The K Word in organisations...

I recall reading, a long, long time back, a poem called "The Blind Man and the Elephant" ... this poem was all about how six people of "Indostan" look at an elephant and try to express their impression of their observation (pardon the mouthful here), and how each arrives at a different conclusion about the same object. This poem has been subseqently seen under different avatars and stories, but thats not of importance here.

At that time, I remember my curiosity getting all perked up, and much to the worry and chagrin of my parents, and their parents (nothing above that, thankfully), I would try to explore various objects in and around home with my eyes closed. My grandmom maintains till this day, that this is the reason I am wearing specs. Not a point of view that learned savants and docs agree to, but you cant argue with grandmoms, whatever generation you are in.

Coming back to the today ... After much experience (?) and meeting people and going around and doing things, I have come to 2 conclusions about the poem I just mentioned :

a. The number of people need not have been just six.
b. They need not have been from "Indostan" only.

At no point, has the poet called any of the "Six Blind Men of Indostan" dumb, or dumber or assigned a similar epithet or a close synonym to them. In fact, he ends his poem by saying "Each in his own opinion ~ Exceeding stiff and strong, Though each was partly in the right ~ And all were in the wrong!".

My quest for understanding what an organisation means when the K word pops up is similar to the poem. The connotations, and hence the conundrums, that pop up are varied, disparate, and out of focus to such an extent, that they defy classification and indexing of any kind. To cut it short, the number of columns (or rows, depending on how you look at it) of knowledge as a basic component is equal to the number of people who define it.

Welcome to the K word in organisations.