Enlightened tradition

This is where I gather my thoughts on a rag-bag of things including tradition, rationality, organisational learning and knowledge management.

These are my personal reflections. They draw on but are not defined by my day job: knowledge management in a UK law firm. Nothing you read here should be interpreted as legal advice, or as a representation of the firm’s view.

There is a (badly recalled) quotation that is supposed to encapsulate the Enlightenment: “The antiquity of an idea, a law, or a notion need not necessarily be a reliable indicator of its excellence.”

Rationality and Occam’s Razor are better tools for judging excellence, but it is still interesting that irrationality in the form of gossip and (harmless) tradition — such as dress codes and the like — are impressive in their power to remove friction from a range of human relationships and endeavours.

Here I want to explore these things, to see how a rational approach to organisational knowledge and learning can fit around established ways of working, traditions or human expectations.