Knowledge Management Policy

The development of this knowledge management policy is based on ISO 30401 Knowledge Management Systems Requirements as provided by the International Standard Organization. All considerations are of an early developmental stage. They don’t reach much further than a declaration of intent and can for the moment only serve as a seed. We want to make clear 1. that there is a problem to be addressed and 2. that it is worth addressing. Acknowledging both the human condition and human dignity makes clear that it will not be possible to solve the problem. But we line up with the hypothesis that with the knowledge we dispose of in our days, things can be done in a better way and that this must be tried. Our attempts might serve as a contribution to a first map to approach the territory. 

This knowledge management policy is supposed to feed back on itself, to develop and mature. It is also supposed to set standards by setting an example.

Knowledge is the most relevant good of our age and will be the future means to keep up and raise civilizational standards for humanity. Passing on knowledge to humans though poses technical problems. A look into human history in general and a more specific look at the developments of the last century in the field of the humanities and arts make it necessary to formulate our standards of knowledge and to bind ourselves to those standards by making them public.

The history of the human knowledge project shows with reliable re-occurence that passing on knowledge to humans contains inherent problems: 

1. The general tendency of loss of information when reproducing information at some other point
2. General human limitations in copable amount and complexity of knowledge
3. General human limitations in transferring knowledge into knowledgeable action
4. The uncertainty-reducing mechanisms of the human brain which make it jump to conclusions
5. The self-preservation oriented selectiveness of the human brain and its inbuilt preferences, biases and interpretations
6. As an especially strong subset of 5. the social aspects of human communication that will search for status gain, consent or security which will all tend to outbeat the pursuit of truth
7. The instability of meaning within the vehicle of language as soon as it is not permanently re-bound, re-tested and re-agreed upon along the thorough observation of the processes it claims to describe
8. Individual human differences in 2.-7.
9. The human ability, arising from the described problems 1.-8., to remain completely unaware of the problems 1.-9.

This makes passing on knowledge to humans a fragile process that will always be susceptible for malfunction. The broad ignorance of this problem has caused and will continue to cause serious damage to the human knowledge project and therefore inevitably also to the overall human endeavour.

We have developed first thoughts on how to address this as a constituent of our work in the field of the art of human acting.

1. A theory of the field anchored in the sciences and their applications must be formulated.
2. Knowledge must be formulated in a way that makes it accessible for as many individuals as possible in the highest quality possible for them individually.
3. Individual differences in potential must be acknowledged in order to allow for the highest achievement possible for the individual. 
4.  The tension between a need for minimization of loss of knowledge in the knowledge transfer and a maximization of its accessibility by the individual must be acknowledged and dealt with.
5. Practice must remain the core of the project. Theory must be formulated in close negotiation with practice and in a way that it will prove its applicability in practice again. This applicability includes that the theory must be formulated in a way that people have the opportunity to understand it on the level of understanding that is maximally possible for them individually, that people will want to use it.
6. The theory must carry along with itself the functions that will preserve it from distortion and that will not only allow but enforce its further improvement.

1. People who pass on knowledge have to be able to maintain the quality of the knowledge but also be able to pass it on. The tension between these two requirements must be acknowledged and dealt with.
2. People within a knowledge project have to fit different criteria, depending on what role they have in it. These criteria can be formulated along a model of concentric circles of knowledge, with only those with the highest ability in generating and scrutinizing knowledge in the innermost circle. 
3. Knowledge hierarchies must be kept intact. This includes the necessity that people know in which of these circles they, with the degree of knowledge they have at the moment, currently stand, and that they accept the hierarchy as an offer for a personal lifepath towards mastery.
4. A hierarchical classification of entry levels into the different knowledge circles must serve the protection of the knowledge and its processes prior to the status gain it might offer to the individual. 
5. It must, against common views of our days, be defended that this, and not an opening up of everything for everybody, will serve the maximum of people in the best possible way. 
6. The uniqueness of the individual must be considered as both an inevitable and a necessary variable. Inevitable because we are all individuals. Necessary, because knowledge can only be built where shared observation happens and individual views put each other into question in order to create better observation.
7. Knowledge networks must be built. 

1. A culture is the basic system that makes things recognizable across different places. A shared and concise technical agreement on language both grounded in what is fact and in what is communicable must be developed. It must be developed in coherence with the underlying knowledge fields of the sciences.
2. A culture distinguishes what will be valued. A culture of knowledge must incentivize and reward the creation of better knowledge and not something else. A cultural practice that honours what serves the best possible pursuit of truth must be built.

1. Knowledge processes need exchange with the rest of the world. Exposure to the mechanisms of the market, the feeding in of knowledge, the creation of observability and the establishment of good games that are worth playing must be pursued.
2. Boundaries are protection measures. It needs clear defense processes towards distortion of knowledge. House rules must not only be established but also upheld. 
3. Within a knowledge project search for consent must never outbeat the pursuit of truth. Agreement for reasons of consent must be dismissed. Pursuit of truth must even then be honoured when it happens to err, has not yet achieved clarity or is done in non-conforming or clumsy ways.

1. It must be broadly acknowledged that simple dichotomies between machines and human beings cease to make sense in our times. Not only do machines become human resemblant, but humans, through increase of knowledge, reveal themselves as entities that can be understood technically. Both ethical and practical questions and chances that arise from this must be thoroughly pursued.  
2. The hesitancy of the human brain towards technical views on the human must be acknowledged as an aspect of human functioning. A reproach that a technical view on the human is per se inhumane must though be parried in the everyday practice of making better knowledge produce better outcomes measured on the multiple layers of human prospering.
3. Technology of our days offers higher stability in terms of knowledge quality protection, it makes knowledge more transportable, more scalable, more affordable and therefore more accessible for all. In order to offer the best possible knowledge to as many humans as possible it is an educational obligation to develop teaching tools based on technology as a complementary and also a substitute means of in-person teaching.