Authors: Georg Von Grogh, Kazuno Ichijo and Ikujiro Nonaka

Book Summary:

Title: Enabling Knowledge Creation – How to unlock the mystery of tacit knowledge and release the power of innovation

Authors: Georg von Grogh, Kazuno Ichijo and Ikujiro Nonaka

After my presentation about knowledge management, you sensitize me not only to focus on the technical and informational side of knowledge managementbut also on the human and organizational culture side.

In this book the authors explain how to establish a corporation structure and culture in which the employees share and especially create new knowledge voluntarily. In their opinion the key to innovative and seminal idea is tacit knowledge. The authors think that knowledge is not manageable. Thus they talk not from knowledge management but rather from knowledge enabling.

In this book are new concepts explained with additional examples about how knowledge in organizations can be created and used.

I decided to make not a summary in the traditional way because I think this book gives us so many good insights in a knowledge management approach which is focused on tacit knowledge. I created an extend version of a table of content.So you can have in a short time a good insight in the book.

Chapter 1: From Managing to enabling knowledge

1. Not knowledge management but rather knowledge enabling. This interpretation includes facilitating relationships and conversion as well as sharing knowledge across an organization or beyond geographic and cultural borders. 4

2. Five knowledge enablers:

Instill a knowledge vision
Manage conversations
Mobilize knowledge activists
Create the right context , and
Globalize local knowledge

3. Five organizational knowledge creation steps:

Sharing tacit knowledge
Creating concepts
Justifying concepts
Building a prototype
Cross leveling knowledge

4. Knowledge enabling emphasizes human relationships and good communication; it can have a positive impact on:

Quality of knowledge
The speed with which that new knowledge is created
Employee satisfactionIntangible improvements
Corporate Image
Relation with suppliers and
Other strategic partners

4. Microcommunities of Knowledge

Especially small communities can encourage the knowledge creating process
Characterized:
Face to face interaction
Common fields of interest
Corresponding forms of behavior
Formed Top down or Bottom up
Focus is on creating knowledge

Chapter 2: The limits of knowledge management: Why so many barriers exist.

1. Individual Barriers to knowledge creation

Limited accommodation

Threat to self-image

2. Organizational barriers

Need for a legitimate language
Organizational stories
Organizational procedures
Company paradigms

3. Pitfall of knowledge management

1. Knowledge relies on easily detectable, quantifying able information

2. Knowledge management is devoted to the manufacturer of tools

Some measure the quality of knowledge
Others prepare the organization to retain the knowledge of the leaving employees
Tools often constrains the employees to much
Most important is a climate which fosters: trust, care and personal networks
Tools should not be imposed

3. Knowledge management depends on a knowledge officer

Better: Resource allocation for knowledge creation is the responsibility of line managers
Knowledge creation should be without boundaries, involving multiple disciplines, multiple functions and organization members with different experience.

4. How knowledge Enabling avoids the pitfalls: Three premises

1. Knowledge is justified true belief, individual and social, tacit and explicit.

2. Knowledge depends on your perspective

Upward and downward scaling are both important ways of knowing a phenomenon better

3. Knowledge creation is a craft, not a science

Chapter 3: Care in the organization – Why enabling context matters

1. Two contexts:

Hypercompetitive
Enabling

2. Four different actions:

Seizing
Transacting
Bestowing
Indwelling : Can affect social knowledge creation (47)

3. The need for care: From western philosophers to Ba

To care for other is to help them learn
Dimensions of care:
Mutual trust
Active Empathy
Lenience in judgment
Access to help
Courage
Indwelling in the workplace a practical guide:
Review the knowledge
Identify sources of tacit knowledge
Customer
Supplier
Strategic partners
Organizational units
Others
Establish caring relationships with each source of tacit knowledge
Build up a common experience base with each source of tacit knowledge
Allow for numerous reiterations of steps 4 and 5
Evaluate the results of indwelling

4. Care and knowledge enabling: How to build a good foundation

Creating trust
Create a sense of mutual dependence
Make trustworthy behavior a part of performance reviews
Increase individual reliability by formulating a map of expectations
Increasing active empathy
Invest in training in listening behavior
Might emphasize
Fostering helping behavior
Training in pedagogical skills
Training in intervention techniques
Making accessible help an element of performance appraisal
Sharing stories of helping behavior
Lenience, Courage and mentorship
Top Management must communicate this values

Chapter 4: Strategy and knowledge Creation (Ensuring Survival in the present and advancement in the future)

1. The responsibility of management is twofold:

Managers have to unleash the potential represented by an organization’s knowledge into value-creating actions. They need to identify what the organization know
Managers have to ensure the creation of unique knowledge, which provides a competitive advantage.

