Joe Firestone: The Knowledge Life Cycle

"Need to Know", "Need to Share"

Fri, 23 Jul 2004 14:57:49 GMT

The Evening of the Deluge (J. W. M. Turner, 1843)

"The Need to Know" and "The Need to Share"

I think I'd like to take a break from "The Poverty of Communitarianism" for awhile and consider some other matters. One of these is politics. Today, the 9/11 Commission released its long-awaited report. The rare display of bi-partisan unity, directness, and commitment to the need for reform was notable in this campaign season. Lee Hamilton, the Vice-Chairman of the 9/11 Commission, in his initial summary remarks at the Press Conference accompanying the formal release of the report, said that we need a basic change of attitude in the intelligence community from "the need to know" to "the need to share". And Hamilton as well as other Commissioners emphasized the fragmentation of information about terrorism before 9/11 and the need for structural change in the US intelligence community to facilitate both an end to fragmentation and integration of information to let us see the patterns of terrorist activity and threat. Of course, there is little to argue with in this diagnosis from the point of view of First Generation Knowledge Management. The commission found "stovepipes" in the intelligence community aided and abetted by the doctrine of "the Need to Know", and the cure for that problem seems most immediately to be the integration of stovepipes and the substitution of "the Need to Know" with "the Need to Share." But will this recommendation really make us safer? Is it only information integration that we need to thwart the terrorists?

"The Need To Know" Can Mean Different Things

Of course, my answer to these last questions is that information integration will not make us safer, because we need more than just that to thwart the terrorists. In fact, what else we need is to "know" more about what the terrorists are likely to do. So apart from "The Need to Share" we also have "The Need to Know" but, of course, my "Need to Know" is not the same as "The Need To Know" Lee Hamilton was talking about. That "Need to Know" is about a situation where information or knowledge already exists in the intelligence community and access to it is restricted by security regulations in such a way that it is "stovepiped" and is unavailable to people in the community who need it to solve problems. In other words, that "Need to Know" is a negative doctrine about constraints that produces fragmentation and mal-integration of our intelligence knowledge base.

In contrast, our current "Need to Know" is about situations where the information or knowledge we need to make a decision does not exist and our problem is the knowledge gap between what we know and what we need to know. This "Need to Know" is about the need to solve problems effectively and about new policies in the intelligence community that will enable better success at making new knowledge that works against the terrorists.

"The Need to Know" and "Groupthink"

This second meaning of "Need to Know" brings us to the recent report of the Senate Intelligence Committee. While recognizing "stovepiping" as a problem, that report also attacked "groupthink" at the highest levels and attributed our intelligence failures to it. But what is "groupthink"? Stripped down to its essentials, "groupthink" is a problem solving process in which the range of tentative solutions and the range of criticism and evaluation of them are restricted so as to bias knowledge production towards the dominant opinion in the group. As much as we need information integration and to instill "The Need to Share", we need even more to ensure that our new better integrated intelligence community has healthy and "open" problem solving patterns. We need such patterns to encourage members of the community to create innovative solutions that have been subjected to and have survived our best efforts to refute them.

The danger in current proposals for a new Intelligence Directorate is not that they won't solve the problem of information integration, but that they may do so at the expense of imagination, creativity, and critical evaluation of proposed solutions to problems and intelligence estimates. In that case we will have more failures, more commissions, and more reorganizations, but no solutions to our intelligence problems.

"Fighting the Last War"

In the end, the 9/11 commission investigated 9/11 exhaustively and made recommendations for how another 9/11 can be avoided. But what about another Iraq? What about another 9/11 where the problem is not fragmentation of information, but a "glut" of conflicting information all integrated in the new National Directorate of Intelligence? If our objective is information integration, I'm sure the 9/11 commission is right in recommending a new National Directorate of intelligence with real authority over the community. But authority is always a two-edged sword. It can create the greater integration of information we need, along with a greater capacity for rapid response to threats. But, we must also see to it that the new Directorate runs an "open", adaptive, intelligence enterprise. And that means building both more creativity and more criticism into the intelligence gathering and estimation process. In reorganizing the intelligence community, we must not "fight the last war". We must build not just to fulfill "The Need to Share", but also to fulfill the real "Need to Know", the need to solve problems, to close knowledge gaps, that arise in the course of their intelligence work.

Poverty -- Summing Up Act-KM

Mon, 19 Jul 2004 03:20:54 GMT

M31

The Poverty of Communitarianism: Summing Up Act-KM

So where does act-KM fit? Is it a communitarian system? Is political communitarianism its characteristic form of politics. Is epistemological communitarianism its dominant theory of Knowledge Claim Evaluation? I'll summarize the record, and draw some conclusions in this post. But first, let's review some of the basic concepts relevant to our analysis.

Review of Concepts

Epistemological Communitarianism includes a theory of knowledge claim evaluation which makes an appeal to a consensus or community-held view as a basis for justifying knowledge claims as true and certain, or, more recently, as probable, or at least, acceptable. Epistemological communitarianism, doesn't just lead to impoverished results: it leads to holding basic ideas beyond questioning and test. It closes off the possibility of change in these ideas and thus restricts the range of adaptations and co-evolution available to us in the face of environmental change.

The alternative to justificationism is criticalism, the idea that adds to fallibilism the notion that we are rational only to the extent that we hold our knowledge claims open to continuous criticism and testing in order to eliminate the errors in them. Criticalism, like justificationism, represents a general category of theories of evaluation. Just as epistemological communitarianism is a type of justificationism, critical rationalism, comprehensively critical rationalism, critical coherentism, and critical scientific realism are types of criticalism.

Political Communitarianism is a form of political system in which decisions are made according to the perceived consensus of the system's members. It is different from Democracy in that it does not specify majority rule or formal voting as mechanisms for decision making, though it sometimes may make use of these. Instead, a group elite, with the authority to make binding decisions, attempts to make these on the basis of attempts to evaluate what that consensus is on a particular issue. It is a salient characteristic of political communitarianism that the elite views itself as representing the community and as obligated to make any decision about the group on which there is a perceived consensus. That is, the elite recognizes no limits on the community's authority to legitimize its decisions by the means of perceived consensus.

Thus, political communitarianism, like Greek Democracy and Rousseau's popular democracy, is not a constitutional political system. From the viewpoint of adaptation, it restricts membership in the system to those who accept the consensus norms, and thereby, ceteris paribus, it restricts the adaptive range of the community, because it restricts the variety of opinions, ideas, and creative expressions available to it.

Political Communitarianism in Act-KM

Act-KM is wedded to political communitarianism. You can see it in the way many group members as well as group moderators acted when Mark and I vigorously and persistently expressed views they disagreed with.

Members believe that there is nothing inappropriate about writing to moderators to urge action against those expressing views they don't agree with if those views are expressed persistently. Of course, these members claim that they are bothered by such things as style of expression, length of posts, the fact that posts are "boring", and sometimes rudeness of those they disagree with. However, they almost never complain about these characteristics when posts they agree with exhibit them.

In addition, some members feel quite comfortable about sanctioning other members whose views they disagree with by commenting on their posting styles and by rudely asking them to stop posting. During December of 2003, in the period leading up to Incident One, both Sylvia Marshall and Serena Joyner spoke directly to the theory posters trying to "shush" them. On 12/08/03 there were 5 posts, including Sylvia Marshall's expressing discomfort over the strong disagreements and personal tone being expressed in the theory posts. Serena Joyner's "Drowning out the little Voices" post on 12/16/03, described her "feeling a little swamped . . . drowned out by this incessant, highly theoretical, "your camp - our camp" style discussion". She also said:

"I support debate - I dislike long-winded, highly theoretical debate when it is repeated again and again. Make your case and move on! The battle won't be won here."

Joyner's rather rude "little voice" was echoed by a chorus of 12 other "little voices", all posting on 12/16/03 all supporting her call to end the theory exchanges.

Group sanctioning of theory discussions was observed again in April after a period of 20 days in which theory discussions had proceeded without visible acrimony. Then on 04/21/04 Stuart Kay posted "Cat Among the Pigeons" a post whose title seemed to crystallize discomfort with the theory exchanges. Sylvia Marshall attacked the "dramatics" and "grandstanding" of certain posters, and Robert Perey responded to one of my replies to Stuart Kay with the words "frig me". On 04/22/04, perhaps noting that these two posts went unmoderated by Mark Schenk, Stuart Kay delivered the most far reaching series of personal attacks, labels and ad hominem comments since the theory posts started in December. David Hawthorne sent in a rare (for him) post that used labeling. Greg Timbrell followed with a comment on list culture asking Mark and I to change our posting style, and, in particular to back off close examination of the logic of the views presented by other members of the community. In effect, Greg was saying it's not the practice of this group to engage in close logical analysis of posts that are often framed in a casual way by people in their spare time and that will therefore always provide opportunities for criticism. Paul James then followed with a flat request that we take our "discourse and diatribe off-line."

After Paul James's post, the community's reaction tailed off and the theory discussion also began to wind down. Public group sanctioning of theory discussions did not return in May, but there was evidently considerable off-line pressure placed on Mark Schenk to stop further postings on similar issues that began on May 17th and continued through May 26th.

For the most part these exchanges were civil and their frequency was very dense from May 17th to 24th. There were a few conflictful exchanges involving, Dave Snowden, Mark McElroy, Greg Timbrell, and myself. On the 26th, Greg expressed his great dissatisfaction with the course of interaction in the group, in a post entitled: "I Don't Think I Can Take It Anymore". He said that he had joined the group in 02/02, had participated in great discussions, and had been fascinated by the dynamics of the group, he then said:

"But lately, I find myself becoming less interested mainly because I am finding certain contributors too dominating and extremely boring.

He then finished by saying that he would turn off automatic e-mail from the group for 6-12 months and the check to see if anything was different.

Greg's post was immediately supported by Larry Chait, who objected to the length of many posts. He said:

"I believe knowledge is best and most effectively shared when done in transmissions of five sentences or less. And so I am almost done. And now my message is complete."

At that point, Mark Schenk intervened to block posting from Mark and I (to be discussed just below), Stuart Kay immediately responded with a Haiku of appreciation, and Natalie Andrews delivered a perfect expression of communitarian sentiment praising Mark saying:

"Mark,

you are our representative - we ARE self-moderating and self-managing. It is our Will.
BTW ... Love your work .... thank you :)" (Emphasis added)

In addition, there were 8 other expressions of support for Mark Schenk, not including Greg Timbrell's graceful thank you.

Though May is notable for its relative absence of posts in which some members attempt to moderate others, behind the scenes opposition by members to the posts is reflected in Mark Schenk's posts to Mark and I and to the group at large. Though sanctioning in May was not public, members did not hesitate to use off-line pressure to stop the posts, and in the face of that pressure Greg's decision to lower his level of participation in the group triggered action by the moderator.

In order for it to work, political communitarianism needs both members who believe in it, who sanction other community members, and complain to moderators; and also moderators who are willing to serve those members. Mark Schenk and other act-km moderators seem to view themselves as servants and instruments of the community, as obligated to reflect the consensus of the members, and as dedicated to preserving the community and protecting it against "excessive" conflict caused by too vigorous interchange. This is reflected in Mark Schenk's various posts to the group during the theory exchanges. On 12/10/03 he said:

"We just need to ensure people are not discomfited by the passion descending to a level that attacks rather than analyses and critiques in a constructive manner."

In his post of 12/16/03 he said:

"What Do We Agree On? There are many more points of agreement in the various 'KM camps' than there are of disagreement. Instead of fighting to obtain the 'intellectual high ground', why not a cooperative effort to identify the points of agreement. I think a list of concepts or principles that we agree on is much more valuable than tedious debate over issues that make me wonder if we can't see the wood for the trees."

On 05/27/04 he said:

"Regrettably, we have today taken action to temporarily remove posting privileges for a number of list participants. We hope that we can devise some model or agreement by which all can continue to participate. This action has been taken in response to overwhelming input from members. I consider it a serious step, and one that will undoubtably attract criticism. In the end; however, the decision reflects our belief that a vital community, albeit imperfect, is better than no community at all."

Mark is clearly dedicated to the idea that his role is to moderate conflict, perhaps even foster agreement, and also to respond to "the overwhelming input" from members. He also thought nothing of abandoning a level playing field by restricting the posting rights of the targets of those who asked for moderation. And, evidently, he did so very much on the basis of the number of people who complained and who unsubscribed. And he did this regardless of whether the behavior of those to be censored was civil, or if not entirely so, at least far less uncivil than many of those who were doing the complaining.

His actions also suggest he believes that members of act-km have no basic and inalienable individual rights of self-expression relating to their substantive views that cannot be limited by the community at large if it decides to do so. All "the community" has to do is provide evidence, through behind-the-scenes complaints to the moderator, that it wishes to censor those expressions, and Mark and the committee of act-km moderators will act. Not only did Mark Schenk and his committee bar future postings from Mark and I (most recently for a two month period), and in relation to a particular thread (during December), even Dave Snowden, but before taking such action he and they tolerated uncivil posts from those defending prevailing views. This was done even when the expression of our views was polite, or at least far more polite than the responses of defenders of more popular views.

Relativism and Epistemological Communitarianism in Act-KM

In an earlier blog post, covering the events of 12/03, I said that the record during December indicated that the community eschewed criticalism and practiced some form of justificationism, but I couldn't conclude that epistemological communitarianism was the dominant form of knowledge claim evaluation in act-km.

