Think fractally: each of us embody a neural network that stabilises and nurtures our personal knowledge domain over time; our families express another network container, and our corporate organisations are like cave walls on which we scratch hard-won intuitions about the nature of survival so that tomorrow we (or others) can help our organisations survive better.

Many of you have come here on the glib assumption we’re going to talk about the latest project management software; that’s not me...today...but I am certainly interested in how we use knowledge systems to support the limited example of project-level intelligence...

Management is a golden term that I use a lot because it is such an expression of the meta-level pre-occupation that is so enchanting to our human brains. Management is about modeling, when you think about it optimistically.

And there’s a great quote from one of the dons of tacit knowledge , Michael Polanyi, who noted that "skilful performance (ie, the achievement of an outcome) is achieved by the observance of a set of rules which are not known, as such, by the person following them."

Now, read another way, you could also say that we’re swimming in rule sets; rules for the performance of this task or the formation of that strategy, or the always-present Monitoring and Reporting framework. Rules everywhere. All from people who want to 'model' our roles and our operational behaviours to suit their management outcomes. And lots of those rules don’t make sense, on the ground, and so we develop defensive, or apathetic attitudes...or for the creatively rebellious, we establish our own strategic processes and it’s suddenly KPIs at twenty paces.

We need to open up the conversation to the larger contexts and specific operational problems with knowledge and project management. My observation is that in 2008 we’re on the hiccuping punctuation point of a stepwise evolution in how we as people relate to the abstracted knowledge spaces in which we swim.