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A Framework for Organizational Knowledge
Creation
Innovation Network for Communities
2 • Knowledge Creation• © 2008 by Innovation Network for Communities. • www.in4c.net • All Rights Reserved.
Organizational Learning
THE LEARNING ORGANIZATION:
An organization where the members have the capacity and opportunity to interact with each other to compare, contrast and adjust their “mental models” of the world as they work together
to accomplish their personal and collective visions.
“Learning in organizations means the continuous testing
of experience, and the transformation of that
experience into knowledge -- accessible to the whole
organization, and relevant to its core purpose.”
(Peter Senge, The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook)
A learning organization is an organization skilled at
creating, acquiring, and transferring knowledge, and at
modifying its behavior to reflect new knowledge and
insights. David Garvin, “Building A Learning Organization”
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Quotes on Organizational Learning
“Learning organizations are skilled at five main activities:
• systematic problem solving;
• experimentation with new approaches;
• learning from their own experience and past history;
• learning from the experiences and best practices of others; and
• transferring knowledge quickly and efficiently throughout the organization.”
(David Garvin, “Building a Learning Organization)
“The centerpiece of the Japanese approach is the recognition that creating new knowledge is not simply a matter of “processing” objective information. Rather, it depends on tapping the tacit and often highly subjective insights, intuitions, and hunches of individual employees and making those insights available for testing and use by the company as a whole.
New knowledge always begins with the individual...Making personal knowledge available to others is the central activity of the knowledge-creating company.”
(Ikujiro Nonaka, “The Knowledge-Creating Company”)
What is theory?
‘Theory is systematically organized knowledge applicable to a relatively wide variety of circumstances, especially a system of assumptions, accepted principles, and rules of procedure devised to analyze, predict, or otherwise explain the nature or behavior of a specified set of phenomena.’ (American Heritage Dictionary)
So, responsible leaders should ask themselves, What good theories do we have that provide practical guidance for ensuring our organizations success? The more clearly you can articulate your organizations theories about what leads to success, the more deliberate you can be about investing in the elements that are critical to that success.
(Daniel Kim, “What Is Your Organizations Core Theory of Success?)
Groups that learn, communities of practice, have special characteristics. They emerge of their own accord: Three, four, 20, maybe 30 people find themselves drawn to one another by a force that is both social and professional. They collaborate directly, use on another as sounding boards, teach each other. You cant create communities like this by fiat, and they are easy to destroy. They are among the most important structures of any organization where thinking matters, but they almost inevitably undermine its formal structures and strictures.
(Thomas Stewart, “The Invisible Keys to Success”)
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Different Forms of Collective Learning
A Learning Community:
A group of individuals who voluntarily come together to accomplish a specific learning agenda together.
Communities of Practice:
A group of people who have informal allegiance to each other because they share certain practices an are exposed to a common class of problems.
Learning Organizations:
An organization skilled at creating, acquiring, and transferring knowledge, and at modifying its behavior to reflect new knowledge and insights.
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Attributes of Effective Learning Communities
Autonomous Agents:
•Individual players (individuals, teams, organizations) who voluntarily come together to learn, and who retain broad freedom about how they interact.
Networked Connections:
•Enough “shared rules” (frameworks, mental models, values, visions, etc.) to communicate effectively.
•A learning agenda — areas of urgency for developing new knowledge.
•A connecting infrastructure — opportunities and means to interact freely.
•Shared memory — ways of recording and passing on new learning.
Profuse Experimentation:
•Individual and collective processes for engaging in the action/reflection cycle.
•Measures of success — ways to know if experiments work.
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Interplay between “tacit” and “explicit” knowledge.
Knowledge creation involves managing the transition from tacit knowledge to explicit knowledge, and from explicit knowledge back to tacit knowledge. “Tacit” knowledge is knowledge possessed by skilled practitioners, but that is intuitive and difficult to make understandable to others. “Explicit” knowledge is knowledge that has been “externalized” and made accessible to a broad range of potential users.
Learning is a constructive process.
•Good knowledge management requires a deep understanding of learning as a process of constructing, not transmitting, knowledge. We learn by engagement and doing in a continuous cycle of immersion, active processing, testing, reflection, and adapting mental models. Learning is emotional as well as logical; it is personal.
