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:

  1. Instill a knowledge vision
  2. Manage conversations
  3. Mobilize knowledge activists
  4. Create the right context , and
  5. Globalize local knowledge

3. Five organizational knowledge creation steps:

  1. Sharing tacit knowledge
  2. Creating concepts
  3. Justifying concepts
  4. Building a prototype
  5. Cross leveling knowledge

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

  1. Quality of knowledge
  2. The speed with which that new knowledge is created
  3. Employee satisfactionIntangible improvements
  4. Corporate Image
  5. Relation with suppliers and
  6. 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