On idealistic solutions

Dave Snowden said something recently that typified my approach to everything that I have done in life over the last 10 years or more.

Knowledge Management should be focused on real, tangible intractable problems not aspirational goals. It should deal pragmatically with the evolutionary possibilities of the present rather then seeking idealistic solutions.

Credit: Dave Snowden

And then I saw these two posts A Deficit View of the World and Three Questions for Opening Up Possibility from Stephen Billing where he makes a similar point and draws from Patricia Benner's The Primacy of Caring.

Stephen concludes his post thus

Benner suggests that decreasing your reliance on a preconceived end or means of getting there can offer a new point of departure for new possibilities that were not previously available. To me, this applies as much to individuals in their personal lives as much as it does to people in organisations.

Credit: Three Questions for Opening Up Possibility, Stephen Billing

And then yet again I got to build on Snowden's original statement with this quote from John Deway that I found in the comments to the above post.

The ideal of using the present simply to get ready for the future contradicts itself. It omits, and even shuts out, the very conditions by which a person can be prepared for his future. We always live at the time we live and not at some other time, and only by extracting at each present time the full meaning of each present experience are we prepared for doing the same thing in the future. This is the only preparation which in the long run amounts to anything.

Credit: John Dewey