“How much I know and how much we know”

To make plans work and achieve some degree of KM facilitation within the organizations, organisations start with low hanging fruit of Explicit Knowledge and this makes sense too as organizations know where to extent their resources, human capital and technology, to capture the same.

While working on the knowledge paradigm one of the challenges posed to organizations is how to articulate the tacit knowledge of the employee and put to use.

During the start of this century few researchers like Castillo, Ambrosini and Bowman started classifying implicit knowledge in three formats. The first level of tacit knowledge, “Deeply Ingrained”, which cannot be articulated, as this nonepistle tacit knowledge is extremely difficult to be “explicitly articulated”, which was earlier said by Leonard & Sensiper. The second level of tacit, which has termed as “sagacious”, “imperfectly articulated tacit skills” or “cognitive form of tacit knowledge by various KM thought leaders. Ambrosini and Bowman acknowledge Nonaka view that this knowledge can be partially captured through “metaphor and analogy”. The third level, Semantic Knowledge by Castillo and Internalised Knowledge by Nonaka which was at one time explicit and has been turned into implicit and Ambrosini & Bowman Castillo and Nonaka, agree this can be articulated relatively easily through dialogue.

“How much we know”, has always been a matter of concern for almost all the organizations. The collective tacit knowledge has been interpreted very differently by organizations and instead of coming out with the clear description many researchers in this field has only added to the confusion.

Spendor’s research says that collective knowledge is more secure and has more strategic significance than individual knowledge. Few likes of Fahey and Prusak, it is less changeable and least affected by attrition

Questions have been raised whether there is a difference between collective and total sum of knowledge being held by all individuals in the system. Thought leaders like Simon clearly stated that, organisation do not hold any knowledge but its members do. But researchers like Nelson and Winter who put forward a different perspective to collective knowledge and said “…an attribute of the organisation just like its modus operandi and culture” as referred by Alton in his paper

My thoughts differ from the school of researchers and authors who believe that Collective knowledge is not aggregation of knowledge held by individuals in organisation.

To begin with we can say that collective knowledge is the complete knowledge, including explicit and implicit, which resides with the employees of organisation.

Again the collective knowledge can be classified into collective explicit and collective implicit knowledge. The collective explicit knowledge which has been termed as encoded knowledge by some and few have termed it as objectified knowledge is said to be easily accessible & transferred among employees as the same can be stored. Collective implicit knowledge which is formed by explicit and implicit knowledge of the group has been called as tacit routines by Ambrosini, embedded knowledge by Blackler and Lam and socio cultural knowledge by Castillo and collective knowledge by Spender. It is understood that the objective of implicit is to allow users to grow but not to replace their thinking.

Collective implicit knowledge, which can be articulated and but due to constraints cannot be stored hence is only available as an implicit knowledge to a group. This availability depends how well a “seeker” is connected and knows the “knowledge holder”.

Blackler distinguishes a further subset of collective knowledge. In his study in mid 90s, “Knowledge, Knowledge Work and Organizations: An Overview and Interpretation, Organizational Studies”, expanded the knowledge types which were proposed by Collins earlier in the decade, viz.

1. Embrained knowledge is dependent on conceptual skills and cognitive abilities. It more of 'knowing that' than ‘knowing how’. It required synthesizing personal insights models, system thinking and have shared visions of organizational learning
This knowledge is considered to be highly practical, high-level knowledge, where objectives are met through perpetual recognition and revamping. Tacit knowledge may also be embrained, even though it is mainly subconscious.

2. Embodied knowledge is action oriented and consists of contextual practices. It more of ‘knowing how’ and social acquisition. This tacit knowledge is formed by interaction among individuals and how they interpret their environment.

3. Encultured knowledge is the process of achieving shared understandings through socialization and acculturation, which refers specifically to the knowledge that individuals hold about the cultural or social norms regarding how to behave or interact with others in the group in specific situations. This type of tacit knowledge in an enterprise is represented in practices and language.

