We Only Know What We Know When We Need To Know It

Human knowledge is deeply contextual, triggered by circumstance, requiring the stimulus of events to remind us of what we know, or to stimulate the creation of new knowledge. The very human phrase ‘I’ll sleep on it’ illustrates this. For a human to sleep on something is to engage in a complex knowledge process; if a computer is sleeping on a problem it has to be rebooted. Serendipity is a powerful human knowledge process, it’s about multiple encounters with people, ideas, concepts, data or whatever, from which knowledge can be recalled or created.

The other major aspect of this rule is the nature of human knowing, while experts when interviewed tend to explain the process of their knowing as a rationally constructed and logical series of steps, direct observation of knowledge in the field generally results in knowledge being displayed in the application of heuristics or rules of thumb which are rarely articulated and often lie below the level of conscious awareness.

The nature of stimulus and attention gaining behaviour in human systems is generally underestimated in organisational design and theory. Clark (1997) emphasises ‘the need to find very close fits between the needs and lifestyles of specific systems (be they animals, robots, or humans) and the kinds of information-bearing environment structures to which they will respond’. He makes an interesting reference to the sense-making capability of a tick, which will sit on a branch in a forest responding to no stimuli until the presence of butyric acid on the skin of a passing mammal allows her to drop and feed. This form of focused attention to specific stimuli is replicated in human knowledge behaviour and over-efficient models will tend to narrow the range of stimuli that will trigger a response. Pattern entrainment is a common aspect of human decision-making, in that we tend to respond to a first fit pattern match with prior experience rather than make a rational evaluation between carefully considered alternatives. We even go beyond that and ‘imagine contradictory evidence away’ (Klein, 1994).

The consequences of this for knowledge management are twofold:

First, we need to manage the stimulus either to trigger existing patterns, when appropriate, or to disrupt the triggering of inappropriate patterns when the context has changed.

Second, the standard approach to enquiry, namely structured interviews and the like will not work when it comes to knowledge. To ask someone what he or she knows is to ask a meaningless question in a meaningless context.