denotes premium content | May 23 2013 Feature
posted 1 Feb 1998 in Volume 1 Issue 4
I only know what I know when I need to know
it... Embracing the active management of tacit knowledge
David Snowden, IBM contends in this
article that the active management - and by implication, acceptance of the value
of - tacit knowledge is a necessary component of any knowledge management
program. It may also be a sufficient component for the initiation phase of such
a program. It is easier and cheaper to implement in terms of resource and time
than many of the more ambitious and investment intensive information systems.
More
critically and enigmatically, tacit knowledge projects also force the cultural
change and re-channelling of management thought that is necessary to the overall
adoption of Knowledge Management by the organisation.
A description is provided of models
that have been used to establish this point in client workshops across a diverse
range of companies. Some management strategies for the active management of
tacit knowledge are also identified. Some early ideas on the use of Knowledge
Diaries and associated decision point mapping are also introduced. These
practices will be expanded in the sequel to this article.
In the emerging discipline of
knowledge management, consultants, companies and academics are creating a body
of what I shall, for want of a better term, refer to as sin. Sin, as many us
were taught when young, has two dimensions (The Catholic Church got there well
before the Boston Consulting Group):
Firstly, at one end
of the spectrum are mortal sins, serious matters which lead to damnation - the
Chief Knowledge Officer and team get fired and the knowledge program is canned.
In contrast we have venial sins which can lead to damnation but can be absolved
with suitable penance - the Chief Knowledge Officer gets fired and is replaced
by a team of external consultants who necessarily fall into mortal sin, but
avoid all responsibility: you chose to eat the apple after all.
Secondly, there are sins of commission which arise from
a deliberate and positive decision to undertake a course of action which leads
to sin - the Chief Knowledge Officer decides to change all incentives schemes to
reward quantitative posting of documents to the Intellectual Capital Management
(ICM). These are contrasted with sins of omission in which the sin arises from a
failure to act timely -either through inertia, lack of empowerment or whatever -
The Chief Knowledge Officer allows professional review of ICM documents to
stifle innovation and new thinking.
In the diagram below I have suggested
an example of each based on my current experience of what should be concerning
organizations undertaking a knowledge program. The danger of it becoming yet
another consultancy fad has never being higher than in 1998 with a proliferation
of activity reminiscent of the (in retrospect) worst days of business process
re-engineering. However, in this article I wish to concentrate on a mortal sin
of omission - namely failure to take tacit knowledge seriously at the
commencement of a Knowledge Management Program. This is not just a danger to
more explicit orientated projects within a program but is also a major missed
opportunity for:
2. Organic, rather than
mechanistic, achievement of cultural change.
3. Identification and building of
communities of competence and/or mutual dependence.
4. Creation of a model for ongoing
measurement of change resulting from the knowledge program.
This article is based on some early
work with clients and further thinking and plans for engagements planned in
1998. It builds on a diverse set of experiences and the pragmatic tacit
knowledge projects suggested are all capable of rapid and low cost
implementation. In a sense this article communicates some current learning and
hypotheses and invites collaborative participation in the continuation of the
work in 1998 and beyond.
It should always be remembered that it has always been easier to define,
identify and catalogue sin than goodness. Additionally, the former is often the
more attractive on first acquaintance...
Why is tacit knowledge so
critical?
The
ability to create and use tacit knowledge is one of the great human skills. In
day-to-day life and experience we rely on it to a far greater extent than
explicit knowledge. However, for an organisation there is no universal answer to
the question posed in the title of this section. Each organisation will find its
own examples and business goals. The role of the consultant is not to create a
dependency on some complex model (a mortal sin of commission) but to enable the
discovery and articulation of those goals.
I have found two models to be of
particular use in achieving this. One is a common sense taxonomy of tacit
knowledge - and associated uses and management control - developed over a series
of presentations in support of internal knowledge champions to cynical audiences
of middle managers. The other, and the first that I wish to examine, is a
learning or knowledge imitation model described by George von Krogh and Johan
Roos in one of the most rewarding, if one of the most dense, of the recent
publications in this arena.1
Three contexts for
knowledge imitation:
1. Co-evolutionary: in which the imitation is
both temporally and spatially proximate. Here, I learn by watching, observing,
assisting and questioning a colleague in the act of task resolution as it
happens - and generally over an extended period of time.
