This year, I had the opportunity to meet with more than 15 executives from predominantly multi-billion-dollar companies across the Gulf Region and Türkiye. The goal? To introduce the strategic value of Knowledge Management (KM) and spark a dialogue around one fundamental question:

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“If knowledge is power, is your organization truly managing this power?”

While this question caught their attention, it rarely translated into action. Only two executives requested further discussions—interestingly, both had attempted KM initiatives in the past and had failed. Their failures gave them something most others lacked: awareness of its potential value.

This experience revealed to me what I now believe is the biggest challenge of Knowledge Management—something I used to attribute primarily to the difficulty of cultural transformation.

So, what is the biggest challenge?

Creating a sense of urgency.

This concept isn’t new. John Kotter emphasizes it as the first step in leading successful change, and Douglas Weidner, President of KMI, also begins his KM methodology with it. But my experience adds a nuance: it’s not the organization at large that must first feel urgency—it’s the executives.

Executives immediately respond to a report showing declining revenues. But what if the report says your most experienced employees are leaving? Or that your product development cycles haven’t improved in years? Those issues rarely provoke the same level of alarm.

So, how do we create that executive-level urgency for KM?

Change the language. Speak the language of business.

One insightful executive—who generously mentored me through this challenge—helped me see the path forward. Here are some key strategies to engage executives and tackle KM’s biggest challenge:

• Identify the critical pain points they are facing right now.
• Shift your perspective to clearly demonstrate business value, not KM theory.
• Start with quick wins and directly link them to those pain points.
• Show the big picture—how early successes can scale across the organization. 

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No executive will argue against the idea that knowledge is power. The issue is they don’t know how to use that power to generate value. If we can clearly demonstrate the "why" and "how," urgency will follow.

And remember—the higher the barrier, the greater the competitive advantage for those who overcome it. KM’s biggest challenge is its first and highest hurdle. But those who clear it are the ones who unlock transformational performance.

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