2. New strategic framework:

Survival strategies
Maintain the current level of success
Predominantly knowledge transforming
Advancement strategies
Emphasize future success
Necessary for knowledge creating companies
Predominantly knowledge creating

3. Advancement and knowledge creation

Knowledge creation process comprises 5 steps (see above)
Manager can’t embark on a strategy unless they don’t know how these steps are linked

Chapter 5: Enabler 1: Instill a knowledge vision

1. Vision

Foresight about a future
Present situation
Knowledge vision gives corporate planners a mental map of three related domains:
The world they live in
The world they ought to live in, and
The knowledge they should seek and create

2. Criteria for a good knowledge vision

Commitment to a direction
Generativity
Specific Style
Focus on restructuring the current knowledge system
Focus on restructuring the current task system
External communication of values
Commitment to Shaping Competitiveness

3. Management approaches

Top down visionaries
Expert visionaries
Distributed visionaries
360 Degree visionaries
Knowledge Creation as an overall organizational activity
5 useful management action
Identify and gather participants and organize the process
Build a common understanding among participants of what a knowledge vision is and the seven criteria for a good one (narratives)
Write up and use narratives of the future as platforms for the vision process
Allow ample time for instilling a vision
Consider the knowledge-vision process as a learning process

Chapter 6: Enabler 2: Manage conversations

1. Conversations that inspire knowledge creation require a number of Socratic ingredients:

Openness
Patience
The ability to listen
Experimentation with new words and concepts
Politeness
The formation of persuasive argument
Courage

2. Two distinct conversational purposes:

Knowledge confirmation
Knowledge creation
In the different stages of the knowledge creation process are different purposes needed

3. Four guiding principles for conversations that enable knowledge creation

Actively encouraging participation
Establishing conversational etiquette
Editing conversations appropriately
Fostering innovative language
A new metaphor or analogy leads to a new concept
The new concept sparks a conversation about what this might mean in practice, generating many interpretations
The circle of meaning gradually tightens and its boundary becomes increasingly visible
The circle narrows even more, representing the groups shared understanding of and agreement about new concepts

Chapter 7: Enabler 3: Mobilize Knowledge Activists

1. What a knowledge activist does three roles:

Catalyst of knowledge creation
Coordinators of knowledge-creation initiatives: (Three conceptual issues)
The Microcommunity perspective
Imagined communities
Shared maps of cooperation
Merchants of foresight
Purpose of knowledge activism
Initiating and focusing knowledge creation
Reducing the time and cost necessary for knowledge creation
Leveraging knowledge-creation initiatives throughout the corporation
Improving the conditions of those engaged in knowledge creation by relating their activities to the companies bigger picture
Preparing participants in knowledge creation for new tasks in which their knowledge is needed
Including the perspective of microcommunities in the larger debate on organizational transformation

Chapter 8: Enabler 4: Create the right context

1. Creating a shared knowledge space: Four kinds of interaction – The knowledge spiral

Originating
Conversing
Documenting
Internalizing

2. How to create a coherent enabling context, one that fits both their knowledge vision and business

Strategy.

The right context must be accompanied by the right organizational structure
Examples:
Toshiba ( Cross-divisional unit)
Maekawa (Task force)
Sony ( Platform/ virtual network, Empowered division)

Chapter 9: Enabler 5: Globalize local knowledge

1. Knowledge should not longer be considered as an abstract commodity, than can be sent from one part of the organization to another

Knowledge globalization should be should be carried out like this:
Triggering knowledge exchange
Cost effective mechanisms
Bulletin boards
Regular knowledge conferencing
Use of knowledge activists
Packaging & Dispatching
Re-creating
Own version of microcommunity
Selected group of participants
Unpack the explicit knowledge
Interpret what they see
Share tacit knowledge about their observations including their aspirations and hopes