denotes premium content | Dec 3 2008 Feature
posted 1 Mar 2000 in Volume 3 Issue 6
Book Review
Title: Rewiring the Corporate
Brain
Author: Danah Zohar
Publisher: Berrett Koehler,
1997
ISBN: 1576750221
This is a grand book for people
who are interested in the relationship between knowledge management and
the application of the 'new science' to organisational transformation. Written in
1997, this book may be new to professionals in knowledge management (as it was
to me). Zohar does not reference knowledge management or any of the disciplines
or practices of knowledge management specifically, but her descriptions of the
distinctions among three types of intelligence, three types of thinking, and
three models for organisational structure and leadership should resonate
particularly for knowledge management practitioners.
Using our current understanding of
the sciences of the brain and the atom, Zohar carefully defines serial,
associative, and quantum thinking. Serial thinking (and its associated manner of 'knowing')
is related to what we are used to calling explicit knowledge. This is orderly,
mechanical, reasonable, and receptive to codification, classification, and
logic. For the second type of thinking, which we would equate to tacit
knowledge, she uses the term associative, indicating that the knowing or
thinking that is implied is based on the brain's ability to unconsciously make
and store connections among physical and mental events. Then she provides what
we might think of as the 'next' type of knowledge to understand and leverage,
quantum thinking.
Quantum thinking is 'creative, insightful, intuitive thinking...the kind
of thinking with which we challenge our assumptions, break our habits, or change
our mental models, our paradigms.' As we would surmise from the analogy, quantum
thinking is not determinate and is entirely contextual. In quantum physics, the
object we view changes based on the fact that we are viewing it. In quantum
thinking, the act of knowing occurs in the moment and is completely outside of
what can be identified or captured. The primary vehicle through which quantum
thinking emerges is dialogue, the proper facilitation of which is what we might
call a new form of knowledge management.
Organisational structures and
leadership models reflect these same three types of thinking, which themselves
reflect complete world-views: the Newtonian/Western (mechanical, serial,
explicit), the Eastern (connected, associative, tacit), and the quantum
(contextual, open to change, striving for breakthrough). What is most compelling
in understanding these distinctions is how the quantum model itself requires the
incorporation and internalisation of both of the other two. It is not the case
that we operate in a single context, but that we have the capacity to maintain
both views and ways of being while we accustom ourselves to the quantum
world.
Knowledge
management, as we know the field, has given professionals in a variety of
disciplines (information systems, human resources, customer relationship
management, and many more) a common language, and (we hope) some common
management practices and disciplines. Rewiring the Corporate Brain is one of a
number of books that help us extend this language. The notion of quantum
thinking as denoting a third type of knowledge opens a number of opportunities
for dialogue on how to manage, not the 'stuff' of knowledge (tacit and
explicit), but the conversations that create it.
Patti Anklam is Technology Group
Knowledge Manager at Compaq. She can be contacted at:
patti.anklam@compaq.com
