During a discussion in the act-km group, Neil Olonoff expressed his distaste for the phrase “knowledge processing,” which I use frequently as a summary term for the activities in the second tier of the three-tier model of KM. In reply, I said that I’m not constitutionally wedded to the phrase “knowledge processing,” that the phrase “problem solving pattern” could be used instead, and that if we did that, KM could be defined as activities intended to enhance some aspects of the problem solving patterns of organizations. I also pointed out that any name was OK with me as long as it’s a reasonable label for:
1) seeking, recognizing, and formulating problems (in the sense of knowledge gaps);
2) arriving at solutions; and
3) communicating the content of the solutions to others.
Neil replied by saying that his approach to organizational knowledge “involves incorporating an appreciation of the social, emergent qualities of knowledge.” This is fine except that it indicates that perhaps Neil believed I did not share that view. Of course I do, as is plain from my book and this piece.
Neil went on to raise questions about 1) , 2) and 3) above. About seeking, recognizing, and formulating problems, he said if knowledge processing begins with that, then one can’t identify opportunities for growth or focus on the future. My reply is that if someone asks you “what kinds of opportunities for growth do you have for the future?” you’ll either know the answer to that question, or you’ll have to develop it. If you don’t know the answer, then you have a problem to solve in the sense of a knowledge gap. If someone asks you, or you ask yourself, what’s the future of knowledge management going to be like, either you know the answer, or you have a problem to be solved and new knowledge to be produced. The idea that developing new non-routine knowledge by starting with problems, somehow precludes being concerned about the future or about growth opportunities, seems to be an example of a clear non-sequitur.
Also, before one advances this sort of argument, one needs to be aware that it has to be a logical argument, since there’s certainly no empirical evidence to suggest that thinkers who focus on problems are unconcerned about the future. On the other hand, if it’s a logical argument one is making, then one has to show that there’s something inherent in the meaning of the notion of “problem” as I define it, that somehow prevents consideration of “growth opportunities” or “the future” during the process of inquiry. Needless to say, I don’t think there is anything in the notion of a knowledge gap that would permit such a deduction about “growth opportunities” or “the future”.
In his comments on 2) arriving at solutions, Neil points out that the problem/solution mindset is analogous to the traditional medical model and that Doctors diagnosed and cured disease. However, the problem/solution mindset in the sense of seeking solutions to close knowledge gaps is traditional to every science, and also to every branch of philosophy, and major philosopher with the exception of Wittgenstein and his merry band of followers, who believed that there is no such thing as a philosophical problem. Neil also asserted that the health care field “realized it should also be thinking about “wellness,” i.e., how to stay well rather than simply cure disease” and added that “This is a good analogy to my concern with the expanded focus on the future and relational aspects of knowledge.” To which I replied that the analogy may be sound, but doesn’t work because “how to stay well rather than simply cure disease?” is a problem, and that the problem/solution orientation of medicine eventually led it to the conclusion that learning how to cure disease is not the only problem out there; there’s also the problem of learning how to stay well.
Neil also objected to 3) communicating the content of the solutions to others, saying that the idea of the “content of solutions” is good “for a purely intellectualized concept of knowledge” where only a message is being communicated, and he contrasted this with his own expanded, embodied, emergent, communal joint experience view of knowledge. I answered by pointing out that Neil’s statement assumes a particular meaning of “content” that the two of us didn’t share, and also a particular meaning of knowledge that we probably didn’t share as well. I also pointed out that my notion of “content” in no way precludes “embodied, emergent, communal, joint experience,” and asked Neil why he thinks that it does.
Neil also referred to the thin, anemic, metaphor of “communicating content” that needed to be put in its “restricted place.” In reply I said:
“Perhaps you put content in a restricted place, and also view it as “anemic” because of your own conception of “content” which may be a mechanistic one restricted to the physical characteristics of a message. My conception of content however, however, is different from that narrow physical Shannon Theory construal, and has to do instead with issues of human interpretative intelligence, social “meanings,” and patterns of concepts expressed by documents. What I mean by content is outlined in more detail on pp. 12-13 of this paper by Richard Vines and I.”
Neil ended his critique with the idea that a new evolution of KM is coming in the form of evolved dialogic, collaborative technologies that will “enable people to explore, reason, and imagine together towards unimagined futures.”
I agreed that the rapidly increasing capabilities of collaborative technologies and social media will have very important effects on KM. Yet collaboration and KM are two different things. It is up to KM to work with new collaborative technologies to find out how they can be applied to enhance performance of the various aspects of knowledge processing, or the problem solving pattern (if you like) we find in organizations. This will require clearly conceptualizing what KM and knowledge processing are about and the relationship of these things to collaboration and increased capability to collaborate. In exploring these relationships we need to keep in mind that the goal of knowledge processing is to find and communicate the best quality knowledge we can arrive at. While the goal of collaboration is to work together to accomplish a particular result. For KM, collaboration is a means, not an end in itself; so collaborative knowledge processing has to prioritize the integrity of inquiry first, and the collaborative aspect of inquiry somewhere below that.