If you don’t write it down, it will never happen

Last week, the blog post was about adages, and how they represent lessons learned.  This week, after reading about codification and economics, I’m looking at how people encode knowledge.  This week’s articles (see Bibliography, below) have returned to the idea of somehow encoding knowledge; which, because we are all unique individuals, ultimately become unique knowledge as it combines with our own set of tacit knowledge that we have.  In treating knowledge and information as commodity items, economists have sought to measure and treat the embodiment of knowledge, knowledge transfer, and retained knowledge as an asset, essentially sticking it into a ledger and looking to see what they can model about it.  It is, in my opinion, a unique calculus about information.

​(Kimble, 2013)​ reviews the literature about knowledge and in so doing, covers a series of points concerning the problems with tacit knowledge; namely that Polanyi’s ideas originated from “his concern to make clear the role that personal commitments and beliefs of scientists play in the practice of science”, and then brings up Nonaka as a contrasting view and goes into a discussion of the SECI model (Socialization, Externalization, Combination, and Internalization).  I will greatly simplify here, but Kimble represents Nonaka’s model as a means to represent knowledge in a kind of dichotomy – either tacit or explicit, which leads one to the idea that knowledge can be managed and codified.  It also leads to a cultural phenomenon whereby the terms tacit and codified knowledge can be interchanged (Kimble uses ‘juxtaposed’) that “tacit becomes a label for anything that is uncodified”.

Phew.  This seems to be a broad complaint (probably valid but a complaint nonetheless) about economists getting into epistemology, because the information society will start being able to transfer value outside of money.  (Can you say, “Bitcoin”?)  The complaint stems from the main idea that economists will try to make knowledge and it’s encoding into a commodity.

Which brings me to Cowan, David, and Foray (2000) ​(Cowan, 2000)​ who really take this idea and run with it.  Now Cowan, et al., wrote their article in 2000 and Kimble was 2013, but the issue remains the same: using the terms for something beyond what they originally intended has ‘weakened’ and obfuscated the meaning and now things are going in an ‘unjustified’ direction.

Subsequently, the term ‘tacit knowledge’ has come to be more widely applied to forms of personal knowledge that remain ‘UN-codified’ and do not belong in the category of ‘information’, which itself is thought of as an ideal-type good having peculiar economic features that differentiate it from other, conventional economic commodities.

… ‘tacit knowledge’ now is an increasingly ‘loaded’ buzzword, freighted with both methodological implications for microeconomic theory in general, and policy significance for the economics of science and technology, innovation, and economic growth. Indeed, references to ‘tacitness’ have become a platform used by some economists to launch fresh attacks upon national policies of public subsidization for R&D activities, and equally by other economists to construct novel rationales for governmental funding of science and engineering research and training programs.

Cowan, et al., eventually propose a taxonomy to assist with a breakdown of epistemic practices and communities but are clearly still working from a viewpoint aligned with Nonaka’s; that is, their belief system that knowledge can be codified and at that point has a value proposition, even though it is on its way to becoming a commodity (Polanyi, anyone?).  Information, in the form of codified knowledge, may not be a cheap commodity, but it is commodity nonetheless.  This economic idea of a commodity is probably directly in contrast to Lauren Johnson’s discussion and Christy Chapman’s.   And from there, economists can model it’s creation, sale, distribution, destruction, and eventual use as a raw material.  At least, that’s what I think they are trying to do.  I don’t contend that it is a good idea but one can see where they would feel the need to try.  Particularly when society is becoming increasingly driven by information; they must be consumed with the idea of relating information to money, wealth, competition, behavior, etc.  And Amber Harrison alludes to the idea that more of something lessens one’s capital as it becomes increasingly commoditized.

Enter Johnson, Lorenz, and Lundvall (2002) ​(Johnson, 2002)​, who start off with a critical review of Cowan, et al., and give their assessment of “why the tacit/codified distinction may be important in relation to economic theory and knowledge management practice”. Johnson, et al, criticize Cowan, et al., along three points:

1. “any discussion of codification of must make the fundamental distinction between knowledge about the state of the world and knowledge in the form of skills and competence”
2. “the dichotomy between codifiable and non-codifiable knowledge is highly problematic. [Their] point is that any body of knowledge might be codified to a certain extent, while it is very seldom that a body of knowledge can be completely transformed into codified form without losing some of its original characteristics”
3. Finally, they “are not convinced that codification always represents progress, something that seems to lie behind most of Cowan et al.’s argument”

And they do a fair job of making their point.  Along the way, I discovered something really cool.  Lundvall and Johnson had previously made a suggestion “knowledge may be divided
into four categories”:

1. “Know-what refers to knowledge about ‘facts’. The population of New York, the ingredients of pancakes, the date of the battle of Waterloo—these are all examples of this kind of knowledge”.
2. “Know-why refers to knowledge about principles and laws of motion in nature, in the human mind and in society. This kind of knowledge has been extremely important for technological  development in certain science-based areas, such as the chemical and electric/electronic  industries. Access to this kind of knowledge will often make advances in technology more rapid, and  reduce the frequency of errors in procedures involving trial and error”.
3. “Know-how refers to skills—i.e. the ability to do something. It may be related to the skills of artisans and production workers, but in fact it plays a key role in all important  economic activities. The businessman judging the market prospects for a new product or the  personnel manager selecting and training staff use their know-how. It would also be misleading to characterize know-how as practical rather than theoretical”.
4. “Know-who involves information about who knows what and who knows what to do. But it also involves the social ability to co-operate and communicate with different kinds of people and experts. Know-who is highly context dependent. Its character and usefulness depend on social capital in terms of trust, networks and openness. It follows that it is rather difficult to codify”.

The general trend towards a more composite knowledge base, with new products typically combining many technologies, each rooted in several different scientific disciplines, makes access to many different sources of knowledge more essential (Pavitt, 1998).

For some reason unknown to me, I kept comparing these three articles against some of my experiences in the Intelligence Community.  There is an enormous amount of tacit knowledge in the Intell Community, about how people behave, what cultures are like, what nuances are being communicated in a message or action, etc.  Almost all of their daily interactions with information are colored through a personal bias perception (Polanyi again) yet they have to press on in spite of them.  Everyone knows they have a bias about the intent of the communication/message/action/event and that they are processing it through their own belief systems.  I was struggling with the Cowan, et al., view that things can be written down and encoded/embodied (see my previous post discussing McNamara and the Vietnam war) and this just resonated with me.  None of the rather basic examples were working for me in the Cowan article.  The Johnson article pulled a lot of it together for me.

In the end, a lot of things we know are not going to be written down, they don’t need to be written down, and maybe even should not be written down.  Sometimes the journey of learning, which is very experiential, needs to be one of (serendipitous) discovery.

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