Learning Lab Denmark

Learning Lab Denmark

Tools for the
Knowledge-Based Organization

Proposal for a Consortium

February 19, 2002

Ib Ravn, Ph.D.

Nellemann Konsulenterne A/S

Page 1

Tools for the Knowledge-Based Organization

1.Executive summary

2.Purpose of the consortium

3.Tools are ideas, practices and instruments

4.Knowledge: rehumanizing the organization

5.The scholarly literature

6.Possible partners and projects

6.1Master’s degree in knowledge management

6.2K-Hub: The intelligence unit of the knowledge society......

6.3Indicators for a networked society

6.4The Danish intellectual capital reporting project

6.5The Competency Council (Kompetencerådet)

6.6A study of best practices in knowledge management

6.7Expertise and ethics in knowledge workers

6.8A productive social setting for science

6.9The Research Management Project

6.10Case: Knowledge enablers in a biotech company......

6.11Case: Knowledge sharing in a consulting firm

6.12Case: Knowledge in a trade union

7.knowledge sharing in the consortium......

8.types of contribution to be made......

Nellemann Konsulenterne A/S

Page 1

Tools for the Knowledge-Based Organization

1.Executive summary

It is proposed that a consortium for research on and development of tools for the knowledge-based organization be established at Learning Lab Denmark.

The knowledge-based organizations must refine and use the knowledge held by its members and not confuse it with the information held by its computers. Knowledge specialists cannot be managed and directed in the classical sense. The organization needs to be rehumanized and conditions for reflection, learning and autonomy enhanced, so that its collective knowledge may be better used to create real value for its stakeholders.

To help organizations do this, tools need to be researched, sophisticated or invented. Broadly conceived, tools include ideas, such as theories, missions and business plans, practices, such as procedures and behaviors, and instruments, such as questionnaires, indicators, agendas and methods.

The intellectual context for this consortium is the literatures on the knowledge society, knowledge management and organizational learning. This is also the scholarly field to which research contributions are likely to be directed.

At this early stage, a dozen possible partners and projects for the consortium exist. They include a Master’s degree in knowledge management, a web- or print-based intelligence hub for the knowledge society, collaboration with the Danish intellectual capital reporting project, ongoing research on expertise and ethics in knowledge workers, a comparative study of competence development in five case organizations, case-based research on knowledge enablers in a biotech company, and development cases on knowledge-sharing activities in a engineering firm and in a trade union.

Although essentially without walls, the consortium is an experiment in knowledge sharing in its own right, in that the researchers and practitioners involved in the multiple projects will be induced to interact and cross-fertilize in a manner not usually seen in the academic world.

2.Purpose of the consortium

The purpose of the consortium is to initiate and co-ordinate research on and development of tools that help knowledge-based organizations contribute more effectively to society. The consortium is envisaged as a directed cluster of projects and activities that involve partners from academia and the private and public sectors in an effort to develop new practices and new insights into the better generation, sharing and application of knowledge in organizations.

Learning Lab Denmark will provide financing mostly in the form of seed money intented to generate matching funds from involved partners and funding agencies. A full-time consortium director will coordinate the activities, most of which will take place on location, in the involved companies and organizations. Learning Lab, however, can become the physical home for researchers for periods such as six and twelve months, thus stimulating learning across projects and consortia.

3.Tools are ideas, practices and instruments

The knowledge-based organization is currently the focus of much interest in the burgeoning field of knowledge management. This field grew out of information management and is still widely considered a matter of computers. The position taken in the present consortium, however, is that what may be stored on hard-disks and paper is information, but only when contextualized, imbued with meaning and embodied in people that think, feel and act does information become knowledge.

To further the interests of knowledge-based organizations, one may broadly conceive of “tools” that help it along. The tools to be considered by this consortium include ideas, practices and instruments.

1. Ideas. Practical ideas may lead to new products and practice; theoretical ideas to new understanding. When the twain meet, an idea – such as a theory of how things are or could be, a vision for a community, or a business plan – may emerge that inspire people to act differently and create their own futures. Such “a mobilizing idea”, as the Spanish philosopher José Orgeta y Gassett called it, need not arise fortuitously, but may be nourished and refined by the concerted theoretical, empirical and developmental efforts of a consortium such as this.
2. Practices. A knowledge-driven organization obviously cannot rely unthinkingly on established practices but must reflect on them, systematically. The consortium will study existing exemplary practices and experiment with new ones, and eventually try to inspire others to adopt those that meet with success – in knowledge sharing, learning, creativity, autonomy, effective value creation and the satisfaction of customers’ real needs.
3. Instruments. The organizations of the industrial age relied heavily on hard instruments to further rationalization, specialization, standardization, etc. The challenge of the knowledge-based organization is to derive soft instruments that are as pointed as these, but many times mores effective because based on insights into the motivational and intellectual processes of its knowledge-holders – the organization’s managers, employees, customers and other stakeholders.

