T0-2 Starting a New KM Language in Your Organization

Starting KM in your organization also means starting to learn a new KM language among your members. A simple tool towards this end is an FAQ on KM (FAQ=frequently asked questions) which can be circulated among members or placed in the KM webpage in your intranet.

Download CCLFI’s FAQ on KM by pressing “Ctrl” while clicking HERE. The FAQ will appear in a new browser tab.

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Thanks to Wordle for the above “word cloud” of the FAQ

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Listening to Life

People do not notice nor give value to those things that are always available or always around them all the time — air to breathe, solid ground beneath their feet, the local culture, being alive, the support of a loved one — until those things are taken away from them, or seriously threatened to be taken away from them. It is paradoxical: anything that is omnipresent tends to escape our notice. Consequently, we fail to appreciate it.

Many species of fish and other aquatic animals are born, live their lifetimes and die immersed in the water all the time; and so I believe they do not notice the water. Dolphins, which can jump out of the water momentarily, have experienced being out of the water; and so I believe dolphins do notice the water. Spinning dolphins even delightfully and playfully shoot up into the air spinning, and splash back into the water. They do it again and again, in apparent glee and enjoyment.

When I was a young man I dated girls at the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in Laguna province in the Philippines. The first time I visited IRRI facilities, I was struck by the beautiful scenic view of the green rice fields, the rows of coconut trees and thatched huts in the distance, the blue-green mountains nearby and the bluer mountains afar. I blurted a remark to one of the girls about the marvellous scenery surrounding them. She said, “Oh, we do not notice them anymore.”

We are immersed in life and its repeating patterns so often and so much that we have stopped noticing life.

People who had looked at Death face-to-face — for example, people who survived a life-threatening illness, or an accident that was fatal for many companions, or any event where they thought they would die — are people who afterwards better saw how precious Life is and who thereafter lived Life more fully. Like young children, they listened, experienced and savored life more intensely. I know, because I survived an illness that threatened my life for nearly four years.

Take your local or national culture. You grew up within it. It is around you all the time. You never even knew what it consists of — until you leave your town or your country and travel to another culture. It is when you are outside your culture and you are confronted with an alien, strange or different culture that you begin to be aware of your own culture!

Nearly two decades ago, I studied an indigenous local spiritual culture. They have a daily practice that they taught me. It is called “pagbabasa ng Buhay na Aklat” or “reading the Living Book.” By “Living Book” they refer to your own life and daily personal experiences. It consists of closely observing, and internally and externally listening to the micro and macro events in your personal life in order to discern patterns, movements and cues as to where Life is taking you as well as where you want Life to take you. They call one’s life the “Living Book” because they believe that God communicates and interacts with every person through numerous micro and macro events in his or her life. In other words, your life experiences constitute your own “Living Scripture” that you have to “read”. “Reading the Living Book” is a practice of passively listening to Life, as well as actively engaging Life. It is a beautiful practice.

Using knowledge management language, “Reading the Living Book” is sensing of tacit individual knowledge, while reading a religious scripture (whether Christian, Muslim, Judaic, etc.) is reading explicit group knowledge. The first is personalized and private, compared to the latter which is common and public.

Early Christians, and modern-day Pentecostal Christians, use the Greek word “rhema” to refer to direct, tacit, personal experience or communication from the Holy Spirit, in contrast to “logos” which is the written, explicit record of that experience. Unfortunately, when the Bible was translated from Greek to English, both “rhema” and “logos” became the “Word” thereby losing the important distinction between direct, tacit, personalized sensing (“rhema”) and the indirect, explicit, public record (“logos”). This shift is one of the reasons why, in my analysis, Christianity lost the virtues in the indigo quadrant (see the diagrams in my previous blog post “Evolving Forms of Governance”): it shifted from rule by the many and inner disciplines of the early Christians during Pentecost, to rule by the few and canon law/doctrinal controls in the modern Vatican-managed Catholicism and various Protestant congregations. Please note that Protestantism is closer to the indigo quadrant than Catholicism.

A similar distinction occurred in the development of Islam: today there is a distinction between various practices of tacit discernment of Allah’s will (maarifah, haqiqah and tariqah) and the more common reliance on explicit or written laws (Shariah) and the Koran.

The KM distinction between tacit and explicit knowledge is an excellent framework for better understanding these distinctions: one is contextual personal knowledge and the other is generic second-hand knowledge. KM also helps us see that there are losses accompanying conversion from tacit to explicit knowledge.

Abraham, the forefather of all Jews, Christians and Muslims, did not have any scripture to rely on (fortunately!). So he used direct tacit means to listen to God. He listened very well, even if he could not at first believe what he heard. Most modern-day Jews, Christians and Muslim rely on their different scriptures (unfortunately!) and their different mental models and judgments are now leading them to misunderstand, hate and even kill one another. Watching all his children now, Abraham must be an exceedingly unhappy soul.

In 1995-1997 I led a team of experts in Filipino culture and indigenous spiritualities in designing, testing and piloting a Pamathalaan Workshop under former Philippine President Fidel V. Ramos. Pamathalaan, according to President Ramos, is “pamamahala kasama ni Bathala” or God-centered governance. One of the experimental workshop modules was a form of listening to Life patterned after the indigenous practice of “reading the Living Book”. It is an inter-faith process of consensual discernment. If God is omnipresent, then our tendency is to fail to notice Him (or Her). The water sustains the fish, but the fish never notices the water. The process is therefore a conscious practice of noticing and listening to God or to Life (is there really any distinction between God and Life?) all around us every day or moment of our life.

In 1997, I was browsing in a bookstore in San Francisco when I chanced (perhaps it was not “chance”) reading the following excerpt from the back cover of a book. The excerpt “jumped out” and I knew it was another corroboration of the Pamathalaan Workshop. I bought this book and all subsequent books by its author, Neale Donald Walsh. Neale “wrote” these books through the process of “automatic writing” (whereby the author’s hand holding a pen or pencil involuntarily moves and writes, or without the conscious control of the person). The title of the book is “Conversations with God: an Uncommon Dialogue, Book 1.”

“So go ahead now. Ask Me anything. Anything. I will contrive to bring you the answer. The whole universe will I use to do this. So be on the lookout; this book is far from My only tool. You may ask a question, then put this book down. But watch.

“Listen.

“The words to the next song you hear. The information in the next article you read. The story line of the next movie you watch. The chance utterance of the next person you meet. Or the whisper of the next river, the next ocean, the next breeze that caresses your ear — all these devices are Mine; all these avenues are open to Me. I will speak to you if you will listen. I will come to you if you will invite Me. I will show you then that I have always been there.

“All ways.”

Put this blog down (it is second-hand knowledge) and start gaining your own first-hand knowledge. Start listening to Life.

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Can We Manage Knowledge? (A Practice in Listening)

A lively discussion is now going on after I opened a new page on “Will KM Disappear?” and posted it too in the Linkedin group “Knowledge Management Experts” (to read the comments, click that page on the panel to the right or click HERE).

Some are saying that we cannot really manage knowledge. Others are saying we have been doing it all the time. I have my own views but I wanted to listen and learn (see my previous blog post on Listening) and really understand the thinking behind the comments posted. Why are the views so widely divergent? What does each commentor mean?

I think we need to be clear and precise what our referents are when we say the words “manage” and “knowledge”. Otherwise, confusion and fruitless debates will follow. Some say that labels are unimportant and let us just get on with the work. In this particular instance, we need precision of communication. In a work team, unclear labels will lead to communication gaps and then to performance gaps.

First, note that people do not talk about “managing an idea or concept”. Rather, they talk about “managing a process” involving ideas and concepts. Similarly, some are sceptical of the term “managing knowledge” but instead say “managing knowledge processes”. Nonaka prefers the term “knowledge-based management” instead of “knowledge management” (read Nonaka’s talk in Bangkok last January 2007).

Accordingly in the table below I detailed a range of knowledge processes that we actually refer to when we say we “manage knowledge”.

DECONSTRUCTING THE PHRASE “MANAGING KNOWLEDGE”

From the above deconstruction of the phrase “managing knowledge” we can better —

• Understand why some KM practitioners say that only explicit knowledge (or “knowledge artifacts” or “knowledge objects”) can be managed, and insist that tacit knowledge of employees cannot be directly managed (by managers and executives);
• Understand why other KM practitioners who equate KM solely with organizational KM will say that mankind has been managing knowledge all the time (even before the term KM was invented) and will equally insist that asking whether knowledge can or cannot be managed is asking a silly question;
• Understand why KM practitioners who include also personal knowledge processes in KM will say that managers and executives cannot really manage knowledge in employees; they will also insist that managers and executives can only facilitate, support, motivate or incentivize the knowledge and learning processes going on inside the heads (and hearts) of their employees;
• Understand how the above (often unstated or unconscious) differences in referents inside the heads KM practitioners (who are all well-intentioned) set up or predispose them towards miscommunication and fruitless debate (I wrote this blog post to avoid this); and
• Understand why change management and similar behavioral tools — which address personal knowledge processes (nearer the bottom of the table) — must often accompany KM.

Here is my 2 cents worth:

The most important knowledge process in the above table is knowledge use/application/practice (the bottom one in red text). There are only two value-creating steps in the knowledge cycle, and knowledge use/application/practice is one of them. If this step is missing or faulty, all other knowledge processes would amount to useless expenditures. Since this value-creating step is affected most heavily by personal factors, KM must include “personal KM” or personal knowledge processes in its scope of concern and therefore also scope of definition.

Therefore, personal KM cannot be optional because personal knowledge processes in each employee are at the foundation of effective organizational KM.

What do you think?

(My thanks to Fernando Goldman, Skip Boettger, Jim Coogan, Harold Jarche, Douglas Weidner and John Tropea for their comments, which made me think this issue through.)

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Appreciating Nonaka’s SECI Model (#23)

Let us review the four critical tasks of a learning organization (numbers 1-4 refer to the figure below):

1. Build those tacit knowledge in workers that contribute most to value creation;
2. Convert useful tacit knowledge into explicit forms that are easier to reproduce, replicate and reuse; this explicit knowledge is collected in an organized fashion into a knowledge repository or Organizational Brain;
3. Provide the right explicit knowledge to be reused or practiced by the right knowledge workers; if substantial volumes of explicit knowledge have been collected, it becomes possible to recombine, digest, analyze, correlate and otherwise “mine” the collection to generate new insights and conclusions that are actionable;
4. Procure needed expertise or knowledge from outside.

The tasks revolve around the green quadrant because (a) it is the quadrant where most value creation takes place, and (b) most of the knowledge in an organization is located in the green quadrant.

According to Laura Birou, only 10-20 percent of an organization’s knowledge is explicit. Robert H. Buckman of Buckman Laboratories estimates this fraction at only 10 percent. William H. Baker Jr. estimates it at 20 percent. Furthermore, not all of this explicit knowledge is captured in the organizations’ IT-based information systems. What IT does well is facilitate the replication and transmission of explicit knowledge so that more knowledge workers can use/practice them, convert them to their tacit knowledge, and create value for the organization.

Notice that the well-known SECI model of Nonaka addresses all four critical tasks of a learning organization:

1. Socialization: tacit-to-tacit knowledge transfer from expert to learner
2. Externalization: conversion to explicit group knowledge
3. Combination: combining new explicit knowledge with other existing explict knowledge
4. Internalization: conversion back to individual tacit knowledge

The SECI model is not the only mix of knowledge pathways that performs the four critical tasks. In the previous blog post, notice that the Case Study 3 organization also addresses all four critical tasks of a learning organization. The mixes of knowledge pathways do vary from organization to organization.

In Case Study 3, the explicit group knowledge is in the form of a Learning-Oriented Systems Manual (=organizational brain), which at this point in time is not yet web-based. This illustrates the fact that although information technology can be an excellent enabler, it is not an absolute necessity for a learning organization.

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Knowledge Pathways in a Learning Organization (#21)

I wrote in the previous blog about the “Organizational Brain” (lower right or yellow quadrant in the diagram below). The Organizational Brain is a superb instrument for storing, providing, replicating and leveraging explicit knowledge but explicit knowledge by itself cannot create value. Information just sitting in a database does not create value. It is only when PEOPLE apply knowledge that value can be created (upper left or green quadrant in the diagram).

There are few exceptions. In a fully robotized factory, technology (~explicit knowledge), almost by itself, creates value. I said “almost” because there will always be humans overseeing the factory. Even in highly automated systems such as Ultra-Large Crude Carriers (ULCCs), about two dozen crew members are needed to manage its sophisticated technological systems.

Photograph from Wikimedia Commons

Value may be created from explicit knowledge such as when a company sells the patents, copyrights, tools, software and formulas it had internally developed. Of course, the original source of this explicit knowledge is the tacit knowledge of the employees who developed them.

In short, the main creators of value are PEOPLE: individuals and teams using their tacit knowledge: this is a central tenet in the knowledge economy. In the diagram below, these are located in the left quadrants, particularly the green quadrant. Structural capital and technology (right quadrants) are only supportive. Note that the diagram is again based on Ken Wilber’s framework. You can go back to the following blogs to read about Ken Wilber’s framework: (click on any link)

• Tacit-Group Processes in KM
• KM and Trans-Societal Megatrend #1
• Four Types of Memory

There are four critical tasks facing a Learning Organization:

Task 1: Enhance employees’ tacit knowledge (green quadrant) especially those that create most value for the organization.

Task 2: Convert useful individual tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge — the form easily replicable and re-usable by more people in the organization (conversion from green to yellow quadrant using Pathways 2, 3 or 4).

Task 3: Facilitate re-use or practice of the right explicit knowledge by the right people (conversion back to green quadrant). Pathway 6 does this. Through practice explicit knowledge is converted into the practitioner’s own tacit knowledge (see “D4- Converting Tacit to Explicit Knowledge and vice-versa”). Some organizations analyze, recombine, correlate and mine their Organizational Brain into more useful forms (Pathway 5).

Task 4: Acquire needed knowledge from outside (Pathways 7-10 in the diagram below)

Some KM tools for Task 1 are:

• Pathway 1 or replication of individual tacit knowledge: Mentoring, coaching, understudy, buddy system, lecture-demonstration, peer assist, cross-visits, knowledge sharing among a community of practitioners. Some of these KM tools tend to lie “outside the radar” of HR practitioners because the HRD framework looks at the individual employee as the unit of management, while the KM framework is based on managing value-creating knowledge across employees.
• Various tools to enhance employee motivation and engagement; our empirical findings at CCLFI reveal the importance of motivational factors (see: “A Success Factor in KM: Motivating Knowledge Workers” and “Practical Exercise: Ingredients of Effective Group Action”)

Some KM tools for Task 2 (individual tacit knowledge to group explicit knowledge) are:

• Pathway 2 (the predominant knowledge pathway for Task 2): Manualization, process documentation, learning history, individual mind mapping, blog, surveys and questionnaires.
• Pathway 3: Lessons-learned session, after-action review, wiki or collaborative authoring, group exercises for thinking together such as mind mapping, causal flow diagramming, fishbone diagramming, etc.
• Pathway 4: Video capture of story telling, company visioning exercise accompanied by documentation, minutes or aide memoire of a meeting and conceptual design brainstorming among architects

Some KM tools for Task 3 are:

• Pathway 5 or recombination: Data mining, performance metrics followed by identification and study of best practitioner, multiple regression or path analysis to detect causal linkages and contributions, statistical summaries and fitting trend lines to data.
• Pathway 6 or group explicit knowledge converted to individual tacit knowledge in many: Practicum, learning-by-doing, on-the-job training, workplace-oriented mentoring, action research, R&D, experimentation and replication/adaptation of best practice.

We know that the usual means for Task 4 are: purchase of knowledge products, hiring new employees, buying a franchise to quickly use a ready product and its support network, engaging a consultant, copying from the public domain, business intelligence procedures, etc.

I have written about these knowledge pathways in Section 3.5 of my Overview chapter in the book “Knowledge Management in Asia: Experience and Lessons” published in 2008 by the Asian Productivity Organization, Tokyo, Japan. If you wish to receive a copy of this chapter, send me an email.

See also: “Knowledge pathways: 3 case studies” and “Appreciating Nonaka’s SECI model”.

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KM and Trans-Societal Megatrend #1

Trans-societal Megatrend #1 (see Q14- Naming trans-societal Megatrend #1: “towards yin”?) can be viewed from Ken Wilber’s framework, as in the following diagram.

When we were looking at “Tacit-Group Processes in KM” and “Gaia Consciousness”, we were in fact using Ken Wilber’s framework:

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When we were examining the global balance sheet of tangible and intangible assets (see “Towards a Global Balance Sheet”), we were also using Ken Wilber’s framework:

In fact, the expanded KM framework (see “Practical Exercise: Ingredients of Effective Group Action #15″) emerged from the simple observation that answers to “What are the ingredients of effective group action?” can be grouped in a way from where the commonly-accepted categories of intellectual capital or knowledge assets naturally emerge! Surprisingly, the grouping is consistent with Ken Wilber’s framework.

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Which falls neatly into the categories of intellectual capital:

Now, what we are observing (see Q14- Naming trans-societal Megatrend #1: “towards yin”?) is that there is a global megatrend running across many sectors of society: corporate wealth creation, global economy, community development, educational psychology, national development, national security, attitudes to environment, psychology, international conflicts, religion and organizational dynamics. In other words, the megatrend is trans-societal. It can be summarized as:

What do you think?

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D4- Converting Tacit to Explicit Knowledge and vice-versa

This diagram shows the losses when tacit knowledge is converted to explicit knowledge:

Here are ways we build our own tacit knowledge from explicit knowledge that we read:

Corresponding KM tools are in the pink and light blue callouts.

In learning certain skills, reading a manual may be incomplete or inadequate. For example, in riding a bicycle the usual learning sequence is: observe – practice, or observe – practice with coaching. I further improved the first figure above by including “demonstrate” and the second figure by including practice “with coaching” (thanks to two suggestions from Charlie Dibsdale).

The figures include the comments for improvement from Silva Ferretti (thanks Silva!). If you have other comments or suggestions for improvement, please post it here.

You can use these diagrams for non-commercial purposes but please give CCLFI acknowledgement each time you show or use it. CCLFI is the KM, OL (=organizational learning) and KBD (=knowledge-based development) advocacy, training and consulting organization I belong to.

Cheers!

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D3- Tacit Knowledge versus Explicit Knowledge

Explanation:

• Operational definitions are less prone to misunderstanding and debate, e.g. “undocumented” is preferable to “difficult to document.”
• Avoid confusing the KM definition of the term “knowledge” with the large variety of laymen understanding of the word (see my earlier post on “A Proposed KM Framework”).

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