The exchanges in April and May reinforced the general pattern of opposition to criticalism and knowledge claim evaluation in the group. Criticism was generally approached in a gingerly fashion and it was the practice to end critical exchanges quickly and move on. Also, the opinion that there were many valid points of view on some issue, many ways of looking at a particular problem, and that no one point of view was better than any other was expressed on a number of occasions. Further, the view that there is no "absolute truth" was expressed in a number of posts.

In addition, throughout December 2003, and April and May of 2004, some members of the group expressed opposition to all lengthy discussions of issues, which, of course, means that they opposed all in-depth exploration of issues in the group. In turn, however, that implies they also oppose the introduction of any close criticism of the logic of ideas, in an effort to eliminate errors in such ideas, and to determine which of our many ideas is false, since this kind of exchange often requires lengthy discussions of them. All of the above suggests that the reigning epistemology for knowledge processing in act-km is not epistemological communitarianism, but relativism (a form of justificationism that denies an objective external reality or criterion for truth, and regards all truth and certainty as personal, local, and ‘relative’ to an individual – i.e., anti-foundationalist, but not anti-justificationist).

Of course, the pattern of interaction between other members of act-km, and Mark and I was different. In exchanges with us, there was a greater focus on the logic of argument during exchanges. And, of course, our posts reflected the belief that some knowledge claims were true and others false and that one of the important purposes of exchange in the group was to decide which ones were false. The pattern of practice in exchanges with us evidently created angst and controversy in the group. It was a pattern the group resisted strongly indicating that its opposition to criticalism and, critical rationalism, the specific version of criticalism that our posts embodied, and its support for relativism is a group attribute that endured from December 2003 through May 2004.

Even though relativism was the dominant ideology of knowledge processing in act-km, it was not the only epistemology characteristic of it. To see this we need to keep in mind the three-tier model I've written about in a previous post on Knowledge Management and Strategy. Focusing on that model for a moment, please note that the epistemology used by act-km members in their knowledge processing may be different from the epistemology they use at the level of Knowledge Management.

At the level of Knowledge Management, act-km members and the moderators seem to hold the idea that the theory of evaluation in knowledge processing should be relativism, and that it is beyond questioning, test, criticism, or even discussion. They all seem to believe that the knowledge claim that there are many competing "truths", all equally good, has been "enacted" and negotiated in their community, and that it is what the community believes and what it should practice. This, of course, is epistemological communitarianism. And it is the basis for the political communitarianism that proved so strong in act-km.

That is, it is because Mark and I tried to transcend relativism in the group by using close logical analysis to criticize the views of members that our posts were eventually blocked. This practice was opposed to the live-and-let-live attitude that others took toward logical analysis. Their attitude is necessary for relativism. The use of logic cannot be allowed to demonstrate that certain views are the product of faulty logic, or contain self-contradictions, or are impossibly vague, because that contradicts the idea that all views are equally valuable, but differing, perspectives on the same problem. That is, close logical analysis, when used to compare competing views, undermines relativism, and questions the basic theory of knowledge claim evaluation accepted by the act-km community. It, and the regulative ideal of seeking the truth, that we advocated along with it, are in direct contradiction with relativism. And the practice necessary to apply critical rationalism is different from the dominant practice in act-km embodying relativism. What is consistent with relativism, is the practice, common in act-km, of presenting alternative views to others, along with sharing information, even critical exchanges in which one side says "I disagree and here is my perspective." And this is the kind of interchange which normally prevails there. But again, what we don't see much of, outside of the context of exchanges with Mark and I, are attempts to say, "here is my alternative view, and I believe there are various problems with your own view, including problems with its logic". Because to say something like this is go against relativism and question the group consensus on it supported by epistemological communitarianism at the KM level.

Finally, will epistemological communitarianism in act-km spread beyond KM to knowledge processing? Will it replace relativism as the dominant theory of evaluation in knowledge processing in the community? I think there is some chance of that happening, but there are also forces maintaining relativism, as well. Relativism is favored by the desire of members of act-km to avoid conflict with one another, and to maintain a rough equality of professional status and recognition. The successful functioning of the community in sharing members' knowledge claims also favors the maintenance of relativism, since sharing in the group doesn't imply that "my knowledge is better than yours." The strong individualist and democratic tradition in Australia also works for relativism because it favors maintaining rough equality in the community.

Working against relativism is the evolution of support for certain positions and the natural desires of members of the group for individual recognition. The standards movement, for example, affords recognition to some, but not to others. It is also a model of epistemological communitarianism, no matter how frequently its supporters explain that their standards are not normative, but only informative.

Further, the more discussions in act-km focus on one or a few conceptual approaches the greater will be the tendency for that approach to be perceived as the consensus approach of the community. When that happens, the community's prior acceptance of the norm of avoiding both criticalism, and close logical analysis of ideas, will begin to favor the consensus-backed ideas. It will do this because even though new ideas can be stated in the group, they will be incapable, in the absence of fair comparison using logical analysis, of contributing to the falsification of the dominant views.

Over a period of time then, a paradigm will develop in the act-km group, and epistemological communitarianism backing that paradigm will set in. The very laxity of knowledge claim evaluation under relativism will become a barrier to change, and to the acceptance, as opposed to the mere stating of new ideas. Eventually however, even stating new ideas will become difficult because members of the group will fear looking silly if they state new ideas in opposition to the old paradigm. At that point, epistemological and political communitarianism will support each other and constitute a stable communitarian system organized around the dominant paradigm of standards and a popular conceptual approach. I'll leave it to the membership of act-km to guess which approach it will be.

Postscript

I'd like to thank Mark McElroy, my continuing close collaborator and sounding board for contributing to this and the other blog posts in this series on communitarianism. His insights have been of tremendous help in accounting for whatever quality these posts may have. And while he does not bear responsibility for my specific views, he has said that he wishes to associate himself with the general critique of communitarianism in KM list serv groups expressed in this series.

In addition to the books and classes referred to in the margins on this page, you’ll find much more information on the theories and models underlying this post at three web sites: www.dkms.com, www.macroinnovation.com, and www.kmci.org. Many papers on The New Knowledge Management are available for downloading there. Our Excerpt from The Open Enterprise . . . may also be purchased there. Our print books are available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or www.bhusa.com.

Poverty -- Incident Two

Thu, 15 Jul 2004 17:21:09 GMT

Guilin

The Poverty of Communitarianism: Act-KM -- Incident Two

This post continues with my account of events in act-km in May 2004.

The Incident

Just before my post and David Paterson's, recorded in my last blog post, Greg Timbrell expressed his great dissatisfaction with the course of interaction in the group, in a post entitled: "I Don't Think I Can Take It Anymore". He said that he had joined the group in 02/02, had participated in great discussions and had been fascinated by the dynamics of the group, he then said:

"But lately, I find myself becoming less interested mainly because I am
finding certain contributors too dominating and extremely boring.

So its time to turn off my automatic email delivery and take a break for
6-12 months or so. Maybe things will be different then

See you in a while."

On May 26th, Greg's post was supported by Larry Chait. Larry evidently objected to the length of many posts. He said:

"I believe knowledge is best and most effectively shared when done in transmissions of five sentences or less. And so I am almost done. And now my message is complete."

On May 27th, Mark Schenk, the moderator of the group sent the following off-line e-mail to Mark and I:

"Hi Joe and Mark,

The manner and level of your participation in the actKM group is causing considerable angst within this community. The main concerns are the frequency with which your posts contravene actKM netiquette in terms of posting length, and the prolific and dominating manner in which you are pursuing your agenda.

Due to the number of complaints regarding your behaviour and its impact upon the actKM community, and the dramatic rise in members unsubscribing (a number of whom having stated they are doing so as a direct result of your combined influence upon the group), the actKM committee wishes to advise that no postings from either of you will be forwarded to the list for at least the next two months (until August 2004).

I hope that during this period we can devise some model or agreement whereby you can continue to participate in the group in a manner that adds value to both the community and yourselves. I would welcome your suggestions as to how this might work.

This decision makes no judgement regarding either your opinions or agendas. It simply acknowledges that the manner in which you are pursuing them is having a serious negative impact upon the actKM community.

Regards
Mark Schenk
Convenor, actKm"

Mark Schenk also posted an announcement to the group, entitled "act-km Revisited", in which he said:

I hope that everyone takes time to read this message.

The ActKM Forum is a learning community dedicated to building knowledge about public sector knowledge management. It aims to provide an environment where members can create and share knowledge about public sector knowledge management issues. ActKM is a not-for-profit incorporated association that relies heavily on a small group of volunteers to moderate this group, organise our annual conference, manage the website and run our annual KM Awards.

We rely on the much larger group of people who participate and share with so much openness and goodwill on this list server to provide
the true sense of community that makes actKM what it is.

Our intent has always been for the list to self-manage, and self-moderate. This approach has proven very successful, until the last
six months, during which time list behaviour has been the cause of considerable angst for all (most?) concerned. We have continued
(with a few notable exceptions) the policy of letting the group self-moderate in the hope that 'things would sort themselves out'. This
has not happened.

Regrettably, we have today taken action to temporarily remove posting privileges for a number of list participants. We hope that
we can devise some model or agreement by which all can continue to participate. This action has been taken in response to overwhelming
input from members. I consider it a serious step, and one that will undoubtably attract criticism. In the end; however, the decision
reflects our belief that a vital community, albeit imperfect, is better than no community at all.

So, enough of the sombre tone, lets get some practical sharing happening...

Regards

Mark Schenk"

Mark's post was greeted with some favorable comment by 8 members of the group (including many who had contributed to the lengthy discussions), between May 27^th, and June 6^th. For example, on May 28^th, Stuart Kay contributed a Haiku:

"A sudden silence
Sense the quiet spaciousness
Gently to be filled"

And on the same day Natalie Andrews said:

"Mark,

you are our representative - we ARE self-moderating and self-managing. It is our Will.
BTW ... Love your work .... thank you :)" (Emphasis added)

And on May 31st, Greg Timbrell thanked Mark saying:

"For your emails of support and understanding
For exercising courage in your convictions
For relieving us of a heavy burden
For letting me be part of a community that I value
For informing me of what happened over the last week.

Now lets move on. . ."

Political Communitarianism in Act-KM in May 2004

There's not much doubt about the presence of political communitarianism in act-km in May 2004. Mark Schenk's post to Mark McElroy and myself spoke of the angst caused by our posts. He spoke of the excessive length of our posts and our prolific and dominating behavior. But what did we do?

The record shows that we did nothing but express our views and then respond to the views of others directed at us. No proof is present in the record that our posts are longer than others delivered in response to us. No proof is present that we were any more dominating than Dave Snowden or Stuart Kay, or others presenting their views on these subjects. According to the record, summarized above, our language during this period is, with one exception, less personal, intemperate, and ad hominem than the language of others responding to us. Further, no mention is made by Mark Schenk of the effect of our interlocutors' posts on the group. As the old saying goes "it takes two to tango", and we had a lot of help from others in keeping those debates going. So why were we singled out?

Adopting a broader comparative perspective, if we consider the level of conflict present in the period leading up to Incident One, and the level of conflict present during the April 2004 exchanges, the May interactions, though very frequent, were not nearly as conflictful and far less uncivil. In fact, there is a progressive increase in civility when we move from the December exchanges, through the April exchanges, and on to the May exchanges, as if act-km was beginning to adapt to the new views and posting styles Mark McElroy and I were introducing into the group.

The answer lies in Mark Schenk's statement to Mark and I:

". . . Due to the number of complaints regarding your behaviour and its impact upon the actKM community, and the dramatic rise in members unsubscribing (a number of whom having stated they are doing so as a direct result of your combined influence upon the group) the actKM committee wishes to advise that no postings from either of you will be forwarded to the list for at least the next two months (until August 2004)."

And in his announcement to the group:

". . . This action has been taken in response to overwhelming input from members. I consider it a serious step, and one that will undoubtably attract criticism."

In other words, the sanctions Mark Schenk took were motivated by complaints about our posts (that is, the "behaviour" of others, and not our "behaviour") and by unsubscriptions from the group. And Mark Schenk responded to these and to the trigger of Greg Timbrell's complaint and unsubscription, with his sanctions toward us. In doing so, Mark Schenk was responding to what he thought the community wanted, not to anything we did, and he did this without any regard to any "individual rights" that we might be expected to enjoy as participating members of the group.

Mark McElroy provided a very good analysis of the situation when, in his off-line final post to Mark Schenk on May 27th, he characterized communitarianism as:

"a type of social system in which ideas are accepted or rejected, sanctioned or not, or tolerated or not, depending upon whether or not the community consensus goes along with them.

Now the role of the moderator in such a system is strikingly characteristic because the moderator is, of course, there to exercise a "moderation" ethic. Everything is held to a community-centric test of acceptability. In communitarian systems, this is viewed as normal and quite acceptable. This is because a higher value is placed on consensus and harmony in such systems than on reason or truth. Both are expendable. Thus, probing inquiry and dialogue in such systems can only go so far. As soon as the level of discourse exceeds a certain threshold of disharmony or disagreement, communitarian rules come into play with a vengeance. The pretense of genuine inquiry is dropped, and the heavy hand of the community enforcer comes out of the woodwork - your hand, in this case.

Indeed, why have "moderators" at all? Only communitarian systems require them. That is, they need to moderate deviations from the norm in order to keep things in conformance with the community, consensus point of view. They need to moderate! Anything that threatens the prevailing paradigm is destabilizing, unwelcome, and must be censored - must be moderated. Ideas that threaten the status quo must be stopped, their proponents excommunicated, and the harmony and moderation of the group restored.

