The course of action taken by Big Army to accomplish this feat — Build complicated [...]]]> Why does the United States Army have such a vested interest in the development of knowledge management?  As written in Made to Stick, the army’s challenge is akin to writing instructions for a friend to play chess on your behalf. 

The course of action taken by Big Army to accomplish this feat — Build complicated beurocracies, establish empires, cultivate overlapping yet contradictory ideas.  Throw SOP’s, General Orders, rules, regulations, and score of skillsets with different titles at the challange.  This creates a breeding ground of cognative waste, much like Deep Blue…every move is calculated, at the cost of financial and intellectual opportunity costs.

A cheaper alternative is to tell the right stories, ask the right questions, and truly listen to the answers and seek to simplify.  The storyteller and listener’s specility is establishing rapport with an audience and grabbing the appropriate nuggets of knowledge and applying it to the bigger picture.  Kasparov ultmately played second fiddle to the machine, but he came close, his path to knowledge came by way of many opponents, learning what their moves had to say.

The forgotten art of storytelling and listening is making a resurgence in the military industrial complexes, when the cultivation of such things happen, we get things like the internet.  When corporations realize the effect artistry can have on their bottom line, we’ll see a resurgence of this at Bed Bath and Beyond.