Conceptual Problems With Early Knowledge Management Practice

Knowledge management to all intents and purposes took off as a management discipline with the popularisation of the words ‘tacit’ and ‘explicit’ by Nonaka and Takeuchi (1995) through the SECI model that identified four transitions of knowledge: tacit to tacit through socialisation in the form of conversation, observation and the like; tacit to explicit by the codification or externalisation of personally held knowledge; explicit to explicit through the combination of codified forms of knowledge; explicit to tacit following the internalisation of documents by human agents. The deficiencies of the language of tacit and explicit as a way of understanding knowledge will be discussed later in the context of the perspective model of knowledge ASHEN and there are more general issues with the model (Snowden, 2002a). The effect of this model was to launch a technology-based emphasis on the disembodiment of knowledge from its owners, be they individuals or communities on the basis that knowledge was not a corporate asset unless it was held by the organisation independent of human agency. This simplistic popularisation of the SECI model largely determined knowledge management practice, resulting in a restricted approach to knowledge. As a description of the process of knowledge creation in the context of product design in the manufacture of consumer goods in Japanese industry the SECI model was sound, as a general model of knowledge flow in organisations, including the service sector and government, it is inadequate.

Another major issue was the proximity of the knowledge management movement to business process re-engineering, the growth of which had coincided with and partially fuelled the growth of management consulting. Re-engineering is focused on efficiency, in removing waste, in optimisation achieved by ensuring the repeatability of prescribed best practice. This was ideally suited to the growth of recipe-book consulting. Indeed the consultancy firms themselves pioneering knowledge management as the codification of recipes based on past projects allowing larger teams of inexperienced consultants to use the knowledge of their more experienced predecessors. For systems and practices where order exists, can be discovered and is repeatable the disciplines of recipe-based consulting are ideal, for the dynamics of human communication, organisational change and knowledge management it proved not only inappropriate but just plain dangerous. In the case of knowledge management the models and practice of re-engineering were inappropriate, but they were the dominant model of the day and as such were applied. Rather like the scientific community of the eighteenth century attempted to apply the dominant disciplines of astronomy to the measurement of longitude and in consequence ignored or simply failed to see that accurate clocks were a more effective solution^[1].

The nature of human acts of knowing reflects a complex and inherently unknowable (in the sense of being empirically verifiable and repeatable) space. It is a quantum shift away from process management, quality management and the like. We can understand this through three rules or heuristics of knowledge management practice.

^[1]Dava Sobel’s best selling book Longitude provides a powerful example of the restrictive practices of existing experts and their ability to stifle innovation.