The Knowledge Evolution

Verna Allee

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781136357190
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

The Knowledge Evolution offers a unique and powerful road map for understanding knowledge creation, learning, and performance in everyday work. This book reframes current thinking by delving into the hidden world of knowledge supporting both individual and organizational performance, laying the foundation for the emerging art of knowledge management. Packed with best practices from leading edge companies, essential guidelines, design principles, analogies, and conceptual frameworks, it serves as a practical guidebook for mastering the Knowledge Era. It will help managers make more intelligent decisions about knowledge creation, reduce wasteful technology investments and lead to new ease and confidence in applying knowledge and learning principles for themselves and for their organizations. Verna Allee delves into current thinking and practice to unravel the genetic code of knowledge itself. This revolutionary approach has surfaced a simple and elegant knowledge archetype. She demonstrates how this archetype can help us deal with complexity and suggests ways of self-organizing that make profound sense in today's networked enterprises. From strategies for core knowledge competencies to the key components of individual expertise, The Knowledge Evolution zeroes in on the critical success factors for the knowledge-based enterprise. What emerges is an approach to knowledge management that is simple enough to communicate at every level of the organization, yet rich enough to encompass all the complexity of modern enterprises. Verna Allee is the founder of Integral Performance Group, a consulting practice in California that specializes in the learning organization, knowledge competencies, organizational systems change, systems thinking, total quality and learning, benchmarking support, best practices research, and strategic development. She holds a degree in the Study of Human Consciousness and her work is informed by a deep interest in intelligence, human development, cognition, intuition and consciousness. She is the author of Learning Links: Enhancing Individual and Team Performance, Pfeiffer and Co-Jossey Bass, 1996.

Part I

Understanding Knowledge

Chapter 1

Introduction:
The Knowledge Era

Nestled in the rolling, wooded hills of Northern California lies a densely packed industrial and residential area known the world over as Silicon Valley. Despite the idyllic setting, this valley never sleeps. At all hours of the day and night, programmers, designers, and entrepreneurs stare at the cathode ray tubes crowning their computers. They often work around the clock to prepare for product releases and develop new technologies in a frantic race to the marketplace. They wage a heroic battle, not only against their competitors, but even against their own bodies. Caught in the creative frenzy, people catnap under their desks or grab odd moments of relaxation in the hallways. Coffee is king.

Here in the heart of the computer and telecommunications industry, people are literally living by their wits. Success belongs to those who can think, learn, solve problems, and take effective action faster and better than anyone else. Ideas leap from company to company in an open synergistic economy where hundreds of innovative companies jostle for space. Sandwiched between two great universities and relatively free from defense industry-type secrecy, the valley is a creative stewpot of knowledge and ideas building one upon the other.

Silicon Valley typifies the new world of work in the Knowledge Era. You find the same energy along other technological corridors in Massachusetts, New York, Colorado, and the Carolinas. Even in the manufacturing belts of the Midwest and Northeast new knowledge is rapidly proliferating, thanks to communication and computer technologies.

This new world of instant information and global communication technology has overturned our thinking and overthrown the old social and economic order. All around us we see enterprises and organizations transforming themselves, sometimes virtually overnight. We are plunged headlong in a scramble to keep up, to learn, to adapt, to change. We feel that if we can learn fast enough and acquire the knowledge we need, we will succeed.

Moving to Hyperspace at Warp Speed

At some point in the Star Trek™ space adventures, a brave band of universe explorers hits the accelerator. Suddenly, their spacecraft propels them all into hyperspace at warp speed. While they are accelerating the crew faces tremendous G-force pressures. The physical stress is almost unbearable. The entire universe rushes by at dizzying speed. Yet, once they actually reach this fictional hyperspace, still at full warp speed, everything seems normal again.

As we look around our workplaces it seems as if we are all collectively moving into hyperspace at warp speed. Changes come at us so fast we can hardly assimilate them. The whole world is instantly accessible through our laptop computers. We can talk to someone on the other side of the globe while walking our dog. Many of us spend whole days gazing into cyberspace, navigating a virtual world. We connect only through telephones and terminals. Our sense of time and space is being altered in the process. We wonder if things will ever feel “normal” again.

Knowledge, too, is expanding at warp speed. Whole new fields such as genetic engineering have brought us routine procedures in health care that would have appeared miraculous a couple of decades ago. I still vividly remember the astonishment of the nation the first time doctors successfully reattached a severed arm in the 1950s. Today heart, lung, and kidney transplants are becoming commonplace, and gene therapy has moved from being a pipe dream to a reality.

Our work changes constantly. Computer processing is replacing whole groups of workers who used to shuffle paper documents. Contingent and seasonal workers are growing in numbers. Today, Manpower Inc. is the largest employer in the United States, providing temporary and contract workers across the whole spectrum of industry. People employed as “knowledge workers” float from project to project, as free agents. They bring know-how and technical knowledge into an organization, then move on to their next assignment. Often their expertise lies in areas that have only developed in the last few years. Job security is becoming a thing of the past. Today, security lies in what you know how to do, what you can learn to do, and how well you can access knowledge through collaboration with others.

Business leader Rosabeth Moss Kantor compares the work of management today to the croquet game in Alice in Wonderland.¹ Nothing in this strange game remains stable for long. Just as Alice has the shot lined up, the croquet mallet (tools and technology) changes into a flamingo that turns and looks in another direction. Of course, the ball Alice is trying to hit is actually a hedgehog with a mind of its own—strongly paralleling the human factor in business.