. . . In addition to the authoritarian and capricious role conferred on moderators in communitarian systems, there is the unchallenged assumption that any list member can approach the moderator, declare a breach of the communitarian ethic by some other member, and legitimately expect that the moderator will bow to their wishes. Members are free to engage in capricious witch hunts with the full expectation that moderators will bow to their wishes."

And all this is justified and motivated by the idea that the ultimate source of legitimacy in communities is the community itself, that only it has rights, and that its will must always be realized. Natalie Andrews made my point well in her post supporting Mark Schenk's action:

"Mark,

you are our representative - we ARE self-moderating and self-managing. It is our Will.
BTW ... Love your work .... thank you :)"

Mark Schenk was only acting in accordance with "the General Will" in blocking our posts.

Postscript

Poverty -- Road to Incident Two: Part Three

Wed, 14 Jul 2004 18:16:37 GMT

Peaks

The Poverty of Communitarianism: Act-KM -- The Road to Incident Two: Part Three

This post continues with my report of the act-km interaction leading to incident two.

Winding Down

In the first post of May 21st, I replied to Stuart Kay's "loud agreement" post saying:

"I think we are mostly in loud agreement, and I think it's true that in many organizations, Management strategy-based KM allows KM to encourage criticism, including criticism of management strategy, because the managers are wise enough to know that such criticism is good for them and the adaptive capacity of their organizations. Having said that, surely you can see that to define KM as an activity that must be aligned with corporate strategy, is to both exclude from the scope of KM, activities that are not aligned with corporate strategy, and also to provide a license to autocratic organizations to use KM in ways that are not consistent with its mission of building organizational adaptive capacity?"

Dave Snowden then responded to my previous comment on his post by thanking me for a "reasoned reply." He went on to explain further what he meant by "linear definition", explaining that it required a sequential relationship between strategy and KM. He also pointed out that Boards sometimes do concern themselves with KM, but that he thinks that the general trend of an increase in Board influence will begin to be reversed as the memory of Enron fades. He also mentioned factors other than too little Board influence that may account for corporate scandals.

Stuart Kay then sent in a reply to my post to him saying that he could see that the outcomes of KM's subordination to management-based strategy I pointed out previously were possible but that my statement was "loaded with assumptions" that "are not universally true." Dave Snowden then responded to Mark's post. He criticized "the extreme response to the use of "naïve" " and expressed his irritation at not being able to engage in conversation on multiple list servs without being subject to postings of this type. He also stated that such postings can destroy participation, but that "openness has its price." He declined to modify his original statement.

The next post was my response to Dave's post to me. I began by agreeing with most of what he said and then continued:

"but I also think that organizational forms can constrain the development and content of ideational structures over time, and I have problems with the notion of "inevitability" here. In any event, I think that a KM function that is Governance-based can help to keep the enterprise "open" and distributed in its problem solving capability, and I will, along with others who are beginning to write in this vein (Mark, Dale Neef, Don Tapscott, Bill Hall, and others), continue to make the case."

Dave then responded to me off-line, sending a note in which we exchanged final thoughts on the role of Governance-based KM from the point of view of dynamics in a complexity framework. We also both agreed that we had moved much closer as a result of our discussion.

The next post was Mark's response to Stuart Kay's question: Mark suggested that openness in knowledge processing would prevent some people from lying, cheating, and stealing, and would expose others. He also suggested that it would enhance innovation, and ended by saying that all of the above was of fiduciary concern, and "that is why KM ought to report to the governance function . . ." My next post was a response to Bill Hall's contribution relating our Governance-based approach to KM to complexity and autopoiesis and to Popper's work. I thanked Bill for making the connections, followed with some references to literature and then argued against the view that the Governance-based approach was "naïve", "utopian", or unrealistic. I pointed out that many innovations are initially viewed in these terms, that labels liked these often indicate opposition to the change involved, and that while there are many reasons of convenience that may explain such opposition, these are not reasons for believing that the Governance-based approach is wrong, or unrealistic, or naive. It is just evidence that the Governance-based approach to KM and The New KM, more generally, is a social innovation. In the next post I replied to Stuart's claim that I made universal assumptions saying "I did not think I said they were universally true. All organizations are not autocratic and all KM activities are not inconsistent with strategy. But how do these facts impact the point I was making?"

Jeff Popova-Clark then responded to my earlier post asking: "So are you saying that you are basing your disagreement with AS5037 on the assumption that management will create goals that are inconsistent with the long-term goals (or purposes for existence) of an organisation?" Bala Pillai began the exchanges of May 23 by agreeing with the case I made in my response to Bill Hall for the view that the Governance-based approach is not "utopian". Bala urged that we not simply assume limitations in our choices and possibiities. Bill Hall then answered Raymind Cheung's post by offering simple definitions of "knowledge", "management", and "knowledge management". Anne Day thanked Bill, while saying she did not have time to read every little bit sent to the list.

Stuart Kay then responded to my last note to him by saying that while I didn't claim that my assumptions were universally true my conclusions were based on them and that if my assumptions were not universally valid, then neither is my conclusion. He then said: "To adopt your principle from the other debate about definitions and standards, your conclusion is therefore falsifiable." I answered quickly and asked him which assumptions and conclusions he had in mind. Stuart answered and quoted a passage from our (Mark's and mine) paper on the Governance-based approach and showed that the assertions in the sentence were not universally valid and were "falsifiable". Stuart then quickly sent in another post in which he said:

"I dispute your conclusion that KM <cannot> be management based if that conclusion is based on the foregoing assumptions which I think are falsifiable. I also dispute your conclusion that the governance based approach results in <entirely different priorities> than a management based approach, again if your conclusion is dependent on those assumptions which I think are falsifiable."

Bala Pillai then posted a response to Bill Hall's definitions saying: "KM is the art of fueling the impossible, the possible and the acumen to know when to do which."

David Rymer began activity on May 24th by responding to my critiques of AS 5037. He offered the following criticisms along with frequent appeals to the authority inhering in standards committees and the ISO. "First your "Governance" model as an emerging area of development currently lacks the demonstrated track record or wide spread level of adoption in this country required for incorporation in a standard." Second, "your focus on Governance vs Management seems to have limited application in Government and community organisations which are major constituencies for the committee." Third, in his organization (The Law Council of Australia), the practitioners also manage and are on the Board so the problems we refer to are not applicable. Fourth, he finds the language I use "too linear, managerial, mechanistic and process oriented to adopt in my own day-to-day KM interactions." Fifth, he characterizes the Governance-based approach as one that "sounds like a 90's solution to an 80's problem when we're trying to work out what 2010 will look like!" And sixth, "The vast majority of people who criticise AS 5037 appear never to have read it!"

On May 25th, I offered a detailed response to David Rymer's post. To his first point, I replied that we were not proposing the idea of the Governance-based approach as a standard but pointing out that making alignment with strategy a requirement of the standard is the problem, not failing to endorse or approve of the untried Governance-based approach. I also said that since the standard that had been proposed excluded Governance-based KM as a possibility, it was demonstrably false. I also said that no amount of conventionalism and positive support for such a definition from practitioners and standards committees in Australia, or elsewhere in the world will remove the prima facie difficulty in contending that Governance-based KM is not KM. I then answered his second and third points by saying that the example he gave from his own organization in which practitioners, management, and board membership overlap, doesn't speak to whether our approach is generally relevant or not to those organizations where there is little overlap. I then pointed to many examples in government where Governance-based KM may have been helpful.

I next answered his fourth point concerning my language by pointing out that he was engaging in labeling and asked him to document his charge with quotations. I then described his fifth point as an ad hominem attack, and as a second exercise in labeling. Then I answered the attack anyway by asking some very leading questions about the relevance of the Governance-based approach to contemporary problems. Finally, I answered his last point by saying that it:

"is either another instance of an ad hominem attack, or simply irrelevant to my post. But in case you meant it to be relevant, I point out that it is not a comment on whether my criticism in any way misconstrues AS 5037. If you believe it does, let's see your analysis with appropriate quotations, If you don't think it does, then what's the point of implying that I've not read the AS 5037 definition of KM?"

This last exchange with David Rymer was somewhat conflictful. I hope it is clear however, that it was David who produced three unmoderated efforts at labeling or ad hominems, and that I only answered these, pointing out their logical status and invalidity.

Stuart Kay then offered a response to my reply to David, saying: "I expect I am going to cop flak for this, but I am foolish enough to do it anyway... ", Stuart proceeded to claim that, contrary to my implication in responding to David, the Bush administration engaged in high quality knowledge processing since it did a very effective job of suppressing information that didn't accord with their policy, and exaggerated information that did. I responded to Stuart by listing the Bush administration's shortcomings in knowledge claim formulation, and knowledge claim evaluation, including their failure to be self-critical and to consider alternative points of view about the post-war occupation, and the implications of what the consequences would be if their assumptions and forecasts were wrong. I summarized by saying that I thought their manipulation of the US into war was masterful, but that their calculations about what outcomes they would need to cope with were incompetent. David Paterson also responded to Stuart asking why his comments should "create any flack."

In my next post I'll describe Incident Two.

Postscript

Poverty -- Road to Incident Two: Part Two

Fri, 09 Jul 2004 20:40:41 GMT

Clouds at Sunset

The Poverty of Communitarianism: Act-KM -- The Road to Incident Two: Part Two

I'll continue my account of the road to incident two by describing further group interaction on May 20, 2004, a very busy day of exchanges.

Sharper Disagreements

Stuart Kay then entered the discussion with a lengthy, entirely civil, contribution centered around a fictional illustrative example entitled "Lost in Translation". After relating the example, he said:

"So where does this leave us? It seems to me that it leaves us at the point that KM is both a governance and a strategic alignment issue.

'Knowledge' itself is critical to the success of any organisation ('knowledge' is an integral part of governance). KM as a discipline, or a 'knowledge organisation' within an organisation, is only 'necessary' if essential to the survival of the broader organisation; if not 'necessary' then it is 'useful' to the extent that:

- knowledge sharing within the organisation is not optimal; and
- the benefits of the KM function / knowledge organisation outweigh its costs.

Is there, then, in the debate on this list a simple misunderstanding? Is one group talking about clever use (management) of 'knowledge' (implicitly and naturally integral to governance; and necessary for organisational adaptiveness), whilst another group is talking about the separately identified functional process of 'knowledge management' (an explicit component of the function of governance)? Is it really a difference in conceptual paradigm or is it in the shift of knowledge processing from the implicit to the explicit, or vice versa, that the difference in views arises?"

The next relevant post was my reply to Robert Kay's earlier response. I expressed appreciation of the standard committee's recognition that there are multiple definitions of KM and that their own was not absolute truth. My reply then focused on presenting various questions in order to confront Robert with the difficulties in his position that the "standard" definition was merely "informative" and not prescriptive. I explained that if it was not prescriptive, but was informative, it had to be descriptive. But if it was descriptive how could it be a standard, and why was it not true or false? I also replied to Robert Kay's argument that we should do standards now, by saying that I didn't think the choice was between doing standards now and waiting for some distant day when everyone will agree on what KM is. Rather, I said, we could just wait (say 5-10 years) until we have more general agreement on important principles and concepts.

Dave Snowden responded to Stuart Kay's post with an expression of approval for his illustrative example. Raymond Cheung responded to Dave's earlier post with the observation that our discussion had lost track of the original query and with request for simplification of the whole discussion and specifically for others to provide simple definitions of "knowledge", "management" and "knowledge management." Next, I responded to Dave Snowden's "naïve" post by pointing out that:

"We all know that Management has great power in organizations. The issue here is whether Governance-based KM can moderate that a bit by creating an independent center of power in the organization and introducing a more Open Enterprise in the knowledge processing realm. We say it can, you say it can't. But your arguments just above don't really speak to that question."

I then proceeded to express agreement with his point on "retrospective coherence," and I agreed that corroboration was needed for theories, and not merely support.

I next replied to Stuart Kay's post, by agreeing with some of it, but also disagreeing at various specific points. I summarized my discussion by saying:

"I think Mark and I are talking about both general adaptiveness and about formal structures that should be subordinate to Governance, but not to Management. And it is because we are concerned about adaptiveness that we favor the Governance-based approach. In my view, once again, KM is a function that is always present in human systems. In its informal state it is not subordinate to management and its strategy. When we institutionalize KM by establishing formal knowledge organizations, the question arises, "where shall KM be located in the formal organizational structure?"

Our answer is that it should be located within Governance because:

High quality knowledge processing resulting in high quality knowledge in use is of vital importance for all organizational functions, and KM is for creating high quality knowledge processing. Just because, as you have shown, other organizational functions are more vital than KM for immediate survival, Management will generally be biased against the KM function, constraining it in various ways over time. This is likely to result in lower quality knowledge for the organization as a whole, making it less adaptive than it otherwise would be. To prevent this, we must recognize the conflict of interest between Management and high quality KM and entrust oversight of it to a function that is less involved in day-to-day concerns than Management, and more involved with the longer-term fate of the organization. That function is Governance."

