Diverse Types Of Community


The zone of acceptable abstraction is one aspect of understanding the nature of possible knowledge flow within an organisation, the other is that ubiquitous word ‘culture’, generally the bucket class concept for anything that we don’t fully understand or which is problematic. A useful distinction can be made between cultures as systems of rules and practices embodied within formal organisations and societies, and culture understood as a value or belief system (Keesing and Strathern, 1998). Rules and practices can be taught, measured to some degree and enforced; values on the other hand rely more on tacit understanding and factors such as ritual and obligation. Another way of describing this difference is to contrast teaching with learning. In teaching we teach what is known and there is no ambiguity as to who is the teacher and who is taught, we know what the right answer is. Learning, on the other hand, is a sense-making process of creating new meaning and insight in which there is considerable ambiguity between the teacher and taught, in fact frequently the expertise of the teacher prevents new learning in a radically new context.

Taking these two aspects, abstraction and culture allows us to identify four different domains in which functionally different communities exist and in consequence to model the dynamic flows of communities and knowledge that need to take place between those domains. This is an application of the generic Cynefin model to communities and is shown in Figure 10.3. Cynefin is a Welsh word whose literal translation into English as habitat or place fails to do it justice. Its meaning rests in the sense of multiple belonging which is an aspect of all social systems, the many tribal, religious, geographic and cultural histories that profoundly influence what we are, but of which we are only ever partially aware. The name reminds us that a full understanding of the past or present is never possible in human systems. The Cynefin model has applications in more or less all branches of management science, here it is being used in the context of communities and as such acquires the axis labels of culture and abstraction shown in Figure 10.3. Its use and background in knowledge management are more fully described in Complex Acts of Knowing (Snowden, 2002a).

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Figure 10.3: Cynefin and community

Moving anti-clockwise around the model from its southeast domain we see four types of community (Figure 10.4).

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Figure 10.4: Dynamic flows of knowledge

Bureaucratic These deal with relatively static knowledge, where the ‘true’ answer is known and people can be trained at a low level of abstraction to follow due process or reuse, generally codified, knowledge. It is the domain of expense rules, safety procedures and response to known threat or opportunity. It is also the space in which reality is imposed through a corporate decision, we often forget that many organisations impose reality on their employees and that something that is true in one organisation may be false in another. Knowledge management in this domain is about standards and committees more than spontaneity.

Expert This is the dominant area in most conventional knowledge management practice and, while it is one of the most useful, it is not as universal as many commentators would claim. Expert communities share a common language, often-based on advanced training, and are able to communicate at a high level of abstraction to other experts. Such communities need to preserve the boundaries for both people and material to prevent compromise of this level of abstraction; a community of experts in which trainees take part as full members will soon result in the non-use of the system by real experts who have limited time for collaboration and have to prioritise into areas where new learning will be more readily achieved. These very boundaries are in turn a danger as the expertise becomes entrained and may not see opportunities or threats that fall outside the habituated patterns of meaning within that community. A brief study of the history of science, and the history of breakthrough innovations demonstrates that few innovations come from established experts, but from accidents and heresy!

The Shadow All organisations have an extensive informal network of communities that arise through common value systems, the experience of working together on projects, joining the organisation at the same time, common social activities; the list is endless. The membership and knowledge controlled within this space is constantly shifting and adapting and is rarely codified. One study in IBM revealed 65,000 informal communities in about 150,000 staff as against 50 formal communities of practice, and that was only a count of those who used virtual tools to share experiences so the actual ratio is probably more extreme. Similar ratios are found in most organisations down to about 500 employees although there are no hard and fast rules. The Shadow is also the domain of emergent leadership. Too many organisations try to repeat past success by selecting against competences ‘measures’ based on past practice rather than using the informal community to throw up natural leaders equipped to handle newly emergent situations.

Chaos The domain of chaos in which all existing patterns cease to exist is low abstraction because we have no formal language of experts, nor the experience of the shadow; the situation is completely new and therefore one in which new sense-making has to take place. In modern knowledge management this is a space in which we have to assemble knowledge assets to deal with a new situation. The language of ASHEN can help us in identifying appropriate deployment strategies for this domain; one of the neglected functions of knowledge management practice is the creation and deployment of crisis teams. The other use of chaos is the deliberate move of entrained experts into a position where their established patterns of knowledge are disrupted and challenged on a cyclical basis to prevent the otherwise inevitable ossification of entrained expertise. Positioned in advance as a part of the creation of an expert community such a programme will be welcomed and embraced, initiated as remedial action after the event it will be fiercely resisted.




Managing the Knowledge - HR's Strategic Role
Managing for Knowledge: HRs Strategic Role
ISBN: 0750655666
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 175

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