In the mid-1990s, I was trying to persuade the World Bank to share its knowledge with its clients. Analytic arguments had no effect. Then I told a story:

In June of last year, a health worker in a tiny town in Zambia went to the Web site of the Centers for Disease Control and got the answer to a question about treating malaria. Remember that this is Zambia, one of the poorest countries in the world, in a small town 600 kilometers from the capital city. The most striking thing about this picture, at least for us, is that the World Bank isn’t in it. Despite our wealth of information on all kinds of poverty-related issues, that knowledge isn’t available to millions of people who could use it. Imagine if it were. Think what an organization we could become!

This simple story helped the World Bank staff and managers envision a different kind of future for their organization, and they eventually embraced knowledge management. --S.D.