Monday, December 20, 1999.
From: Arnold Kransdorff ak_pencorp@msn.com
I have been following the discussion about Organisational Learning and
Knowledge Management with great interest. For a KM list, it is instructive
that subscribers have such variable definitions of their subject and its
various components.
If it's helpful, here's my ha-penny worth:
Organisational Learning characterises how organisations learn from their
own and others' experiences, otherwise known as Experiential Learning.
Knowledge Management is the process of collecting and disseminating
know-how and experiences within an organisation to enable the process of
Organisational Learning, or Experiential Learning, to take place.
To fully understand their nature, it is necessary to perceive the
difference between data, information and knowledge, and the distinction
between explicit knowledge and tacit knowledge.
Data is a fact depicted as a figure or a statistic. Data in context - such
as in a historical time frame - is information. In contrast knowledge is
interpretative and predictive. Its deductive character allows its owner to
understand the implications of data and information and act accordingly.
Knowledge is made up of explicit knowledge, sometimes called skilled
knowledge, and tacit or cognitive knowledge, sometimes known as coping
skills. The former is the type of knowledge such as the professional or
vocational skills that are recorded in the abundant manuals, text books
and training courses available - what I describe as the "what" of
know-how. As some of you have noted, this type of knowledge is relatively
easily codifiable and, thus, communicable.
For the process of experiential learning it is the core of all functional
skills - but only half the learning story. It is the more valuable tacit
knowledge that provides the real meat of experiential learning. Tacit
knowledge is acquired largely by experience that is personal, functional
and context-specific. Hard to formalise and communicate because it is
mostly implicit and ambiguous, it is the "how" of know-how that makes
organizations tick. In any business, the latter is necessary to make the
former work smoothly and efficiently.
Together, they're called Organizational Memory (OM), embodying the
institution's inventory of tried and tested experiences, the uniquely
corporate form of intellectual capital that is the most important
constituent of any establishment's durability. Without it - this a state
known as corporate amnesia - organizations cannot learn from their own
experiences. Characterised by knowledge loss, this stems from short and
selective memory recall. A short memory is endemic in almost all
organizations and is a function of organisations' capacity to forget while
selective recall is a defence mechanism when individuals screen out
criticism and put the 'blame' elsewhere.
This is now compounded by the flexible labor market, which has presaged
one of the biggest changes in working practices this century. Showing no
signs of abating, it is replacing almost the entire employee base of most
organisations every three to six years, depending on the national
proclivity for the practice. The US leads the world in short job tenure,
closely followed by the UK and other parts of Europe. Knowledge loss from
this universal work model is the single biggest source of know-how leakage
out of companies. When they do anything, companies generally end up
capturing the explicit component of knowledge.
Several of you have observed how difficult it is to capture tacit
knowledge.
This is an area in which we have been working for many years. We have
concluded that the most efficient way is through the technique known as
Oral Debriefing, where individuals - prompted by a skilled, independent
interviewer with a keen knowledge of management issues - recount their
experiences in their own words. Alongside being relatively inexpensive,
the reason it is done orally is that individuals are generally better
speakers than they are writers. Also, the spoken word is invariably a more
efficient way of conveying the abstract and complex nature of the
often-obscure issues surrounding decision-making within groups and the
knowledge of the detail of job-related events and tried and tested usage
as it applies to the organization's own market circumstances and special
environment (so-called episodic knowledge).
If organizations don't allow succeeding generations to inherit this tacit
knowledge, the organization's constantly changing workforce applies the
lessons of other employers, whose way of doing things, corporate
environment and market circumstances are always very different. In effect,
the experiential edifice that characterizes an organization's ability to
perform is being constantly torn down rather than being built upon - to
the detriment of productivity and competitiveness. The consequences are
hardly invisible: constant jobs disruption, endemic firefighting, overrun
budgets, late project completions and a conveyor belt of repeated
mistakes, re-invented wheels and other unlearned lessons, the expensive
evidence of which litters industry. Which brings us back to why
Organizational Learning and Knowledge Management have become such
important management disciplines for businesses today.
Visit the web site www.pencorp.co.uk for more particularised information
on corporate amnesia and the management of Organizational Memory (OM).
Arnold Kransdorff
Beagle House
80 Hill Top
London NW11 6EE.
Ph (44) 020 8458 9343.
e-mail: ak_pencorp@msn.com
--"ak_pencorp" <ak_pencorp@email.msn.com>
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