Harvard Business Review on Knowledge Management
Few organizations have the openness and trust needed to admit this kind of failure. Such insights are rarely analyzed and internalized by a company. The culture makes the difference. If everyone in the organization has that attitude of the IBM CEO, the overall culture within the organization becomes one of learning and development. If the young manager had got sacked he would have walked out the door and taken this valuable knowledge with him. However, IBM is unwilling to stumble along, oblivious to the lessons of the past. It is an organization that is willing to foster an environment that is conductive to learning:
A learning organization rarely makes the same mistake twice. It has the capacity to learn new things and change the way it behaves
Learning organizations cultivate the art of attentive listening. If employees are in a culture where they know that their plans will be evaluated and implemented, that their learning will be applied, progress is far more likely. A learning organization is an organization skilled at a creating, acquiring, and transferring knowledge, and at modifying its behavior to reflect new knowledge and insights. New ideas are the trigger for organizational improvement. Without accompanying changes in the way things get done, only the potential for improvement exists.
Continuous improvement programs are emergent all over as organizations strive to better themselves and gain a competitive edge. Their knowledge gained from failure is often instrumental in achieving subsequent successes. Often, failure is the ultimate teacher:
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it
George Santayana
Not all organizations have managers like in the IBM example. Too many managers are indifferent, even hostile to the past, and by failing to reflect on it, they allow valuable knowledge escape. For successful management of information and knowledge, employees cannot be defensive and must be open to criticism or bad news. Competition among professionals often inhibits sharing and assigning credit for intellectual contributions difficult. Because professional knowledge is their powerbase, strong inducements to share are necessary. In an organization that has a culture that is not ready to learn, when quizzed about the reasons behind their actions, the employees tend to respond with such like just because. An intolerant culture will have a significant effect of the knowledge management strategy and the capability to manage information. Inventing knowledge that has already been invented elsewhere in the organization is not productive. In a collaborative culture, this is less likely to happen.
Cultures vary on how they value teamwork. Every organization will consist of people from different backgrounds; the teams people work in can be very diverse. Persons with different thinking styles often don’t understand or respect one another, and such differences can fuel personal disagreements. Cognitively diverse people must respect the thinking styles of others. Conflict can be positive if we use this form of creative abrasion to generate innovative ideas.
For a strategy to work the people involved need to be genuinely committed, not sullenly compliant. Take the example of some of the worlds most successful organizations. Hewlett Packard, Microsoft and Motorola, all have one thing in common. They have the ability to learn.
While experience is a good teacher, it is a private tutor. The central precept, and frustration, of organizational learning today is that people act collectively, but think individually.
The tendency of each profession to regard itself as an elite with special cultural values may get in the way of cross disciplinary sharing. Studies of the NHS have revealed that Doctors and Nurses do not communicate with each other as well as they should. They belong to different communities of practice. The nurses and doctors communicate amongst themselves soundly but sharing information and knowledge across the subculture boundaries becomes a seldom occurrence. Political and social influences affect the culture so that professionals have little respect for those outside their field. This in turn effects the ability of the organization to manage information and knowledge. [e.g.] Doctors and nurses example given my Christine Urquhart
The presence or absence of strong social networks any communities of practice gives us the sense of the social capital in an organizational culture. In organizations with low social capital it is much safer to be paranoid than trusting. People continually watch their backs, not much knowledge is shared and collaboration is even the weakest consideration. In a successful culture, a community of practice is made up of volunteers, no-one forces anyone to belong or contribute. They are distinguished by their passion for what brings them together. Their members tend to be like each other, perhaps with the same types of jobs and skills, or some other common interest or bond. While community members learn and work together, they don’t necessarily produce deliverables. Communities of practices, like a living organism, will evolve, grow and die. But in its lifetime it provides the environment for a wealth of knowledge to be shared.
In many organizations, expertise is held locally in a particularly skilled computer technician, perhaps. Those in daily contact with these experts benefit enormously from skills, but their field of influence is relatively narrow. Transferring them to other parts of the organization helps share their wealth. What happens when the technician works in a competitive organization that does not recognize or reward sharing? An organization with a high rate of employee turnover will likely have a culture in which employees are apprehensive about their future. They are likely to hold on to what knowledge they do have to ensure their financial wellbeing. If they are the only person who knows how the system works, they are indispensable; even in times of recession. In a culture of this type, implementing a knowledge management strategy will be a significant task.
Employee competence is the capabilities of the people within an organization. Employee competence grows when more people know more that is useful to the organization and the organization uses more of what people know. Two key issues are creating environments where people willingly transfer tacit knowledge and improving trust among people. As employee competence grows there is better performance, more innovation and higher concentration of skills in what is important, and more people working in areas critical for organizational success. It enhances socialization and the exchange of knowledge between members of an organization as Tanaka did with the head baker[1]
For an organization to have a knowledge creating culture, the organization itself must comprise of individuals that are interested in knowledge sharing and have a willingness to admit their mistakes and grow. Management can create a positive culture that is receptive to learning by using recruitment to intelligently select intelligent people. People who are passionate, highly self sufficient and have tremendous autonomy. New hires that are ignorant of shared values, can threaten stability. It is easier to recruit the right people than to hire ones that must be re-educated. Hiring the right attitude is vital. We can take the example of Microsoft who ask the lowest performing 5% of the organization to leave. Microsoft is always growing, always learning, and continually spreading knowledge and information. Creating knowledge depends on tapping the tacit and often highly subjective insights, intuitions and hunches of individual employees and making those insights available for use by the organization as a whole.
Management must help develop a culture where communities of practice can develop through no underestimating the importance of social activity. Such activities help build the interpersonal relationships that enable a community to do real work. But having said this, they should be structured so that they meet the goals of building a community. The organization will have an intricate web of personal relationships, the environment that is compulsory for information sharing.
Many successful enterprises have abandoned hierarchical structures, organizing themselves in patterns specifically tailored to the particular way their professional intellect creates value. Such reorganization often involves breaking away from traditional thinking about the role of the centre as a driving force. The maintenance of organizational flexibility is one of the essential roles of tacit knowledge. The knowledge that actors have of each other, each others intentions is not expressed, recorded universal knowledge. Phronesis, is born from the experience of social practice, it provides markers for what can be said and what cannot.
Organizations have different stages in their lifecycle. At each stage the organizational culture is entirely different. No organizational culture is a panacea. Culture differs from organization to organization, they are as varied and as individualistic as the people that comprise them. Any organization will have multiple personalities and to a certain extent, subcultures can be healthy but can become destructive when conflicts arise and when they become too ingrown. Culture and Politics are part of that environment. They both affect how receptive that environment is to learning. How the knowledge grows. Like a vine of tomatoes will not grow in a frosty, nutrient-sparse environment, information and knowledge sharing will not flourish without the culture that rewards it.
Politics and Culture affects an organizations ability to learn. Knowledge is our most important asset; it is what makes us competitive. Although the study of tacit knowledge is in an embryonic stage, it can give us the advantage that makes the difference. Recommendations from scholars are often far too abstract, and too many questions remain unanswered. Before the people and hence the organizations can improve, they first must look beyond the rhetoric and high philosophy and focus on the fundamentals.
Senge, Peter. The Fifth Discipline. 1990
the Greek word for knowledge gained through wisdom. Tacit Knowledge.
Schein, Ed. The corporate culture survival guide.