Discordant Fodder in Knowledge Management

“All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values” -Marshall McLuhan-

Knowledge management as a strategic organizational devise, or medium, is touted to hold one of the highest potentials for gaining efficiencies, and creating value (Becker, B. 2006). It allows organizations to develop, use and preserve intellectual capital and perform knowledge work (Stewart, 1997). This knowledge management meme both enables and requires organizations to continually learn new knowledge and systematically deploy it for value creation (Pinchot and Pinchot, 1994). The apparent objective of knowledge management is therefore to create and strategically maintain human resources that are capable of continually creating competitive advantage for their companies. In this way, knowledge management, a sub construct of Cartesian thought, upholds the perception of the necessity for constructing order in organizations.

Global events currently bare witness to the destructive power of modern organizations, and the power of blind compliance to their precepts - and rather than fueling the need to further underlie order to this chaos, as the evolution of knowledge management is bound to do, the time is ripe to empower a discordant movement embodying a radical distancing from Cartesian imperatives of the so called intelligent organization and its knowledge management practices. The intelligent organization embracing competitive advantage and engaging any knowledge management strategy as a primary tool for survival is ripe fodder for a discordant hostile takeover.

The Managing Knowledge Polemic
“A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding.” -Marshall McLuhan-

Much of the research on knowledge management goes back to the distinction made by
the philosopher Michael Polanyi between ‘tacit’ and ‘explicit’ knowledge (Polanyi, 1962). Tacit knowledge is specific to a particular context, often unspoken, and acquired by trial and error, or watching how others do it. Explicit knowledge is more universal, codified, and acquired by formal education and training. An example of tacit knowledge is the ability to drive a car. Explicit knowledge is set out in the car’s manual or handbook which prescribes when the oil should be changed. Tacit knowledge may become codified in manuals, or statements of official doctrine set out in speeches by organizational executives, or in annual reports for example. The relationship between tacit and codified knowledge is often one of power and authority.

In their review of the literature on knowledge management, Alavi and Leidner (2001)
identify four general social processes: creating knowledge; storing and retrieving it; transferring it; and applying it. This tends to frame knowledge as a thing, ‘out there’, to be manipulated, rather than a process embodied in particular people, and their relationships with each other. Furthermore, knowledge is often defined as the top end process in a hierarchy of information and data. Information and data can be stored in files and discs, but it does not become useful knowledge until it is processed in the minds of individuals and is presented in the form of words or symbols (Alavi and Leidener, 2001). Its representation in words and symbols (i.e knowledge management) makes it a collective as well as an individual phenomenon. However, when codified by knowledge management as explicit, serves to provide justification for increases in an organizations capacity for action, regardless of tacit definition or value.

Generally, we assume that knowledge is a good thing, and that the more it is
shared the better. But what should be obvious to most is that knowledge management allows for the inference that organizations also strategically keep secrets and ‘forget’ information in systematic ways (Thompson and Wildavsky, 1986). Knowledge management strategies often assume organizations must keep some kinds of secrets and may in fact provide capacity to use secrecy to cover up mistakes, and avoid accountability. On one hand, organizations may forget knowledge through long-term processes of misfiling or through shifts from paper based to electronic forms of storage; but through systematic knowledge management they may more deliberately ‘forget’ embarrassing knowledge, for example about their behavior under a previous director, or regime.

Secrecy is a fulcrum for discordant illumination. Informal tacit phenomena have always been critical to the success of formal systems and policies (Wenger, p. 217). These include those processes embodied in particular people and in their relationships to each other. Relationships are inter dependent and non linear rather than simple and linear ( Quinn Patton et al, 2007). Knowledge management serves the explicit secret in the face of tacit knowledge, in a manner similar to the current global economic media exposé where front page news paper articles describe economic recovery, but reading further inside the newspaper stories of hardship prevail.

In Lieu of a Conclusion
“Only puny secrets need protection. Big discoveries are protected by public incredulity.” -Marshall McLuhan-

This missive, a theatre of discordant thought, does not allow ‘knowledge’ to remain a neutral, sociological phenomenon merely carrying authority or credibility – but also asks if it is true or not. For example, that bodies of professional knowledge – for example in medicine or physics – that were once regarded as true are now regarded as false. Thomas Kuhn’s book on the Structure of Scientific Revolutions describes the process of ‘paradigm shifts’ between periods of normal science. (Illich, 1970). The medical profession has initiated a process of self-reflection on the empirical foundations of its doctrines in the movement for ‘evidence based policy making’(Nutley et al 2002). A similar process needs greater illumination in the knowledge management field. A re-engineering of perceptions is due. We need not manage knowledge, but rather need to think about our thinking of the value of organizations as possible conditioned responses; cages of ideas.

No one can say what force governs and creates the laws of physics, but perception is often regarded as being central to the process. Adopting the discordant, even paranoid, perception we may better fathom what constitutes one organization's reality or another’s hallucination. We may be better at challenging the organizational hallucination before it becomes consensus. Knowledge management must support a close scrutiny of these thorny questions in an attempt to grasp the rose of truth. It must plumb the mind of the paranoid, plumb the mind of the discordant, hoping to find the truth behind organizational communications as mere conjecture. If our beliefs and perceptions are creating our reality, it is time we looked more closely at what -- and who -- is creating our beliefs and molding our perceptions.

References:
Alavi, M. and D. Lender, ( 2001), Knowledge Management and Knowledge
Management Systems: Conceptual Foundations and Research Issues MIS Quarterly
25(1): 107-136
Becker. B., Gassman, O., (2006), Gaining Leverage Effects from Knowledge Modes within Corporate Incubators, Social Science Research Network, retrieved August 9, 2009 from: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=875085
Illich, I., (1970) Deschooling Society, retrieved August 9, 2009 from:
http://www.utwatch.org/archives/deschoolingsociety.html
Nutley, S., Davies, H, Walter, I. ( 2004) Learning from Knowledge
Management Conceptual Synthesis 2 Research Unit for Research Utilisation,
University of St Andrews. Retrieved August 26, 2009 from: http://portal.st
andrews.ac.uk/research-expertise/researcher/hd/publications
Pinchot, G., Pinchot, E. (1994), The end of bureaucracy and rise of the intelligent organization. Berret-Koehler Publishers, San Francisco.
Polanyi. M. (1962), Personal Knowledge: Toward a Post-Critical Philosophy New
York: Harper Torchbooks
Stewart, T. (1997), Intellectual capital : The new wealth of organizations, Doubleday, New York,
Thompson, M, Wildavsky, A.(1986), A Cultural Theory of Information Bias in
Organisations Journal of Management Studies 23(3): 273-286
Wenger, E., (2002), Managing Organizational Knowledge through Communities of Practice, Harvard Business School Press, Boston M
Quinn Patton, M. , Zimmer, B.,Westley, F., (2007) Getting to Maybe How the World is Changed, Vintage Canada, Toronto ON