Sentient Spiders, Rogue Robots, and Your Insights Repository – A Knowledge Management Story

This session uses science fiction as a lens to examine persistent knowledge management challenges that insights teams face. Through three sci-fi novels (Children of Time, The Mountain in the Sea, and The Murderbot Diaries) we’ll explore how organizations lose institutional knowledge, struggle to translate insights across functions, and create information silos that prevent research from reaching the people who need it.

Each story becomes a metaphor for specific challenges in research knowledge management: institutional memory loss when experts leave, translation barriers between different team languages, and access problems that keep valuable insights locked away. Rather than another “best practices” presentation, this talk reframes familiar problems through compelling narratives about spider civilizations that inherit wisdom, scientists attempting cross-species communication, and security units navigating corporate data politics. 

Attendees will leave with:

• A fresh perspective on why knowledge management initiatives often fail (a design problem, not a technology problem)
• Frameworks for thinking about how knowledge flows (or doesn’t) in their organizations
• A practical question to ask before filing away research: “If someone doesn’t know to search for this, how will they find it?”
• Recognition of patterns in their own organizations they couldn’t see before

The talk is storytelling-driven, visually engaging, and immediately applicable to the challenges of managing research repositories, preventing duplicate work, and ensuring valuable research actually gets used.