Making knowledge

Just how do we create knowledge?

There are basic conditions and special practices that help with knowledge formation and utility vetting.

• Generative community

At the top my list is a community - a group that shares interests, develops a common language, builds trust, shares experiences and engages in dialog. With new tools for connecting such as blogs, IM, VoIP, web-based conferencing, e-mail and listservs it is no longer necessary to be co-located. Sharing deep insights, subtle differences and articulating experiences is easier and faster during face-to-face exchanges, helped by the presence of artifacts or exemplars and promoted when the group is open to reflection around failures.

A community is where proto-theories are examined, where ideas are tossed into the mix, where creative abrasion helps to surface hidden assumptions and assists with exploring thoughts we did not know we knew. Social mediation is key, and this is where cohorts help you make meaning and gain understanding. We own a social brain and apprenticeship is the natural way to learn. We need cohorts and community to build a shared repertoire of key concepts, evolve tools, craft language, gather stories and highlight sensitivities.

• Deep dialog

Dorothy Leonard struck a chord talking of creative abrasion in her book "Wellsprings of knowledge". To change mindsets you need to raise energy levels, increase the attention and focus. This is difficult to achieve in a placid conversation. Exposure to alternative assumptions and frames, some advocacy, deep dialog, strong engagement and a pure clash of ideas help to unsettle, and resettle meaning. Prior beliefs are difficult to change using classroom instruction and teaching as telling. Taken too far, increasing stress levels will reduce the learning opportunity, there is a fine balance to be maintained.

Conversations to assist participants opening up possibilities, sharing relationships, engaging in reflection and inquiry, allowing them to give 'voice' to their unspoken values, insights and beliefs.

• Crafting distinctions

A basic premise for knowledge sharing is that we share context. When a group has agreed on meaning, established the boundaries of their discourse and know the interests and expertise of their members, they leverage their ability to do productive work, and explore advanced topics by orders of magnitude.

The key is arriving at a shared understanding. Naming experiences, exploring & testing uniqueness and utility is perhaps the core practice for making new connections, increasing awareness and sharing insights.

• Shared      awareness

With information overload all around us, easy access to information and multiple versions, it is essential to belong to a group or network that will act as a filter, pointing you to new, interesting, unusual or intriguing tools, conversations, papers, groups and theories. Keeping up with information torrents and maintaining a sharp focus while being open to new thoughts and discontinuities is difficult to do alone.

• Information      ecology

Information is embedded in a web of relationships, connections and context. An understanding of the essential differences between information and knowledge helps focus on qualities and practices that foster knowledge emergence. 

Knowledge ecology  is a subtle concept, concerned with knowledge flows and dynamics, relationships, learning, dialog, social networking, building social and human capital. The focus is on personalization, interactions, culture, practices and social context. KE is about sharing, learning, innovation and the environment (Ba) for knowledge creation. Core practices are dialog, reflection, brainstorming, conceptual mapping, knowledge construction & summarization. Core representations are stories, pattern language, distinctions, conceptual graphs and sociograms.

Your thoughts please!

Comments

[Andre Saito]

Hi Denham!
Thanks for your comments at my site last week. I posted some answers there, but since I don't have an RSS feed, here is a comment to this entry you pointed to...
I agree very much with you about the importance of a community, dialogical approach to KM, and I am a firm believer in that. But KM has come to mean so many things that a balance among the different perspectives has been very challenging...
Anyway, I'll keep your warnings in mind along my research. Thanks!

You are very welcome Andre

[Buck Lawrimore]

Knowledge management is still a rarified discipline little known in the vast majority of companies. Because it requires a particular mindset or personality type on the part of the organization leaders, it is not likely to take hold except where the leadership, culture and market success factors are conducive, for example, an IT company or a consulting firm or good old academia.

[Matthias Melcher]

Thanks for the great post; I now understand some things better.

[Garsett Larosse]

Hi Denham!

As developer of TeleCommunities, I of course support your general analysis.

But it seems to me that we have to stop using the word knowledge as a placeholder for so many different products and processes.

All you say is true, but it is also not true in situations where the experience of understanding is not linked to the processes that we mean to focus on. In other words, knowledge for one person is not knowledge for someone else. It's the experience of the knower that counts. Sometimes there's no interest and need for shared awareness.

I'd say that a core practice in what you describe as knowledge ecology should be the ability to link insights to processes. KM meets systems thinking? In oragnisations, yes. But I'm also referring to the basic processes with which we understand and organize the world; our learning styles, our worldview structuring.

[Anol]

Hello Mr. Denham
Thanks for such a great articulated post. The benefits of creating knowledge through community, dialogue and opinions (within contextual framework) for an organization is so obvious.

As John Udell also mentioned -

If individuals agree to work transparently, they (and their employers) can know more, do more, and sell more.

If this concept is so crystal clear and obvious, then why do most organizations not embrace social interactivity in their learning initiatives? First thing comes to my mind - organizations where ‘Darwinian’ culture is promoted, i.e., where the management supports hierarchy-based “divide and rule” policy. In such organizations, the fear of becoming dispensable is associated with sharing knowledge (this becomes more and more relevant when we talk about core tacit organizational knowledge). In the middle of ego and turf-battles, social interactivity is unimaginable. Where conversations are not connected and instead hindered by personal or group ‘silo-based’ agendas, emergent learning and innovation can’t take place and the complete knowledge ecosystem is useless – no matter whatever technology base you try to install.
I would really appreciate if you could enlighten us on how we can ‘sell’ and ‘promote’ the concept of knowledge ecosystem in an organization.

[Shawn Callahan]

Hi Denham, as always your post is packed with heaps of ideas. What you say here makes sense to me, especially the focus on community.

Perhaps another area of knowledge creation is the ability to experiment. This is partially embedded in your description of community. One of the things I've noticed is that very few organisations have explicit ways to support experimentation. It's either the full blown programme of activities or, as you suggest, people banding together in their communities to try a few things out under the radar--the skunkworks.

I think experimemtation is going to increase in importance as organisations recognise that more and more issues are complex and small, experimental interventions followed by ways to see what happened will be the best way forward.