In my last KM blog, I analyzed the relationships between KM and conflict, in the context of seeing problems and making knowledge. This post will extend the analysis to integrating knowledge.
I classify knowledge integration activities into four categories: knowledge and information broadcasting (KIB), searching and retrieving (S and R), teaching, and sharing. All of these can occur using media or electronic tools, or through face-to-face interaction, and all of them always occur in some interaction or collective agent context. At the individual level the context may be other individuals or collectives in an organization. Collective agents providing a context for knowledge integration include teams, friendship groups, organizational sub-divisions, committees of “experts,” communities of practice or inquiry, and the organization itself. Since knowledge integration activities occur in contexts of social interaction, it’s clear that they can involve conflict, cooperation, or withdrawal from social interaction. Since both excessive conflict and the withdrawal from social interaction often resulting from it, are both barriers to knowledge integration, part of doing a good job at enhancing knowledge integration is to use measures that will moderate the natural conflict behavior arising in all human interactions, including collaborative ones.
What are the sources of conflict behavior? The fundamental source is that the goals and/or objectives of people differ and that action intended to achieve one agent’s goals or objectives often results in costs (including monetary and non-monetary ones) for other agents in the social network. This will always be the case in a social system, thus guaranteeing that some level and kind of conflict will always be present as one aspect of social interaction.
In the context of knowledge integration, exchanges among agents can result in increasing resources and opportunities for some and in decreasing resources, constraints, and risks for others. Activities intended to enhance knowledge and information broadcasting may distribute knowledge and information more broadly throughout a social network, but they also may equalize the availability of information and knowledge, and in doing so decrease the relative advantage in availability previously enjoyed by some agents relative to others. If some agents maintain goals or objectives that include having a continuing comparative advantage over others in information and knowledge, they may respond by trying to undermine or to block KIB tools or innovations. Even those receiving the benefits of KIB may oppose the introduction of new technologies to facilitate it, because they’re afraid of information glut and also fear they won’t be able to integrate new KIB technology into their daily work.
A similar dynamic may apply in the category of searching for and retrieving knowledge and information. New technology supporting searching and retrieving information may be opposed by those fearful that their own relative advantage in possessing knowledge and information would be eroded. Communities of Practice or other social networking initiatives may also be opposed because they facilitate interpersonal searching and retrieving. Lastly, using newer 2.0 and 3.0 social media technology may also be opposed out of fear that enhanced social networking will democratize the knowledge and information playing field.
Knowledge sharing, unlike KIB, is peer-focused. Conflicts in this area of knowledge integration activity arise out of exclusion of some agents from the process and also out of lack of reciprocity in knowledge exchanges. When people begin to share knowledge, if some share freely and others do not, those who do will perceive a lack of reciprocity and will end or reduce sharing as a result. These effects can be observed in interpersonal face-to-face contexts and also in IT-enabled virtual communities and networks.
An important source of conflict in KIB, searching and retrieving, and knowledge sharing is how security and access is handled. From the viewpoint of the agent restricted from a source of information or knowledge, the imposition of the restriction according to a rule, is conflict behavior depriving the agent of what may be needed information or knowledge. From the viewpoint of those imposing the restriction, access by others to sources they believe should be not be open to them is also conflict behavior.
As I’ve already suggested some conflict behavior accompanying knowledge integration is inevitable. This is especially obvious when we recognize that any organization will have security restrictions on certain information, if only to protect privacy needs. Private organizations will need to restrict product and marketing plans and details to those who need to know them, and intelligence organizations certainly need to do the same with much of the information they gather and the knowledge they develop. However, restrictions are never without cost from the viewpoint of transparency and distributed problem solving. So, the extent and nature of restrictions and the conflicts accompanying them are always a matter of balance.
In addition, beyond the conflicts arising out of security and access concerns, the other types of conflicts mentioned earlier must be managed in such way that they don’t get out control. What I mean by out of control is reaching a state where mistrust is so great that interpersonal interactions, whether IT-assisted or face-to-face are restricted to members of one’s own faction, alone, so that patterns of knowledge integration fragmentation become the order of the day and cross-faction integration becomes a rarity. This kind of fragmentation is one of the primary attributes of Frozen Problem Solving patterns.
