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June 21, 2005

Harvesting Tacit Knowledge

Most experts in the knowledge management arena have special interest in the problem of "tacit" knowledge. This collection of knowledge, which is the knowledge residing in people's heads and not externally documented, is generally considered to be the "largest amount of knowledge" contained in a company.

Considering that people enter the membership of a company largely due to the knowledge they demonstrated or professed aforehand, this can't be a surprise, and indeed it isn't treated as one.

However, what becomes freshly intriguing about that knowledge is that it has a largely unleveraged lifecycle in the company.

That is, despite hiring practices and process-guided daily operations that drive deployment of an employee's knowledge:
- much of what is initially available for use is not used;
- much of what is then added to it is untracked and unnoticed; and...
- much of where the additions come from is not premeditated as a source.

In fact, this means that we really have little idea as to what the population knows overall, which certainly questions the idea that "most" of the company's knowledge is tacit.

Furthermore, assuming some degree of overlapping (redundant)knowledge, immature knowledge (incomplete), and misinformed knowledge (incorrect), we might wonder how much of the total tacit knowledge is worth keeping and using, and whether in fact the amount that would survive such a vetting is greater than the explicit knowledge collection or not.

We still don't have the magic wand that let's us see the total inventory of tacit knowledge. And let's face it, taking that picture would have to turn into a movie, not a snapshot, akin to filming the waves on the ocean. So how does it make sense to compare the two sets of knowledge?

Obviously, one term of comparison looks at whether the knowledge in question is "effective" knowledge. In order to be effective, the knowledge would have to satisfy some minimum criteria that are probably beyond debate, such as:
- being conceptually relevant to the particular user's task;
- being credible in a way that can be validated; and,
- being obtainable at an expense that does not exceed the value of its usage.

Even those three "tests" pose a significant burden of accountability on a person making the evaluation of effectiveness, since in each case there is potentially huge variety in the characteristics of the situation that qualifies the knowledge. For example, how big is the range of knowledge users when considering the difference in their intellectual proficiencies? What mechanisms can and should be used to validate the qualities of the source of the knowledge? And how is value defined for the application of the knowledge at the time it is applied? While those are issues that have already found numerous important solution approaches, they testify that for the measure of effectiveness, one size solution is unlikely to fit all.

An even more fundamental problem of identifying "effective tacit knowledge" is the problem that the main repository is people -- about whom we can say only one thing for certain: everyone has four conditions related to how they are "knowledgeable", both tacitly and explicitly:

1 - being aware of what you do know;
2 - being aware of what you don't know;
3 - being unaware of what you do know; and,
4 - being unaware of what you don't know.

Right off, we assume that we'd like to go get the knowledge available from conditions #1 and #3. But conditions #2 and #4, which involve missing knowledge (not just tacit) are equally important for knowledge management to address, because the nature of personal involvement in an organization is that we continue to have new experiences that can change us and change what we pay attention to. The related business issue is that so many instances of missing knowledge are tacit instances, escaping notice and therefore having unmeasured impact on processes and decisions.

So overall, the challenge isn't to just circulate things that are not in broad enough circulation yet, but rather to cultivate knowledge availability in a way that promotes both progress and benefits in all four conditions or states of knowledgeability.

What should be happening in each state, to properly manage the potential knowledge utilization of the community?

Without declaring a definitive answer, the following illustration points in the direction of an implementation of knowledge management functions that should be considered.

From left to right: By facilitating 24x7 capability to conduct a relevant action for each state of knowledgeability, processes are fed to evaluate the situation. These processes respond with a function that generates enhanced resourcefulness from the situation by refining the knowledge and directing its flow through key modes of community-wide access featuring references, alerts and coaches. Successful KM will further try to motivate action at the left and market availability at the right.

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at June 21, 2005 1:00 PM

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