Knowledge Management: The Death of Wisdom

Chapter 5

“I Forgot to Remember!”

Experience. The wisdom that enables us to recognize in an undesirable old acquaintance the folly that we have already embraced.

—Ambrose Bierce, U.S. author1

The record of how well and/or how quickly industry and commerce learns from experience is not good.

From Jean Piaget’s Einstein-applauded observations of how children learn to Professor David Kolb’s reflective process to transform knowledge into new knowledge has taken more than 80 years. Kolb’s own efforts have been around for a quarter of a century, with his weary statement that his Experiential Learning theory only started to be recognized empirically after more than 10 years. And alongside everybody else’s considerable efforts, some of ...