4.Knowledge: rehumanizing the organization

“Knowledge” is a leading contender for the qualifier that will replace “industrial” society. Leaving aside the hype about the Internet-driven knowledge economy and e-this and e-that, the very intangibility, evanescence and subjectivity of knowledge are indisputably qualities quite unlike those of the classical factors of production – land, machinery, capital.

When knowledge is the medium of productive relations, many essentially human aspects of work and organizational life need to be understood and accommodated far better than previously. Industrial society induced people to be machine tenders and functionaries in factories and bureaucracies, and correspondingly mechanistic forms of management sprung up. Today’s highly educated knowledge specialists, however, demand that their interests and potentials for learning, reflection and development be considered. Basic material needs having been more than adequately met by industrialization, the farther reaches of human nature are next in line for inclusion in the workplace. Questions of value, community, meaning and mission are central to knowledge workers. They expect management to provide a fertile ground for their more or less autonomous efforts to provide goods ans services for the organization’s customers and clients. The organizational gardener who desires to cultivate this ground needs gardening tools – such as those to be developed by the Learning Lab consortium under consideration.

This consortium is appropriately a Danish effort, for in its smugness about high levels of welfare and education, Denmark is curiously deficient in knowledge-friendly forms of organization and management. Our hospitals, universities and schools are hardly organized to maximize reflection, learning and flows of knowledge. Rather, they remain primarily concerned with protecting intellectual turf and upholding territorial demarcations of knowledge and power. Trade unions are still grappling with the erosion of worker allegiance brought about by the waning of industrial society. Major efforts such as the new system of incentive-based wage supplements in the public sector (“Ny løn”) indicate that trade unions remain more concerned with pay and rights than with members’ opportunities for professional development and personal growth in the workplace.

The public sector is currently in the grips of the ideology of New Public Management, which emphasizes financial control, corporate planning and measurements of human services in a style reminiscent of the rationalistic ethos that took hold in the private sector in the 1960’s. Traditional production industries are forced by market pressures to cop out and relocate their shop floors to Eastern Europe or third-world countries. Relegating menial work to the nether regions and retaining knowledge work upstairs not only raises new ethical issues of intellectual colonialism, but also merely defers the hard problem: refashioning production management practices to fit a knowledge economy. Research-intensive companies in the biotech and pharmaceutical industries seem to manage their knowledge resources well enough, but even so-called knowledge-service businesses (consulting engineers, lawyers, accountants, management consultants) seem to dedicate too little time to reflection and research into the improvement of their services.

All told, there is much scope for knowledge-style development in private companies and public institutions. Despite appearances and self-congratulation, Danish organizational life is still far from being a picture of the knowledge-based society that supposedly cares for learning, professional development, autonomy, social values, environmental awareness and global responsibility.

5.The scholarly literature

Barely tens years old, the literature on the knowledge economy and knowledge-based organizations is already vast. A beacon is Peter F. Drucker, whose writings (Post-Capitalist Society, 1993, Management Challenges for the 21st Century, 1999) have long predicted the arrival of knowledge as the only resource of consequence. He urges managers to treat their employees as respectfully as one would volunteers, lest they find employment elsewhere, taking the company’s major resource with them.

In the business literature, Michael Polanyi’s (Personal Knowledge, 1958) concept of tacit knowledge has achieved the worldwide prominence it never obtained in philosophy. Ikujiro Nonaka and co-authors (The Knowledge-Creating Company, 1995, Enabling Knowledge Creation, 2000) have shown that knowledge-driven organizations succeed when they facilitate the flow between tacit and explicit knowledge and try to enable (rather than manage = manhandle) knowledge creation.

Other writers like Karl Erik Sveiby (The New Organizational Wealth, 1997) have taken a more financial tack and noted the difference between knowledge-based companies’ book value and their market value. They suggest that immaterial assets like knowledge may account for the difference and then try to measure the intellectual capital involved, so as to better attract investors. Leif Edvinsson (Intellectual Capital, 1997), who pioneered knowledge reporting at Skandia, the insurance company, divides intellectual capital into human capital (that leaves the office at five o-clock) and structural capital (that is owned by the company). This distinction underlies the widespread efforts to extract knowledge from organizational members, thus making the organization less vulnerable to employee withdrawal – an attempt to circumvent the challenge posed by Drucker: that of giving knowledge workers so much respect and autonomy that they choose to stay.

A book that has been widely read in Denmark is that by Thomas Davenport and Laurence Prusak (Working Knowledge, 1997), who present three dozen cases of how organizations have put knowledge to work for strategic goals. A less utilitarian approach is introduced by Etienne Wenger (Communities of Practice, 1998), who shows that learning is inherently social and must be conceived of as proceeding in communities of practitioners concerned with like tasks. Without respect for the social fabric of such communities, knowledge sharing in organizations will not take place – a perspective congenial to the Danish predilection for things social. A similar concern with the diffusion of learning processes in the organization is found in the literature on organizational learning, pioneered by Chris Argyris and Donald Schon (Organizational Learning, 1978) and advanced by the influential work of Peter Senge (The Fifth Discipline, 1990) and the Society for Organizational Learning.

