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Preparing
for Conversations with David Hawthorne
Internal Knowledge
Markets Critical to Organizational Adaptation
David Hawthorne
Vice President, Affiliate Relations, NaviQuest Group, Inc.
New York, New York, US
 Biography
At NaviQuest, David
Hawthorne is responsible for organizing private and public educational
institutions, professional associations, and training providers
into a network of talent developers for the global talent market.
Hawthorne joined
NaviQuest from HCI Learning Works (Hawthorne Communications,
Inc.), a specialized consulting practice focused on the development
of collaborative projects between knowledge organizations in
higher education and the private sector. HCI, founded in 1985,
has forged numerous successful learning enterprises for clients
such as New York University, University of Chicago, International
Institute for Learning, Philips Electronics, IBM, Panasonic Broadcast
Systems, Grey Communications, Tektronix, National TeleConsultants;
Silicon Graphics, and The National Association of Television
Program Executives. Hawthorne continues to devote some of his
time to the development of these types of collaborative learning
enterprises.
Hawthorne served
as senior vice president, eLearning Environments for NYU Online
where he developed its award-winning instructor training program,
"T3," HR Executive magazine's "Product
of the Year for 2000." Hawthorne was also Adjunct Associate
Professor of Film & Television at NYU, SCE from 1972 to 1977.
Hawthorne has been
a strategic communications researcher, analyst and consultant
and is a former magazine editor/publisher, and an award winning
journalist, recognized for editorial excellence three times by
the American Business Press. He is a frequent contributor to
a number of KM forums, including AOK, act-KM, and NY KM Cluster.
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Paper
By David L. Hawthorne
Which came first,
the chicken or the egg? Which is more crucial to a successful
career, the individual or the organization, her
knowledge or her skill, his education or his experience?
Even if we knew the answers, how could we describe an individual's
career so that it was both fair and accurate? What are the uses
of such a story? Who are the users? What are the motivations
and purposes for the use of such a story? Where is the knowledge
in such a story? Can it be, should it be, managed? Who should
manage it? What are the meaningful patterns in a career? How
can they be interpreted?
Are issues like
these ones that a market can decide? If nothing else, they are
some of the issues we are dealing with at NaviQuest as we attempt
to build visible talent markets for internal and external
organizational use.
I am going to raise
a number of questions in this discussion that are similar to
the ones above, questions that have many different answers depending
on perspective. I believe that much of the frustration and vexation
that I have seen expressed by earnest practitioners of KM in
this forum rise from a similar dilemma: how to transition
invention to innovation when our linguistic traditions limit
our ability to see things differently.
I am going to be
explicit about my own opinions on these issues and I expect that
the reader and I will differ on some points and agree on some
others. I also expect that there will be only rare (i.e., "zero")
occasions when any two of us agree or disagree on all counts.
I am hoping to inoculate myself and other participants from the
polemics that sometime surface in forums such as this. My intention
is not to engage in polemics or inspire them, but rather to see
if we can see our way out of another kind of paradox -the paradox
of our own linguistic formulations. (In the STAR Series with
Józefa Fawcett, just concluded, I felt I saw a particularly
good example of the paradox in the discussion of Top down/Bottom
Up approaches to organizational reform through KM. I don't
wish to get back into that discussion, but my instinctive reaction
was, "Here we go again, using terminology that frames the
problem in ways that make it more difficult, if not impossible,
to solve." TD/BU is rooted in the discredited org chart
model of the industrial age organization. I haven't met anyone
in years who believes that org charts reflect anything about
an organization other than a hypothetical map of authority (in
the governance sense). Org charts certainly do not explain how
an organization actually gets things done. Still, tremendous
resources are spent discussing and modifying org charts. It strikes
me as ritualistic rather than useful.
I believe KM is
a human social science and not a natural science.
