Abstract:
The life-blood of most organizations is knowledge. Too often, the very mechanisms set up to facilitate knowledge
flow militate against it. This is because they are instituted in a top-down way, they are cumbersome to manage
and the bridges of trust fail to get built. In their thirst for innovation, the tendency is for firms to set up elaborate
transmission channels and governance systems. As a result, staff are drowned in a deluge of mundane intranet
messages and bewildered by matrix structures, while off-the-wall ideas and mould-breaking insights are
routinely missed. Added to this is the challenge of operating across professional, cultural, regional and
linguistic boundaries, where ways of sharing knowledge differ markedly, even within the same project team.
Drawing upon extensive research with scientists in the ATLAS collaboration (a high-energy particle physics
experiment comprising 3,500 scientists from 38 countries), we explore five paradoxes associated with
knowledge exchange in global networks. Each paradox leads to a proposition which takes the theory and
practice of knowledge management in a fresh directio
