ASHEN - A Different Perspective

ASHEN – A Different Perspective

The ASHEN model is powerful in that it uses commonplace, or slightly unusual words (artefacts and heuristics) and invests them with common-sense meaning. It provides a different perspective, or creates an awareness of a required change in attitude. By asking the ASHEN question in the context of a KDP we can achieve a meaningful answer which itself leads to action. When you made that decision, what artefacts did you use, or would you like to have? What skills did you have or need and how are they acquired? What heuristics do you use to make such decisions quickly, what is the range of their applicability? What experience is necessary and what experience do the people you respect in this field have? Who are the people who just seem to get this right, who have something special ( natural talent) how exclusive is it? Who else has it? Such questions allow the questioned to produce meaningful answers with minimal interference from the questioner.

Both ASHEN and the process of identifying KDPs from the stories of current and past experience are means by which we can gain new perspective on the issue. It is important to emphasise that ASHEN is not a set of categories into which knowledge can be allocated, but a means of gaining perspective; the questions get the interviewee to see things from different perspectives and is more likely to stimulate them into remembrance.

Most importantly ASHEN helps create a key shift in organisational thinking from key-person dependency to knowledge dependency. This essential step of depersonalisation is critical to effective knowledge practice. It is the shift from Only Linda can do X to X requires this combination of artefacts, skills, heuristics, experience and natural talent and at the moment, only Linda has them. The former statement has only crude solutions, the latter permits greater sophistication and the potential for long-lasting solutions and sustainable management action. It achieves this by using language that describes the situation at the right level of granularity to permit action without excessive analysis.

Critically, the nature of the language we use determines the actions that we can take. The crude description of knowledge as either tacit or explicit encourages the tendency to focus on codification of knowledge. The language represents thinking of knowledge as a ‘thing’ that can be either tacit or explicit, and thus the presumption, all too common in knowledge management, that tacit knowledge can, and should be made explicit before it can be regarded as an organisational asset. The ASHEN model on the other hand can encourage the creation of explicit knowledge for artefacts, skills and, to a degree heuristics but not in the case of experience and natural talent. This is not to say that the tacit and explicit words are not useful, but they are a secondary description of knowledge assets as shown in Figure 10.1. Once we have used the ASHEN model to give us a perspective on the nature of knowledge, and remember that this is not a categorisation model, and then it is legitimate to take the tacit–explicit perspective. This links to key questions about the need for, or desirability of, codification. In practice for any asset, we have two questions that need to be asked:

Figure 10.1: The balance of tacit and explicit knowledge

1. Is this knowledge, in whole or in part, capable of codification?

2. If it is capable of codification then is it desirable to do so.

The second question is important, and the answer relates to the degree to which the knowledge is dynamic in nature and the levels of uncertainty in the surrounding environment. Generally the more dynamic and/or the more uncertain the knowledge the more likely it is that the balance will shift towards tacit at the expense of explicit; to context and narrative rather than content. The cost of codification is also a factor that links the codification decision to the time value of the knowledge. Partial codification can also be useful but is too rarely considered in many knowledge programmes where the desire for completeness tends to override common sense.

Another way of looking at the tacit–explicit balance in knowledge is to think of knowledge as being both a flow and a thing, rather like electrons are simultaneously and paradoxically waves and particles. Things are capable of codification as is, for flows we can structure and influence the channels through which the flow can take place, but the knowledge itself is too ephemeral to be codified as such, indeed (to pursue the metaphor) the attempt at codification may change the nature of the original for the worse.