4. Embedded knowledge is explicit and resides within systematic routines and maybe ritualized. It relates to the relationships between roles, technologies, formal procedures and emergent routines within a complex system.

5. Encoded knowledge is information that is conveyed in signs and symbols and represented textually and digitally. This knowledge is decontextualized and abstract. Rather than being a specific type of knowledge, it deals more with the transmission, storage and interrogation of knowledge.

“We can know more than we can tell”

I started my research on Content Creation and Consumption and started working on what could be called as currently available knowledge within the organization and further planned to classify the same into tacit and explicit. And found there is lot of ambiguity in term tacit which brings significant challenge for us regarding how to manage and how to transfer the tacit dimension of knowledge within the organization.

To clear this ambiguity I relied on Socialization, Externalization, Combination, Integration (SECI) model of knowledge as proposed by Nonaka. This model proposes that knowledge creation occurs through a process of socialization between individuals to share tacit knowledge; externalization to translate or convert individual tacit knowledge to explicit knowledge; combination to capture and disseminate new explicit knowledge; and internalization, whereby the organization’s explicit knowledge is internalized by individuals so that it becomes tacit again.
The research on implicit learning in cognitive psychology field suggests that the extent to which tacit knowledge can be articulated depends, at least in part, on the way in which the tacit knowledge was originally acquired.

To make it easier we need to first adopt two aspects of knowing, “knowing what and knowing how” are always present in any instance of knowledge. Implicit and explicit learning are not completely separate but are interactive or co-operative processes existing along a continuum. In particular, in complex learning situations a person’s performance is likely to involve both implicit and explicit learning processes.

Tacit knowledge can have both a technical and cognitive dimension. Technical tacit knowledge is skills know-how, learned implicitly through experience, and it is usually not possible for an individual to articulate or describe this technical know-how. Cognitive tacit knowledge is knowledge that is developed implicitly using “mental models” or exemplar situations. These mental models are so ingrained, as described by Murray, that we take them for granted. It has been found that at times SMEs, when asked to bring forward their cognitive tacit knowledge, their articulation might not hit the mark they don’t really know at a conscious level why they choose certain actions (Schön, 1983; Stanley et al., 1989)

Innovative Decision Management

The thought behind this post emerged from the spiritful discussion happening in KM forum in LinkedIn . The discussion started by Art Schlussel, If the term "KM" could get a do-over what would you call the discipline? brought forward best of global knowledge and thoughts on one page ( I guess it will take dozens of pages to print this discussion as it has crossed 200+ comments mark !!)

The answer depends on how we perceive KM. As Gurteen puts in his article, referred in his comment, "...the phrase knowledge management is a poor description and because of much of the early hype and failures, it has a bad name in some quarters as a result. But we need to face up to that", and that is quite true.

The term holds lot of different meanings to different employees within the same organisation. But at the end the role of KM is to facilitate learning thru innovation to have effective decision making at all levels, and which I believe.

But I really feel sorry for the person who avoids discussion involving KM, as mentioned by Gurteen in same article. We all know that we cannot avoid Knowledge management as KM works in all organizations but this could be in unstructured & structured format and at organized & unorganized level but with the primary objective to develop wisdom that gives ability to capture and synthesis ( or let’s say ‘evolve’ as said by Md Santo in his comment) data/information which could be put to fruitful use.

Edwards in 1994 wrote that raw information may be widely available to many, but only some organisations will be able to convert the information into relevant knowledge and to use this knowledge to achieve their aims. The processes by which they do this are known as KM strategies.

On 2nd Gen KM Charles Savage put forward that the most successful organisations are shifting from strategies based on prediction to strategies based on anticipation of surprises.

