The Fifth Plague of Egypt (J. W. M. Turner, 1800)
I’d like to thank Olaf Brugman and Jack Vinson for their comments on my blog post about Knowledge Management and Strategy. I am very interested in the parallel between the view of The New Knowledge Management (TNKM) and Rudolf Steiner’s work of 1919, and I agree that one implication of what we are saying is that, as Olaf says: “knowledge development should not be subordinated to – or monopolized by – economic life (be it corporate or societal”. I also agree very much with his statement that:
“Economic reasoning and decision-making cannot solve all social issues, and it shouldn’t. However, to be able to move, as a society, towards a better version of society, we need all three impulses that make for change: coming from economic life, rights life, and cultural (= knowledge and feeling) life. And economic and bookkeeping logic should not be the only one governing our knowledge development.”
And I agree, as well, with Jack’s observation that:
“I think Joe’s point here is that knowledge management can serve much more than strictly the goals of individual businesses. In this light, I also begin to hear the strains of Debra Amidon and others, who argue that the “innovation superhighway” should serve the public good for everyone, not just the companies who have bought “KM solutions.””
As important as the points made by Olaf and Jack are, however, I don’t think the important ideas that KM transcends (1) economic life and also encompasses rights life and cultural life, or (2) the goals of individual businesses, should overshadow the main point I was making. It speaks directly to those who believe, unlike Olaf and Jack, that KM should not transcend economic life, or the goals of individual businesses.
Once again, that point is: even if your company’s strategy is strictly focused on only its own economic goals, it is still true, nevertheless, that if you want to achieve these goals continuously and on a sustainable basis, you should implement an autonomous KM function that is not aligned with current strategy, but rather with a KM strategy of enhancing knowledge processing. Keeping the three-tier model in mind, and also my previous blog posts entitled “All Life Is Problem Solving” and “Organizational Problem Solving”, here is another, shorter statement of the key argument leading to the conclusion that there is a contradiction in practicing KM and aligning it with strategy.
(1) Strategy focused on economic goals is implemented through business processes which use already created knowledge including strategy iself.
(2) Knowledge use is not specifically a knowledge process. Rather it is part of every act of decision making and of every pattern of actions constituting a business process.
(3) Knowledge Use Management is therefore every manager’s job, Knowledge or otherwise and it is not what I mean by KM.
(4) Organizations, including profit-oriented companies, are complex adaptive systems. In such systems the outcomes of routine, rule governed processes based on previously created knowledge, frequently deviate from the objectives and goals of the system. This creates a need for adaptation (and an epistemic problem) that must be fulfilled by problem solving (or knowledge or learning) processes.
(5) These processes are used to produce new knowledge that, in turn, is applied in re-inventing business processes so that the deviation of their outcomes from strategic goals and objectives is less or is entirely eliminated. The knowledge processes of knowledge production and integration are the organization’s way of problem solving and producing new knowledge that it can use to adapt.
(6) Among the possible outcomes of new knowledge production and learning is creation of new strategic knowledge that modifies or replaces the goals and objectives themselves and that evaluates the old strategy as too costly, impossible to implement, or simply non-adaptive relative to the organization’s economic goals.
(7) New strategic knowledge of this sort is often essential for organizational adaptation and for the sustained attainment of its goals and objectives through time, and therefore knowledge processes and the knowledge workers who implement them must have the capacity to produce it when necessary.
(8) Organizational Knowledge Management is the set of activities and processes that maintain and enhance the knowledge or problem solving processes of organizations, including the capacity of knowledge workers to implement them.
(9) If KM is aligned with strategy, it must focus knowledge processing on solving problems that arise, by viewing them as problems of implementing strategy, rather than as problems of strategy itself. Thus, if KM is aligned with strategy, it should pursue policies and programs that discourage inquiries criticizing the current strategies it is aligned with, or that inquire into whether those strategies are valid.
(10) But this view of KM, a logical implication of its alignment with strategy, is in contradiction with (6). KM cannot be both aligned with current strategy and also committed to enhancing the organization’s capacity for sustainable problem solving and adaptation, since enhancing that capacity includes enhancing problem recognition and problem solving involving current strategy itself.
(11) Therefore, since there exists a set of organizational activities, a function, that can enhance the organization’s capacity for sustainable problem solving and adaptation, and we choose to call that function Knowledge Management, it follows that it (KM) cannot be aligned with current strategy, but must be independent of both its dictates and of the authority of those whose function is to both implement and formulate it.
In short, KM is about more than implementing economic goals, it is about maintaining and enhancing the capacity to adapt, which in turn requires other goals, as Olaf says, cultural goals and rights goals (See Excerpt #1 from The Open Enterprise). And why is this so? Because complex adaptive systems such as organizations are not about only one thing, not even a thing so important as profit or economics. They’re also about culture, politics, social networks, communities, people, values, ethics, and goals in each of these areas. And they’re also about the knowledge necessary to pursue these diverse goals, and the knowledge represented by goals, objectives, culture, strategy value claims, and ethics, that are produced by such systems as they re-make themselves in co-evolving with and meeting the challenges of their environments.
So, in the end, it’s not at all surprising that adaptive functions of organizations, including problem solving and KM, are about more than just serving the economic goals or strategies of organizations. Rather, they are about change and the capacity to change themselves, and so they must transcend and check other executive functions of the organization, lest they freeze its pattern in a way that makes it too rigid to withstand the winds of change.