It has far more to do with the properties of living human entities
than it does with the natural laws of physics, chemistry, and
the other so-called, hard sciences. If someone wants to make
the argument that we live in an environment fundamentally governed
by the laws of natural science, I will concede the point, but
I will argue that the natural science laws do not dictate how
living entities adapt, interact, or respond to that environment.
For this discussion
I will make occasional appeals to the audience to use their "imagination,"
something I deem to be a uniquely human capability. In this first
exercise, I ask you to imagine Earth in a contemporary
timeframe, without any humans. What might it be like? Could the
oceans still exist? The continents? The beasts? Disease? Most
of us will agree that we can imagine such a state, even if we
imagine that various familiar aspects of Earth will be radically
different. In our imaginations, we do not seem to feel as though
human existence is a pre-requisite for the planet. We all know,
for instance, that life on Earth existed for millennia without
humans and, while we do not know if humanity was an inevitable
consequence of Earth-life, we can imagine that it did not have
to be. That is the power of imagination.
I also think that
KM is a genuine science of human organizational design
in which the fundamental entity, the irreducible element, is
the "individual human." KM's fundamental use is the
shaping of conditions for interactions between "individuals"
to enable some human purpose or intent.
In other words,
I am describing something that belongs to what the Nobel laureate
Herbert A. Simon dubbed, The Sciences of the Artificial (Third
Edition, 1996). Simon neatly explains his division between the
natural sciences and the artificial sciences thusly:
"Natural science is knowledge about some class of things
-- objects or phenomena -- in the world: about the characteristics
and properties that they have; about how they behave and interact
with each other." Natural science has in its province both
physical and biological phenomena -- but Simon urges us to be
careful about equating the two. "A forest may be a phenomenon
of nature," writes Simon, "(but) a farm certainly is
not." In short, Simon says that the natural sciences describe
the "world as we found it," the world without human
intervention. The sciences of the artificial, on the other hand,
have everything to do with "complex systems that live in
complex environments." The laws of natural science govern
the world, but humans take the features of the world and, with
the limits of those laws, reorganize its features to suit human
purposes. So, Simon proposes that natural sciences are
insufficient to account for all that happens in a world inhabited
by humans and that other sciences, i.e., "sciences of the
artificial," are required to describe, explain, and ultimately,
design human interactions with the environment.
Now, back to riddle
that I started with. To my satisfaction, I have resolved the
chicken and egg issue:
My opinion is
that neither the chicken nor egg came first, or second. The ontogeny
of the chicken continues, uninterrupted, passing repeatedly through
the "egg" stage and the chicken "stage."
So long as the "chicken" is able to survive in its
environment it will continue to produce eggs which will continue
to produce chickens, each chicken very much like all the chickens
that preceded it and, each new chicken, distinctly different
from all the rest. If, in the future, the chicken becomes extinct,
it will be due to a failure of the chicken and its egg to adapt
appropriately to its environment. The chicken will have very
little say in the matter. Something new will rise to take the
chicken's place in the environment, and breakfast will never
be the same again.
Humans have a different
relationship with their environment. Humans can use the knowledge
they discover and they can imagine the world organized differently.
They can play what-if games and they can evaluate risks
and decide that some risks are acceptable and others are not.
Human systems (individual beings, families, communities, organizations,
institutions, and so on) not only adapt to the environment but
also systematically rearrange and reorganize it to suit human
purposes.
Now, let us try
a second exercise in imagination. This exercise strolls over
toward Husserlian phenomenology (as described by Petitot, Verla,
Pachoud, and Roy in Naturalizing Phenomenology). Imagine
that humans approach the environment with an active imagination.
That is, that we do not necessarily see things as they are, but
rather we experience our interactions with them (this is a little
subtle, I admit). The Husserlian phenomenologist asserts that
this does not constitute solipsism. The assertion simply says
that humans have a way of seeing things and putting them together
so that they can deal with them (so-called, "originary intuitions").