Of particular interest in Denmark is the work on intellectual capital reporting by Per Nikolaj Bukh, Jan Mouritsen and co-authors (Videnregnskaber, 2001). In their view, an intellectual capital statement is more than a indicator-based snapshot of the knowledge possessed by an organization; it is a narrative tool for the directed processes of knowledge sharing and application in the organization.

These are but half a dozen highlights of the literature on knowledge in organizations, to which the present consortium may seek to contribute – through research activities such as those to be outlined below.

6.Possible partners and projects

At the present stage, a number of opportunities for research and development by the consortium exist, as do a number of prospective partners with kindred interests. Below are listed some of these activities, be they ongoing, about to be launched or still merely opportunities (the persons named are among those interviewed for the preparation of the present proposal). These project ideas are to be supplemented by projects more actively designed and directed by Learning Lab Denmark, once the consortium has been established and its director vested with the power to act accordingly.

6.1Master’s degree in knowledge management

At the request of the Ministry of Education a Master’s degree in knowledge management is being put together by a committee centered in the Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy at the Copenhagen Business School. The degree is aimed at professionals and will be part-time and extend over two years. Learning Lab Denmark is already a partner in this project.

6.2K-Hub: The intelligence unit of the knowledge society

The possibility of establishing a hub that will monitor, report on and promote the emerging knowledge society is currently being explored by the Swedish journalist Bjarne Stenquist, who is under contract with Learning Lab Denmark. The hub may be web-based (a magazine on the net), print-published and/or materialize as seminars summarized in journalistic form.

6.3Indicators for a networked society

A variety of indicators of non-financial performance and immaterial assets have been developed in recent years, including intellectual capital statements the balanced scorecard. A useful research effort would be to collect, order and streamline them for their more effective use by organizations.

6.4The Danish intellectual capital reporting project

Under the direction of professors Jan Mouritsen and Per Nikolaj Bukh, of the Copenhagen and Aarhus Business Schools, respectively, two research groups examine intellectual capital reporting in some 100 companies. The project also involves an expansion of its original focus on knowledge reporting into knowledge processes and their management generally. Both professors have expressed a keen interest in collaborating with Learning Lab Denmark in this matter.

6.5The Competency Council (Kompetencerådet)

Established by the business analysis house of Mandag Morgen, this council will shortly engage some eighty leading-edge managers and personnel specialists in a two-year effort to identify value drivers in five selected organizations in the dimensions of leadership, employees, tools, space, partners – and an as yet unknown factor X. Project manager Zakia Elvang has invited the consortium to undertake research on this otherwise practical and case-based effort.

6.6A study of best practices in knowledge management

A benchmarking type of study of best KM practices in consulting firms has been proposed to FRI, the association of consulting engineers and planners, by COWI knowledge manager Niels Jørgen Aagaard, who has invited Learning Lab Denmark to play a role in this research.

6.7Expertise and ethics in knowledge workers

The modern professional is widely praised for his or her expertise and the decades of training required for technical mastery. Now the social responsibilities and moral dimensions of professionals’ knowledge are being subjected to study in a very large research effort, termed Good Work, under the joint directorship of Howard Gardner of Harvard University (he of the many intelligences), Mihaly Chickszentmihalyi of the Claremont Graduate School (widely known for his work on flow), and William Damon of Stanford University, who is an authority on moral development. Their main Danish collaborator, Hans Henrik Knoop, associate professor at the Danish University of Education, is looking forward to pursuing this line of work in a close partnership with Learning Lab Denmark.

6.8A productive social setting for science

Recent research conducted at the Department of Sociology at the University of Copenhagen suggests that the nature of the social setting provided for scientific research in laboratories and university departments is an important co-determinant of the quality of the science produced. The principal investigator, dr.phil. and psychologist Bo Jacobsen, is interested in pursuing the implications of this for high-level knowledge work in organizations generally, in a collaborative effort with the consortium.

6.9The Research Management Project

Now in its third year, this multi-center project seeks to apply insights from research management to organizations generally, on the premise that in the knowledge economy, the production of knowledge is no longer the exclusive privilege of research institutions but expands to private-sector companies as well. One of the project directors, associate professor Søren Wenneberg of the Copenhagen Business School, is set to explore areas of mutual interest with the consortium.

6.10Case: Knowledge enablers in a biotech company

What enables knowledge sharing in a large biotech company? Can an indicator system be set up to monitor the knowledge sharing? A Ph.D. project by Martin Impgaard will explore these questions at NovoZymes. The project is sponsored jointly by NovoZymes and Erhvervsforskermidler (government funds for business-relevant research). This research is linked to the intellectual capital reporting project mentioned above.

6.11Case: Knowledge sharing in a consulting firm

Highly specialized or otherwise segregated departments in knowledge-creating businesses like consulting engineers need new practices of company-wide knowledge sharing so as better serve customers whose needs are not so fragmented. The vice-president of development at a major such firm, Henrik Kærgaard of NIRAS, wishes to accelerate his company’s knowledge activities in a reflective partnership with Learning Lab Denmark.