Learning is a social process:
Before there were schools, textbooks, and curricula, learning was a process with those who possessed a degree of expertise. Modern learning theory is increasingly acknowledging what traditional practice groups have always understood – learning is a fundamentally social process that occurs in “communities of practice” – groups of individuals (whether farmers, engineers, doctors, mothers, politicians or artists) who share a common way of doing things. Thus, knowledge is is embedded in the way members of a community of practice carry out their work. Learning is therefore a process of gaining membership in a community of practice.
Practice communities accelerate knowledge attainment:
In practice communities, information travels seamlessly and very rapidly – common mental frameworks (“paradigms”) and language and dense networks of connection make this happen. But practice communities also tend to reject knowledge and insight that does not fit their established way of doing things. They therefore often have difficulty in generating and nurturing innovation.
A Framework For Organizational Knowledge Creation
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The knowledge creation process involves four distinct phases (adapted from Nonaka and Takeuchi). Each phase implies a set of activities to be carried out by the Center. The continuous management of the cycle leads to a “learning spiral” that generates deeper and more powerful levels of knowledge and competence.
Tacit
Tacit Explicit
Explicit
Sharing and Networking
Writing it Down and
Distributing It
Comparing it to What Others
Know
Integrating It into Skill
Development and Strategy
FROM:
TO:
NETWORKS DOCUMENTATION
BENCHMARKING & TOOL DEVELOPMENTSKILL DEVELOPMENT
The Cycle Of Knowledge Creation
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Tacit
Tacit Explicit
Explicit
Sharing and Networking
Writing it Down and Sharing It
Comparing it to What Others Know
Integrating It into Skill Development
and Strategy
FROM:
TO:
SOCIALIZATION
(Sympathized Knowledge)
EXTERNALIZATION
(Conceptual Knowledge)
COMBINATION
(Systemic Knowledge)
INTERNALIZATION
(Operational Knowledge)
Nonaka and Takeuchi, The Knowledge-Creating Company
The Cycle of Organizational Knowledge Creation
ORGANIZATIONAL ENABLING
CONDITIONS:
•Intention
•Autonomy
•Creative chaos
•Redundancy
•Requisite variety
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Knowledge Flow
Process Some Potential Activities
From tacit to tacit
SOCIALIZATION: Create opportunities for practitioners to interact with each other and share their “trade secrets” and implicit practices.
•Facilitating networking opportunities between practitioners•Creating on-line networks•Organizing “learning communities,” “users groups” and other forms of ongoing practitioner networks
From tacit to explicit
EXTERNALIZATION: Convert tacit knowledge to explicit knowledge embodied in concepts, principles and practices that others can access and understand.
•Creating and distributing information products
From explicit to explicit
COMBINATION: Connect this new knowledge with knowledge from other fields and other experts then revise and integrate into best practice guidelines.
•Commissioning expert studies and analysis (global benchmarking), using research and academic institutions•Creating curriculum, tool kits and other learning materials
From explicit to tacit
INTERNALIZATION: Create opportunities for people to begin to use new knowledge in their practice.
•Workshops and other training events•Joint project opportunities
The Cycle Of Knowledge Creation
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Enabling Conditions for Knowledge Creation
INTENTION
•Clear vision, values and goals
•Clarity about what knowledge needs to be created
AUTONOMY
•Freedom to act independently
•Creation of unexpected opportunities
•Autopoetic and self-similar
CREATIVE CHAOS
•Continuous questioning and reconsidering existing premises
•Capacity for self-reflection
REDUNDANCY
•Intentional overlapping of business information
•Encouraging of “learning by intrusion”
•Strategic rotation of personnel
REQUISITE VARIETY
•Variety within the organization that matches complexity of external environment
•Open access to information
•Flat and flexible structures
•Frequent reorganization
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KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTS OVER TIME
POWER OF KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTS TO TRANSFORM
FIRST GENERATION
SECOND GENERATION
First Generation. Use the activities of knowledge creation/ learning cycles to seek patterns in practice.
• Identify key patterns that one is seeking.• Initiate many exploratory learning projects.• Observe projects with pattern seeking lens.• Develop first generation knowledge products that are anecdotal, descriptive, suggestive (e.g.
stories, cases)
Second Generation. Convert patterns into tools with reliable results.
