This book addresses a recurrent theme in the reporting of, and responses to, child protection tragedies in the UK and internationally. When systems fail and professional judgements retrospectively prove to be wrong, shrill exhortations for professionals to share information to facilitate better multi-agency working are once again recharged and the volume cranked up. This book provides a welcome analysis of why ‘information sharing’ remains a wicked issue.

Research, including my own, shows that knowledge sharing and learning are influenced by multiple interpersonal, social and organisational factors. The identification of children at risk and the sharing of knowledge and decision making across time and space may properly be conceived as a complex system, whereby inter-dependencies and couplings between professionals and agencies can be both the source of safety but also a risk, depending on how they are ‘done’. The promotion of multi-agency working with children and families is promoted as a way to prevent children ‘slipping through the net’ of services, and of ensuring that professionals have the ‘full picture’. The literature repeatedly emphasises that good communication has the potential to reduce this complexity and support coordination, but what does communication mean and how does one know when it has taken place?

Knowledge sharing is more than the transmission of information. It denotes the exchange and use of diverse knowledge, and often more tacit ‘know-how’, between different groups to engender shared understanding. But, as this book shows, knowledge is difficult to share and it typically acquired and developed through participation in ‘communities of practice’, rather than management information systems. In short, knowledge is not a ‘thing’ that a community ‘has’, but rather it is what they ‘do’, ‘make’ and who they ‘are’. This distinction is important because efforts to understand, and indeed promote knowledge sharing and collaboration, should focus not only on the formal assemblages of knowledge, but also the more informal and unarticulated manifestations of know-how. Recognising these differences, knowledge sharing requires different strategies and practices. The sharing of tacit knowledge is often based on more informal, day-to-day interactions around common problems, the creation of opportunities to enable social intercourse and creative problem solving. The detailed empirical work in this book shows how professional sense making is constrained by the local organisational practices that disrupt relationships and reduce or eliminate proximity.