The Knowledge Eco-System

Just as organizations should design their data to be shared so they should do the same with their learning. These elements should be part of the requirements alongside any assets.

Hi Karen, I love your analogy and I fully support what you're promoting about sharing of knowledge but I feel how we currently share knowledge and educate the project community is very outdated and in need of an overhaul. I'm not even sure how you measure the success of the learning legacy? Is there something tangible that provides evidence of how the knowledge that has been shared has actually resulted in better outcomes? (to be the standard). I'm open minded but yet to be convinced over the last 10 years of working on large infrastructure projects in the UK. I like the concept of a data trust promoted by Martin Paver because technology can easily anonymise data to enable "the many" to access and benefit from it. This plays to your NDA type arrangement but technology drives a step change. There are organisations like nPlan that already adopt this approach as they pool hundreds of thousands of anonymised construction schedules and use machine learning technology. More recently I observe a willingness to open up more data for the greater good. For example, the IEA: https://mobile.twitter.com/MLiebreich/status/1507065088355749891 Learning Legacy to me means something more than simply sharing and publishing material online.

You probably know my thoughts on this Karen. Knowledge sharing is a key part of the jigsaw, but on Crossrail I understand that there was ~￡7Bn spent on change and risk. It is no-one's job, anywhere, to leverage these insights, other than a superficial aggregation. If we get the data right we can use machine learning to flag up issues before they arise, depending on the conditionality of the project. Yet there is no appetite to do this. On major projects, clients may only see 5% of the data, the rest of it sits in the supply chain. If the supplier doesn't win the next job, that experience, codified in data, is lost. We know which parts of a WBS are predisposed to variance, the causality of this variance and when we should be intervening. Data enables us to make more informed decisions. There is no way a human could every carry all of this in their head, whilst also being subconsciously influenced by 188 cognitive biases. A data trust can facilitate this, that works for everyone. The 'mycelium network' is?provided by the ontology (it defines the architecture of the connections) and the trust facilitates the access into this network.

Karen Elson How is potentially valuable knowledge that is not known/used by your major projects network found and considered? This is not to undermine the value of existing experience, but to add to it knowledge from other environments? Two areas spring to mind - emerging research ideas, and proven new practices that haven't become common on major projects. How do you protect great new ideas from being quashed by the supporters of conventions? And what has to happen with new ideas that can't just be added, because they challenge some existing beliefs or rules?

Amazing work Karen Elson its come such a long way since you developed London 2012 learning legacy!!