Can Knowledge survive with the disruptive measures of the current US administration? The emerging answer may be coming from a collective movement of individuals says Andrew Herd, founder of KM Landscape, Senior Knowledge Management Engineer and a panellist at CILIP Conference 2025.

This year Andrew Herd sits on two panels for CILIP Conference, the first of which tackles the topic of Data Modification and Access Removal in the US.

Andrew’s career has spanned engineering, project management, environmental and community development, academic research, space safety and standardisation across a wide range of profit and non-profit organisations - to most recently Knowledge Management (KM) at the European Space Agency - a knowledge-dependent organisation.

His views on possible solutions to the challenges are drawn from the experience of KM community at large. At the end of 2024, with the support of KM Global Network (KMGN), he launched the KM Landscape @2025 – an open cocreation project to answer the question “what is KM in 2025” and in doing so to build an inclusive foundation for the benefit of future KM.

This now has over 100 members across 31 countries and is “cocreating a list of existing KM terms in use in 2025 – simple and complex, all at the same time”.

Andrew said: “The concept of KM Landscape is to capture what's out there by giving the many diverse voices a project to cocreate in, a platform to be heard from and publication means to create a meaningful outcome.”

There are plenty of voices offering terms to include and these are collected, not least from the various Application perspectives of KM: Development (inc. Sustainable Development), Organisational, Societal, Personal and also including Cognitive / Knowledge Science.

There is though a particular application that seems to be increasingly relevant in the current context: Personal Knowledge Management, or PKM.

PKM

“Why is PKM increasingly important today?” Andrew asks. “That's where we come back to the recent changes in the US. Because things, at a governmental and supporting organisational (NGO) level, have been dismantled, the only entity left is the individual.

It has been individuals who have said "this is important”, and we have seen action at the individual level - as well as in communities of practice. They appear to have come together because this knowledge crisis matters at a personal level with individuals applying the principles of PKM - and with the strong reinforcement of being part of a community.

So he suggests that getting through a (knowledge) crisis will often depend more on individuals than organisations, individuals who move beyond or outside of their organisational remit, whether prompted by a pandemic or politics, environmental or societal change - as any of these can and do create knowledge crises.

“This is a personal interpretation. But I wonder, with the struggles at the organisational level for establishing knowledge management - which I hear very strongly from individuals in the KM communities at large - I wonder whether there is greater energy at the personal level. Could we be coming to a point of shift, where it is no longer performed by the organization – rather it’s in the organisation, manifested through individuals, who deploy personal and collective knowledge management systems?

This doesn't, from my perspective again, let an organisation off-the-hook. So the organisation should always, always create the climate of knowledge management (i.e., the means). So, I wonder whether it is at the level of the collective individuals’ culture (i.e., beliefs and values) that KM is actually justified”.

Prevention and mitigation

On the topic of Data Modification and Access Removal in the US, he said for the future there were two aspects for addressing the knowledge loss crises: prevention and mitigation. “For prevention of loss you would look at the causes. So, yes, the cause could be political, but it could also be other factors like health, such as the COVID crisis which we recently felt in the space domain. This health crisis directly impacted knowledge access, and you would look at the cause-effect chain and introduce measures to break or change this”.

“For mitigation the question is, after the crisis event happens, what is the response? And I see and hear, in response to the situation in the US now, what's really encouraging is the power of the individual, the power of collective individuals and the knowledge they have managed to recover and make available again.”

He said: “And that's where the ownership aspect comes in - not necessarily at the organisational level – as I'm not sure organisations necessarily are collectively saying, “we need to do something” but at the individual level, we have seen that there is a bigger resonance and hence individual reaction and collective response (action)”.

Reframing knowledge loss

Andrew is also on the panel Protecting Against Knowledge Loss. “This topic is about everyday knowledge loss, not these single crisis events and their knock-on effects. The knowledge loss that is an all-too-regular occurrence, both in organisations and also elsewhere”.

“It’s not untypical for organisations to start knowledge capture two to three months from people leaving – but this needs to be started years beforehand. As predicting departure is so challenging this means everybody should be using knowledge management practises, every day, from the start of their career. Knowledge management offers the tools to understand what knowledge you have, what knowledge you don't have, how you want to grow and learn throughout your career, and how you might achieve that.”

Andrews sees a future in which workforces will see the benefits of applying KM in the day-to-day “Why not say, by using knowledge management practises, you can learn faster. Why not? When we talk about new ways of doing things, changing the knowledge loss risk paradigm – using the “fail fast - develop fast approach” for example - that should also make us ask if there are better ways of learning quicker. Can we afford for people to learn on-the-job (learning by doing) just like someone did 10 or 20 years ago? The answer is ‘no’”.

Actions not words

He says the question is “How do you make sure you communicate the knowledge that you've learned in order that when you leave, it doesn’t leave with you? What skills that actually make knowledge tangible, how do you manifest them, how do you deploy them? And again, it comes down to the individual.

In this case the response to data modification and access removal in the US, has not just been a mindset-change, but an action. The wave of response hasn’t just stated “this is unacceptable”. What is remarkable is the amount of actual tangible work that has been done (in collecting data, information as well as knowledge), rather than only a body of feeling.”

He said: “Ultimately in knowledge management, you always need to work with an individual, the lowest denominator of knowledge. And the question is: where does the power and the energy come from to prevent knowledge loss from happening? Does it come from the top down or does it come from bottom up? What I see in response to the changes in the US, the response has been from the bottom up.”

“The final irony of this crisis of data , information and knowledge loss in the US is that the body of knowledge impacted is directly related to responding to crisis events. In these times where there are many crisis at our doorstep – whether triggered by political, environmental or health events – I would suggest that empowering individuals is a key way to preventing knowledge loss”.