Jeff Popova-Clark responded to my response to Robert Kay by making the point that "the Governance-based approach to KM (as described by your paper) is consistent with KM being aligned with strategy (i.e. long term strategy = purpose of organisational existence - see my previous post)." He also pointed out that "a definition does not need to attempt to be "the truth". What it needs to be is functionally useful. A definition can be merely an agreed (but otherwise arbitrary) standard by which everyone agrees to adhere." Mark McElroy (still on 05/20/04), responded to the "naïve" charge in Dave's earlier post with a lengthy message whose challenging flavor I can best convey with the following quote:

"Naïve is it? I see. Is it naïve to say that boards are elected by stockholders? Is it naïve to say that boards are accountable to their stockholders? And to regulators as well? Is it naïve to say that CEOs are hired by boards? Is it naïve to say that boards are meant to hold CEOs accountable? Is it naïve to say that stockholders expect them to do so? Is it naïve to say that boards owe their stockholders a fiduciary duty to exercise oversight over the affairs of the organization?"

The remainder of Mark's post was full of other sharp rhetorical and sarcastic questions and other comments that expressed sharp disapproval of Dave's views. It also conveyed the sense that Mark was responding to a perceived insult in Dave's characterization of our view as naïve.

Robert Kay followed Mark's response to Dave, by responding to my previous response to him. Robert indicated he would not try to resolve our differences on standards, which were unresolvable, and he repeated his views that AS 5037 could be used as a starting point for learning. He then proceeded to argue that most of my points seem to go back to requiring that definitional standards be true, and that he couldn't understand that because sometimes I seemed to agree with him that there is no absolute truth about these things. He then asserted that standards could not be absolutely true because they were incomplete. I followed Robert's post with an answer to Raymond Cheung, referring him to one of my blog posts. Stuart Kay then responded to Mark's response to Dave by asking: "Are you suggesting that good KM in a governance model (or any other model) will prevent dishonest people, or people with political agendas, from lying, cheating and stealing?" Stuart also responded to my post saying: "Mostly I think we are in loud agreement." He then proceeded to comment on a few points. First, he claimed that a general statement Mark and I had made in our paper on the Governance approach was not universally valid. He also argued that many organizations were like his own in that even though KM was aligned with Management-based strategy it was also possible for it have input into strategy.

After Stuart's post I replied to Robert Kay. I stated that I thought we had come to a stopping place in our exchange except for one point. Then I replied to his contention that I seem to require "truth" in definitions by saying that I only require that they survive testing and criticism and thus not be demonstrably false. I ended by summarizing my views on the problems of AS 5037. Next, I also replied to Jeff Popova-Clark's post. I began by pointing out that the Governance-based approach is consistent with the long-term strategy of enhancing organizational adaptive capacity. But it is not necessarily consistent with strategy as formulated by Management, which may well be inconsistent with that goal, and I reiterated that it was this point that Mark and I were making. I then answered his view that definitions need not be true, saying that nominal definitions were conventional, but that real definitions such as KM definitions said something about the world and therefore should not be false. I applied this idea to the AS 5037 and KMCI definitions of KM pointing out that AS 5037 was surely false because it excluded Governance-based KM.

In the next blog post I'll report on the exchanges of May 21st and beyond.

Postscript

I'd like to thank Mark McElroy, my continuing close collaborator and sounding board for contributing to this and the other blog posts in this series on communitarianism. His insights have been of tremendous help in accounting for whatever quality these posts may have. And while he does not bear responsibility for my specific views, he has said that he wishes to associate himself with the general critique of communitarianism in KM list serv groups expressed in this series.

In addition to the books and classes referred to in the margins on this page, you’ll find much more information on the theories and models underlying this post at three web sites: www.dkms.com, www.macroinnovation.com, and www.kmci.org. Many papers on The New Knowledge Management are available for downloading there. Our Excerpt from The Open Enterprise . . . may also be purchased there. Our print books are available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or www.bhusa.com.

Poverty -- Road to Incident Two: Part One

Sun, 04 Jul 2004 22:07:53 GMT

Junction of the Thames and the Medway (J. W. M. Turner, 1807)

The Poverty of Communitarianism: Act-KM -- The Road to Incident Two: Part One

When the April theory exchanges ended on the 27th, interaction in act-km wound down for awhile. Over the next few weeks it primarily consisted of announcements and exchanges of information. Subjects included social network analysis, people taking intellectual capital with them when they retired, and organizational forgetting. Exchanges involving a greater degree of disagreement began again on May 17th, and evolved to Incident Two on May 25-27, after a high density of postings during the days leading up to May 25th. I'll describe these exchanges in a number of blogs, both to provide enough detail to give a feeling for the content of the exchanges, and also to provide a basis for analysis of the style of political interaction and knowledge claim evaluation in the community.

Initiation

Maureena Lockyer-Benzie, a newcomer to KM, asked (05/17/04) whether "the definition (AS5037) is the most appropriate. Other definitions would be appreciated." AS 5037, is the consensus-based definition of KM offered by the Australian Standards organization.

David Williams began the responses with a definition (05/17/04) based on the idea of an organizational process that uses knowledge and intellectual assets to generate organizational value. Later on that day, Patrick Lambe responded by referring to exchanges on the same subject in October 2003 that generated a lot of heat. He also said that a phenomenological definition of KM is that asking for a definition of it will produce a fight but no clarity in the concept, and he then offered the following view:

"A standard is a terribly useful thing for that very purpose - we can just pretend it's true and go about our normal business."

In other words, a standard definition is good because it resolves conflict, but not because it really introduces any clarity into the subject, or helps us to delimit its scope, or represents an addition to our knowledge.

On May 18th, Georges de Wailly stated that he agreed with Mark, and went on to state that KM is the activity of getting "the right information to the right person, in the right time, and in the right context". He also characterized KM as a "logistics of information." I responded to Maureena also by stating that there was no consensus in KM on a definition and referred her to a paper by Mark and myself discussing the issue. I also called her attention to a recent blog of ours on a Governance-based approach to KM, and pointed out that it was in conflict with AS 5037. Mark then responded to Maureena and Georges and took the position that KM definitions are "utterly political and counter-productive” and that we should not be concerned with definitions, but rather with purposes and value propositions. He then want on to criticize AS 5037 for making KM's alignment with strategy a definitional requirement, a move he characterized as the "strategy exception error".

Jeff Popova-Clark (still on 05/18/04) responded to my post on the Governance-based approach by reading our blog post and then by stating that he agreed that KM should not be subservient to short- and medium-term goals of organizations, but that it had to be subservient to the long-term goals because they are "equivalent to an organisation's very purpose for existence. . ," and if ". . . KM is not subservient to the organisation's purpose for existence then KM is using organisation resources for purposes other than the purpose of the organisation." Bala Pillai, next, supported Mark's post on definition, and Kate Andrews responded to Mark by saying that her experience indicated that organizations are relaxed about the idea that "knowledge processes should align with organisational intent." She also expanded on this point, ending by asking, reasonably: "I wonder if, when we focus on practice, some of the heat goes out of these topics?"

Early on May 19th, I responded to Kate Andrews by agreeing that sometimes the heat goes out of this topic in practice. I also asked her whether it wasn't true that if KM is normatively defined as needing to be in alignment with management strategy, that this provides a normative foundation for Management to constrain KM from encouraging norms and practices of critical evaluation of Management strategy? Next, I replied to Jeff Popova-Clark, attempting to place his remarks in a still broader perspective and pointing out that the Governance-based approach contended that KM should be aligned with the goals and objectives emerging from Governance, whether long-, medum, or short-term, rather than with the goals, objectives, and strategy emerging from Management. Kate Andrews then responded to my earlier reply by reiterating her point of view that KM should be aligned with organizational intent and that in her experience KM was dedicated to change and not the status quo.

Dave Snowden (05/19/04) next added a civil post objecting to the either/or orientation of the conversation up to that point with respect to both strategy/KM and KM definitions. He emphasized the importance for KM success of it being in alignment with corporate strategy, and also the role of definitions of starting or staging points for further development of ideas. He wrote about the co-evolution of concept and practice and presented the view that cases that are not specifically generated to test a theory, cannot provide support for it. Following Dave's post, I responded to Kate Andrews by agreeing with the substance of her post, but I also pointed out that her reply had not, in fact, addressed my two questions.

Later that day, Mark McElroy responded to Dave Snowden's post. He agreed with Dave's point that for KM to be a success, Management needs to take it seriously; but also pointed out that if KM is mandated by Governance, Management will be required to take it seriously. He went on to make the point, in contrast to Dave's strong implication, that there is plenty of evidence supporting the idea that Governance-based KM may work, and that there is also much evidence in recent corporate behavior that Management strategy-based KM does not work very well.

The next post, by myself, at once responded to the first post on definitions by Mark McElroy, an earlier post by David Williams, as well as one by Patrick Lambe. The thrust of it was to characterize definitions as elevator speeches that we could (a) accept by convention, or (b) view as synthetic statements that might be false. I illustrated the view that definitions are synthetic statements by critiquing David Williams's offering, and also by applying that view in relation to standards and Patrick's view that standards are a convenient way to avoid conflict over key concepts. I also referred the group to a recent blog post of mine explaining my view on definitions. In the next post on definitions and standards (still on 05/19), I responded to Dave Snowden's post on these questions. I agreed with much in his post, as indicated in my response to Mark, but said that I thought that the AS 5037 definition of KM was off the mark because it excluded Governance-based approaches. I then discussed the clear difference of opinion on the merits of the Governance-based approach to KM, but indicated that we had reached the end of argument on this point in previous exchanges, in my book with Mark, and in recent posts on my blog site. Finally, I indicated puzzlement at Dave's reference to "linear definition" in his post, while endorsing the notion of co-evolution of theory and practice.

Bill Hall then contributed a post in which he complimented the forum for the conversation on the 19th about definitions and alternative approaches to KM, and then proceeded to discuss organizations viewed as CASes and the implications of this view for KM. Referring to my work and Mark's, Bill indicated that working independently of us, " but from the same broad epistemological base provided by Karl Popper's later works . . . I have come to very much the same conclusions as they have about the roles and practice of KM in organisations." Bill also indicated that he thought the majority of the difficulties people have with our views is paradigmatic in nature and that he hoped that papers he was working on would bridge the communications gap. Megan Smith then offered some comments relating Gary Hamel's views on deep organizational change and innovation to the comments on organizational purposes made by Jeff Popova-Clark. She asked for comments on Hamel's emphasis on widespread employee participation in developing innovations and strategy. Mark quickly responded to Megan, pointing out that he very much agreed with Hamel and that macroinnovation was about implementing ideas about innovation very similar to Hamel's.

Intensification

Kate Andrews (still on the 19th) contributed a very short response to Mark, in which she asked:

"I wonder if others see the irony in eschewing KM definitions and standards, and advocating for diversity at the same time as characterising a strategy alignment view as 'not to be taken seriously' and 'unsustainable'?"

I responded to Kate quickly, saying:

"To eschew standards and favor diversity doesn't mean that one can't have a position of one's own, and be very critical of some alternative positions. It simply means that one must be committed to the ideas that one may be wrong, and that KM is still sufficiently young to warrant a great deal of caution in committing to standards that have not yet stood the test of time and criticism."

Until this point, the conversation begun with Maureena Lockyer-Benzie's post asking about definitions had been conducted in a very civil way focusing primarily on substance. It was largely devoid of personal attacks, ad hominems, or labeling, and had not exhibited any hints of political communitarianism.

At this point Greg Timbrell posted a response to Kate Andrews's last post. He said:

"I feel a need to respond to your post in Haiku

You speak your wise thoughts
A philosopher responds
All is lost"

And then he proceeded to inform the group of the Haiku form. In the context of my response to Kate and the back and forth between us, I think this may be seen as the first instance of labeling to occur in the course of the discussion. A number of Haiku posts, which I will not review here, followed Greg's post and proceeded in parallel with the theory discussion. One of their functions seemed to be to provide an outlet for unease or frustration over the increasing density and intensity of the theory discussion

The next important theory post was from Robert Kay, who responded to my post responding to Mark McElroy, Patrick Lambe, and David Williams. Robert referred to his experience as a member of the committee producing AS 5037, and said:

"Do any us believe that the definition in the Standard is the absolute truth on the matter - not to my knowledge. Do any of us believe we could come up with a definition that would satisfy everyone - not really. This is why in the final Standard there will be a statement alerting readers to the fact that there are multiple definitions. The definitions people use are going to be related to the context they work in, their personal histories and the histories of the contexts in which they are undertaking action - amongst other things. Consequently any definition is by definition going to be incomplete (this is not the same as false or incorrect). This is also why the Standard is intended as an informative document - not a prescriptive one."

The exchanges on definitions and standards continued on May 20th. The first post on that day to address itself to these issues was by Dave Snowden who responded to both my posts and Mark's. Dave explained what he meant by "linear definition", but without explaining why the term "linear" was properly applied. In the process he asserted again that it wasn't important whether strategy preceded KM or vice versa since these would interact. He then went on to say that he thought that our view on Governance was "naïve". But in using that adjective he did not merely "label" our view, but proceeded to explain why he thought it was naive: specifically because in most organizations Executive Management has its way with Boards anyway. The implication of this is, I suppose, that it doesn't really matter if KM is located in the Governance or the Management function. He then reiterated a previous point he had made about whether cases not developed to test a model should be used to support it. After a paragraph of argument he concluded: "Retrospective coherence is not 'evidence' that can prove a theory, it's an indicator of a possible new experiment."

I'll continue my account of the road to incident 2 in my next blog.