2.
Differentiated:
where the imitation is
temporally differentiated but spatially proximate. Basically this means that I attend
a course - it may be bespoke for me, but I observe the task with the benefit
of the expert's hindsight - the 'finished task tends to look neatly structured, and
task resolution can be linked with a particular stream of actions'.
3.
Detached: in this final context the imitation of both
temporally and spatially differentiated - basically I get given the
manual.
Learning
can of course take place across several of these contexts. Neither is there a
right or wrong approach to knowledge imitation - each of the contexts are
appropriate for different stages in the evolution of knowledge.
I have tested the above model
on many audiences over the last year and have received consistent answers to
the question: which is the most valuable form of learning and why? Without exception
the first is seen as the most valuable - not only as a mechanism for transfer
of knowledge, but also as a means of creating new knowledge - either original
ideas or evolution of method. The transfer in this case is principally tacit,
in the process of learning we move through a curve: starting with an awareness
of what we don t know (conscious incompetence); through the hesitant
first steps in which assistance and reference back to the expert are necessary;
to arrive at the point where we are able to use and develop the knowledge
ourselves (unconscious competence).
The first model is front-loaded in
terms of time and effort - dangerously it may not transfer knowledge to the
organisation as a whole - but is far more efficient and creative in the longer
term. The latter models both protect knowledge and provide the potential for
more consistent delivery of a skill across multiple projects.
The real point here, in
terms of valuing tacit knowledge (which is not to devalue explicit knowledge)
lies in von Krogh and Roos's title for the first model - it is co-evolutionary,
knowledge is not just transferred, it is grown, altered, enhanced, developed (or
occasionally damaged or even lost - evolution needs its failures to ensure its
successes). Too many knowledge management projects convey a requirement for
neatness and order which contrasts with the complex and often messy environments
in which humans most effectively create new knowledge.
A taxonomy of tacit
knowledge
I am not attempting here to create an alternative to the common taxonomy
of knowledge - How, What, Why, Who - and all the permutations and
combinations thereof. However, one of the dangers of these taxonomies is that they do
not challenge the common objective assumption of many knowledge projects -
namely that all useful knowledge is explicit. Subjectively many of these projects
pay lip service to the existence of tacit knowledge but they assume (a mortal sin
of omission) that this will somehow be handled in the human space around the
ICM system that they are creating. This error has been compounded
by over-engineering in some process improvement exercises. As illustrated in
the 'T' model (see below) the tacit-explicit dimension of judgement is a question of
balance - different situations require different types of knowledge and
learning. The asset dimension is about sharing and communication - ICM's can
manage the distribution of explicit knowledge but not tacit - although they can
be an important enabling tool. Trying to combine the two arrows in a single
project will not work. 
A
better understanding of tacit knowledge can be achieved through a further
classification of the tacit-explicit spectrum. Over a series of workshops with
single and multiple clients I have observed a tendency to polarise between those
who believe that all meaningful tacit knowledge can be made explicit, and those
who argue that the process of making something explicit in some way damages or
at best alters the knowledge in question. This polarisation can generally be
avoided by a simple classification of tacit knowledge illustrated in descending
order of intangibility below. Associated with each of these is an illustration
of potential use and also of an active management strategy.2
The purpose of this type of
classification is simple - once an organisation has articulated (preferably in
its own language with its own stories) some variation of this classification
then it is possible to set in place programs and management strategies. Tacit
knowledge can be very powerful in an Organizational context as a means of making
fast, efficient decisions with sparse or incomplete data - i.e. the day-to-day
norm of management decision making.
However, to be successfully used
within an organisation, the transfer and deployment of tacit knowledge requires
clear and proven trust between :
1. Individuals who possess or create
tacit knowledge
2. Between the organisation considered as an entity and individuals
empowered to exercise judgement.
