Liberating Knowledge
Understanding the sense making communities
in the complex ecologies of the modern organisation

Editor's Note: The following paper was provided to the Association of Knowledgework to make a point during the January 2002 STAR Series Discussion moderated by the author.

Author
Dave Snowden is a former director of IBM's Institute for Knowledge, a fellow of the Information Systems Research Unit at Warwick University. He can be contacted via e-mail at snowded@btinternet.com

Currently there are two distinct schools of thought in knowledge management. These schools operate according to different metaphors of the organisation and the society in which it operates.

The first uses a mechanical metaphor. Here the organisation is seen as something that, with sufficient study and analysis, can be understood and prescriptive models can be created that will produce consistent and beneficial behavior. This school has an honorable tradition, originating in the work of Frederick Taylor and other founding fathers of scientific management in the early part of the twentieth century. It culminated in business process reengineering, itself having roots in cybernetic theory. This approach has also been driven by the significant growth of consultancy over the past 30 years. The financial model of most major consultancies requires extensive intellectual capital reuse. Once created, a method can be rolled out consistently in a variety of organisations by junior staff. One partner can now support far more consultants than was the case even five years ago. The business schools in turn have geared themselves to the production of analytically focused and ambitious graduates to feed this demand. However, the scientific model is that of Newtonian physics and, like Newtonian physics, it is no longer good enough and is certainly not universally applicable -- although it is still useful in the majority of day-to-day circumstances.

The second school operates from an organic metaphor, seeing each organisation and its environment as a unique complex ecology comprising multiple inter-dependent and inter-causal units. The organic school recognises the historical value of the mechanical metaphor in creating the modern organisation and driving the efficiency improvements of the last few decades. The distinction between mechanical and organic metaphors is not new. It first occurs in the sixties (Burns and Stalker, 1961) and is foreshadowed in a collection of essays looking at representation and anti-representation, which included some of the early work on knowledge and autopoiesis -- best understood from its Greek root auto self plus poietein to make, produce, remake, conceptualise (von Krogh and Roos, 1996).

The mechanical metaphor will continue to be useful in quality management, process improvement and system design along with other structured and known aspects of an organisation's operations. However, with BPR, the last drop of benefit has been painfully wrung from the mechanical metaphor. Indeed, in some implementations process reengineering often went a step to far and removed the necessary redundancy that enabled organisations to respond organically to change.

In a new age of uncertainty we need more flexibility and responsiveness than can readily be provided by a mechanical understanding of the firm: the ability to sense change on receipt of incomplete or partial data or stimulus; to respond in such a way as to reduce uncertainty for your organisation, but not for your competition; to make your organisation lucky by being in the right place at the right time. These are the survival characteristics of the modern resilient organisation.

The underlying issue here -- and the one that the organic school seeks to understand -- is the increasing level of uncertainty in the business environment. The boundaries between supplier and customer are blurring. New markets and new market leaders are seemingly created overnight with little investment. Information warfare techniques are practiced between competitors. Key staff and their teams sell their intellectual assets to the highest bidder. We live in an era of change and uncertainty, in which the ecology is not sufficiently stable for any mechanical model to approximate to reality.

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