Knowledge Management: An Evolutionary View Review
Knowledge Management: An Evolutionary View by David J. Pauleen frames KM as adaptation: practices, tools, and cultures coevolve with organizational environments. Instead of a fixed blueprint, you get path dependence, variation, and selection. The message is sober: KM succeeds when it fits local constraints and learns over time.
Overview
Pauleen surveys KM waves: early codification, communities and social learning, analytics and platforms, and today’s AI-assisted workflows. He maps shifts in governance, incentives, and technology, showing how each era solved problems and created new ones.
Summary
Chapters link evolutionary concepts to KM design: generate diverse knowledge practices, select via measurable outcomes, retain through standards and roles, and enable mutation through experimentation. Cases show incremental wins beating top-down portal mandates. Culture, leadership, and measurement act as selection pressures.
Authors
David J. Pauleen is a KM scholar-practitioner. His approach blends theory with grounded cases and emphasizes practicality over hype.
Key Themes
Fit over fashion; experimentation over grand designs; selection via outcomes; coevolution of people, process, and tech; resilience through variety.
Strengths and Weaknesses
Strengths: clear evolutionary lens, realistic change playbooks, and caution against one-size-fits-all. Weaknesses: lighter technical depth on modern LLM stacks and metrics can be high level. Use it to steer strategy and governance.
Target Audience
KM leaders, product and ops managers, transformation teams, and academics seeking a durable framing for KM change.
Favorite Ideas
Portfolio of KM experiments; selection by cycle time and reuse; retiring practices that no longer fit; small mutations compounding into capability.
Takeaways
Treat KM as evolutionary. Seed variety, measure honestly, keep what works, and retire what does not. Align incentives and governance so adaptation is routine, not an exception.
