This edition first published 2018
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Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data
Names: Morabito, Joseph, 1946– author. | Sack, Ira, 1942– author. | Bhate, Anilkumar, 1947– author.
Title: Designing knowledge organizations : a pathway to innovation leadership / Joseph Morabito, Ira Sack, Anilkumar Bhate.
Description: Hoboken, NJ : John Wiley & Sons, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017009402 (print) | LCCN 2017011361 (ebook) | ISBN 9781118905845 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781119078777 (pdf) | ISBN 9781119078784 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Knowledge management. | Organizational effectiveness.
Classification: LCC HD30.2 .M655 2018 (print) | LCC HD30.2 (ebook) | DDC 658.4/038–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017009402
Cover image: © John Lund/Gettyimages
Cover design: Wiley
We want to thank our students for their participation in our graduate course on knowledge and organizations. Through their questions, participation in class exercises, and experiences in their respective organizations, we have been able to test ideas, create unique problems, and shape thought‐provoking diagrams and text.
We deeply appreciate several faculty colleagues for their feedback on selected chapters that correspond to their respective areas of expertise.
We also express our sincere gratitude to our research assistants. In particular, we thank Rishikesh Bhosale, Priyam Mishra, Prannoy Pal, Shamanth Umesh and Anisha Vappala.
In his last book, Management Challenges for the 21st Century, management guru Peter Drucker asserts that the most important issue for 21st century organizations is the improvement of knowledge worker productivity. Drucker (1999) goes on to claim that knowledge management (KM) is not merely another management idea or tool but the harbinger of a new economy that will fundamentally change society and organizations. We only need to look around us to see how knowledge and technology are transforming the world.
More than a 100 years ago, Frederick Winslow Taylor, an alumnus of Stevens Institute of Technology, transformed the world with Scientific Management: the scientific analysis of work and the separation of work from worker—all elements of mechanical design. In fact, Scientific Management is largely responsible for the flourishing of industrial economies. However, the 21st century requires that we solve a new problem: the design and management of organizational knowledge and knowledge work. What is needed, in effect, is an approach that does for knowledge work what Scientific Management did for industrial work.
In his lectures at Harvard University in 1932, John Dewey, widely acknowledged as the foremost American philosopher for cultural criticism and aesthetics, compared a machine with a work of art. The machine is an outcome of imagination—there are many imagined possibilities, but one is selected to produce a final result. The machine operates in the physical realm, arranged by human contrivance. In contrast, “the work of art … is not only the outcome of imagination, but operates imaginatively rather than in the realm of physical existences. What it does is to concentrate and enlarge an immediate experience.” The machine–art metaphor accurately contrasts data and information with knowledge as well as industrial and knowledge societies. As with a machine, data and information are of the world; as with art, knowledge is of the mind. Whereas the machine is a tangible thing that gets diminished with use, knowledge is imaginative and enlarged with application. Hence, in contrast to the machinery of the industrial society, the knowledge society is characterized by intangible assets and resources. Finally, as with the machine, the industrial society is of the imagination; as with art, the knowledge society is in the imagination.
Continuing with the machine–art metaphor, Dewey (1934) states: “The formed matter of esthetic experience (art) directly expresses … the meanings that are imaginatively evoked; it does not, like the material brought into new relations in a machine, merely provide means by which purposes … may be executed. And yet the meanings imaginatively summoned, assembled, and integrated are embodied in material existence…” Similarly, unlike an industrial or service organization, the design of the knowledge organization is tied to the human imagination and the character of knowledge itself—this makes it substantially different than designing a manufacturing or information processing organization. Designing the knowledge organization requires that we formulate the elements to summon the imagination and create knowledge, assemble and integrate the new knowledge with other knowledge threads, and embody the outcome in a physical world. Such elements are the “stuff” of design.
The machine–art metaphor encapsulates our research into knowledge and the organization. The knowledge economy is handicapped by its industrial history—our education, management, and legal systems carry the legacy of the industrial era into the modern era. For example, a performance review is an artifact of industrial work where performance is compared to a predetermined specification or set of goals. The performance review still exists today—complete with forced distribution quotas and rankings. How is this useful in an organization which makes its living by thinking?
(We borrow from the title of Davenport’s (2005) book Thinking for a Living—a good metaphor for knowledge work, which we elevate to include the knowledge organization as well as knowledge work.)
The knowledge organization concentrates, enlarges, and embodies its imagination into physical products and not‐so‐physical services. Knowledging, as with art making, is an imaginative endeavor that operates imaginatively, concentrating and expanding itself with use. In the knowledge organization, everything we design and manage should promote imagination and thinking, concentration and enlargement, integration and application.
