hoarding vs. sharing knowledge
I went on a walk with a colleague today. We work in different departments, but within the same division. Our departments are siblings, if you will.
We started talking about a colleague who worked in a third sibling department in our division, who was the head of that department. We'll call them Third Sibling. They were mean and unhelpful. Third Sibling left our organization about a year ago, but left the rest of us with lasting scars. How? Well...
Third Sibling didn't like working with other people. They didn't like collaborating with others, even when it was necessary.
For example, Third Sibling was responsible for the back half of a workflow that begins in my department, with a system that I manage. It's a critical system and workflow, but despite several requests, they refused to document or discuss how their part of it worked. When they left and their end of the process broke, we had no documentation or institutional knowledge to lean on.
One time my colleague walked by Third Sibling's office, noticed their door was open, and swung by to ask a clarifying question about a project. Third Sibling asked my colleague to go back to their office and just chat them.
After that, my colleague went to one of Third Sibling's direct reports for clarification, assuming that Third Sibling just didn't like them for some reason but someone else on their team would help. The direct report said, "I'm sorry, I'm not allowed to share that information outside our department," and Third Sibling flew out of their office berating my colleague for asking.
If we worked in a high-strung corporate office where collaboration and open communication was rare, Third Sibling's behavior might make sense. But we work in academic research services where the dissemination of knowledge is our entire purpose. Our field is not centered around gatekeeping information. We provide access to information. Third Sibling's behavior was extremely rare, perhaps anomalous in our field.
I asked my colleague why they think Third Sibling behaved that way. My colleague simply said: knowledge is power.
Third Sibling hoarded that knowledge so they were "more valuable" as an employee. They instructed their direct reports to hoard knowledge so their department was "more valuable" as a unit.
Perhaps that's one way of interpreting the "knowledge is power" sentiment. But there are two sides to every coin.
It's not powerful when nobody wanting to work with you. You're not valuable when nobody invites you to work on cross-departmental projects, or keep you in the loop (aka give YOU information), or generally utilize the expertise or talent of your team. When you hoard that kind of information, nobody grows, learns, or improves. Services and systems don't improve either. Everything is just at a stalemate, with people trying to work around you because they can't work with you. You're not positioned on a pedestal, high and mighty above everyone else. You're a roadblock people learn to ignore or go around. Last time I checked, roadblocks don't keep their job during a recession.
To me, sharing knowledge is true power. When you share important information with others, your credibility as a leader and authority improves. People want to utilize your skills and expertise because you're good at what you do, and you can be an asset to a team or project. You make others better and teams stronger. When you share knowledge with others, they share it back with you. Everyone grows as they become increasingly informed. The services and systems grow with improvements and enlightenment about problems.
Take Bear Blog as a microcosm. We all love Bear Blog, and people like René Fischer and Robert Birming, among many others, openly share code to improve the individual and collective Bear Blog experience. They could hoard that information, but it improves everyone's experience when blogs are coded well.
In my field of academic research support service/IT, we are strong advocates for Open--open access, open source, open data, open research, etc. We believe that sharing information advances fields of knowledge and research because people can stress-test ideas, debate ideas, and build on each other's ideas. We believe that sharing leads to improvement more often than not.
Hoarding knowledge prevents information ecosystems from benefiting everyone involved, and potentially everyone everywhere.
There's a Black female British rapper named Little Simz who mentions this in a song called Free. Here are some of the lyrics:
I think that love is forgiving yourself
I think that love is offering your immediate help
I think that love is everything that we need in this world
I think the key is being honest and being yourself
I think love is understanding that people can change
And loving them anyway through every stage
I read All About Love, then I gave it to Jade
Love is sharing knowledge, there's so much to gain