Postscript

Poverty -- Troubled Participation: Part Two

Thu, 01 Jul 2004 00:02:56 GMT

The Poverty of Communitarianism:

Act-KM -- Troubled Participation: Part Two

In my last post I described part of the period of troubled participation in the act-km group during April 2004. In this post, I'll pick up the story of act-km and cover the time period through the end of April 2004.

The Expression of Angst and the Temporary Denouement (continued)

At about the same time as Greg Timbrell's post on act-km List Culture, Paul James contributed a post in response to our replies to Stuart Kay which said:

"Oh no! Stuart is being attacked by the KMCI gang again!

Joe and Mark, do us all a favour and take all of your discourse and diatribe off line! Please."

And on the 23rd, John Hargreaves said:

You have struck a chord with me here Greg. I think what you describe is similar to situations where people are 'afraid' to ask questions, concerned that they might appear naive and open to ridicule. One way of looking at such concerns is that people are worried about their egos taking a hit.

How then would it be if egos were able to be set aside, would sharing and communication be enhanced? And as a result, would learning and knowledge generation occur more easily?"

On April 23rd Mark responded to David Hawthorne's post, but not in kind. Mark avoided personal comments and ad hominems and ended by asking David what his alternative epistemology to correspondence was. Paul McDowell then responded to the increased level of tension kicked off by Stuart's first post by asking of both Mark and I:

"Given your earnest reply, and your recognition of the reactions to your interventions, then it would seem logical to wonder why you continue to use a style of communication which appears to elicit this response?"

David Hawthorne responded to Mark's post on April 25th. He answered Mark's questions without recourse to the characterizations he had engaged in earlier, and gave his views on correspondence and on Varela's views which he interpreted as opposed to correspondence. Mark responded to David early on April 26th and explained that there was nothing in David's account of Varela that precluded correspondence or suggested a retreat from reason, rather than a retreat from empiricism. I followed with an answer to Paul McDowell's question, saying that I continued to use my unpopular style of communication because I needed to exhibit a style of critical exchange that conflicted with the non-criticalist practice prevalent in the group. And that I needed to do that to illustrate practices in communities of inquiry "in which competing knowledge claims are subjected to continuous testing, error elimination, and knowledge claim evaluation in hopes of getting closer to the truth."

My response to Paul elicited the off-line response from Stuart Kay I mentioned earlier and began a lengthy discussion of the pros and cons of this style. Mark also responded to Paul and, I think, expressed our joint perspective very well in these words, commenting on criticalism and the group's reaction to our practice of it:

”But I am no less sensitive and sympathetic to those who find it disconcerting or uncomfortable. I really am very sorry about that, but I also think the criticalist approach is easily mistaken for antagonism for its own sake, or pedantry run amuck. It is none of that. I urge you and others to give us the benefit of the doubt here, and to listen only to what we are saying and not to what you think we might otherwise be doing.

I also urge you to be more critical yourself (selves) in what you hear from us and from others who are critical of our approach. Over the past few days, for example, we weathered much criticism that in fact consisted mostly of sweeping generalizations about our style of inquiry and debate, with virtually no substance or evidence behind it. Here’s the pattern that often unfolds; watch for it: (1) Mark and/or Joe critique an idea and offer their own in response, (2) some back and forth follows, (3) some brave soul finally comes out and condemns us for our style of criticism and heaps sweeping generalizations upon us, (4) we respond with a request for examples of the crimes we have been accused of (“semantic attacks,” etc.), (5) we patiently wait for a response, and (6) no such examples come forward.

Thus, what we have here is really not so much a dispute over the substance of our ideas, but with the substance of our style instead. It’s as if the mark of a successful list serv has less to do with the quality of the knowledge we produce and share than with whether or not we approve of each others’ style of discourse and tolerate a kind of ‘nobody’s ever wrong and everybody’s right’ ethic. I really am very sorry to say, however, that some claims are just simply false, and we do ourselves, one and all, a profound disservice by carrying on as though they weren’t. And to interpret every disclosure of falsity as a personal attack is to cripple the learning enterprise. How can we possibly improve the quality of our knowledge if every revelation of falsity is greeted with hostility in response?

And so I think in critiquing the criticalist attitude as a basis for discourse in a list serv like this, such critics ought to be held to account for the alternative they would have us all embrace. Let us practice what we preach here, right now. As knowledge managers, what epistemology, if not criticalism, should we be practicing amongst ourselves as we engage in knowledge processing on this list? For those of you who reject criticalism, what alternative would you have us embrace, and why should we do so?"

Bill Hall then responded (04/26/04) to Mark's post discussing his work on Maturana and Varela's theory and the relationship of their work to Popper's and to the correspondence theory of truth. Bill explained that acceptance of Maturana and Varela's views on the construction of reality by organisms, is not inconsistent with acceptance of Popper's views on correspondence. Bill's post was followed by my own response to David's post, which explained the closeness of approach of our views and his. David then responded to Mark, with more clarification of views on Maturana and Varela. He also expressed his view that he finds my work and Mark's useful for innovation, because it focuses on self-generated barriers that may get in the way, but not on learning, because it doesn't work for him when he has to "understand events as they are unfolding."

I responded (04/26/04) to David Hawthorne's answer to Mark by explaining more of the perspective underlying our work and by showing that these perspectives were very close to his own. My primary emphasis was to show that many of our assumptions were constructivist in character, but that these did not preclude a correspondence epistemology and a criticalist theory of evaluation. David responded quickly on the same day, thanked me for my post, and continued to take issue with the idea that the search for true knowledge claims should be the regulative ideal in problem solving. His post proceeded to express his idea that criticalism was not adequate to deal with the dynamics of problem solving and creativity. I responded, late on the same day, by noting that the regulative ideal of truth as the goal of problem-solving was a motivator, and that that was its value. I also responded to the idea that criticalism was opposed to creativity by pointing out where it was useful in problem solving and referring David to my blog post entitled "All Life is problem Solving".

Mark responded to David as well, early on April 27th. He addressed David's claim that our work did not deal with the role of emergence in KM at some length. Mark indicated that from its beginning our work had been based in the theory of complexity and emergence, and he made reference to his web site, the Policy Synchronization Method (PSM), which is based on ideas of self-organization, and emergence, and our research. In brief, Mark documented that emergence "is one of the areas of work where we have perhaps gone further than anyone else in KM."

Fred Nickols continued posting on April 27th with the query:

"Last time I checked, the only way we know anything is by way of our senses. How is that reason and rationality are separate from our senses?"

Mark McElroy responded to Fred's post (04/27/04) by pointing out that we "sense with our senses" but we cannot know with them. To know we need to bring reason to bear to criticize and see whether what our senses are telling us is true.

Finally, I responded to Bill Hall's post of the day before on Maturana/Varela, Popper, and his own work integrating various streams of research. I supported Bill's views and related them to KMCI work and to other literature. I also pointed out that Maturana and Varela were constructivists rather than realists and that it was possible for people to both accept autopoiesis in living systems and to differ on epistemology.

The End for the Time Being

My post of April 27th ended the series of posts on theory. It had begun nearly a month before, in a discussion of Knowledge Management training, and ended in discussions of epistemology and their importance for KM. Many good exchanges had occurred during that time in the sense that posters had developed a much better understanding of the views of others. Many participants, according to their own statements, seemed to come close to agreement on some matters. And many others continued to disagree.

During the first period of exchange until April 20th, very little angst was publically expressed in the exchanges and personal attacks were minimal. But, evidently, a sense of frustration with the theory exchanges and the criticalist style of exchange, employing close logical analysis, practiced by Mark and I was building. Stuart Kay gave voice to that frustration in his post of April 20th. That post did not involve personal attacks, but a later post of his included a severe personal attack, and this was preceded by one by Robert Perey, and followed by others by Sylvia Marshall, and Paul James. Even David Hawthorne offered a post predominantly devoted to labeling the views of Mark and I. The conflicts with Stuart and David were worked out through continued exchange. In Stuart's case these were off-line exchanges with me. In David's they were online exchanges involving Mark, Bill Hall, David, and myself. Differences with many other members of the group: e.g., Robert Perey, Paul James, Sylvia Marshall, and Greg Timbrell, did not proceed to a conclusion, but would surface once again in May.

One of the primary questions raised by this period of interaction within act-km, is why posts by Mark and I created the angst they did among some members of the group? My posts were largely devoid of personal attacks and Mark's had remarkably few such expressions considering the volume of his posts. So what caused the problem? Given the posts of Greg Timbrell, Paul McDowell, other protesters and the off-line communications I received from Stuart Kay, I think the explanation lies in conflicting norms and practice, rather than in the subject matter of these posts, or in whether Mark or I were polite or not relative to a formal standard such as restricting our criticisms to views rather than people.

The practice that has developed in the act-km group over time is one of friendly exchange marked by no more than occasional and mildly critical comments on the views of others. In fact, the view had developed among many that there are many differing equally valid approaches to KM, and that it was wrong to claim that there was one absolute truth. Apparently the routine practice of exchange in act-km is a reflection of relativism, a form of justificationism that denies an objective external reality or criterion for truth, and regards all truth and certainty as personal, local, and ‘relative’ to an individual – i.e., anti-foundationalist, but not anti-justificationist. On the other hand, the practice of close and rigorous examination of people's messages and criticism of the logic of these messages is a new form of practice introduced into the group by Mark and I.

It is a practice that evidently threatens some participants, bores others, and introduces inconvenience for others who have to make their way through digests that are suddenly lengthy and hard to manage. The new practice angers these participants. From their point of view it does not bring important benefits, and it introduces the heavy cost of visible conflict into the group. They don't want to see it continue, and they don't think they need to tolerate it. So they move to sanction it. They do so by delivering messages using personal attacks, labeling, and ad hominems on-line, and by asking the moderator of the group to take action to bar those who wish to introduce the practices they oppose.

During April, the evidences of political communitarianism were not as visible, as they had been in December. The moderator did not get involved beyond his failure to moderate the personal attacks delivered by those frustrated by the new practices, which after all were themselves no more than the right of exercise of free and civil speech within the group. Stuart Kay's "Cat Among the Pigeons" post was not quite the call to arms that Serena Joyner's "Drowning Out the Little Voices" had been. Nevertheless, it was effective enough to call forth a considerable expression of disapproval of the new practice of close critical examination of posts. It also encouraged those in the group who thought that social sanctioning of the members introducing the new practices might be successful at some point in the future. We will see in future blog posts, that those who may have thought this way were quite right. It was only a matter of time until the opportunity to exercise community authority to remove the offending practices would present itself.

Postscript

Poverty -- Troubled Participation: Part One

Tue, 29 Jun 2004 04:20:12 GMT

The Poverty of Communitarianism: Act-KM --

Troubled Participation: Part One

In my last post I analyzed the history of an incident in the act-km group from both political and epistemological perspectives. I concluded that during December of 2003, the act-km group was characterized by political communitarianism, but I also found that there was insufficient evidence in the record to conclude that epistemological communitarianism applied to the group as well. In my next two blog posts, I'll pick up the story of act-km in January of 2004 and cover the time period through the end of April 2004.

Back to Normal Peace and Quiet

After the intense period of exchange on theoretical subjects, the act-km group participants settled into a variety of friendly, civil exchanges on such practice-focused topics as: Review of Projects and Lessons Learned, XK Extreme Knowledge, Prioritization of Knowledge Initiatives, Dear Sheep's Brother (an exchange on language and its relationship to culture), Query on Classification Schemes for Knowledge Retrieval, and Risk Mitigation and KM. Except for occasional informational contributions neither Mark, Dave Snowden, nor myself were involved. Critical discussions about framework or theory differences were relatively sparse. Of the three of us, Mark was most active, posting on the Prioritization, and KM and Risk Mitigation threads and making a few announcements.

Increasing Participation on Theoretical Issues

The next exchange that began to show increasing participation on theoretical issues began with a thread on Managing KM --Training, which appeared towards the end of March. The thread began when Greg Timbrell asked whether "in KM are we managing projects, programs, or endeavours?" Alice MacGillvray (03/31/04) answered with a post saying "I think the answer depends on two things: how you define knowledge management and where you sit in the process." Alice went on to discuss Mark McElroy's definition of KM and also spoke of a broader approach in which she gave examples of KM in relation to all three categories. Mark McElroy then responded (03/31/04) with a clarification of what he meant by KM and an endorsement of Alice's view. Greg (04/04/04) then responded with the idea that KM has elements in it that go beyond Project Management, stated his view that it required Program Management and "resource, cultural, and process control" capability. Mark responded (04/05/04) by agreeing with Greg and by asking him what he thought that KM should be doing, and what he thought the goal of KM that underlies its program should be.

Greg (04/06/04) replied by complimenting Mark on his "simple and powerful" questions and by providing answers to both questions with the following statement.

"I believe that KM is about using a knowledge perspective to maximise the use of firm resources and improve business processes and relationships in alignment with corporate goals."

Mark then responded (04/07/04) by disagreeing with Greg about KM's purpose of aligning with corporate goals and offering the theory that KM should "instead, worry about enhancing the quality of learning, innovation, and problem solving independent of our strategies du jour." This response of Mark's was followed by extensive and vigorous theoretical discussion of the issue of whether KM should be aligned with corporate goals and/or strategies. Greg (04/08/04), Rachel Baker (04/11/04) Dave Snowden (04/12/04), Warwick Holder (04/12/04), Paul James (04/14/04), Christie Mason (04/15/04), and Mark (various replies), all contributed to a very civil discussion.

