Systems, Evil & Saving the World

One Monday morning 5 years ago, something struck me in the shower. I was working for one of the big 4 accounting/prof services firms at the time as a KM grunt. I was going thru one of my natural cycles of work-related anomie and couldn't see the point of anything.

What hit me as I was washing off the soap was very simple.

My job was saving the world.

Please note, this did not involve wearing my underpants outside my tight blue lycra trousers (altho that may have made performance appraisals a darn sight more fun).

Instead, the explanation went something like this. Expertise in the world is getting ever more specialised. Back in the eighteenth century one person could realistically expect to know the sum total of one scientific discipline. However, the problems that humanity faces (and various sub-groups thereof - nations, corporations, communities) are increasingly complex & multi-faceted. Environmental, political & economic challenges. Someone was needed to pull link together these diverse groups of experts to meet these challenges. And one of those someones, in a way, was me. Note the qualification: I personally wasn't preventing the destruction of the ozone layer. But I could quiet myself with the thought that I was aiding and abetting intellectual fecundity.

I shared this thought with some of my colleagues. Only some thought I was a lunatic.

Fwd>> So Dave Pollard's blog How To Save The World made me smile. Dave P was something high-up in KM at Ernst & Young. Dave's online musings (altho "musings" doesn't quite capture the intellectual & moral inquisition that the writing sometimes undertakes) have coalesced some thoughts of my own around the nature of evils.

We normally think of Evil as something big and dark - and capitalised. But try shifting perspective to page 24. Think not of The Big Bad. But "little bads" all over the place. Local maxima & minima that sub-optimise their parts of the system. Glitches. Action only makes sense in context. And the ultimate context for all actions is... everything. A system of systems.

We all engage in little evils constantly. My actions make life harder & more unpleasant for others but life easier for me. Evil shifts from something concentrated to something dispersed - like an aerosol. Shifts from something outside to something inside & across. Shifts from "it" to "them" to "us". And back.

Back to the start. If becoming evil is a failure to act in the best interests of the system defined in its broadest terms then fighting evil requires that you see the system as it really is. From as many multiple perspectives as you can. Ensuring that as many people in the system have that opportunity as well.

So there you go. Knowledge Management. Saving the world. Fighting evil. Toodle pip.