There is lot of ambiguity to terms explicit and implicit and we need to reach out to Cognitive psychology to understand these two term. As per Polanyi there are two dimensions of knowing, “knowing what” and “knowing how”. He said that that these two aspects of knowing are always present in any instance of a person’s knowledge. He argued that we know that tacit knowledge exists because practical outcomes of its application are clearly visible and can thus infer that there must be some implicit or tacit knowledge that the person has but cannot articulate. Polanyi argued that the aim of explicitly and objectively formalizing all knowledge may not be achievable, as the implicit or tacit aspects of knowledge cannot be fully replicated as formal explicit knowledge and for these two there are many different transfer mechanisms.

In one of the paper Derek Binney put forward that successful organisation are shifting from management based on compliance to management based on self-control and self-organisation. They are also shifting from utilisation of already known knowledge to the creation of new knowledge, from pure ‘technology’ KM applications to also include ‘process’ applications

Binney provided a framework, KM Spectrum, to help organisations make sense of the large diversity of material appearing under the heading of KM, and to help them assess where they are in KM terms. His focus is on the KM activities that are being carried out, grouped into six categories:
1. Transactional KM: Knowledge is embedded in technology.
2. Analytical KM: Knowledge is derived from external data sources, typically focussing on customer-related information.
3. Asset Management KM: Explicit management of knowledge assets (often created as a by-product of the business) which can be reused in different ways.
4. Process-based KM: The codification and improvement of business practice and the sharing of these improved processes within the organisation.
5. Developmental KM: Building up the capabilities of the organisation's knowledge workers through training and staff development.
6. Innovation/creation KM: Fostering an environment which promotes the creation of new knowledge, for example through R & D and through forming teams of people from different disciplines.

Binney’s analysis makes sense as he ponders on the knowledge-centred classification of KM and the business perspectives classification of KM.

To make KM successful in organisations KM should have top-down approach so that there is efficient “Intellectual Capital Management”. The argument put forward by Paul Nauwelaerts in his comment on the term 'Intellectual Capital Management” is quite interesting.

KM has to be imbibed in a corporate strategy. "Shaping corporate strategy around knowledge" by Day & Wendler is quite interesting reading which have similarity to Wiig which has a similar category of "Knowledge Strategy as Business Strategy"

I believe, storing –“non-interactive document-centric warehousing approach”- sharing, auditing /re-auditing (weeding) are all processes which will undergo change with the need which we have seen since KM 1.0 and will witness till n. When we Integrate Web 3.0 (we can replace 3.0 with value n) with KM, we intend to improve the effectiveness of science of decision making.

Recently, in one of the organisation, I saw KM as a harbinger of organizational change. I saw that the KM requirement from each team was quite diversify but the common element was that they wanted inputs to bring in innovation in their work and reach risk free decision. (Was it fear of success or failure or they want effeciency cannot comment)

I do agree with Brad and John who have agreed that it is means creating “ ‘relationship’ connections and flow” or as Nirmala commented earlier "interplay in the ecosystem", The knowledge management success model developed by Jennex and Olfman emphasizes the need for knowledge management systems to include both stores of knowledge and linkages or pointers to people with knowledge expertise. In literature by Dixon; Davenport and Prusak it has been emphasized that KM processes such as knowledge creation, sharing and use and KM strategies are crucial for successful firms of the 21st century. Czerniawska & Potter and Leibowitz have put forward that Knowledge originates in and with people; it creates networks, communities and routines whose life spans exceed that of the tenure of the individual members

2nd Gen of KM thinkers such as Chris Argyris, Peter Senge, Nonaka , Levitt, March and Scheinall have laid stress on importance of thinking about processes and connections.

Senge has put forward that organisational learning is only successful when it is based on an understanding of how the whole organisational system is connected, rather than a focus on individual parts. C Argyris further develops the idea of learning by distinguishing between single and double loop learning

In their article published in late 80s’ Levitt and March were less positive about the capacity of organisations to manage knowledge effectively and to learn from past experiences. Later in early 90s March highlighted the considerable limitations that impede organizational learning which include the complexity of organizational experiences, human habits, hierarchical structures, routines, and differing interpretations by different sub-groups within an organisation.

Did I say " Innovative Decision Management "?