Distributed Knowledge Management

Middle-Down-Up Approach

Janne J. Korhonen
University of Helsinki
Cognitive Science/Connet/Ckt171C
Essay, Fall 2001.

Contents

1 Introduction

The basic economic resource in today's "knowledge society" is no longer capital, natural resources, or labor, but knowledge (Drucker, 1993). It is increasingly important for organizations to know what they know as well as what they should. The competitive advantage of knowledge resources is reflected in the recent amount of attention towards Knowledge Management (KM), which I would define as the continuous intentional efforts of an organization to explicate and build its knowledge, disseminate it across the organization, and construct its knowledge infrastructure to support these activities.

Just as there is no agreement on what is knowledge (Tuomi, 1999), there is no universal definition for knowledge management. In its most common form, KM has been viewed as gathering information and sharing it for use within the entire enterprise. Adhering to the Cartesian dualism of subject and object, knowledge has been investigated in its external manifestations such as centralized databases, outside of human beings. Until recently, the importance of distributed knowledge, human cognition, and organizational communication has received less attention.

Accelerated technological change, fierce competition, and frequent fluctuations in supply and demand impose continuous change on organizations that are trying to survive in the increasingly turbulent economic environment. Moreover, organizations need to be responsive to changes in their workers' attitudes, assumptions, and aspirations. In brief, organizations must learn.

This paper briefly examines knowledge management in regard to the related concept of learning organization. In the end, I propose middle-down-up management with two knowledge processes: leadership and management. They correspond to internalization and externalization of Nonaka and Takeuchi (1995), respectively, but the processes also map between espoused theories and theories-in-use of Argyris and Schön (1978).

2 Knowledge

The classical definition of knowledge, dating back to Plato, is "justified true belief". Implicit in this notion is that knowledge can be probable, at best, never certain, because all information, no matter if it is based on sensory experiences as in empiricism or contemplative deduction as in rationalism, is subject to suspicion. Since knowledge has been viewed as referential to external reality, the history of Western epistemology is markedly skeptical.

Edmund Husserl contrasted the paradigm of physical objectivity in phenomenology that defines reality through consciousness. Knowledge does not relate to noematic "things as such" in objective transcendence, but to the phenomena that are instances of subjective reality, or immanence. It is secondary, whether the phenomena represent the external reality.

Intersubjective (not objective) knowledge is constructed within interpersonal communication. The purpose of dialogue is to reveal the incoherence in each other's thoughts and to build more and more coherent collective thought (Bohm, 1965). According to Festinger (1957), human beings seek consistent, or consonant, belief systems and avoid dissonance, which is a psychological counterpart for entropy. Meaningful phenomenological knowledge is constructed through language in discourse.

Adopting this (inter)subjective and constructive notion of knowledge, we may assert that knowledge always requires a subject, someone who knows. Accordingly, knowledge cannot be managed, per se; only the knowledge environment can be managed (Abram, 1997). Nonaka and Konno (1998) have coined the term ba to refer to a place and process where knowledge can be created, disseminated and used. Ba can be physical, such as an office, virtual, such as email, or mental, such as shared experiences--common to all bas is that they facilitate the development of dialogue and thus the construction of social consonance.

3 Organizational Learning

Usually, organizational learning occurs within a constant framework of basic organization-wide assumptions, beliefs, and norms--deeply ingrained schemata that Argyris and Schön (1978) call theories-in-use. This kind of single-loop learning does not require changes in what Schein (1985) considers as organizational culture, or "the pattern of basic assumptions that a given group has invented, discovered or developed in learning to cope with its problems of external adaptation and internal integration, and that have worked well enough to be considered valid, and therefore to be taught to new members as the correct way to perceive, think and feel in relations to those problems".

Sometimes, organizational norms, strategies, and underlying assumptions need to be radically restructured so that they must be embedded in the images and maps (or artifacts, in Schein's terms) which encode organizational theory-in-use. Argyris and Schön (1978) call this sort of learning double-loop.

As regard to Festinger's (1957) theory of cognitive dissonance, single-loop learning may occur within the realm of prevailing social consonance, whereas double-loop learning is triggered by dissonance at the organizational level.