Human description of cosmic truth may be accurate from time-to-time,
but if so, the correlation is largely coincidental. Sometimes
we seem to get it right, though there is always room for doubt.
Humans should not be absolutists.
One major limiting
factor to our ability to reorganize human systems is our use
of language. Some cultures treat language as almost sacred, almost
concrete. Zen Buddhists, however, contrive their famously enigmatic
sayings to loose the shackles of language on thinking and doing.
Things are not, generally, exactly as we describe them. Fashion,
style, fad, and foible, use language more freely and all have
enviable records for invention, innovation, adaptation and fluidity,
while business, politics, law, science, and religion too often
seem frozen in their tracts.
Organizations seem
rooted in a morass of sacred cows fattened on their own language.
Organizations thrive on written procedures and practices at the
expense of first hand observation and experience. If we could
see things as they are done, we would be in a much better
position to make appropriate adjustments. Instead, we look for
compliance after the fact. Without any genuine appreciation for
how things are done, new approaches to managing are frequently
dismissed with, ". . . not the way we do things here."
KM would be more effective, in my opinion, if it focused
on developing methods of organizational observation and sense
making rather than on organizational historiography. KM should
be a look-around discipline and not become another source
for more retrospective coherence and rationalization. Applied
properly, it may be able to tell us what is likely, but probably
not, what is possible. To guide us to what is possible we have
only our imagination.
In our efforts to
enable a visible talent market, we routinely confront
managers who cannot imagine a better way to find talent or use
talent in their organizations. It is as if current HR hiring
practices, performance assessment, and promotion practice worked
flawlessly. It is as if every organization knew exactly what
talent it requires to implement its strategy and advance its
programs, products, and services. It is as if managers routinely
deployed exactly the right talent precisely to where it is needed
while seamlessly extending the organization's competitive advantage
and improving profitability (or cost effectiveness in the case
of non-profits). In such a near perfect system, it is hard to
explain why so many of these very same managers express the conviction
that the current system is badly broken, why so many employees
feel their talents and contributions are invisible within their
organizations, why bosses complain about shortages of critical
skills and knowledge, and clients/customers seem bitterly disappointed
by so much of what they experience in the marketplace.
There is a certain
schizoid nature to this phenomenon. As individuals, workers seem
to want to tell their stories, they want to display their talents
and accomplishments for all to see, but as managers, they are
agoraphobics. Managers say they want to have better knowledge
of the talent that is available to them both inside and outside
of their organization, but they also say they are afraid that
an "open talent market" would invite an exodus of critical
talent resources. What does that say about the workforce policies
and practices of our organizations?
Perhaps we expect
too much of managers. In my encounters with many types of organizations,
I have encountered very few "leaders" among managers.
I have found only a few individuals who can be fairly described
as leaders at the very top of the organization, and just a few
more in the ranks who are struggling to make a difference, to
innovate and to change. Most of the "innovation" I
encounter comes in the creative workarounds of workers confronting
obstacles incidentally. KM has made much of putting "practices"
in place to cultivate these high performance improvisations,
or stem the loss of knowledge; yet the literature presents a
generally poor record of success for such practices. Have we
misunderstood something?
I think we have.
For one thing, I think we have under appreciated the degree to
which management functions to achieve homeostasis. The goal of
most organizations (that is the, "actual effect" as
opposed to the "stated goal") is sufficiency and not
optimization. "The economic units in capitalist societies
are mostly business firms, which are themselves hierarchic organizations,
some of enormous size, that make almost no use of markets in
their internal functioning. Roughly eighty percent of the human
economic activity in the American economy . . . takes place in
the internal environments of business and other organizations
and not in the external, between-organization environments of
markets."1 Markets, which are mechanisms that
"aim to coordinate decisions and behavior of multitudes
of economic actors," are most always external to the organization.