The latter of these requires active
management - it can not be left to chance. It is a top down and bottom up
requirement.
The active management of tacit knowledge
The table below illustrates ideas that
have arisen from a variety of experiences in different industries. In the sequel
to this article I will elaborate some more detailed ideas and thinking in each
of the categories. However, none of these are necessarily sufficiently new or
different to 'build knowledge intensity'.3 Over the last year we have been
experimenting with a novel technique that introduces some of the concepts of
tacit knowledge management into an organisation through a knowledgeable way of
working rather than an explicit (sic) sales of knowledge management. Applying
the principles of knowledge management to tackling established issues in a
company is often the only, and often the most effective, way of ensuring the
successful adoption of knowledge management program in companies who are
suffering from consultancy fatigue.
I only intend to outline the essence
of the approach in this article; in the sequel I will provide some illustrations
from the experimental work.
Knowledge Diaries4
A variety of tools and techniques have
developed to create knowledge or information maps of organizations. Many of
these (for example Systems Theory) provide sophisticated models. However there
are three problems:
1. They tend to be mechanistic and re-enforce a prejudice that
sufficient analysis and information capture can make any knowledge
explicit.
2. They
tend to dependency cultures, in that their operation requires the constant
presence of experienced consultants (mortal sin of commission). Tacit knowledge
is not only intangible, but also tends to evolve and change through its
exercise. This means that mapping tools must be capable of utilisation by an
organizations own staff without the need for expensive tools and training.
3. The most
fundamental issue in respect of knowledge management is that I only know what I
know when I need to know it.
To get to the essence of tacit
knowledge in a community you have to use the co-evolutionary learning context
identified earlier - i.e. if you go into the field and get your hands dirty then
you see knowledge in action. No one can - or if they can they won't - disclose
the nature of their tacit knowledge through a formal interview process.
In order to get close to
this we have experimented with the process of getting a sample of decision
makers who have a high tacit knowledge content to their decision making, and
getting them to keep a diary of the decisions that they make. The form of this
diary is to ask four questions of each decision:
1. What information did you use to
make this decision?
2. How did you communicate the decision - form and vector?
3. What information
would you have liked to have to make a more effective decision?
4. How did you feel
about the decision?
Ironically, the latter question has often proved the most valuable.
People's feelings about decisions can provide an instrument to classify the
nature of knowledge being applied.
Once these diaries are gathered in, a
map can be drawn of the flow of information between decision points within an
organisation. This also helps identify the cluster points for knowledge and the
nature of communities who share knowledge without management intervention -
generally communities of mutual dependence - the trust word again.
The value of these
information/decision flow models is that they provide a significant contrast
with Business Process models. Often the process model will provide an idealised
(or explicit) representation of the business. The flow model generally shows up
where the real effort is concentrated and the principle focus of the
organisation. One of the early assignments using this method illustrates this
perfectly - the process model showed a strong customer orientation, the
information/decision flow model showed that all the energy of the company was
going into managing suppliers and internal processes!
Interestingly, two methods have been
used to create the information/decision flow diagrams with similar levels of
effectiveness:
1.
The diary is kept by a junior (as junior as possible to prevent any threat) who
shadows the knowledge worker. In some cases students on vacation assignments
have been used. This imitates some of the best features of the mediaeval craft
hall.
2. The
diaries are created slightly artificially in a succession of cross disciplinary
workshops - in which client staff carry out the facilitation.
The first
of these is more 'pure' in its result - but takes time. The second is less 'pure'can
often create an additional benefit in innovation and process improvement.
One of the main benefits
is that the tacit knowledge assets are effectively disclosed tangentially
through their association with the more definable decision points.
Looking
forward
As
stated earlier - it is easier to identify sin than virtue. However there is much
good work going on in companies in the area of tacit knowledge management -
often unsung as high investment projects more often attract internal and
external publicity. In the sequel to this article, I will elaborate the outcomes
of the knowledge diary process and provide some insight to the development of
craft hall models alluded to above.
David Snowden is at IBM.
