Examining the ‘nature’ of KM: Learning from the environment and humanity at KM & AI Summit 2025
You may not realize it, but there’s much to learn about KM from the world around us—both in the natural and interpersonal sense. Examining these systems, from the buzzing of bee hives to the way our personhood has always shaped knowledge sharing, bears compelling insights for KM.
Dave Snowden, founder and chief scientist at The Cynefin Company, will lead two sessions at this year’s KM & AI Summit—“KM & Learning From Nature: Walk & Conversation,” and “Collaborative Behavior & Knowledge Sharing”—offering nuanced observations about what natural environments and the history of human collaboration have to teach us regarding modern KM strategies.
Unlock the future of innovation and knowledge management at the KM & AI Summit in Scottsdale, Arizona, March 17-19, 2025.
At his first session, “KM & Learning From Nature: Walk & Conversation,” Snowden will take attendees on a trek through the Arizona desert, calling attention to the way that in natural systems, effective decisions are made without any centralized intelligence or direction.
“If you look at a bee swarm…each bee…tries to find a new location for the hive. They come back to the swarm, and they dance a figure-eight dance. And the plane of the figure-eight angled to the Sun tells you the direction, and the intensity of the dance says how good they think the source is. And the other bees then follow that… The whole swarm goes to one location, and it's always the best of the ones that they've investigated,” explained Snowden.
“Now there's no direct intelligence, it’s distributed intelligence,” Snowden noted. The question then becomes, “how do you get distributed intelligence to work at scale” for industries and organizations?
Snowden’s second session, “Collaborative Behavior & Knowledge Sharing,” will focus on moving away from text-based work to tap into the way humans innately collaborate—and have collaborated to survive in the history of—well, ever.
“One of the massive problems that KM people have is they focus on text and text retrieval, which is why they're always getting obsessed with AI,” he said. “[But] the reality is, what we can write down is less than 10% of what we know.”
Humans use patterns to optimize decision making, and these patterns are derived from both personal experiences and multi-sensory data—visual, oral, scent—to arrive at a decision.
“If you look at the way human beings make decisions, we're constantly micro-hallucinating, and the hallucinations come from our personal experience, other peoples’ experience, through stories and pure imagination—which we're good at. And those hallucinations are entangling themselves with multiple sensory data,” said Snowden. “As those hallucinations and sensory patterns entangle themselves, they form patterns, and we make first-fit pattern decisions. So, the first pattern which appears to work, we act on it. We don't rationalize; we optimize.”
Both of Snowden’s sessions place an emphasis on nature—how humans and the world we inhabit form decisions.
This is critical now more than ever, as “we need to understand that knowledge creation and knowledge for a human thing—and humans are not machines,” Snowden pointed out.
He further cautioned against the all-encompassing AI hype wave, explaining that “one of my worries is it's not that AI will ever exceed us in intelligence. It actually theoretically can't… The trouble is, we will reduce our own intelligence to the point where it does.”
With that being said, Snowden looks forward to “the conversations around the sessions, which are always the most interesting…We know that human beings think consciously about problems and their anomalies. So, part of my goal at the conference is to create enough anomalies that people think differently.”
Snowden’s sessions will take place on Monday, March 17, at 10 a.m., and Wednesday, March 19, at 10:45 a.m.
For more information on KM & AI Summit and to register, please go to https://www.kmworld.com/KMAISummit/2025/Default.aspx.