Why are organizations -- which extol the virtue of the market
-- so determined to eschew the use of the mechanism inside their
own environments? Of what are organizations afraid? Maybe the
reason fashion, style, fad, and foible spread so rapidly through
society is that they thrive outside the organization, in the
public, open market. (Speaking of TD/BU patterns of innovation,
note how fads and fashion originate anywhere and spread in every-which-way
in the market.)
I advocate the use
of "internal markets" for knowledge as well as talent.
I think our organizations would be much more effective if they
adopted internal market mechanisms -- transparent and open trafficking
in knowledge about internal business processes, strategies, goals,
and so forth. Of course, "we cannot do that. Chaos would
result."
So why is chaos
so rare in external markets? We see turbulence and change in
external markets but rarely a breakdown into chaos. Markets have
the capacity to stabilize themselves though they are not in anyway
immune to disruption.
What is it about
the market mechanism that makes it so resilient? For one thing,
markets are generators of visible patterns. The patterns do not
possess any specific meaning. They exist without intentionality.
The meaning of the patterns is the product of human interpretation.
Humans see patterns and tell stories about those patterns (think
of weather reports). Stories have humanly assigned meaning and
intent. Such pattern stories often come in the form of advice
to others to take some action (buy/sell). Two humans, looking
at exactly the same patterns can tell completely different stories
about them and both stories can be right. We are in the realm
of the artificial where different rules apply. It is foolhardy
to expect the same degree of certainty from the realm of the
artificial as we expect from the natural world.
I think that these
conditions partially explain why KM has shown such interest in
narrative and storytelling. Stories are not the source of truth
but rather a source of patterns that are meaningful to other
humans. While I am no literary deconstructionist, I do ascribe
to the notion that the author's intent in any story is only a
weak indicator of meaning. The power of the story really arises
in the mind of the audience and their responses.
I do not know that
"knowledge markets" are a fixed mechanism, but I do
know that markets, in general, are characterized by all sorts
of enabling infrastructures, including rules (however flexible
those rules may be). I believe that if we went about enabling
"knowledge markets" inside our organizations we would
find that our "multitude of actors" would become far
more effective decision makers. We would also discover that "markets"
are often characterized by observable leading edge indicators
that provide organizations with a window on conditions. With
the shift of the human enterprise from the industrial age to
the information age, we need to reconceptualize our organizations
to behave more like the markets they serve. Knowledge is flowing
freely in and out of our organizations but internally, we seem
all jammed up. While our organizations seem to have trouble sharing
knowledge, our markets seem eager to do it. Knowledge, like talent,
should be free to come and go as it pleases.
I pass an NYU building
on Washington Place here in New York several times a week. There
is a brass plaque mounted outside marking it as the site of the
"Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Tragedy." Triangle management
had long made a practice of locking its employees in the building
so the predominantly immigrant female workforce could not sneak
off the job. On Saturday March 25, 1911, near the end of the
workday, a fire broke out on the top floor of the factory. In
keeping with company policy, the doors to the stairways and street
were all locked to keep the mostly young, immigrant women workers
from leaving early. One hundred and forty-six women burned or
leaped to their death. A shocked public and a galvanized labor
union movement demanded action. Sweeping labor reforms resulted
and, ultimately, many of New York City's textile factories closed.
(Though not all the abuses disappeared.)
I would be willing
to bet that many Triangle employees complained about the locked
doors but we know that all such appeals went unheeded. We would
like to think that today's business organizations are much more
attuned to changes in the environment but how much less indifferent
was Enron to the mounting evidence that its practices would bring
financial ruin to thousands of innocent people? While the outside
environment can remain indifferent to the internal practices
of organizations, organizations can only remain indifferent to
externalities at their own peril. Internal market mechanism would
greatly improve the ability of organizations to sense and respond
to changing conditions and I believe we should devote some of
KM's substantial brainpower and talent to designing and building
them.
1 H.A. Simon, "Organization
and Markets," Journal of Economic Perspectives, 5(1991):25-44.
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