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Knowledge management: a vital weapon for sustainability

Published on September 30, 2026   21 min

A selection of talks on Management, Leadership & Organisation

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0:00
Hello. My name's John Edwards. I'm a professor of knowledge management at Aston University in Birmingham in the United Kingdom. I've been working in knowledge management for more than 25 years now.
0:19
Knowledge management is probably something that organisations have been doing for as long as there have been organisations. But it only got its name at the end of the 1980s and started to become a subject of academic and practical debate in the 1990s. Organisations have a great deal of knowledge. They always have had. It could be in people's heads. It could be in the procedures and rules. This is how we work; this is how we operate. It could be buried in reports, and that's not always so easy to find. It could be in computer systems, not just the files stored there, but the whole way that the computer system is set up, what it lets you do, what it makes you do. Now, there's no point in having this knowledge unless the organisation and the people in it actually use it. But one of the problems, and you may know this as the not invented here syndrome, people are often unhappy to use knowledge that comes from elsewhere, wherever that is. If it's not something I know, I'm not so happy about it. The key to getting forward from this situation is to involve the people in all the changes that you make. What that means is knowledge management is an issue for everyone in an organisation, not just knowledge management specialists or chief knowledge officers. That makes it everyone's problem. To give an overview of what I'll be talking about,

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Knowledge management: a vital weapon for sustainability

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