Meeting the “Engagement Family”

Thank you to Harold Jarche for a fairly recent blog post about Managing Engagement, a commentary on a piece by Ewen Le Borgne on “The Happy Families of Engagement”. The piece is a good read, premised on the fact of course that KM is a facet of engagement; part of a greater “family” in which each part is improved by the others.

The author breaks this family down in to three broad categories of Communication; Knowledge Management and Monitoring & Evaluation.

I’m going to visit KM last, and start with the Communications branch. This involves PR, Marketing, and internal as well as external communication. This is, as Le Borgne points out, all about the message. The audience may vary, and the tone or approach, but the goal remains the right message. 

Monitoring and Evaluation is performed by the “collectors and reporters”. This goes from the planning stages to the “lessons learned” steps, passing straight through data collection. Le Borgne points out that “other family members consider this branch to be … procedural”, rather than creative as they are.

So where does KM come in? Knowledge Management happens where these other two branches meet. Knowledge Management is about “strategic information”. It is not about the message in of itself, and it’s not about the mere data points, but rather about learning from the message. In the author’s words: “it’s all about how you can use information (“evaluation”) and communication to improve your approach.”

 A great start in understanding the role of KM, Jarche’s commentary on this post goes on to discuss the Network, moving in to talk about Collaboration. His post is also a good elaboration on the “Engagement Family”.

How do you find this explanation of KM? Do you see it this way yourself?