Clock Worlds and Space-Time

Futurists suggest that profound change results when the underlying science or mythology changes. George Land and Beth Jarman calls these “breakpoints,” or moments when profound shifts of mind and thinking lead to dramatically different behaviors.² We have been experiencing just such a shift, and the G-forces are tremendous. That shift is the shift from the Newtonian worldview to a quantum worldview. The sciences of quantum physics and chaos have reordered our understanding of how things work.

In a warp-speed, hyper-space world these new concepts are often more relevant to our actual experience. Yet, we work in enterprises designed for the linear clockwork world of Sir Isaac Newton and economist Adam Smith. Much of the stress we feel comes from trying to reconcile our emerging understanding of how things work with a world we created according to very different assumptions and principles.

This shift of thinking is simply too powerful to be ignored.³ Even though people may not speak the language of quantum physics in the workplace (although a growing number do), we see evidence of this mindshift everywhere (Table 1.1). Each of these ways of thinking emerges from a different science. This results in different ways of managing and organizing.

Table 1.1 Traditional Thinking, New Thinking.

Assumption	Traditional Thinking	New Thinking
Scientific Foundation	Newtonian physics	Quantum physics
Time Is	Monochronic(One thing at a time)	Polychronic(Many things at once)
We Understand By	Dissecting into parts	Seeing in terms of the whole
Information Is	Ultimately knowable	Infinite and unbounded
Growth Is	Linear, managed	Organic, chaotic
Managing Means	Control, predictability	Insight and participation
Workers Are	Specialized, segmented	Multi-faceted, always learning
Motivation Is From	External forces and influence	Intrinsic creativity
Knowledge Is	Individual	Collective
Organization Is	By design	Emergent
Life Thrives On	Competition	Cooperation
Change Is	Something to worry about	All there is

Both ways of thinking are valuable. As we expand our understanding, old knowledge does not become obsolete or irrelevant. We integrate old understanding with new so that both are transformed. Newtonian science is still valid science. It is quite useful in certain domains. However, it is not much help when it comes to understanding complex systems. In a world of cyberspace, warp speed, global economics, and molecular biology we need all the sciences.

The Emerging Knowledge Economy

The Information Age is already nudging the boundaries of traditional thinking. It has propelled us to a quantum leap in complexity. Old ways of managing information simply can’t keep up. With so much available to us, choosing what information to gather, share, and process can be overwhelming. As a result, people are becoming concerned with the quality of their choices around information. Intent on sorting out what is useful and relevant, people are beginning to grapple with the relationship between information and knowledge.

The management thinker Peter Drucker has sparked much interest in the knowledge economy. Over two decades ago he coined the phrase “knowledge workers”⁴ to decribe managers who know how to allocate knowledge to productive use.

Drucker’s fascinating historical exploration of the social purpose of knowledge suggests three distinct phases.⁵ The first phase, he notes, was the pursuit of knowledge for the sake of knowledge, enlightenment, and wisdom prior to the industrial revolution. The second phase began about 1700 A.D. with the invention of technology. In this stage, knowledge came to mean organized, systematic, and purposeful knowledge, what we can think of as applied knowledge. Then, around 1881, Frederick Winslow Taylor’s scientific approach to organizing work ushered in the third stage: the critical beginning of knowledge applied to knowledge itself (Table 1.2).

Knowledge is now being applied to knowledge. This is the third and perhaps the ultimate step in the transformation of knowledge. Supplying knowledge to find out how existing knowledge can best be applied to produce results is, in effect, what we mean by management.⁶

Table1.2 Three Phases of Knowledge Transformation.

Phase 1 the Age of Enlightenment	Knowledge for the sake of enlightenment and wisdom
Phase 2 the Industrial Era	Applied knowledge
Phase 3 the Knowledge Era	Knowledge about knowledge

I regard The Knowledge Evolution as a more recent development than does Drucker. Applying knowledge to knowledge in business only really begins when we reflect on the learning and knowledge component of the work itself. The importance of learning and knowledge only became clear to us later, when we began exploring organizations as social phenomena.

The person that led the way in this regard was not Taylor, but Kurt Lewin. Lewin’s more psychological approach to the world of work began having an impact in the 1930s. He explored psychic tensions, job satisfaction, motivation, leadership, and participation. He also introduced methods of action research and experimentation that decidedly moved the focus of management experiments from solutions to learning. This important shift from mechanistic engineering to social-psychological concepts was much more self-reflective than Taylor’s way of working—and very important. For the inevitable result of self-reflection, in a social and psychological sense, is the application of knowledge to knowledge itself.⁷

Even though the early stirrings of the Knowledge Era were in the thirties, real momentum began building in the 1970s, with the work of Chris Argyris and Donald Schon.⁸ They noticed that there are major gaps between the way people say they do things and what actually happens. There is a “disconnect” between people’s espoused theory of why they do something and their actual theory-in-action. They suggested that managers must deepen their self-reflection to include their own thought processes. Now, at last, we were seeing the application of knowledge to our own knowledge and thinking. This breakthrough has led directly to much of the recent work in organizational learning, influencing how we understand the creation of knowledge.

Information and Knowledge as Products

A remarkable phenomenon of the knowledge economy is that information has emerged as a product in its own right. Information that s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part I: Understanding Knowledge
• Part II: Building Blocks for Knowledge
• Part III: Into Practice
• Appendix 1: The Knowledge Archetype in Theoretical Constructs
• Appendix 2: Sample Question Set for Knowledge Building in Information Management
• Chapter Notes
• Bibliography
• Index