Preparing
for Conversations with David Snowden
Third
Generation KM:
Separating Content, Narrative, Context
 Introduction
David Snowden is
Director of the Institute of Knowledge Management for Europe,
the Middle East and Africa. One of the founders of 'Organic Knowledge
Management', he is an acknowledged expert on the management of
tacit knowledge and has developed a series of pioneering methods
including the use of anthropological techniques for knowledge
disclosure through the ASHEN  model, the
use of stories as an advanced form of knowledge repository (based
on six years of research into story telling cultures around the
world) and the Cynefin "Just in Time" model of knowledge
transfer between formal and informal communities.
A gifted speaker
and educator, he is in regular demand as a keynote speaker world
wide and will keynote the AOK/Delphi Group Enterprise Learning
and Knowledge Exchange (ELKE) Summit, March 13-15, 2002 in Palm
Springs California. This STAR SERIES discussion is a prelude
to his presentation on Third Generation KM at the ELKE Summit.
His masterclasses
in Organic Knowledge Management and Story Telling are highly
rated and regularly sell out. Many of these events have been
organized by the ARK Group, an AOK affiliate, and with another
AOKer, Stephen Denning who was the
first STAR SERIES guest moderator in January, 2001.
David Snowden is
currently leading two Institute programs: one is the further
development of Story Techniques into advanced decision support,
merger and acquisition and multi-cultural communication; the
other uses Complexity Theory to link concepts from Learning and
Knowledge Management. He has authored many articles on the subject
and contributed commissioned chapters to two forthcoming books.
He is currently
working on two books and editing two others. His own books to
be published in 2000-2001 are on the use and abuse of Story and
Complex Knowledge.
Dave Snowden has
an MBA from Middlesex University and a BA in Philosophy from
Lancaster University. He is an honorary fellow in knowledge management
at the Universities of Surrey and Warwick and teaches on the
MBA programs at Warwick, Sophia Antipolis and Piacenza.
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Big Thing at IBM's
Institute of Knowledge Management
While choosing the
thread for Conversations with David Snowden, he wrote the following:
The big thing here
is the application of the science of complex adaptive systems
to management - breaking 100 years of Taylorism. Narrative is
one of the tools coming out of this thinking. I should say here
that by complexity I do not mean the agent based modelling stuff
coming out of Santa Fe, but the European tradition that informs
complexity with Free Will. Human systems can impose patters,
Ants cannot.
Text below is from
a book chapter I am working on; it is the concept piece that
then introduces some pragmatic methods and is being written for
translation into German for a Central European Audience. I can
easily post some provocative material and I have three more articles
out on this theme in the next few weeks. If they then want to
take up the narrative theme that's fine -- or multiple themes.
If narrative then it will build on Steve who talks about one
story form. I will move on to Fable, Myth, Virus, Archetype and
also current work on the use of narrative and complexity theory
in a one year plus project for DARPA (US Govn.) on anti-terrorism
where we are looking at knowledge in the context of decision
making. Its recently for obviously reasons moved from background
research to an active project -- NATO and INTEL are already looking
to take up the techniques.
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Draft Chapter on KM
Generations
The first generation
of knowledge management is the period prior to 1995. Here "knowledge"
as a word is not problematic, it is used without conscious thought
and the focus is on information flow to support decision makers.
Executive Information Systems, Data Warehousing and Process re-engineering
dominate this period.
In 1995 Nonaka and
Takeuchi publish the Knowledge Creating Company and for the first
time on common business language the words tacit and explicit
are introduced, although Polanyi had explored the subject in
more depth in the 1940's. This publication with its SECI model
defining four transition states of tacit-to-tacit, tacit-to-explicit,
explicit-to-explicit and explicit-to-tacit proved decisive and
was broadly taken up by consultants and software vendors, both
groups seeking to drive revenue through the rapid growth of collaborative
technologies.
The pioneering work
of practitioners such as Buckman, Edvinsson, Lank, Saint-Onge
and Ward amongst others, provided legitimacy and the second generation
with its emphasis on conversation of tacit to explicit was born.
For second generation thinkers and practitioners, most notably
in central Europe, Probst and his collaborators, the function
of knowledge management is to convert private assets into public
assets, though the extraction of that knowledge into codified
form. I have argued elsewhere (Snowden 2000a) that this approach
unnecessarily focuses on the container rather than the thing
contained, and this view has been strengthened by the increasing
recognition by practitioners that there is much tacit knowledge
that either cannot, or should not, be made explicit.
As we move into
the third millennium we see a new approach emerging in which
we focus not on the management of knowledge as a "thing"
which can be identified and catalogued, but on the management
of the ecology of knowledge. Here the emphasis is not on the
organisation as a machine with the manager occupying the role
of Engineer, but on the organisation as a complex ecology in
which the manager is a gardener, able to direct and influence,
but not fully control the evolution of his or her environment.
We are also seeing a refreshing move away from programmes which
seem to manage knowledge for its own sake, to those that tightly
couple knowledge management with both strategic and, critically,
operational priorities.
"I always know
more than I can say, even after I have said it, and I can always
say more than I can write down."
This is one of the
basic operating principles of knowledge management, regrettably
not fully understood in the second generation. The process of
moving from my head, to my mouth to my hands inevitably involves
some loss of content, and frequently involves a massive loss
of context. Once we recognise this we can start to rethink the
nature of knowledge management. Most second-generation approaches
are to all intents and purposes content management; they focus
on documents containing structured and reflective knowledge that
is disconnected from the knowledge holder, diffuses easily and
is formal structured.
What we can say
and what we know are respectively covered by Narrative and Context
Management. Context management in contrast focuses on connecting
and linking people through, for example, expertise location,
social network simulation, apprentice models of knowledge transfer
and the retention strategies for key staff. Managing context
involves the recognition that knowledge cannot be disembodied
from human agency either as giver or receiver, content is the
exact opposite. Context Management takes control of what we know,
but cannot fully say or write down. Content Management organises
that which can be written.
Narrative Management
lies somewhere between the two and is the focus of this chapter,
it manages what we can say in conversation and in declamation,
it is also cheaper and less onerous as task to capture than written
knowledge and its use is closer to the natural patterns of knowledge
acquisition in organisations because:
- it is easier and
less onerous to capture, because I can record to a video camera
in ten minutes what it will otherwise take two weeks to get round
to spending a hour or so writing up;
- it is a natural
process, in that when we face a new task, or encounter a problem
we go and find people to talk to, to ask questions to provide
context sensitive answers and advice that cannot be provided
by past project reviews and idealised statements of best practice.
The separation of
context, narrative and content management in third generation
approaches in turn makes each more effective. By understanding
the imitations and capabilities of each medium -- head, mouth
and hands -- we make each more effective and the combination
of the whole is accordingly greater than the sum of the parts.
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