[Host's Note: Thanks, Roy. Summaries of interesting talks are always
welcome here. ...Rick]
========================
I have just returned from a 2-day conference organised by a UK
publisher, Learned Information (Europe) that brought together some
practitioners and many theorists of "Knowledge Management".
As should be expected, the quality of the lectures/presentations was
varied. However there was one speaker who made us all sit up for a
variety of reasons. David Snowden is the Director of the Knowledge and
Differentiation Programme, IBM Global Services, UK. David gave two
presentations: the second was really part 2 of the earlier one. He
asked, "Is there anyone here who wasn't at the earlier one? Oh good ..
I can continue where I had to leave off".
He is the first IBM Director Information I have heard speak publicly who
didn't wear a blue suit, the white shirt and the sober tie. And .. and
this is a big and for IBM, he had no overhead foils, no video projector,
no flip chart stand .. just his hands and his face.
He severely challenged us all. He was far from complimentary about the
claims of the so-called Knowledge Management product vendors. "If they
start using the word 'solution' in the context of Knowledge .. think
again". He lambasted us regarding our sloppy understanding of what we
mean by knowledge and the differences between tacit and explicit
knowledge. But most of his time was spent persuading us to recognise
the difficulties of getting folk to divulge what they really know .. the
act of creating knowledge. "Ask them directly through an interview or
a questionnaire, and they will tell you what they think you want to
hear". "If you are asking about a process, they will tell you they do
it the way the company expects them to do it". "Any experience gained,
any lessons learned are simply not divulged."
His first talk was entitled "3 metaphors, 2 stories and a picture".
David's first point was that at the heart of the learning process is a
common language. "Remove the Knowledge and the Information words from
your vocabulary". "Remove the triangle" (he was referring to the data
at the base - wisdom at the peak thing): "it is pretentious!!" "The
Knowledge and Information words are confusing now: don't use them."
"Rather, try and define 'the use of Knowledge', and 'the use of
Information'". One way of doing this is through the use of metaphors.
David showed how we latch onto metaphors and can use them as a skeleton
key to open up otherwise closed knowledge. Metaphors, he suggested, are
the only way to explore and gently tease out complex knowledge .. the
tacit knowledge. They're powerful agents of change. He suggested that
it is through stories " told around the water cooler", that, for
example, the real state of a process is described and its shortcomings
appreciated. The corridors, the rest rooms, the queue at the
canteen/restaurant is where you will hear -- hidden in the war stories,
what folk have learned as they try and carry out middle manager's
demands. David reminded us that ancient civilisations had an oral
history, and developed it primarily through the spoken word. The Jewish
history and tradition were conveyed through word of mouth. Recent
anthropological studies of the Kalahari bushmen have reinforced our
views of the importance of passing on hunter/gatherer skills by talking
about it as much as doing it.
He illustrated the point with .. 3 metaphors. "At the heart of a good
metaphor is trust."
"If the trust fails, you have to fall back onto the information
available in the (explicit) knowledge".
David then got us to think of the four transformation possibilities
between tacit and explicit knowledge.
To picture the difference between tacit and explicit, David got us think
about travelling around London. You could use a map of London to, say,
get from a rail station to your hotel, or you could use a black taxicab.
The map contains information. You can navigate your way using universal
symbols and structure. You observe, orientate, decide and than act.
Using the services of a taxi ... is faster. The taxi driver uses tacit
knowledge: he spent over 30 months cycling round the streets of London,
assembling his internal map.
Dave closed off the section on use of metaphors by suggesting they must
be memorable. He related the story of how, after giving a lecture in a
Central European country, he received a letter simply addressed to "The
taxi-driver and map man at IBM UK".
David likened current attempts to expose knowledge to trying to get the
submerged portion of an iceberg to be above the surface. David said
that medieval apprenticeships under the tutorlage of a Craft Master were
the most successful attempts in extracting tacit knowledge. "And, don't
forget that the apprentice was no threat to the Master. Consultants are
great threats." He suggested that we could get at tacit knowledge, but
only by converting it into explicit knowledge. "The result is but a
shadow of the original". "This extraction/transformation takes great
effort." He illustrated this by getting us to think about the energy
required to convert water at 100 degrees Celsius into steam at 100
degrees Celsius. "The elements are the same; but the containers in
which we can hold these two substances are very different. They behave
and perform very differently. And the uses of the two substances are
equally different."
His "picture" was a chart that we had to imagine! The horizontal axis
showed a range of Community .. from individual to full co-dependent
workers. The vertical axis showed the range of explicit through tacit
knowledge. Issues affecting the sharing/willingness to learn issues
within each quadrant were discussed.
To reinforce these ideas, we had the two stories .. too long for here
I'm afraid.
Then, drawing on a groundwork of creating knowledge through story
telling, David gave a couple of examples where such techniques had
produced wonderful and rich results with clients. In each case, the
storyteller was given opportunities to use the common language of their
workplace (and David had to make the big adjustment).
"Anything we want to do in the field of Knowledge Management we are
already doing somewhere else," he suggested.
Lastly, he suggested that the way to start a Knowledge Management
initiative was to find a business problem that requires a Knowledge
Management approach. "Do NOT build a Knowledge Management solution," we
were warned. David suggested that an intense period of 7 or 8 weeks
"working with what you've got, analysing what you hear and treating
this as the core of the knowledge creation process" works well.
David was one of the guest speakers at the International Knowledge
Management Summit '99, San Diego, late March 1999.
Roy Greenhalgh
rgreenh@ibm.net
--Roy Greenhalgh <rgreenh@ibm.net>
Learning-org -- Hosted by Rick Karash <rkarash@karash.com> Public Dialog on Learning Organizations -- <http://www.learning-org.com>