• “Mine” and connect the observations to identify underlying patterns.
• Test observed patterns against other knowledge.
• Develop second generation products that are analytic, diagnostic, prescriptive and reliable.
Developing The Power Of Knowledge
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Levels of Organizational Learning
•More complexity
•More strategic risk
•Higher levels of management attention
•Longer cycle times
New Markets and Customers
New Products and Processes
Cross-organizational Process Redesign
Continuous Improvement within Processes
Strategic Business Redesign
Transforming Industry Practice
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The Evolution of “Practice Fields”
Stage 1: FRAMING.
Stage 2: NETWORKING.
Stage 3: MATURATION.
Stage 4: STANDARDIZATION.
Conceptual framing and isolated practice examples.
Networking of innovators and the
proliferation of practices. Practices are fragmented and
considered “proprietary.”
Maturation of practices;
convergence around common methods
and tools; integration of
previously differentiated
practices; development of a
professional implementation
support network.
Practices become highly standardized, and incorporated into
formal training; credentialing and
certification systems. Practices are considered
“commodities.”
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Summary of Organizational Learning Dimensions
Be clear about your “theory of your business” – the core assumptions, hypotheses and purposes around which the organization is designed. Your vision creates the basis for
your knowledge agenda.
Clearly define the kinds of knowledge that are most important to the achievement of your mission & vision; assess your current knowledge assets and build a plan for knowledge
creation.
Create systematic opportunities for individuals doing similar work to interact and share their tacit knowledge with each
other.
1. Clarify your vision
2. Build a knowledge
agenda
4. Nurture Communities of
Practice
Organizational learning is not a substitute for day to day discipline in operations. In fact, it depends on such discipline
being in place.
3. Create a base of operating
discipline
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Summary of Organizational Learning Dimensions
Create disciplined processes for exposing the underlying rules of successful mental models and behaviors in the organization so that they can be shared with others and
compared to outside knowledge.
Have an explicit process for designing and trying out innovative new practices (e.g. a “new product/service
process”).
Design in redundancy, overlap and information sharing between different parts of the organization.
5. Convert tacit to explicit knowledge
6. Support a culture of innovation
7. Organize sharing across practice
communities
Avoid hierarchical and autocratic organizational designs; create disciplined “autonomous agents” with open access
to broad ranges of information.
8. Create flexible and entrepreneurial organizational
structures
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CQI and Organizational Learning
•Continuous improvement is simply a specialized and disciplined form of learning that uses a distinct set of processes and tools to increase the performance of systems.
•The core “genetics” of the CI process is the scientific method.
•The value of a continuous quality improvement framework or culture is that it creates some common learning practices across the organization.
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Toyota – Creating A Community of Scientists
“The fact that the scientific method is so ingrained at Toyota explains why the high degree of specification and structure at the company does not promote the command and control environment one might expect. Indeed, in watching people doing their jobs and in helping to design production processes, we learned that the system actually stimulates workers and managers to engage in the kind of experimentation that is widely recognized as the cornerstone of a learning organization. That is what distinguishes Toyota from all other companies we studied.”
What Toyota Production System has done is to create a “community of scientists” that is continuous conducting experiments on the production process. (“If we make the following specific changes, we expect to achieve this specific outcome.”)
The purpose of standardization in this context, is not to enforce discipline, but to enable experimentation – you can’t accurately test a hypothesis for improvement if you don’t have stability in the system you are experimenting on.
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Toyota – An Example of A Learning Organization
THE FOUR RULES OF TPS
Rule 1: All work shall be highly specified as to content, sequence, timing, and outcome.
Rule 2: Every customer-supplier connection must be direct, and there must be an unambiguous yes-or-no way to send requests and receive responses.
Rule 3: The pathway for every product and service must be simple and direct (flow).
Rule 4: Any improvement must be made in accordance with the scientific method at the lowest possible level in the organization.
Management’s Role is to Engage in Socratic Dialogue:
•How do you do this work?
•How do you know it is being done correctly?
•How do you know the outcome is free of defects?
•What do you do if you have a problem?Source: “Decoding the DNA of the Toyota Production System”, 1999, Harvard Business Review
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