Chapter 10: Knowing What We Know: Language And Tools For Knowledge Mapping

Overview

This chapter has been written by Dave Snowden, Director of Cynefin Centre for Organizational Complexity, IBM Global Services.

The over-zealous pursuit of efficiency at the cost of effectiveness lies at the heart of the many failures in otherwise well-intentioned management initiatives to deliver against expectations. This pursuit, with its emphasis on process improvement has dominated management thinking either side of the millennium. It attempts to use (and abuse) human agents as if they were components in a machine, capable of categorisation, deployment and replacement. Human resource or personnel management has not been exempt. They have frequently served as the impersonal agent of financially driven organisational downsizing; or perpetuated the mechanical metaphor of efficiency through attempts at categorisation such as competence modelling and the ascription of empirical prescriptive truth to a variety of psychometric instruments.

The understandable, if unacceptable, intent to render the human aspects of an organisation into something that can be managed without ambiguity, in part originates from a desire for control, but also from a discomfort with uncertainty: efficient systems require control and the repeatability of function, something to which humans are not naturally inclined. In this chapter strong emphasis will be placed on sense-making achieved through models based on viewing a subject from different perspectives, rather than by categorisation. Categorisation assumes that the whole is the aggregate of the parts, each of which can be understood in its own right. Perspective modelling argues that by looking at a thing from many perspectives new patterns of meaning will emerge. In knowledge management, as in all human systems, the whole is never the sum of its parts, it may be more, is frequently less, but it is never the same thing.