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What about ignorance management?

We talk about knowledge management but less so about ignorance management – and yet there is likely more ignorance in the world. And if knowledge is poorly understood then ignorance is even murkier.

In a recent Information Innovation @ UTS webinar, we covered:

  • The range of ignorances that we all find in organizational life and their impact on us
  • The benefits as well as the downsides of ignorance
  • The patterns of human behaviour that lead to ignorance
  • How we can harness as well as counter ignorance to lead to better outcomes.

Videos from the webinar are now available.


Michael Smithson

Michael Smithson is a Professor in the Research School of Psychology at the Australian National University. His primary research interests are in judgement and decision-making under ignorance and uncertainty, and statistical methods for the social sciences. His publications include 8 books, 2 edited collections, and more than 170 refereed journal articles and book chapters.


Jason Collins

Jason Collins helps organisations solve problems by understanding and changing human behaviour and by improving decision making. He co-founded and leads the behavioural economics practice at PwC, and has previously held roles as data science lead with ASIC, as policy adviser with the Australian Treasury, as an environmental campaigner, and as a solicitor in private legal practice. Jason has a PhD combining economics and evolutionary biology, and is a founding columnist at Behavioral Scientist.


Matt Moore

Matt Moore is an Honorary Associate and a Sessional Lecturer at University of Technology Sydney. He has written and spoken on knowledge management in relation to artificial intelligence, social media, and post-truth. Previously he has worked for Seven West Media, PwC, IBM, ASIC and Oracle.


Header image source: Mohamed Hassan on Pixabay, Public Domain.

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Matt Moore

I bring people together in new ways to create new ideas, new products and new experiences. I love enabling smart people to achieve their potential. My experience includes leading a team of 5 technology solution designers in a series of projects covering the whole enterprise stack (infrastructure, data, applications, business processes); sales, pre-sales consulting marketing and post-sales training and support for an Australian SAAS company; digital transformation project management (migration to Adobe EM and content redesign) for a global professional services brand; CRM management and sales operations for a global professional services brand; knowledge and information management strategy and execution across multiple industries; and learning development and delivery for a global technology company.

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One Comment

  1. This was a really nice webinar run by Matt. As usual, I listened to hear one thing, heard a different point of view and ended up questioning a huge chuck of what I thought I knew. Every time I meet him I end up feeling less knowledgeable! Maybe Ignorance management is a thing after all? Thanks for running it Matt.
    My main concern is the ignorance of leaders around knowledge. Many I work with tend to two extremes; either 1) oh that’s easy, they should pick that up in no time (we don’t need the expense of a handover do we? Just send them in a three day course instead), or 2) we can never know what people know so it’s all pretty much luck and hiring the right people. I suspect solving this ignorance may have a large impact in service delivery sustainability. RealKM is a good start, but where do we go next?

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