What is a Knowledge Asset?
A knowledge asset contains a distillation of experiences that gives us the opportunity to reflect on what others have learned from relevant experiences so that we can take more effective action. We structure a knowledge asset so that the distillation links to the specific experiences of individuals and methods to contact those individuals to facilitate a discussion. The stories may be expanded and supported by other media, such as documents, audio clips and video clips.
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The foundation of the knowledge asset is a story. In the context of a Knowledge Asset, a story contains the description of an experience plus a statement of what has been learned from that experience. The statement of what has been learned is called a Principle for Action and it takes the form of a Causality Statement (or its equivalent).
When several Principles for Action are self-consistent or consistent with a broader Principle for Action, we call this a Common Principle for Action. A Common Principle for Action is supported by a variety of experience from a variety of settings. It is thus the highest level of distillation in the Knowledge Asset.
More details on the elements of the definition of a Knowledge Asset
The knowledge asset has a structure. It is a distillation of knowledge gained from experience. But it is also a documentation of the experiences that lead to the distillation. It also contains links to individuals who have had those experience. So while it is fair to say that the Knowledge Asset tries to bring together the collective wisdom of a community, it also establishes the 'paper trail' that leads from the particular piece of collective wisdom to the experiences and the individuals that form the basis of that collective wisdom.
(We use a paper trail to demonstrate the validity of a particular claim in legal or financial matters. In the case of a knowledge asset, we use the paper trail so that people can explore the experiences that lead to a particular piece of wisdom and, if they so wish, to make contact with the individuals that had those experiences. The structure is the same, the reason for that structure is different.)
Humans use stories for many reasons. Stories in a knowledge asset have a particular structure. We include a story in a knowledge asset because it contains an experience that contains a lesson that may help others to improve their response to a challenge.The story contains a description of an experience and a lesson learned from that experience. We frame the lesson in terms of a causality statement. A causality statement takes the form 'If you do this, then that will happen." The Causality Statement is the attempt by the person who tells the story to make the experience relevant to their future actions or the future actions of the reader. In the knowledge asset we call this causality statement the Principle for Action.
In the Constellation, we frequently bring people together to learn from their experiences in a non-hierarchical fashion. They bring their experiences into the conversation and they seek to learn from each other without a sense of student or teacher. We say that they learn-and-share with each other. Everyone has the opportunity to talk about their experiences and the lessons that they have learned from those experiences. Everyone has the opportunity to reflect on these experiences and lessons. And then what we frequently find is that the discussion leads to a shared learning that embraces some or all of the principles for action. We call this shared learning a Common Principle for Action. It is a useful way to gather together a diverse set of experiences and learning and often opens up new possibilities for people.