It has been widely assumed that double-loop is a laborious and difficult task that requires "sense of urgency" (Kotter, 1995), "unfreezing" (Schein, 1999), and "unlearning" (Hedberg, 1981). Nonaka and Takeuchi (1995), however, view that it is (or should be) a daily activity tied in knowledge creation. Instead of conducting one-shot transformations at times of crises, the organizations need to be capable of learning how to learn. This kind of deutero-learning (Bateson, 1972), or meta-learning, is learning about the context of learning as well as the content of learning. It is organizational when it is "embedded in maps and images which guide organizational decision, control, and instruction" (Argyris and Schön, 1978).

Learning organizations are "organizations where people continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free, and where people are continually learning how to learn together" (Senge, 1990). They learn how to learn, on a continual basis. Rosengarten (1995) conducted a meta-analysis of 30 approaches to learning organizations. He found ten key characteristics:

1. Team work and team learning.
2. Systemic thinking and mental models.
3. Free vertical and horizontal flow of information.
4. Education and training of the whole workforce.
5. Learning reward system for employees.
6. Continuous improvement of work.
7. Flexibility of employees and company strategies.
8. Decentralized hierarchies and participative management.
9. Constant experimentation.
10. Supportive corporate cultures.

4 Leadership and Management

Kotter (1988) defines leadership in two ways: 1) it refers to the process of moving a group of people in some direction through (mostly) non-coercive means, and 2) it refers to people who are in roles where leadership is expected. Relatively, Kotter (1990) distinguishes leaders who create and change environments from managers who merely adapt to changing circumstances.

In the following model, leadership refers to a process of ongoing strategic adaptation to the ever-changing external environment. By changing the images and maps of the organization (Argyris and Schön, 1978), or the artifacts of the organizational culture (Schein, 1985), the leaders bring about changes in organizational theory-in-use. By management, thereagainst, I will mean the process of exposing organizational theory-in-use in external manifestations.

5 Middle-Down-Up Management

In conclusion, I will present an integrative framework that unites the concepts of learning organization and knowledge management. The model, depicted in Figure 1, is based on Senge's (1990) five "disciplines" of learning organizations:

1. Systems Thinking. A conceptual framework, a body of knowledge and tools that has been developed over the past fifty years, to make the full patterns clearer, and to help us see how to change them effectively.
2. Personal Mastery. The discipline of continually clarifying and deepening our personal vision, of focusing our energies, of developing patience, and of seeing reality objectively.
3. Mental Models. Deeply ingrained assumptions, generalizations, or even pictures or images that influence how we understand the world and how we take action.
4. Building Shared Vision. The practice of shared vision involves the skills of unearthing shared "pictures of the future" that foster genuine commitment and enrollment rather than compliance.
5. Team Learning. The discipline of team learning starts with "dialogue," the capacity of members of a team to suspend assumptions and enter into a genuine "thinking together".

Figure 1. Middle-Down-Up Management.

Learning occurs at three levels: individual (personal mastery), group (team learning), and organizational (building shared vision). Mental models underlie all learning. They can either impede it by going unnoticed or accelerate it by being reflected, surfaced and examined. On the other, learning may change mental models. The fifth discipline, Systems Thinking, integrates the other four by enhancing each of them.

Adapting the middle-up-down management process of Nonaka and Takeuchi (1995), I will propose middle-down-up approach. In this framework, middle managers play an important role by working as a "bridge" between the broad visions of the top management and the concrete realities of business that front-line employees confront. They figure out the strategic intentions of the top management and translate them into a conceptual framework comprehensible to their subordinates. By signaling their own priorities, assumptions, and ways of thinking and acting, leaders manifest espoused values (Argyris and Schön, 1978). These conscious and explicitly articulated values, however, are not necessarily internalized by the organization but remain to be questioned, debated, and challenged in dialogue, until the team has a shared perception of the success based on these values, and the value goes through a process of cognitive transformation into a belief and, ultimately, and assumption (Schein, 1985). In this leadership process, the images and maps of the conceptual framework are then incorporated into organizational theory-in-use, and explicit knowledge is internalized into tacit knowledge.

When people share common mental models congruent with the shared vision, they can be empowered: they will know how to operate in various business settings as long as the overall business reality remains invariant. On the contrary, "to empower people in an unaligned organization can be counterproductive" (Senge, 1990). Shared vision emerges from the personal visions of individuals in the management process, in which the mental models are manifested on the surface of the organizational culture, and the tacit knowledge is externalized into explicit knowledge.

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