Knowledge Management and Sustainability

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Projects involving sustainability are complex - disparate domains, multiple stakeholders, uncertainty. A web enabled Knowledge Management System can address that complexity.

What is Knowledge Management?

Knowledge Management is an emerging discipline. It is poorly defined and nebulous, and like sustainability, not a new area of science, but a new way of cutting across existing schools of thought. There is Information Technology at one end, and esoteric philosophical discussions of knowledge and wisdom at the other. It draws on ground breaking computer science – speech recognition and artificial intelligence. It also draws on the less glamorous library sciences. It concerns itself with learning and communication. In many ways, it is paradoxical that a discipline called Knowledge Management could be so imprecisely defined.
Despite that vagueness, knowledge management is concerned with three things:

What is known;
How that knowledge is used; and
How fast something new can be learned.

Simply put, it enables us to find and organise data and information so that it can be articulated and applied to make better decisions.
The reasoning follows that if we make “sustainable decisions”, that is decisions that take into account the likely impact on people, profit and planet (Triple Bottom Line), then we will arrive at sustainable outcomes.
The difficulty is that when we define sustainability so broadly, when we choose a timescale that spans generations, then making good sustainable decisions is incredibly problematic.

Why making Sustainable Decisions are hard

Firstly, we must concern ourselves with many different disciplines and processes – from macroeconomics to microbiology, from the social sciences to financial markets, from material flows to traffic flows and to cash flows. The breadth of sustainable considerations means we need to integrate the thoughts of different experts. We have a need to co-ordinate the different streams of activity. We also have the need to summarise and communicate the analysis back to the decision makers. All of these things add complexity.
Secondly, we typically have to deal with multiple stakeholders with competing objectives. We have to make tradeoffs between difficult decisions and compare alternatives. When dealing with forests for example, how do you balance the impact on regional and local economies against the need to preserve the ecosystems? How, when synthesising possible solutions, do we find one that maximises the benefits? How is agreement reached amongst the stakeholders that such a solution is practicable?
Thirdly, implicit in the concept of sustainability is the need to predict the likelihood of future events. In and of itself a difficult practice, harder still when the lifecycle of sustainable projects can be hundreds of years. Questions of sustainability often involve aspects which are overwhelmed by vagueness or incomplete information where there is poor understanding of the systems and mechanism in play, a high degree of uncertainty in the probability of events, or where the impact of such events are difficult to define.