In another blog, I’ve distinguished 3 primary approaches to KM: the decision interruption approach, the expectations gap approach, and the ecological approach. The ecological approach to KM is the one that is most likely to fall victim to increasing conflict and mistrust in knowledge integration. The reason for this is that it is the approach whose interventions are least-focused on enhancing knowledge integration related to specific business domain contexts of problems and solutions. So, when enhancements to knowledge integration are implemented, their impact is undermined by the tendencies toward conflict behavior I highlighted earlier. In the ecological approach, these are not moderated by the contextual need to communicate specific new solutions to problems to those who might need them, or to help others solve specific problems. In effect, knowledge integration is somewhat de-contextualized from the rest of knowledge processing, and this makes it much more vulnerable to conflict tendencies or propensities than in alternative, non-ecological approaches.
In contrast, the decision interruption approach involves active interventions in the decision making processes of knowledge workers, by an IT system that performs knowledge and information broadcasting activity. That system, in turn, is fed by committees of experts, whose motivation to produce knowledge for the system is provided by the problems presented to the committee, and by the social rewards derived from committee participation. The knowledge workers who received the broadcasts from the system, are sometimes led to question the knowledge provided by them. This, in turn, leads to problem seeing and solving by the knowledge workers. In this approach, further, the knowledge workers are required by the system to share their solutions with the committees which leads to new cycles of problem solving.
In short, the close inter-relationship, even inter-penetration of the problem seeing and solving aspects by the knowledge integration aspect, provides a motivation for agents to overcome their fear of sharing and to moderate tendencies toward conflict in the sharing process. In the decision interruption approach, people do not share for the sake of sharing itself, but because knowledge sharing is very closely related to the problem solving process, and their desire to solve problems outweighs their reluctance to share. The general implication here, is that approaches to KM that integrate knowledge integration and problem solving closely, will avoid the problem of conflict in knowledge sharing getting out of control because the need to work together to solve problems will overcome the fear and mistrust that may beset sharing outside of problem solving contexts.
The expectations gap approach also provides for knowledge sharing as an integral part of problem solving and tracking and documenting its results. That is, the cultural changes effected as part of this approach, tie the motivation for knowledge sharing into successful problem solving as the last step in the process, or even as support for the problem seeing and knowledge production processes of other agents. In other words, in the expectations gap approach knowledge integration and other phases of knowledge processing are often intertwined. The effect of this, as it is in the decision interruption approach, is to moderate knowledge sharing conflicts because the problem solving motivation outweighs the fear and mistrust besetting sharing. Moreover, once this approach becomes institutionalized, fear of sharing and mistrust recede into the background, since observed reciprocity in sharing and good business process results demonstrate that sharing works.
When we consider the differences among the three approaches in the area of knowledge integration, we can see that 1) conflict in knowledge integration is caused by fear and mistrust, which are, in turn, related to constraints and restrictions in knowledge integration which, in their turn, are more likely to be found in the ecological approach than in the other two approaches, and 2) the closer integration of the three phases of knowledge processing in the other two approaches also tends to remove the constraints and restrictions besetting knowledge integration because of the need to make knowledge available and accessible for problem solving. So, the other two approaches tend to create and reinforce the development of open problem solving patterns in an enterprise, while the ecological approach must pursue additional measures to overcome tendencies toward conflict in knowledge integration.
Finally, the fourth category of knowledge integration, teaching, has a limited role in both the decision interruption and ecological approaches to KM. But enhancing teaching is very important to the expectations gap approach. This approach uses comprehensive mentoring, as well as workshops, to implement the cultural aspects of the expectations gap approach. Workshops are more subject to conflict than mentoring. In workshops, distance between teachers and students is more likely to create alienation and conflict than mentoring relationships are. In mentoring, the mentor and mentee have a much more intense interaction, and a greater shared interest in success of the mentee, than we see in the teacher-student relationship. So, here is another area where the expectations gaps approach tends to moderate the conflicts inherent in knowledge integration. In Part Three of this series I’ll analyze the place of conflict in the top KM tier of the three-tier model.
To Be Continued