Knowledge Can Only Be Volunteered, It Cannot Be Conscripted

In practice we can enforce compliance with a process or quality standard because the outcome is measurable. We may have difficulties with motivating people, but we know whether something has been done or not; in contrast we can never know if people have used their knowledge. Attempts to enforce or mandate knowledge sharing result in two types of behaviour that, from a manager’s perspective are inseparable.

Camouflage behaviour in which knowledge is shared, but in a form which is unintelligible or unusable without reference to the knowledge holder. This ensures that the trustworthiness of the requestor can be validated before knowledge exchange takes place. Camouflage behaviour is often linked with knowledge retention-based on fear of abuse, rather than power. For valuable knowledge, fear of abuse is more significant, in that the knowledge holder is afraid that their knowledge will be abused or misused if they do not maintain control. Such behaviour is often justified by past history, and exhortations to the contrary will not be listened to.

Conformance; pressed to share knowledge, people do the minimum required to satisfy the formal requirement, but do no more. If fear of abuse is a more powerful reason for knowledge retention than power, then time is the most important of all. The volume of e-mail, collaborative requirements and the like create time pressures on employees, which mean that difficult or complex tasks get insufficient attention. Conformance is more dangerous than camouflage. With camouflage interested parties can gain access to human validated knowledge, with conformance they may think that the recipe is complete, but may be missing a vital ingredient, or more likely important context. Best practice schemes are particularly prone to this, as they are dependent on sufficient disclosure of context to understand applicability of the relevant practice.