On 04/14/04, Dave Snowden responded to Mark again with a strong but civil disagreement with Mark's view and Mark responded in kind on the same day. But his response contained the first statement in the exchanges that may be viewed as a personal attack, when after asking Dave whether he believed something he followed with: "Are you that much of an authoritarian?"

I then provided (04/15/04) my first post on this subject. That post was a close analysis of Dave's post of 04/14, primarily claiming that it did not address many of the questions Mark had raised. I also responded to Christie's post addressing the question of how you address the question of the impact of KM without connecting to management's strategy or goals. Larry Langman then (04/15/4) posted to try to clarify Mark's view further with an example. Mark did not respond quickly. His next post emphasized "the strategy exception error" and the Governance-based approach to KM by way of further response to Paul James's intervention.

The Buildup to Angst

The posts following Mark's response were from others commenting on his views. Paul McDowell (04/15/04) expressed the view that KM should be part of all aspects of management and then (04/16/04) asked whether organizations were using Mark's paradigm of KM. Patrick Lambe (04/15/04) criticized Mark for the negative personal comment reflected in the question he asked Dave, and then went on to say that:

". . . alignment can also mean that two things are managed into a workable relationship without either forcing the other to its purpose (Strategy compelling KM or KM compelling Strategy). So it would be perfectly possible in thinking of those situations to see KM and Strategy as convergent and complementary processes."

Patrick also questioned (message 3382, 04/19/04) my post of the 15th, asking whether I was pursuing the topic of discussion or Dave Snowden. In reply, (04/19/04), I responded by asking him whether he thought that Dave's lack of responsiveness to Mark's criticisms was relevant to whether Dave's view that Mark's conclusion is wrong should be given credence or not?

Fred Nickols (04/16/04) asked whether Mark's view implied that the CEO was subordinate to KM through the Board, and whether, in this view, some of the organizational management burden would not be shifted from the CEO to the CKO. He also asked, in a separate post on the same day, whether KM was a knowledge claim, and, if so, why is it more scared than strategy. I replied to that by saying (04/19/04) that KM was not a knowledge claim, but that statements about it were, and were no more sacred than strategy claims. Jeff Popova-Clark (04/19/04) expressed the view that the approach to KM was a matter of perspective, and that one could certainly look at KM from many differing perspectives including a Governance perspective.

Mark McElroy then began to post responses to the various comments on his posts. On April 19th, Mark answered Paul McDowell's question on whether any organizations used a Governance-based approach to KM. He answered Fred Nickols's questions about knowledge claims, whether the CEO is subordinate to the CKO, and whether there is a shifting of the Management burden in the Governance-based approach. He next replied to Larry Langman's analogy and said it was a good one. He followed that reply with an extensive answer to Patrick Lambe's post of the 15th, but here he did not acknowledge the personal overtones in his question to Snowden, and also made reference and even used the word "totalitarianism" in connection with views that suggest that learning should be constrained to activities that support management.

Patrick Lambe then followed with three more posts on the 19th. He agreed with Jeff Popova-Clark's post. He replied to one of Mark's posts. He responded to Mark's citation of examples of the Governance-based approach by suggesting that the US Government might be currently providing an example of such an organization. Finally, he posted a message saying that he meant no negative overtones in his previous post, but that he thought that ideas stand or fall by who believes in them.

Mark answered Patrick on the 20th, pointing out that the idea that knowledge stands or falls based on who believes it may be true, but that it is arguably irresponsible to say so because it encourages appeals to authority in evaluating knowledge -- an ad hominem argument. He also characterized Jeff Popova-Clark's position as relativistic without explaining why -- a use of labeling in discourse. Jeff replied making a number of interesting points, including that he, like Mark, was a realist, but that he believed in the need for multiple reference frames in viewing multi-dimensional truth. Mark then responded briefly and personably to Patrick's post about the US government.

The Expression of Angst and the Temporary Denouement

Up to this point, a very extensive exchange had taken place between Mark and various correspondents including myself over a period of three weeks. Most posts were devoid of personal attacks, labeling, or ad hominem arguments, with the exception of a handful from Mark. Many very high quality posts (in my view) resulted from these exchanges and the discussion became fairly deep on certain aspects of the issue of Management vs. Governance-based KM. The next post (04/20/04) was from Stuart Kay. It was entitled "Cat Among the Pigeons", and it contained a fairly extensive statement of a relativistic position including a lengthy quote from Ronald Dworkin, a noted legal philosopher supporting relativism. The essence of Stuart Kay's view was expressed in his statement:

". . . I find all practical and theoretical posts to this list useful, but not the claims - explicit or implicit - of authors that their views are better or more correct."

That is, Stuart's view implies that competitive knowledge claim evaluation, using close logical analysis is not a useful activity. Stuart's post shortly was reinforced by Sylvia Marshall who did not explicitly state support for the position of relativism, but viewed Stuart's post as an attack on the "dramatics" and "the grand-standing" of unnamed posters. Patrick Lambe also supported Stuart's view. I quickly responded to Stuart's post by providing a very detailed analysis of it with the objective of showing that the relativistic position taken by both Stuart, and Dworkin was wholly without merit. My response, though very direct and critical, was not personal or ad hominem. It did however use the very logical style that Stuart had implicitly criticized. Mark McElroy also responded on (04/21/04) to Stuart's post, in a lighter vein, but again in a manner that avoided personal attacks.

Robert Perey responded (04/21/04) to my post with both extreme brevity and incivility, saying simply: "Frig me!!!" I never answered his post. Stuart responded (04/21/04) to Mark and I with another lengthy post. The first part of it was a serious effort to engage with our point of view by critiquing a graphic white paper on epistemology we had previously cited. But about one-third of the way through his very long post, Stuart gave way to the most extensive expression of personal attacks, labeling and ad hominem argument yet seen in the group. Mark answered Stuart's post on 04/22/04, by taking his substantive arguments and replying to them in detail. He then responded to Stuart's attack on our style by pointing out that it was neither substantive nor based in a close analysis of what we said. Mark did not respond in kind to Stuart's personal attacks, but was very measured in his lengthy response. David Hawthorne responded to Mark with a post that involved an interpretive characterization of our views. Though his post was very well-written and much lighter in tone than Stuart's, and though it contained one substantive criticism about the views we expressed toward risk, It was, for the most part, every bit as much an exercise in labeling as Stuart's post.

I responded (04/22/04) to Stuart's post with another lengthy analysis. I treated his post seriously and did not reply to his attacks in kind. Stuart responded to my post by taking our exchange off-line. We then exchanged views over the next day and-a-half until we developed a good mutual understanding and came to a stopping place. Later, on the 24th, Stuart had occasion to write me again to comment on a response I'd made to someone else. This time we corresponded until the 27th, and again ended our correspondence after coming to a good mutual understanding.

Meanwhile, Greg Timbrell contributed a post (04/22/04), part of which, contained "a comment on our list culture". The comment pointed out that the views expressed in the list were written in spare time, not meant to be perfect, informal, and hence always "provide opportunities for criticism." Greg then suggested we needed to remain balanced in criticism and to refrain from long, detailed and often boring examinations of every point made by a poster. Greg also pointed out that others may experience "angst" and may not contribute because they fear too close an analysis of their posts. In other words, Greg was saying that close logical analysis of the views expressed in the act-km community is in conflict with its norms.

I'll continue the story of the period of troubled participation in act-km in my next blog.

Postscript

Poverty -- Incident One: Part Two

Tue, 29 Jun 2004 02:09:15 GMT

Fisherman at Sea (J. W. M. Turner, 1796)

The Poverty of Communitarianism:

Act-KM -- Incident One: Part Two

This post picks up my analysis of the first incident in the act-km group with an analysis of the communitarian response.

Communitarian Response

As I've indicated above, there was always some level of disapproval for the exchanges over theory using detailed logical analysis, that were occurring in the group. Serena Joyner's post on 11/27/03 made clear her distaste for overly long posts and personal attacks, a description that certainly fit some of the theory posts. On 12/08/03 there were 5 posts expressing discomfort over the strong disagreements and personal tone being expressed in the theory posts. These ended with Sylvia Marshall's attempt to bring these posts to an end by "shushing" both Dave and Mark. Alongside these negative expressions there were some messages expressing positive support of the value of the theory posts for learning. Mark Schenk's comment on 12/10/03 reflected some of this positive view, but he also said: "We just need to ensure people are not discomfited by the passion descending to a level that attacks rather than analyses and critiques in a constructive manner." In this way, he expressed his view that he had to ensure that people were not too uncomfortable over what was going on.

On 12/16/03, the community erupted against the theory discussions. Serena Joyner led the way with post 3011 entitled "Drowning out the little Voices." This, ingeniously titled post described her "feeling a little swamped . . . drowned out by this incessant, highly theoretical, "your camp - our camp" style discussion". She also said:

"I support debate - I dislike long-winded, highly theoretical debate when it is repeated again and again. Make your case and move on! The battle won't be won here." (Emphasis added)

Serena Joyner's "little voice", which betrayed an assumption that differences of opinion in the group could not be resolved through critical discussion and logical analysis, was echoed by a chorus of 12 other "little voices", all posting on 12/16/03. There were a few posts that balanced positive and negative evaluations in their comments and four that supported the theory discussions. The favorable posts arrived later on the 16th, however, and the most favorable, not until the 18th. That post (message 3063) from David Hawthorne said:

"What happened in the McElroy/Firestone, Snowden debate? Everything that should have happened! No votes of closure, please. I found the exchanges illuminating even when they made me feel a bit uncomfortable. That's the way it's supposed to work. If I wanted to engage in shushing, I'd go back to the church I grew up in where there was no shortage of people with a penchant for enforcing their personal conceptions of permissible discourse. I liked the fire and fury and I liked how "the little voices" were provoked to action. I liked the denouement --the efforts at graceful extrication and the reluctant loosening of grasped lapels. My advice, let it roll. Go on and act out, and act up, or risk taking the "act" out of KM."(emphasis added)

Mark Schenk's reaction to the outpouring of negative sentiment was swift. He posted a note on 12/16/03, initiating a thread on "lessons learned from the debate". In his note he mentioned three lessons: (1) cooperation is better than the competition he saw during the period of the theory exchanges, (2) self-moderation -- did it work, should it be continued? (3) How about a cooperative effort to identify the points of agreement within the group? And he said:

"I think a list of concepts or principles that we agree on is much more valuable than tedious debate over issues that make me wonder if we can't see the wood for the trees." (emphasis added)

Basically, Schenk's post was a public effort to bring the community together and to moderate negative reactions. It was not focused on making knowledge, but on integrating the community, and it also implied a lack of faith in the ability of logical analysis to help in problem solving. Behind the scenes, Mark Schenk also took the following steps. (A) He asked Dave, Mark, and I to discontinue our postings on the topics we had been exchanging on. (B) He refused to post a message of mine in answer to one of Dave's posts. He didn't do this due to any characteristic of my post specifically, and he acknowledged that my posts were the most civil among the three of us, but simply because he felt he had to discontinue our exchange. In his words:

"But, at the end of the day, this discussion has deteriorated to the point where intervention was necessary for the continued health of the group (my assessment, for which I am accountable)." (emphasis added)

(C) Mark also blocked a second post of mine. This one answered "the little voices" posts. It quoted the passage from message 2975 I used earlier in this blog post, and pointed out "Now as far as I can see, this point has not even been the subject of discussion, much less refutation, by any voices, little or otherwise."

Mark objected to the tone of my note, specifically to its subject line which was: "Re: The Chorus of Little Voices" and to the salutation: "Dear Little Voices". He characterized my note as "condescending" because I used the same identifier to describe "the little voices" as they used to legitimize themselves. I agreed to revise the note and changed the subject to "Posts that criticize and theorize", and the salutation to "Everyone". It ended it with:

"Now as far as I can see, this point has not even been the subject of discussion, much less refutation, by anyone. So why should the moderator put a stop to posts that theorize and criticize?"

In spite of my revision, Mark Schenk never posted my response to those "little voices". In doing this he illustrated his own belief in the idea that posts that criticize and theorize are not very effective in making contributions to the community. In contrast, Mark let Dave Snowden's and Mark McElroy's responses through. Dave used his opportunity to renew his personal attacks, ad hominems, and labeling activities and to avoid substantive arguments (see message 3022). He even referred to unnamed "amateur philosophers" in his post, a labeling exercise that Mark saw fit to comment on in his response in message 3040. But most of Mark's final message was devoted to a heartfelt statement of disappointment over the negative reaction of so many in the group to honest theoretical exchange; and to the effort to seriously discuss the scope of KM, and difficulties with a framework (ASHEN) that some in the group were already using.

Communitarianism or Something Else?

Before reaching a conclusion on whether or not communitarianism was at play in act-km during incident 1, I think one needs to evaluate behavior and claims expressed in the group in the context of possibilities other than communitarianism. In the area of politics, I believe the alternative possibilities are (1) managerialism, the idea that sole legitimate authority resides in the group managers, and (2) constitutionalism, the idea that the authority of neither the managers nor the community can abridge certain individual rights of the participants, even though legitimate authority to manage day-to-day affairs may reside in either the managers, the community, or both. So which alternative fits incident 1 in act-km? Is constitutionalism, communitarianism, managerialism, or some possibility I've not been able to specify reflected in this incident.

