denotes premium content | May 19 2013 Feature
posted 1 Sep 1998 in Volume 2 Issue 1
It,s in the timing... Humour,
improvisation and the capture of tacit knowledge
Although much has been written
about tacit knowledge, workable approaches to its capture are still few and far
between. Here Roger Evernden suggests that humour and improvisation may be the
missing links between tacit knowledge and the creation of intellectual
assets.
Much
of the Knowledge Management literature available is serious, practical stuff,
tailored to a readership that probably likes to think of itself as serious and
practical also. This is especially true for discussions of tacit knowledge,
where the subject matter tends to be rather nebulous anyway.
But what is noticeably
lacking in much of the discussion surrounding Knowledge Management, especially
tacit knowledge, is humour. However, exploring what people find funny and how
this is expressed may provide new insights into the use of tacit knowledge, and
therefore the creation of intellectual assets.
The omission of humour is rather
striking when one might suppose it to be one of the most significant domains of
tacit knowledge. Humour is an important cultural medium, situated at the
intersection of the personal and the social, where it functions in a context of
high ambiguity and is particularly contingent upon the exercise of judgement and
timing.
Tacit
knowledge could be said to have two major impulses or drives, one towards what
might loosely be termed 'imprinting', the other towards improvisation. Insofar
as they may be separated, these refer respectively to knowledge transfer and
knowledge creation.
'Imprinting' comes to mind in accounts of knowledge transfer that
function according to imitation. Another variation on this theme might be
'inscription', in which certain ways of being and doing are in-scribed by one
employee onto another over a period of time. Improvisation, on the other hand,
involves sleight of hand. It is the means by which something is 'carried off'
with skill, often marking the qualitative difference that distinguishes the
expert from the amateur. It is in this notion of dexterity and its relation to
judgement that timing comes into play.
Knowledge
transfer
Knowledge transfer has been considerably discussed as a means for
generating intellectual assets and retaining them within the organisation;
identifying key individuals within informal communication systems; and so on.
This is partly related to those developments in the Knowledge Management
movement leaning more heavily towards the 'learning organisation' rather than
towards issues related to 'artificial intelligence'.
Improvisation
The value of considering
improvisation here derives from the view that humour is not only a domain of
tacit knowledge but also one of desire. The hidden discourse of desire within
Organisational life is rather marked - although it is not so often labelled in
terms of 'desire': personal motivation and the politics within which goals are
located tend to be recorded through the language of business.
Humour provides an
effective strategy for dealing with doubt by shifting the ground of the original
conjecture. It messes with the way things are. It stirs things up, though it may
also calm them down. Humour makes it possible to see in new ways. The humorous
play on words, delivery of the punch line in telling a joke - all depend on a
keen sense of timing to 'carry it off'. On another level, humour is a phenomenon
that binds people together and so has potential for knowledge transfer, and for
exploring in its own right for what it may yield concerning knowledge of the
tacit.
This leads
us to consider issues of communities and informal networks. The sudden promotion
of knowledge as a marketable commodity has been given a moral gloss through use
of the notion of co-operation. Greater focus on humour, and how it may be used,
could produce more effective means of managing or representing inequalities,
within collaborative arrangements in certain contexts. From another perspective,
humour provides a way of articulating dissent, even within a culture that
enforces collaboration in such a way that there appears to be a unity of
purpose. Humour has the value of being wonderfully subversive and, in any
context in which greater creativity is sought, may be used to displace,
exoticize, or otherwise challenge cherished modus operandi.
Capturing knowledge through
humour
So how do we go about deducing tacit knowledge from a humorous situation
- and how do we translate it into an intellectual asset? Conventional approaches
suggest opportunities such as relating funny incidents in informal settings,
capturing performances on video so that individuals and groups are also able to
appreciate more nuanced aspects of the performance, such as facial expressions,
movement and the importance of timing. In other words to create contexts to
observe the play of tacit knowledge. This takes the articulation of tacit
knowledge a stage further than direct knowledge transfer between individuals. By
incorporating visual elements, the video (or some other medium) provides a
context for indirect knowledge transfer and affords an opportunity to create
greater awareness of the ways in which they already use tacit knowledge. It is
not something new or exotic.
Humour and its relationship to the
hidden
The focus on humour in the narrative, and in other enactments, as a form
of social commentary and for bringing 'hidden things' into the open, has a long
tradition. For example, the 'commedia dell'arte' was a form of theatre that
emerged in Tuscany around 1550 and flourished for two hundred years. It combined
intellectual and physical agility through mime, improvised and scripted dialogue
(often coarse) with tumbling and acrobats. Its relevance here has to do with its
role for individual and collective expression using humour conveyed through
narration and movement, especially in relation to social issues. By the
eighteenth century, the commedia had evolved into forms such as vaudeville and,
in the present, pantomime. I have only digressed here to demonstrate that
collective acts of satire, farce and humour are inextricably bound up with our
ways of knowing and doing.
As to what intellectual assets might
be created through humour, one example is through in-house entertainments. At
one of the leading U.K. insurance companies it was (and may still be) standard
practice at the end of each year to hold a Christmas Revue. Each department was
expected to contribute a sketch for this event. Sketches were generally
original, creative and almost without exception, humorous. A number of rules
guided the sketch-writing process. The event was organised and run by
non-managers. Almost any topic was acceptable provided there were no obvious
put-downs or personal attacks. Of equal importance, there was to be no
managerial retribution for reasonable parody, satire or banter. Apart from
providing seasonal fun and diversion the revues were a great success in at least
two respects. Firstly, they provided a channel for letting-off steam and
allowing feelings, positive and negative, to become explicit. Secondly, the
feelings and commentaries contained within the sketches were not entirely
ignored by management and the revue sometimes resulted in changes in behaviours
and practices. The informality of the event, together with the use of humour,
made it possible to say things that would otherwise have remained unsaid. In
fact, some of the situations were not sufficiently explicit before the revue for
participants to be able to discuss details, understand issues, or 'know' either
the problems or the solutions. Timing is important here too, as these situations
may have been difficult to bring into the open at a different time of
year.
