Let us introduce Athena, a medium-sized consultancy company, employing around 100 consultants. Athena delivers custom-made software applications for their customers, pri- marily knowledge management and work-flow support tools. The consultants work in client projects and often work from the customer's site for several weeks, sometimes months, in a row. This makes it difficult for the employees as well as the managers to share knowledge and experience across their different projects, and to keep track of the latest solutions developed. To enable the consultants to work together, and work as a team, the consultants themselves have developed a wide range of well-functioning software applications, or knowledge man- agement tools: they have designed their own intranet and extranet, and applications for sharing project specifics like best practice exemplars and project management procedures.

The tools the consultants have developed are primarily dedicated to the articulation and spreading of codified knowledge. In addition to these efforts, Athena has made the not so common decision to invest in knowledge-sharing practices that cannot easily be accounted for. At Athena the management decided to extend the lunch break, sponsor free lunch for all employees, and hire a chef with the work instruction 'spoil them'. The lunch area is now in the centre of the Athena building. Entering the lunch room in the morning, the first thing greeting you is the smell of freshly brewed espresso, the second is the smile of the chef, and the third is a couple of employees in the corner playing darts. If you pause for a moment you can get a glimpse of your lunch being prepared; if you take the time to stop, which one often does, you might get the recipe. 

The reasoning behind the lunch initiative was that it would encourage the employees to eat together, to talk together, to socialize. By making the lunch attractive, they wanted to tempt their consultants to come to head office more often. In other words, believing that knowledge sharing is primarily a social enterprise, a natural extension of spending time together, extending lunch and making spending time together attractive was seen as a perfect way of enhancing knowledge sharing and creating practices. 

The investment has turned out to be a big success. Around noon the lunch area gets crowded. You hear a buzz of talk about projects, slick computer designs, programming codes as well as Saturday's pub round and the lack of kindergarten availabilities. There is no obvious hierarchy among the lunchers, no scheduled seating, and employees, managers, and customers all line up for their food. There is just a big smorgasbord of hot and cold meals, the promise of a good meal, and potential for good company. On Fridays it is more crowded than ever, as Fridays are labelled 'lunch with all', and consultants working off site are encouraged to come 'home'. The Friday lunches are used for presenting important announcements and project achievements....

Questions 

1. (How) Can you justify calling free lunch a knowledge management tool? 

2. What types of knowledge, if any, can be said to be shared and possibly created in such an initiative? 

3. Discuss what types of knowledge management efforts you would invest in if you were a senior manager.