Ensuring Strategic Direction: Using Principles-Based Strategy and Scenarios Together

personalized and contextual information and knowledge is “pushed and pulled” from those who know to those who need to know.3 The strategy is a departure from previous strategic planning efforts for three major reasons. First, it is principles-based, advisory in nature, and embraces an enterprise focus. Second, it emphasizes the responsibility to share knowledge from a human capital and organizational culture perspective, instead of emphasizing the technology aspects of knowledge management. Lastly, besides listing twelve fundamental principles underlying KM, the strategy includes a futuristic Army scenario from a soldier’s perspective which highlights the twelve KM principles in a context that is easily understood by soldiers and senior leaders alike. People are “hardwired” for stories and learn from them.4 Hence, the strategy features the SPC Alfredo story, a futuristic scenario that paints a vivid picture of a future state, putting the twelve principles in context in a plot line that spans “warfighting” aspects of knowledge transfers to business systems illustrations of the KM principles.