According to Hirotaka Takeuchi, who is now dean of the Graduate School of International Corporate Strategy at Hitotsubashi University and a visiting professor at Harvard Business School, Tokyo-based business scholar Ikujiro Nonaka is “quite simply the father of knowledge management. His research over the last 20 years opened up a whole new field and set the stage for how the best organizations understand human capital today.” Nonaka’s concept relies on a community in which generosity is prevalent, people feel recognized as distinct individuals, and informal, honest communication is commonplace. Tacit knowledge is a key component. Tacit knowledge (as opposed to formal or explicit knowledge) is knowledge that is difficult to articulate and is more about the unspoken knowledge that people draw on from within themselves: observations, ingrained habits, inspirations, hunches, and other forms of awareness. Nonaka’s thesis is that organizations that favor explicit over tacit knowledge limit their capabilities in several ways: (1) defining competence as the ability to rank high in metrics rather than to succeed in real-world business, (2) view people skills as static and so fail to invest in the development of talent AND (3) get mired in IT-based knowledge systems that restrict, rather than enhance staff communication.
In his most recent book, Managing Flow, Nonaka and his colleagues trace the development of knowledge creation in robust detail concluding that there are four stages:
• Socialization involves mobilizing people for face-to-face communication and immersing them in shared experiences that help them develop empathy for customers.
• Externalization entails the translation of tacit experience into words and images that can be shared with a larger group (e.g. inviting a seasoned team of frontline workers to design a training manual that describes their own tacitly acquired skills).
• Combination is the extension of tacit knowledge into explicit forms that can then be disseminated throughout the organization.
• Internalization is the reabsorption of explicit knowledge back into daily practice, but with an awareness of larger and more complex issues.
Closer to home, Professor Mark Nissen at the Naval Postgraduate has made his own well recognized contribution to mapping key concepts in the net centric warfare context. Just as understanding the mechanics of electrical flow is critical to developing useful electronic devices, understanding the mechanics of understanding information flow is critical to conceiving useful knowledge centric systems.
Bottom line is that designers of knowledge management systems are in left field if they treat humans as interchangeable parts, receiving and processing data. This explains why many companies have invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in knowledge management systems that fail to deliver innovative results.