Obviously I leave the last possibility of incompleteness in my typology for others to specify. Moving to constitutionalism, Act-km has no "constitution" written or unwritten, that guarantees the right of free expression on substance to each individual member. In fact, individual members have no rights, only privileges to post to the group. Dave Snowden, Mark, and I were required to stop posting on the threads we were discussing in accordance with the administrative decision of Mark Schenk, based on his view that continued postings by us were endangering the "continued health of the group". Our privilege to post on those threads was removed. That could not have happened in a group with a constitutional right of free expression.

Was act-km reflecting managerialism in this incident? I don't think so. Of course, in all yahoo groups, "the owners" have the formal authority to specify what the rules of the game of interaction will be, and therefore act-km could morph into a managerialism-based group at any time by fiat. However, the managers of act-km appear to view themselves as serving and representing the members, and view their job as expressing the will of the members and facilitating its direct expression. Therefore they look to members' self moderation, and to the expressions of members for guidance, and don't believe that they have the right to do anything that would oppose the consensus of the group. Faced with the choice of imposing decisions against the will of the group or resigning, I think that the managers of act-km would resign their leadership rather than do anything they believed the community was against.

Was political communitarianism at play in act-km during the incident? I think it was. In the events I've recorded above, there is no evidence of constitutionalism. Moreover, Mark Schenk's note of caution on 12/10/03 doesn't appear until after a number of expressions of concern about the conflicts expressed in the theory posts had occurred. And his post on learning from the debates doesn't appear until after most of the "little voices" posts have appeared on the 16th.

It is ironic that Mark, in post 2973, says: "We have almost always let the group self-moderate in the interests of freedom of expression . . . ", because "self-moderate" has more than one meaning. It can mean that the individual self-moderates her own posts, or that the community self-moderates through the social sanctions it imposes or attempts to impose on its individual members. In the above record, the moderators in act-km enabled individual members to express (and with a fair amount of rudeness, in my view) their desire for other individual members to cease posting simply because they did not like the theory posts. The moderators relied on these expressions in hopes that they would "moderate" the theory posts. When the theory posters continued to express themselves, however, and the "self-moderation" escalated to a high level of intensity on 12/16 with the expressions of all "the little voices", Mark Schenk intervened to end the theory posts. Why did he do that?

I think the record indicates that it was not because theory posts were really so conflictful as all that. I've indicated above that there were some personal attacks, ad hominems, and instances of labeling in these posts. But they were relatively few, primarily restricted to exchanges between Dave Snowden and Mark McElroy, and could easily have been controlled by placing theory posters under moderation and requiring them to revise their posts to delete inflammatory remarks. His decision to stop the theory postings was, I believe, based on his view that the community consensus (expressed in "the little voices") was that they should not continue, and he felt that the health of the community was dependent on his acting in accordance with that expressed consensus.

But in allowing his perception of community consensus to provide the basis for his elimination of the theory posts, he violated the rights of Dave, Mark, and myself, in the name of the community and its continued health, as if we had "shouted 'fire' in a crowded theatre". But the act-km group is not a crowded theatre, and there is no reason to restrict the rights of individuals to express themselves for the sake of what the community wants, unless, of course, the moderator and many members of his community are political communitarians.

What about epistemological communitarianism? Is that at work in act-km? Based on the record of this first incident, I think the answer to that question is not clear. Certainly, during the period leading up to and encompassing the incident, there was no strong emphasis in the group on the importance of critical evaluation and testing in knowledge making, though a few members of the community were supportive of it. In fact, Mark Schenk's message on "learning from the debates" emphasizes both the importance of cooperation and the idea of coming up with a list of things everyone agrees with. He says nothing about the importance of critical testing and evaluation as a lesson to be learned from the debates. Nor do more than a few in the group in their various posts on theory, standards, tools or any other subjects. In addition certain posts critical of the theory exchanges exhibited impatience with the close logical analysis used in the theory posts.

This absence of concern with criticism, suggests that in the area of epistemology, the ideology of act-km may either be unformed as yet, or may be some form of justificationism, rather than criticalism. But which form of justificationism is present, or whether there is an emergent epistemology characteristic of act-km, is not clear from Incident One alone. In my next blog, I'll discuss the next period of troubled participation in the act-km group.

Postscript

Poverty -- Incident One: Part One

Sat, 26 Jun 2004 01:46:27 GMT

Earth Rising From Apollo 11

The Poverty of Communitarianism:

Act-KM -- Incident One: Part One

In my last two posts I've discussed conflict, rules, and learning in list servs, spent a good bit of time on communities of inquiry, and also advanced the conjecture that three popular KM list serv groups exhibit a commitment to political and epistemological communitarianism in their ideologies and moderation practices. I also promised to provide more detailed analysis of occurrences in the three groups to document the presence of communitarianism. This post, the first of many on this subject, and the first of nine on act-km covers part of the first incident in the act-km group.

Theory Posts

This incident began innocently enough with a question in message 2893, dated 11/23/03, requesting some quick ideas on the nature of a knowledge audit. There followed a vigorous discussion with a few disagreements expressing differing views on this subject. In message 2910, 11/25/03, Dave Snowden expressed his views on the subject relating his answer to his ASHEN framework. Others asked for clarification about ASHEN, and there followed a number of posts covering ASHEN and its possible role in audits. Matthew Tutaki (message 2924, 11/27/03) then posted a critical comment which, in addition to comments directed specifically at Dave Snowden's claims, also included an ad hominem argument on the role of vendors and on vendor motivation by way of casting doubt on Snowden's substantive views.

Snowden then replied, with a minimum of ad hominem, I thought, followed by a Tutaki comment beginning to break off the exchange. Serena Joyner then intervened with a post (#2929, 11/27/03) that spoke favorably about the value of exchange in the act-km group, Snowden's work, and also criticized posts that were overly long and contained personal attacks. She also criticized "those who may use the forum to push their particular barrow, particularly if it is ill-informed or not backed up with evidence. Look, it just gets boring!" Joyner finished her message with the admonition: "We have a fabulous arena for debate and knowledge creation - lets keep it so."

Following Joyner's post, a few more posts supporting ASHEN appeared, and then the original thread morphed into a new one called ASHEN and Relationships. This thread introduced a bit of debate about whether it was useful to collapse ASHEN categories. Then, in message 2946, on 12/07/03, Mark McElroy raised the question of whether ASHEN makes a clear distinction between information and knowledge.

McElroy's post contained no ad hominems, personal attacks, or labeling of ASHEN or its main author, Dave Snowden. Snowden replied (in message 2950, 12/0703) with an account of how he uses ASHEN, attempting to show that the way he uses it does not require a clear distinction between Information and Knowledge. For the most part, his response avoided personal or ad hominem attacks and labeling, but at one point he implied that he, presumably, in comparison to others, does not play word games and he also provided the following gratuitous comment.

"I don't really want to get sucked into the beliefs and claims issue that seems to be an obsession of the latest KMCI method, I thing is a misreading of Popper but accepted long ago that we were no going to agree on this!"

This statement is not related to the substantive argument, but is a reference with a pejorative tone that labels the KMCI perspective as obsessive and negatively evaluates its interpretation and use of Popper's epistemology without explaining its negative evaluation.

Mark McElroy (in 2951, 12/07/03) replied almost immediately with a comment that answered Snowden's critique and largely avoided anything personal. At one point however, McElroy used sarcasm to get a point across saying:

". . . And though I do not profess to have access to the truth, much less feel that anyone can know it with certainty, I do not feel this warrants the abandonment of its pursuit as a regulative ideal. If you disagree, what shall we call your brand of KM, Knowledge [as if it matters] Management?"

In message 2953, 12/08/03, Snowden delivered a response which avoided personal attack, with the exception of some labeling to the effect that McElroy made a terrible number of assumptions in his post, until the very last paragraph. There he criticized a presentation on epistemology by myself and McElroy, by using an ad hominem and a very personal attack in relation to KMCI's promotional use of an evaluation of the content of a joint presentation by Mark and myself at the KM Global Exchange conference a couple of years ago. It is not clear, how his point, namely, that a fact can lead one to a conclusion that is different than one might arrive at if one had a more complete set of facts, is connected either to our epistemology presentation, or to the previous posts exchanged between the two concerning the ASHEN model.

At that point, Kate Andrews intervened (message 2954, 12/08/03) saying: "I wonder if others share discomfort that for a 'no one-right-way' discipline we seem to spend much time in this forum defending to the death our own 'one-right-way' of seeing the KM landscape." Kate's was the first of five posts that day criticizing either the theoretical discussions, the ego involvement of the people contributing to them, their complex language, or their "boring" character. This was punctuated by McElroy's reply to Snowden (message 2960, 12/08/03). It included two instances of labeling:

"Where does your uncritical pandering to the powers that be and their strategies end, and why should the rest of us in KM subscribe to it?" And:

"Well I guess that’s a pretty cynical and condescending point of view. I try to tell the truth when asked to, don’t you?"

Mark's post was followed by a few that expressed concern about the hostile exchanges that were occurring. One post focused on substance and compared the McElroy and Snowden points of view. Another post by Snowden said that he was ending the discussion, but insisted on the validity of his personal attack. And finally a message (2968, 12/08/03) by Sylvia Marshall that asked both Dave and Mark to take their argument off-line ("The rest of us don't want to know"). In message 2969, 12/09/03, Mark responded to Snowden by summarizing his case and pointing out that Dave had failed to answer any of his questions. He also addressed the increasing expressions of angst in the group about the exchanges over theory saying:

"To the others on this list, I know that some of you do not want to see or participate in this thread any longer. For those that do (as some of you have indicated), I will be happy to go along. Others can just hit the delete button, I guess. Let’s see what happens. After all, this is an open community, isn’t it?" (emphasis added)

Mark's post was followed by one reflecting positively on the debate, and then by a post by Bill Hall (message 2972, 12/09/03) advancing the idea that the conflict of views among McElroy, Snowden, and myself (though I had yet to post anything to the group), was due to paradigm incommensurabilities. Bill also commented on the strengths of both approaches and his areas of disagreement.

At this point, Mark Schenk, the moderator of act-km, thought (message 2973, 12/10/03) it was time for him to comment on the past few weeks of interaction. His post celebrated diversity, and then made the following comment:

"Secondly, the passion of the debate is undeniable, indicating people who care deeply about the subject matter. The willingness to share so openly is fantastic, and it creates a great learning opportunity. We just need to ensure people are not discomfited by the passion descending to a level that attacks rather than analyses and critiques in a constructive manner." (emphasis added)

He then followed with a statement of his commitment to self-moderation for the group and a request that posters observe group netiquette, which he summarized, while referring readers to a posted file for the full version. Mark Schenk's post was the first expression of moderator concern about conflict exhibited in the exchanges.

After Mark Schenk's intervention, the first two of my posts to the list serv appeared. The first (message 2974, 12/10/03) was a comment on Bill Hall's post pointing out that there were direct logical conflicts between my views and Dave Snowden's and not just incommensurabilities. The second (message 2975, 12/10/03) entered the debate between Mark McElroy and Dave. It made the point of the importance of the distinction between knowledge and information even more strongly and then addressed the meta-debate about whether the thread on ASHEN should end with these words:

"Again, I'd like to put this point more directly, if I might. The calls from various people to end this thread, are calls to stop other members of the group from posting civil messages designed to further the group's process of inquiry. These calls are requests to "block the way of inquiry" to quote Charles Sanders Peirce. To the extent such calls are successful, or even thought to be legitimate, they stand in the way of critical examination of conflicting points of view concerning the ASHEN Model. They therefore harm our collective efforts to increase our knowledge about it, since we can only learn about the quality of our knowledge claims by seeing whether they survive the criticisms and other tests they face. (emphasis added)

Since fostering inquiry must be among the chief purposes of a community devoted to KM practice, such communities ought to be tolerant to a fault about such exchanges. They should not be anxious to smooth them over in the interests of a harmony that ends such interactions prematurely, or in the interests of escaping boredom. In the end, what harm is there to members in getting posts that explore deeply issues they are not interested in? No one has to read such posts and all are free to begin other threads that they are interested in. So why enforce a community view of what should be discussed on even a small minority, and risk losing the chance that something someone says in the throes of dialog may be very significant for the group as a whole?"

The material in both these posts was entirely substantive. There were no ad hominems, personal attacks, or labels used in them.

Mark McElroy followed my post with one (message 2976, 12/10/03) responding to a post of David Hawthorne's arguing against the idea that one needs truth as a regulative ideal for knowledge production. Mark's post was entirely civil, substantive, and courteous, as was David's response in message 2977, 12/10/03. Dave Snowden (message 2978, 12/10/03) and Mark McElroy (message 2980, 12/10/03) then exchanged posts. Both were polite. Mark's post avoided personal attacks. Snowden's post repeated his labeling of Popper's views as "narrow" and the interpretation of his views by Mark and I as a narrow construal of Popper without explaining his reasons for these characterizations. He also softened but still sought to justify and excuse his attack on Mark relating to KMCI's promotion of the evaluation of its conference presentation. Mark then addressed (message 2982, 12/10/03) Bill Hall's previous characterization of KM in another very substantive post without personal attacks, ad hominems or labeling. Bill did not respond to this post, but I responded (message 2990, 12/13/03) with a commentary on the nature of KM and the priority of KM over strategy. Once again, there was nothing personal in the style of this post and no response from Bill was forthcoming.

