Luis Suarez has a great story about knowledge management from someone who has nothing to do with knowledge management in Knowledge Management - Where Are the Bees?
The short version: Luis met the president of a beekeeper collective, and it turns out his "job" is exactly what people in KM do. Here's the key realization in Luis' piece (in response to the beekeeper's description of his role):
WHAT?!?!?! Why is it that you do it again?
Well, according to him (Paraphrasing his words, of course), he is part of a community of folks, i.e. the cooperative, with a common and shared mission and a set of goals (i.e. Earn their living as beekeepers), who work collaboratively in getting the job done while contributing to the well being of the environment and he gets to travel to all of those different countries to meet up with other beekeepers -from other communities- so that he can learn, exchange knowledge and collaborate with them into fixing some of the different key issues they face (i.e. Disappearance of the bees, for instance, amongst others), so that when he comes back he gets together with his community and transfers all of that knowledge to his colleagues so that they also acquire that same knowledge and therefore are able to do their jobs better, while contributing to fixing a global problem, locally.
I think the power of this discovery in this instance is the solid depiction of the principles we discuss in KM. The real world example solidifies all the theory and discussion and ideas.
So, how do we deal with this in relation to our clients (internal or external)? Clearly getting people to articulate their problems and needs helps. Having stories like this are certainly going to help. How else do I (as the consultant) make the connection for them between what they are doing today and what they could do? How do I (we) draw out a "what good looks like" when they don't even know what they could achieve?