How, we may ask, do we design a knowledge organization? Is it really different than designing traditional organizations? As we will see in subsequent chapters, one anecdotal solution is to “do the opposite.” If the factory system requires control, the knowledge system (KS) demands autonomy; if the factory system requires the formal implementation of strategy and knowledge (i.e., top‐down, early knowledge binding), the KS demands that we first gather or create knowledge and then implement through lateral relations (i.e., bottom‐up, late knowledge binding); and so on. Of course, as interesting as “doing the opposite” may be, a formal approach to design is required.
In this regard, it is instructive to continue with the art metaphor. In 1908, Henri Matisse described the actual process of painting: “If, on a clean canvas, I put at intervals patches of blue, green and red, with every touch that I put on, each of those previously laid on loses in importance … It is necessary that the different tones I use be balanced in such a way that they do not destroy one another. To secure that, I have to put my ideas in order; the relationship between tones must be instituted in such a way that they are built up instead of being knocked down. A new combination of colors will succeed to the first one and will give the wholeness of my conception.”
How do we select and order our ideas so that each reinforces rather than undermines the other? In our previous book, Organization Modeling, we introduced several artifacts for the formal selection and ordering of organizational design elements (Morabito et al. 1999). Our approach to organization design included the idea of “organization molecules” for the domains of organizations—process, information, culture, and other domain‐specific molecules. Organization molecules give structure and order to the domains and may be considered organizational building blocks. In Chapter 4, we introduce a “knowledge molecule” for the domain of organizational knowledge work.
While we finished Organization Modeling with a short discussion of knowledge (K), in this book it is appropriate that we concentrate fully on K. Despite the recommendation of our students, we never developed a “knowledge molecule.” This is because designing KM carries with it the weight of knowledge itself—it is inherently different from, say, designing a business process. As with Matisse painting a picture, the colors and tones must be selected and balanced to bring out a larger whole, even when neither the goals nor the colors are fully known in advance. In fact, as we will subsequently see, the colors of knowledge are everywhere in our society. Furthermore, the colors and tones are in the hands and mind of an artist—they are not mechanical pieces readied for assembly according to a blueprint. Hence, we think of K design more as an artistic rather than as an engineering endeavor, operating dynamically in the imagination, much as Matisse painting a picture.
Despres and Chauvel (2000) have observed that KM is “intuitively important but intellectually elusive”; hence, from a management perspective KM is “everything and nothing.” This is a critically important observation because, indeed, KM is everywhere and thus cries out for the structure—that is, the ordering of ideas—necessary to bring coherence to the discipline. The world is surrounded by knowledge—the impact of KM is everywhere (see Figure I.1a).
Whereas most approaches to KM concentrate on the organization, we have extended the discussion to the very small and the very large (see Figure I.1b). Again, KM is everywhere and demands an integrated line of thinking.
This book is based on our graduate course delivered at Stevens Institute of Technology, “Design of the Knowledge Organization.” In this course, we discuss the discipline of KM from a variety of perspectives. Accordingly, the organization of this book is as follows:
Knowledge is an integral construct and a discussion of K is better understood as such. This is in contrast to modular thinking, which characterizes mechanical design. Indeed, knowledge design is more like painting a picture than designing a machine—writing this book illustrated this point to the authors.
Our solution has been to combine topics into a handful of themes, each of which is somewhat dense and can be expanded into a separate book. We believe our organization will promote its use by students, faculty, researchers, and practicing managers. This is illustrated in Figure I.2.
The chapters in this book are organized around “themes.” Themes have an architectural flavor and remain comparatively constant; only their content changes. In the new and dynamic discipline of KM, we believe it advantageous to establish stable themes. Each of these “territories” of KM contains a variety of ever‐changing topics. Furthermore, since knowledge is like a spider web where everything is connected to everything else (in addition to being recursive), several topics require discussion in more than one context (i.e., territory). An obvious example is knowledge creation, a topic with a stand‐alone discussion in KM literature but also one that manifests itself in every context—business process and strategy, for example. Accordingly, we recommend that you read each theme or chapter in several sittings and cross‐reference other chapters when necessary:
Culture, strategy, work, conversations—virtually every human activity or endeavor, even the layout of your office or school, is a K system. This book is a journey through such systems from the perspective of the organization. Again, we do not cover every possible KS, but we invite the reader to join our journey as we explore several of the endless possibilities. Also, we ask that you consider for yourself the KS with which you have experience—even your personal culture—and how it fits into the new world of knowledge organizations.