The Dynamic Flow Of Knowledge

Understanding the different domains of the Cynefin model enables a more sophisticated approach to the creation and mapping of knowledge within an organisation. One shift that has already been identified is the shift of expert communities into Chaos on a controlled basis. The second move is from the shadow to expert sometimes known as Just in Time knowledge flow. The metaphor to JIT in manufacturing is deliberate. We used to store all of our stock on the factory floor until we realised it was too expensive, at which point we created new relationships with suppliers to bring stock in when, and if, it was needed. The same applies to knowledge management; the sheer volume of knowledge in the shadow domain exceeds our capacity for formalisation and we do not know what we need to know until we need to know it, so attempts to anticipate that need through taxonomies and the like will inevitably lead to the wrong knowledge being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Techniques for JIT-KM include expertise location as an alternative to Yellow Pages and the use of pre-existing communities to form formal communities rather than attempting to engineer the creation of an ideal. The main advantage of this latter practice is that informal communities naturally work out their own acceptable zone of abstraction and use pre-existing trust relationships. The formal creation of either of these is an expensive, time consuming and frequently unsuccessful process best avoided. Finally the amount of knowledge subject to formal codification is limited and is not a part of the main dynamic.

We can now return to an earlier reference to the separation of knowledge management into three: context, narrative and content. Content management is a necessary activity in the bureaucratic and to some extent the expert domains, where the stability of knowledge permits the investment necessary for codification. Context management applies in the main to chaos and to the shadow with some intrusion into the expert domain. Narrative straddles shadow, expert and to a degree bureaucratic. The essence is to apply the appropriate tool in the appropriate space.

The other aspect of the flow of knowledge within organisations are the various formal and informal social networks that build over time as a result of multiple interactions between people and communities. Social network theory is often associated, but should not be used with concepts of social capital that it supports, but on which it is not predicted.