How Do Rocket Scientists Learn? (aka, knowledge management lessons learned at Goddard, NASA) - GovLoop

How Do Rocket Scientists Learn? (aka, knowledge management lessons learned at Goddard, NASA) - GovLoop

The success of the things that come out of NASA is a reflection of the knowledge of and collaboration between thousands of brilliant people. NASA's work is organized around Missions, where people from across the center are brought together to work on projects. Knowledge Management is about the better application of collective knowledge to individual problems. At Goddard, the focus is on the individual's learning processes, structures, and needs, rather than content management systems.

Social Media Can Enhance Learning (but relationships matter)

The important thing to note is that whether you collaborate or simply connect, the strength of your ties will have an impact on what you are able to do. If you really want to be able to get rapid, trustworthy answers or enhance or accelerate results on a project, it will be important to develop those strong ties. Social media has a lot of potential, but you need to think about how to facilitate different kinds of (online and offline) relationships between people so that their thinking is improved, innovation occurs, and they can get quick answers to complex problems, in order to enhance and accelerate business outcomes.

Learning in Public is Hard, but Worth It.

If you share what you know and what you don't know in the middle of a project, you give people an opportunity to share specific knowledge that can help you in the moment. If it works, this can help save time and money. Sometimes learning in public is a difficult process, but the feedback, support, and resultant improvements are worth it.

The History of Knowledge Sharing

One of the earliest known iterations of knowledge sharing took the form of cave drawings in 15,000 BC. From there, documentation became more sophisticated, evolving from imagery to alphabets, and from walls to scrolls. The invention of the printing press in 1440 was the first time information was easily distributed via print material. It wasn't until over 400 years later that libraries were available to the general public. The 1900s saw incredibly rapid changes in knowledge sharing, starting with real-time radio broadcasting at the beginning of the century and then culminating with the invention of the internet in the 1980s.

Research shows that consultants were amongst the first professionals to seriously explore and consider the best means of sharing knowledge. As companies grew and technology improved, one lesson had been made clear: the death of knowledge is to isolate it. Knowledge isolation is a problem, and while there are countless platforms to store and share knowledge, finding ones that are highly searchable is rare. Without the ability to easily search, knowledge inevitably gets lost.