The value
of improvisations of this sort lies in their potential for communicating a range
of information relating to diverse aspects of organisational life, whether about
new products, rituals, or situations surrounded by high levels of anticipation,
doubt, anxiety, or hostility. This value may be assessed through cost
reductions, for example, in terms of higher staff retention or reduced in-house
training or marketing. An example of how such an approach could have contributed
value brings to mind a leading Australian bank. This bank developed a system
designed to provide flexible support for product development and customisation
and to put control of developing business products in the hands of business
people (and away from technical information people). The project ran into
difficulties that were at least partly related to ignoring the need to sell the
product in-house. This, together with the secrecy that surrounded the product's
development, produced considerable hostility in a context of competition for
scarce resources. While the development did not founder entirely because of the
lack of wider support, the latter would have contributed much to its survival.
As the product was something of an innovation, it is all the more striking that
it should have stopped short of an innovative approach to matters of inclusion,
communication, and participation.
There are other correspondences, such
as with learning styles, and between these and 'modes of knowledge conversion'.
Nonaka and Takeuchi have described four modes of knowledge conversion that occur
when knowledge is created through the interaction between tacit and explicit
knowledge.1 They describe processes
or techniques that take place in each of the conversion modes. For example, they
claim socialisation is the use of tacit knowledge in shared experience, creating
knowledge in the form of shared mental models or skills. This type of
transformation is therefore dependent on group processes and an organisational
culture that supports the necessary social interactions. Externalisation is the
transformation mode, argue Nonaka and Takeuchi, that has been "somewhat
neglected" in organisational theory. Externalisation occurs when tacit knowledge
is used to create explicit knowledge in the form of metaphors, analogies,
concepts, hypotheses and models. Figure 1 below summarises these four modes of
knowledge conversion.
An approach for analysing individual
learning styles that is fairly typical of the research in this area is the work
by Honey and Mumford. Just as there are four modes of knowledge conversion, they
suggest that there are four learning styles - activist, reflector, theorist, and
pragmatist. Activists are willing to try anything once; as soon as one activity
or experience has finished they look for the next. Reflectors like to observe
experiences from different perspectives, collecting data from several sources
and thinking about it before reaching a conclusion. Theorists analyse
experiences, grouping their ideas into complex but logical theories. Pragmatists
are always keen to try out theories to see if they work in practice. No one
matches precisely only one of the learning styles, and learning situations are
best approached using a combination of all four styles.
If these four learning styles are
mapped to the four modes of knowledge conversion, the result is a 16-cell table
as shown above.
For each of the knowledge conversion modes there appears to be a
dominant learning style. The individual learning styles are often described in
terms of the characteristic strengths or weaknesses for each style. Similar
characteristics are used in our table, but here the characteristics refer to the
cultural norms within an organisation. To take an example, if we focus on the
externalisation mode it would seem that the dominant or appropriate learning
style should be the Reflector. Nonaka and Takeuchi talk about the need for
dialogue and collective reflection. It could be argued that the most successful
organizations in this area are careful, thorough and methodical, thoughtful,
open-minded, and with an ability to assimilate large volumes of complex
information and ideas into a format that can be described in a logical manner.
Just as the dominant learning style helps to explain the cultural
characteristics of an organisation that is successful in this area, so the
remaining learning styles provide insight into corporate cultures that are not
supportive of the externalisation of knowledge. So an organisation that cannot
see the immediate application and use of explicit knowledge is less likely to be
involved in externalisation (pragmatist). An organisation that has plenty of
ideas and spends a lot of time justifying its actions through sound logical
arguments or prioritising based on pre-conceived mental models may miss a lot of
the opportunities for converting tacit knowledge into explicit forms (the
theorist). Organizations that rush into Knowledge Management, keen to adopt it
as the latest trend and hoping for a quick return on their actions may not get
the longer term benefits that a well-thought Knowledge Management strategy might
bring (activists).
The insights that this juxtaposition reveals between individual learning
styles and knowledge conversion modes can then be applied to change management
programs that genuinely support migration from an industrial to an information
economy. Analysis from this grid also suggests the different techniques that
will be most effective in each mode of learning.
In conclusion then, how does the
earlier discussion of humour and its capture via in-house entertainments and the
like combine with models of learning styles and information conversion? Both
refer to different aspects of business performance, within the wider context of
a system of representation that is currently being challenged by tacit
knowledge. There are many ways to understand tacit knowledge. The value of
humour in this endeavour lies partly in its ability to 'keep the ball in the
air' so that, as in dialogue, knowledge is always emerging. It is difficult to
discuss tacit knowledge without use of metaphor, which is itself an expression
of tacit knowledge. Humour produces eruptions: the body erupts into laughter,
and conventional ways of thinking are interrupted, transgressions which may be
later recodified as new norms.
Roger Evernden is a specialist in
information and Knowledge Management. He is a founding director of WorkSpace
International.
workspace@compuserve.com
| 1 Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi, The Knowledge-creating Company , Oxford University Press, 1995, pp. 62-70 |
