Strategy or S-tragedy?

As I mentioned in a previous post, this class on Knowledge Management is designed to generate different perspectives on the concepts around knowledge, knowledge sharing, and knowledge management.  The idea is to pick three academic articles from a list and then talk about them.  Truthfully, this week I learned a lesson: don’t be too casual about which articles you pick.  Some of the articles were wholly uninteresting to me and rather ‘cumbersome’ to read.  That situation makes it difficult to draw some sort of inspiration for writing a blog post.  What I was hoping to do was have some brilliant conversation about how planning for a knowledge management system is more likely to lead to success than just telling everyone, “Here’s a blogging tool and here is a wiki.  Now go forth and create knowledge!”.  Bah, humbug.

Fortunately, inspiration came to me from a different source.   Matt Taylor posted something in the class conversation channel that brought up a thought about being prepared:   

“…The main example in mind being scientific papers, articles, books, and other forms of media. If the ideas in these are not properly conveyed to others, many people would be lost, and would gain nothing from trying to learn. Like @Tim and @Brandon* where saying earlier, it would be wise to learn how to properly convey our thoughts and knowledge in a way that can be understood by the majority”.  

The comment above sparked an idea which I hope to tease out in the following paragraphs.  We’ve been talking around a variety of topics, knowledge management, how to build knowledge management systems, what really informs the design of a knowledge management system (see my earlier post; see the post from Jennie Nippert), and how to approach it.  Chalmeta and Grangel (2008) used their experience in implementing a Knowledge Management System (KMS) to create a methodology. They point out,

“Running a KMS development and implementation project in an organization is an extremely complex process that involves different technological, human, and organizational aspects. To ensure the project is successfully implemented, while at the same time reducing the level of complexity, it is necessary to follow a methodology that acts as a guide throughout the analysis, development, and implementation of the KMS”.

They provide a strategy for organizing the design, development, and deployment of a KMS.  In my previous background with Documentum – one of the leaders in document and content management – we could probably have used something like this in our explanations of what would happen in a KM project.  Surprisingly, in my 14 year run at Documentum, we were rarely commissioned to develop a KM system.  I found the strategy to be a bit overblown on my first reading but upon reflection, I think it has enough detail to be flexible enough for just about any sort of KM project.  I should take more time to ask my self more questions about my own pre-conceived notions of knowledge and how to manage it.

Which brought me to the Tremblay (1995) article.  I’m not hiding anything when I tell you that I didn’t enjoy this paper at all.  Pompous, academic, and cumbersome, he asked a fundamental question about the nature of the information society: What is really happening in our information society?  Is it new information that is transforming us?  Or is it simply our existing ‘treadmill of capitalist commoditization of assets that is changing us? Tremblay compares Henry Ford’s initiation of a cultural revolution whose end is still not yet in sight to Bill Gates’ revolution of the computer.  Is this the information society at work or just mere capitalism?   Should we refactor our thinking and talk about Bill Gates instead?  Like Jennie Nippert said, “I’m a big picture person”.  Wading through 16 pages of philosophical wanderings is not my oeuvre.  But he said one thing that grabbed me:

“[Our] tendency to situate technology at the centre of our work needs to be questioned, particularly since we go so far as to draw general conclusions about the type of society in which we live or which we foretell”.

Okay, I get that.  To net this out, one should always be questioning, particularly your own assumptions about something.  Tremblay is saying that we so believe in technology that almost all of our writings and conversations about it are positive; rarely are they negative.  Expanding that, you can get to realizing that nothing stays static so your perceptions should not either.  Your objective may stay the same but you might have to adjust your strategy and tactics to suit the changed environment. 

How fast can/should one change?  Ziori and Dienes (2008) did a study on the rates and abilities of people to learn new concepts as influenced by what they already know.  “Implicit as opposed to explicit learning is sometimes characterized as unselective or purely statistical” while “Explicit knowledge is knowledge that one is aware of having and hence is easily verbalized; [therefore], implicit knowledge is knowledge that one is not aware of having”. And they say that context is everything.  Hmm.  So Ziori and Dienes set out to study if implicit category learning can be affected by prior knowledge.  And yes, their experiments confirm that prior knowledge facilitates concept learning.  Which takes us back to Tremblay – always be questioning.  There’s the old saying, “The problem with most people isn’t so much that they’re ignorant, it’s that they know things that just aren’t so”.

Myt father is a psychiatrist.  He likes to point out that one of the difficulties in his profession is that patients lie.  They lie to other, to their doctor, even to themselves.  So what if they don’t trust the system or the other person?  Connelly, et al., started studying the concept of people/employees actively hiding information.  That is, they deliberately choose to not participate in the information society.  Technology is not going to solve that problem, and in fact, it’s not always a bad thing.  They write,

“Of course, in the same way that knowledge sharing is not always a positive and beneficial behavior (Schultze & Leidner, 2002), it is equally important to emphasize that knowledge hiding is not necessarily a ‘‘bad’’ or deviant behavior. As with many other behaviors (e.g., lying), there may be positive, negative, or unintended consequences, depending partly on the intent of the perpetrator. Employees may engage in knowledge hiding in order to protect their own interests or the interests of their organizations, or they may hide knowledge to undermine or retaliate against another employee”.

Wow. That’s something I never considered before in any of my experiences for knowledge management.  I can’t fix that with technology and in fact, I have to accept that it will happen and that it should happen.

Talk about always be questioning.  My strategies and tactics have to change to accommodate that world view.

*Tim Shannon & Brandon Muncy & Matt Taylor

Bibliography:

Chalmeta, R. & Grangel, R. (2008). Methodology for the implementation of knowledge management systems. J. Am. Soc. Inf. Sci., 59, 742–755. doi: 10.1002/asi.20785

Connelly, C. E., Zweig, D., Webster, J. & Trougakos, J. P. (2012). Knowledge hiding in organizations. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 33, 64–88. doi: 10.1002/job.737

Tremblay, G. (1995). The Information Society: From Fordism to Gatesism. Canadian Journal of Communication, 20, 461–482.

Ziori, E. & Dienes, Z. (2008). How does Prior Knowledge Affect Implicit and Explicit Concept Learning?. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 61, 601–624. doi: 10.1080/17470210701255374