completeness inevitably fall behind reality.
Instead, successful KM treats knowledge as provisional. Always in draft. Always open to revision. This mindset reduces anxiety around quality and encourages contribution.
It also reflects how professionals actually work. They adapt. They test. They refine.
Knowledge management, at its best, supports this continuous becoming rather than attempting to freeze understanding in time.
Closing Reflection
For senior KM leaders, the challenge is no longer knowing what good practice looks like. It is sustaining it in complex, human systems.
The most effective KM strategies are not those with the most sophisticated architectures, but those that respect how knowledge is created, shared, and used by real people under real constraints.
When KM is approached as practice rather than project, something shifts. Adoption becomes less forced. Value becomes easier to see. And knowledge begins to move, not because it was mandated, but because it makes sense.
Read: How to Build a Knowledge Management Strategy That Actually Gets Used