What I am working on is what sort of knowledge is embedded in a person and
what sort of knowledge is embedded in a team. To help illustrate, I will
give an example. Imagine that a team consists of 4 people {A,B,C,D}.
Imagine that all these people have more or less equal talents but
different specialties and that they work well together. As a team they
represent one of the best in brightest in their field. (Now this is as a
team, not individually, although I am not sure that this makes a
difference). Person A is then approached by another team and convinced to
leave the team. The teams make an arrangement that Person A is not to use
any of the stuff (explicit knowledge, i.e. algorithms and such) that she
learned from her first team. However, Person A is still able to use the
tacit knowledge that she gained while working with the team. This
knowledge is not readily available to her first team because (as almost
universally accepted) tacit knowledge is hard to codify. Person A still
knows who to ask and how to ask the right questions. She also knows how
some of the algorithms were developed although she can not use them. This
knowledge will help her out in future problems that address similar ones
that she faces with the first team. In other words, she still has a lot
of the "case based reasoning" that she learned while on the first team.
Now legally, this is hard for team A to keep. They don't really have much
recourse in this situation, at least as I see. They really can't prove
what Person A learned while with the team, and even if they could, do they
have a right to this information?
While this is a somewhat clouded and complicated argument, this is
actually the simplified form. The more complex and interesting (at least
to me) aspect to think about is if a whole team leaves an organization.
Is a team more than a collection of its parts? Can a second team come in
and follow the algorithms of the first and duplicate its success? What
exactly does an organization have a right to as far as knowledge? Is it
simply explicit knowledge or is it the Tacit knowledge and the Case based
knowledge that they picked up a long the way. I feel that this topic is
sufficiently juicy that there are several parts that could be addressed.
If anyone has any ideas on the subject I would be very interested to hear
them. Also if anyone knows where I can locate information on this topic I
would like to hear it as well.
Thanks,
Michael Hertz
309 Emmet Street
Charlottesville VA 22903
--Michael Hertz <mth3r@server1.mail.virginia.edu>
Learning-org -- Hosted by Rick Karash <rkarash@karash.com> Public Dialog on Learning Organizations -- <http://www.learning-org.com>