Systems thinking and knowledge management: Positional assertions and preliminary observations

In recent years, there has been significant interest in 'knowledge management'. However, the plethora of both conceptual and practitioner literature has provided little consistency regarding key definitions or methodologies that can act to guide practice. This can result in practitioners selecting particular ideas, constructs or language that has weak conceptual grounding and result in ephemeral and 'ad hoc' practices. This paper analyses the use of systems thinking for 'knowledge management' practices because it is argued to have the potential to provide methodological guidance for practitioners. The context of the research in the paper is in the humanitarian sector, and in operations that are often politically messy and complex, where there are often many unknown factors. it is a context in which knowledge in a broad sense of the word, as in any human activity, plays an instrumental role. Copyright (C) 2004 John Wiley Sons, Ltd.