If you made it through the book to this point, you might be a little disappointed that I did not provide you with a silver bullet on how to master your organizational knowledge flow. I do not think there is such a thing. But to master anything, you need a lot of prac tice. And to practice, you first need to get started. So while you might not have gotten a ready-to-run solution, I hope that you take away a range of guiding and key principles that will help to master the flow over time.

Some of the elements that I have mentioned might seem rather simple. In reality, they are not necessarily simple to implement. But you will need to keep most of the elements in mind all the time.

These are all just guiding principles. I hope some of the examples that I have provided throughout the book will enable you to translate the concepts to work for your own organizational environment. Not everything will apply directly, but I am sure that you can derive behaviors from them that will enhance the knowledge flow in your organization.

Mastering knowledge flow management will be a continuous process. The underlying conditions are in a constant flux. Your organizational culture evolves based on a number of influences; I hope one of them is the move to a more knowledge-aware organization. Supporting technology changes rapidly and can influence human behavior. Business models and processes can change quickly as well.

The changing environment means it will not be easy to come up with any longer-term solution. Mastering means understanding the core principles, translating them to the currently active environment as well as possible, and being prepared to constantly adapt your approaches to changing environments. So the key issue is not so much mastering the knowledge flow in today’s situation; it is mastering the adaptation to succeed in tomorrow’s situations. This can work only through building deep experience with all involved components. Although technical understanding is definitely very important, it is the deep understanding of human behavior and how it relates to knowledge that will make the flow work in the end. By having expertise in your organization that can deal with these complex processes, you will provide a chance to anticipate what might be needed later instead of just reacting to what you see today.

But you are not alone. Just as the more technical-oriented knowledge management has found a growing community, there is a growing group that understands the wider concepts of managing the knowledge flow more holistically.

This book is my attempt to give this movement a little bit of a push, and I am planning to keep with my favorite topic via a dedicated blog. If you have experiences, examples, or comments, I very much welcome them at masterknowledgeflow.blogspot.com.