Review on Seminars

From Thursday Seminar

The topic for today is 9. What is the relationship between Individual and Organizational knowledge? How can they be transformed? Tacit to Explicit and Explicit to Tacit. From the team discussion, we have go through the possible definition of Individual and Organization¡¯s Tacit and Explicit knowledge and build up scenarios that how to transform between those four types of knowledge. For me, the most important gain from this topic is the awareness of in the real organization – how to translate people tacit knowledge into organizational knowledge. Below is a simple summary of thoughts that in form of basic procedures (not all necessary) to achieve it in terms of effective Knowledge Management.

For Organization:
Consider the impact of Leadership and a balanced reward system.

(1)Individual Tacit to Individual Explicit:
Achieved by motivate employee to share tacit knowledge, encourage them to exchange both form of knowledge. Organization should have a health organizational culture that involves tolerance-failure, people empowerment, appreciate people value and respect to employees¡¯ contribution.

(2)Individual Knowledge to Organization Explicit:
Need capture employees¡¯ knowledge, test of understanding and avoid misinterpretation. Encourage people express their suggestion and appreciate its potential value.

(3)Organization Explicit to Individual Knowledge:
Achieved by exchange of knowledge, such as provide access to the collection of knowledge database, better organize and store of database structure.

(4)Organization Explicit to Organization Tacit:
This procedure is take place while collected knowledge is reflected, studied and keep reviewed. Create value for organization and bring insight to other people. All about manage (include create value) of knowledge, and make use to knowledge.

Example of organization tacit knowledge is when a successful leadership is performed in a certain level of the organization, even if that person left the organization, the way of leadership that have been introduced are likely to remain into the organization and act as part of the organization tacit knowledge or culture. And this organization tacit knowledge is the most valuable asset of the company.

Once organization explicit knowledge is translated to tacit knowledge, its value is unlikely to be lost (hard to discover or have an awareness of existence) to other company or studied and copied (only physical and surface could be observed and copied). Consider the unsuccessful examples for external companies try to study and implement Toyota Production System.

For me:
In order to transfer individual tacit knowledge to others, I need to consider the issues of:
Introduce the Win-Win mindset and Find support;
Awareness of SoPK ¨C understands the company as a whole system; Appreciate its value and culture; Understand people philosophy and Variations embedded in the system; Keep learning / reflecting on necessary knowledge.
Ability of influence people, individual¡¯s thoughts and behavior, value and mindset, and organizational culture,

Thoughts about introduction of mark-reward blog reflection:

As we know Dr.Deming says 80% of errors is due to the system, but in terms of attitude and purpose – I believe, 100% due to individual, or human influence (external element do have influence, but once again, depend on individual people how strong their believe holds).

Look at Paul’s approach, I am not saying that is the most perfect one. But we need have an awareness, that is all we have – the current best solution. We suppose to view this mark reward as the short term profit that encourage us to try blog, and we should discover by ourselves that the true benefit lay in the reflection process that curried out on daily basis. And then, we can keep this blog version of reflection without external reward, because we understood its true purpose and embedded benefit.

I admit that, this method is misleading, But I have to say, this is our best shot. Look at six-sigma, method itself did no harm to people, but still, many people now view it as a completely rubbish. Are the tools that stupid? Is the theory really old-fashion? Sure many people fail to implement it, and discovered its limitation and misleading. But ask once again, did the tool failed them or their own quality stopped them?

Consider years ago, people are crazy about six-sigma and rush into it without understanding, for this kind of behaviors, are they in good quality? I treat them more like gambler and unreasoning (blindness) follower rather then thoughtful businessman or don¡¯t even mention the word leader (also leader for himself). I believe many companies apply six-sigma because they heard the ability to cut down cost, if that is all their attitude and purpose, no wonder (not accident) they fail ¨C It is a consequence of their input (mindset, attitued, behavior).

We say people control their own destiny, but we do not say people only control 20% of the destiny. My view is, you go as far as your effort, only your imagination could stop you.

: 30 Mar 2007 01:36 |  Tags: Eee Kbam |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem