Beyond "Knowledge"

Last month I wrote a post about what I called the "knowledge management mess" in response to a post about knowledge management that Lou Paglia had written on his CoRrElate blog. This morning I read Lou's latest post on this subject; and, while I still feel that the area is as much of a mess as it ever was, Lou's comments section tends to have a lot of positive karma. So, in the interest of my positive thinking, I would like to offer a “modest proposal” for getting out of the mess.

The basic idea is this: Since the proper domain of management is concerned with what people do, we should pay more attention to the actions that take place in any work situation and then direct our inquiry towards how those actions come to occur. To a great extent our actions are informed by what we know; but because, like the fox, we know a great many things, we cannot fall back on a vague concept like “knowledge” to satisfy our inquiry. Rather, in the tradition of Max Weber, we need to take a more analytic approach to the actions themselves and then, in a parallel tradition of Kenneth Burke, we need to take an equally analytic approach to the motives that drive those actions.

I fear that the concept of knowledge management is predicated on the myth that organizations will function more effectively (and, hopefully, more efficiently in the bargain) if they have better access to better knowledge. I believe this myth needs to be blasted away by the proposition that organizations can only function more effectively when they have more effective managers (and anyone who has given a serious reading to the Nonaka-Takeuchi Knowledge-Creating Company book knows full well that the authors support this, particularly in the case they make for the value of middle management). From this point of view, we need managers who are better at “reading” the actions that take place “on their watch” and making tactical (and sometimes strategic) decisions based on those “readings.”