Triumphs drive the plot of our lives forward, give us goals to aim for, both personal and corporate. We want to succeed, and we want to succeed in competition with others, whether that competition is acknowledged or unacknowledged. And perfect knowledge management, like the perfect marketplace, actually removes the sense and the momentum of this drive towards success. Because in order to succeed, we need to know things that our competitors don’t know. We need imperfect knowledge to exist. [...]

That tacit doctrine, preached so often and so unthinkingly, that indiscriminate knowledge sharing benefits everybody, is simply naïve – or it is deliberately deceitful. Successful knowledge management in the real world is not about indiscriminate knowledge sharing at all: it’s far more about knowing what to share and when and with whom, what to keep secret, and what to reveal, whom to trust, and whom to avoid. [...]

We are hopelessly unsophisticated in our approaches to knowledge management. We believe, for example, that we are managing knowledge if we manage to get the right information to the right desktop at the right time, and we spend a lot of money on acquiring the ability to do that. We assume, naïvely, that only the corporate plot and its aspiration towards triumph matters when it comes to knowledge asymmetries, and that everybody will share knowledge willingly once they understand what the corporate plot is. We forget that individuals and small groups also have smaller plots, smaller tragedies and triumphs, and their own unique aspirations. And they will also use knowledge asymmetries to drive themselves towards success, regardless of what the bigger, more impersonal plots of our superiors dictate. [...]

First, it’s not enough to simply deliver the knowledge, important though that is. The key is whether knowledge is, or can be, acted upon. That means far more emphasis on helping our people become skilled knowledge users. [...]

Second, we don’t have to have perfect knowledge management, nor would we particularly enjoy it. In a competitive world, we simply have to be better at managing knowledge asymmetries than our current competitors are. [...]

Finally, we need to recognise that the corporate plot occupies only a part of most people’s lives. Knowledge sharing and knowledge secrecy also operate in our personal trajectories through life. When the two conflict, when my interest appears to be compromised by the dictates of my masters, then I will deploy my knowledge asymmetries first in my own defence – if not actively, at least passively.