The Knowledge Asset
The Constellation has a Knowledge Asset for the practises of Life Competence.
The Knowledge Asset is our attempt to learn from the experiences of communities that are working towards Life Competence.
The Knowledge Asset is a resource for a community as it moves towards Life Competence.
Community Life Competence is about a community taking action to deal with a challenge that it faces. A community often needs resources to take action.This diagram shows part of our Knowledge Asset for the practise of 'Resources'. For this Knowledge Asset, we define the scope of the practise 'Resources' as, 'We identify we access and we develop the resources that we need to reach our dream.' We will use it to illustrate the structure of the rest of the Knowledge Asset.
This part of the Knowledge Asset organises what we have learned from the experiences from four communities from around the world . The four experiences are summarised in the four boxes with pictures at the bottom of the page. From left to right, we are introduced to communities in northern Thailand, from Tamil Nadu in India, from Sikasso in Mali and from Manila in the Philippines.
We can access the Knowledge Asset from 3 levels.
The first level is about 'Experiences' and you can access them from the captions at the bottom of the page. These will quickly give you a flavour for what you will find if you decide to explore further. There is a 'headline', there is a link to a summary of the experience and there is a link to the full story. There is also a link to the person who has told the story.
Each caption leads upwards to the second level which we call a 'Principle for Action'. A Principle for Action is the lesson that we have learned from the experience in the context of the practise (in this case 'Resources'). This Principle for Action is written in the form of a practical suggestion for an action that you can take to help you manage your resources more effectively. So it will say that 'if you do this, then you will find that this will happen'. Once again, you can quickly scan through the Principles for Action in a Knowledge Asset to decide if you would like to delve down more deeply into the experience or to contact the person who has had the experience.
The 'Principles for Action' usually lead to a third level of distillation that we call a 'Common Principle for Action'. Imagine if we could bring together the four story tellers in our diagram. We would be confident that they would have a fruitful conversation sharing their experiences and what they had learned from them. And it is possible that out of that conversation would come the insight that their experiences were in some way related and that there was a shared lesson that they could learn that embraced the lessons that came from the individual experiences. We call this shared lesson a Common Principle for Action. The Common Principle for Action is still stated as a practical guide to action, but it commonly has a wider scope than any of the subsidiary Principles for Action.
When we use a Knowledge Asset, some of us like to start with the Common Principles for Action and then delve down to the experiences and the individuals who had them, while others prefer to start with the people and their experiences and work up to the Common Principles. In either case the aim is to give you some ideas to deal more effectively with the challenge that you face. Explore the Knowledge Asset in whatever way that you find helps you most and most easily.
How we have built the Knowledge Asset
This set of pages gives a background to the thinking behind the Knowledge Asset described above. It also gives details on how we have built them. If you are happy just to use the Knowledge Asset, you do not need to understand any of this material.
The role of stories in a Knowledge Asset
The stories in our Knowledge Asset
The practise of Resources and the dream for the practise
The Knowledge Asset