During the time the ASHEN thread was slowing down, it began to "spin off" other exchanges. First, Robert Perey (message 2993, 12/14/03) took issue with Mark McElroy on the idea of "truth" and advocated a concept of degrees of truth applying fuzzy logic. Mark (message 2997, Shawn Callahan (message, 3002) and I (message 2999), all commented, with Shawn supporting Robert, and Mark and I critiquing his views. No personal comments or labeling occurred during these exchanges.

Second, Mathew Tutaki, Amanda Horne, Dave Snowden, Gray Southon, David Rymer, Mark McElroy, James Dellow, and I began to exchange views on KM Standards. These posts (2985, 2986, 2989, 2991, 2992, 2995, 2996, 3000, 3007, 3008, and 3009) all avoided personalizing issues. In message 3003, 12/14/03, during a discussion of the idea introduced by Dave that "Ontology precedes Epistemology", however, I offered an ad hominem argument to suggest that this idea needed to be looked at carefully against its competitors. But I also carefully identified the ad hominem, and did not claim it as a reason for thinking that the idea was false. Nor did I use the ad hominem to personally attack Dave Snowden. Rather, I used it as a reason to avoid hasty adoption of the "Ontology precedes Epistemology" notion without critically evaluating it against alternatives.

Third, a thread also started on Technology as a Tool. This thread involved Greg Timbrell, James Dellow and myself in posts 2994, 3004, 3005, and 3010. All exchanges avoided personal comments and were highly substantive.

I'll continue with Part Two of Incident One in my next blog.

Postscript

Poverty of Communitarianism

Thu, 03 Jun 2004 21:08:19 GMT

Expulsion From the Garden of Eden

(Thomas Cole, 1828)

The Poverty of Communitarianism

Communitarianism harkens back to methods of knowledge production and decision making in traditional closed societies, where decision making in both knowledge and social processing relied heavily on community consensus and on cultural traditions that are strongly supported and reinforced by an organic tightly knit community. I'll distinguish two types of Communitarianism: epistemological and political.

Epistemological Communitarianism

Epistemological Communitarianism includes a theory of knowledge claim evaluation which makes an appeal to a consensus or community-held view as a basis for justifying knowledge claims as true and certain, or, more recently, as probable, or at least, acceptable. It is often associated with Thomas Kuhn’s characterization of ‘paradigms’ and the views of the prevailing scientific community upon which they rest. Today, it is also often associated with fallibilism, and with any of a number of theories of knowledge including: realism. coherentism, instrumentalism, pragmatism, and relativism.

There are other theories of knowledge claim evaluation, apart from epistemological communitarianism, that involve attempts to justify knowledge claims in terms of some foundation. These include: Expertise-based, paradigm-based, and managerial-based justificationisms. Each is dominant in its sphere. Epistemological communitarianism, however, is the form of justificationism that is most frequently seen in peer-based groups such as communities of practice.

The poverty of epistemological communitarianism is due to its justificationism, the idea that knowledge claims must be justified and established relative to some foundation of unquestioned statements. Justificationism is false, because no statement can be justified, nor does it need to be, in order to be considered knowledge. Nor is it true that knowledge claims which have the consensus support of some professional community are true. So justificationism, including epistemological communitarianism, doesn't just lead to impoverished results: it leads to holding basic ideas beyond questioning and test. It closes off the possibility of change in these ideas and thus restricts the range of adaptations and co-evolution available to us in the face of environmental change.

The alternative to justificationism is criticalism, the idea that adds to fallibilism the notion that we are rational only to the extent that we hold our knowledge claims open to continuous criticism and testing in order to eliminate the errors in them. Criticalism, like justificationism represents a general category of theories of evaluation. Just as epistemological communitarianism is a type of justificationism, critical rationalism, comprehensively critical rationalism, critical coherentism, and critical scientific realism are types of criticalism. I'll wait for future blog posts to explain the distinctions among these, but you can learn more about most of these distinctions from a graphic white paper written by Mark McElroy and myself called "Corporate Epistemology".

Political Communitarianism

Thus, political communitarianism, like Greek Democracy and Rousseau's popular democracy, is not a constitutional political system. Its poverty is due to its failure to protect the rights of individual participants against "the general will" of the community. It does not constrain the emergence of tyranny and specifically the expression of community-based authoritarianism in decision making affecting the rights of individual members. From the viewpoint of adaptation, it restricts membership in the system to those who accept the consensus norms, and thereby, ceteris paribus, it restricts the adaptive range of the community, because it restricts the variety of opinions, ideas, and creative expressions available to it in distributed problem solving. Political communitarianism then, is poor in freedom, and in its capability to adapt.

Epistemological and Political Communitarianism

Epistemological and political communitarianism are logically independent, but also frequently correlated. When both are present, they reinforce one another, and a stable communitarian system. When neither are present, communitarianism is absent. When epistemological communitarianism is present and political communitarianism is absent, epistemological communitarianism may still be quite stable, because it may be quite compatible with alternative political forms other than constitutional regimes. Even with a constitutional, open political order however, epistemological communitarianism can still survive if members accept such philosophical doctrines as paradigms and their inescapable incommensurability, expert authority, social constructivism, and epistemological relativism. When political communitarianism is present and epistemological communitarianism is absent, there is great pressure placed on the knowledge processing system by the political order to move toward epistemological communitarianism, because failure to do so would suggest that the communitarian political order is illegitimate. In addition, the present world intellectual climate is fertile for epistemological communitarianism, given the spread of relativism, radical and social constructivism, and the "floating foundationalisms" of Wittgenstein, Quine, Rorty, and Polanyi.

Communitarianism and Communities of Practice

An important issue in creating CoPs is whether they will evolve toward communitarianism or other types of political systems. Since participation in CoPs is voluntary, I believe there are only two stable forms of CoPs, communitarian and constitutional or open CoPs. The interesting question this raises is whether there are differences in generating conditions that enable one or another of these types (keeping firmly in mind that each of these CoP attractor states is an emergent that cannot be determined simply by its generating conditions)?

I think there are such conditions. They have to do, first, with the Ideology of the people forming the community. Ideology matters. If the people who form a community believe that no decisions are beyond the authority of the community's "general will" as expressed in community interaction, then it will be the case that the community's founders, who are often its elite, will not hesitate to express "the general will" without recognizing any constraints arising from individual rights. In other words, in communities, the ideology of its founders, if reflected in its initial rules and interactions, is likely to be carried over into its practice and into its developing norms and values. This is especially true because the natural (biological) pragmatism reflected in the reinforcement learning dynamics affecting all life is biased toward avoiding the short-term conflict accompanying dissent. Members in such communities are all too likely to accept that they are "apprentices" whose participation should be peripheral and non-disruptive for some time, and that learning in the CoP is about socialization into the community, rather than contributing to the recognition and solution of its problems.

In open CoPs, which are constitutional in character, the Ideology of those who form a community may be very different. To begin with, it is likely to view the CoP as an interactive group, that may or may become a community for some time, if ever. It also may view the CoP's purpose in terms of the primacy of member problem solving and inquiry and not in terms of the primacy of "negotiating meaning" and "creating community". Finally, it will view the community as built on the inalienable individual rights of its members to express any content on any issue related to the domain of the community; either by asserting a knowledge claim, or by criticizing one that has been asserted -- provided only that that expression is civil enough to moderate the conflict that is to be expected from inquiry possessing a vigorous and unremitting critical dimension. These Communities of Inquiry (CoIs), in contrast to Communitarian Communities (CCs) have no "apprentices," only contributors. Learning in them is about solving problems, not about "negotiating meaning". CoIs reduce the force of community social sanctions against individuals who express views dissenting from the community at large. One result is that the community can develop a higher tolerance for conflict and a more diverse membership. This, in turn, means, that this type of community is likely to have a wider range of adaptive possibilities in its tool box, and consequently a greater capacity to co-evolve with its environment than CCs.

Communitarianism and KM List Servs

KM List Servs are wedded to political communitarianism. I don't say that lightly, and certainly you won't hear most people in these list servs "'fess" up to it. But you can see it in the way many group members and group moderators act when people begin to vigorously express views that they disagree with, even when the expression of these views is polite, or at least far more polite than the responses from defenders of the community view.

Not only do the moderators of these e-mail-based CoPs bar future postings from those who express dissenting views persistently and vigorously, but before such action takes place they tolerate uncivil posts from those defending prevailing views. They also react strongly to any hint of incivility from those trying to develop the case for new perspectives. Members in such groups believe that there is nothing inappropriate about writing to moderators to urge action against those expressing views they don't agree with, or simply don't want to see expressed for whatever reason. And moderators think nothing of abandoning a level playing field by restricting the posting rights of the targets of those who ask for moderation, purely on the basis of the number of people who complain, and regardless of whether the behavior of those to be censored is civil, or if not entirely so, at least far less uncivil than many of those who are doing the complaining.

The dominant theory of knowledge claim evaluation in KM list serv groups is epistemological communitarianism. Knowledge is viewed as that which emerges from the practices of the group through its attempts to negotiate meaning. And it is assumed that the knowledge outcomes of meaning negotiations are justified by community interaction/negotiation processes producing community practices. This justificationism goes unremarked and unquestioned, as if there is no alternative basis for knowledge production other than epistemological communitarianism based on the community's situated negotiation of meaning.

I will document these views about KM list serv groups in future blog posts by describing recent occurrences in the comprac, act-km, and AOK-net yahoo groups, three groups in which I've acted as a participant observer. First, however, I want to consider the question of why these KM groups are communitarian in character.

Why Communitarianism?

Why should the three KM list serv groups all be communitarian in character? Groups outside of KM, for example, The Fabric of Reality, The Critical Café, The Critical Rationalist, and The Post-Popper Groups, all yahoo groups like the three KM groups, are anything but communitarian. There are rules in some of these groups, but others are not even under moderation. Sometimes moderators do intervene in Fabric of Reality when they think a discussion has become circular. But this is very rare and only occurs after very detailed exploration of questions. I have never seen participants in these groups complain to moderators about the posts of other participants. In the unmoderated groups, I have seen members bitterly complain to one another or to other participants about someone else. But I have never heard of anyone in these groups asking the moderator to stop someone from posting, or restrict their participation.

I think the explanation for communitarianism in the KM groups lies in KM itself, and specifically in the widespread popularity of the reigning theory of Communities of Practice developed by Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger, and others since the early 1990s. I think that it is from that theory that the moderators of the three groups, as well as their members, have adapted communitarian ideology, which easily becomes reflected in the practice of their list servs.

The moderators of all three KM Groups may fairly be said to revere Communities of Practice as one of the primary, or even the primary, advance introduced by KM. All are quite familiar with the CoP literature and with various stories about CoPs and their successes and failures as knowledge sharing tools. All seem to view themselves as servants and instruments of the list serv communities they serve, as obligated to reflect the consensus of the members, and as dedicated to preserving their communities and protecting them against excessive conflict caused by too vigorous interchange. All seem to believe that knowledge is "enacted" and negotiated in their communities, and that knowledge in these communities is what the members think it is, or what they practice. None seem to believe that any members have basic and inalienable individual rights of self-expression relating to their substantive views that cannot be limited by the community at large if it decides, as evidenced by behind the scenes complaints to the moderator, that it wishes to censor those expressions.

In these various groups, the moderators' outlooks are reinforced by many who actively seek censorship of "offending" parties and who reward the moderators with praise when they show "courage" by supporting popular sentiment rather than individual rights. Some members actually believe that people should keep their posts short so that these members can continue to enjoy the convenience of using e-mail digests instead of subscribing to individual e-mails, so that they may simply delete posts they do not wish to read. Thus, they oppose all lengthy discussions of issues, which, of course, means that they oppose all in-depth exploration of issues in the group. Still other members believe that knowledge is relative, and that in the context of CoPs it is relative to the community itself.

In short, the explanation for the occurrence of communitarianism in KM list servs lies in the influence of CoP theory, and in the ideologies of the moderators and members of these KM groups. The ideologies at issue encompass both political and epistemological communitarianism. And the results are restrictions in the range of membership and adaptability of these groups, and the development of legitimacy for structures of knowledge processing that are fundamentally opposed to constitutional democratic values and to long-term adaptiveness and innovation.

The alternative to such groups is the Community of Inquiry (CoI), a type of open community that is focused on problem solving and inquiry and individual rights of self-expression, on producing new knowledge, and on adaptation. CoIs also let the development of community take care of itself, a by-product of its success in problem solving, rather than an end in itself. In future blogs, I will provide case studies of each of the KM groups and illustrate both political and epistemological communitarianism in each.

Rules and Learning in List Servs

Thu, 03 Jun 2004 15:39:32 GMT

Ad Hominems, Personal Attacks, Labeling, and Learning In List Serv Communities

Until recently, I've been taking some time to participate in the act-km yahoo group where there has been an active discussion of Management vs. Governance-based approaches to Knowledge Management (KM). While I think the discussion has been a good one and that many useful views have been expressed during it, I've also noted, and not for the first time, the use of ad hominem arguments, personal attacks and labeling in exchanges within the group. Behavior of this sort has occurred in the AOK and com-prac groups as well. It also occurred in the KMCI Groups (the KMCI Virtual Chapter and KM Best_Practices groups) during the time of their sustained activity, until I changed and enforced rules prohibiting these practices.

One of the key responsibilities of Knowledge Managers is to facilitate knowledge production, and I've made clear in previous posts that knowledge production is critically dependent on knowledge claim evaluation and its smooth functioning. But knowledge claim evaluation cannot function smoothly when the error elimination process, along with its necessary component of criticism, becomes conflictful, rather than collaborative. How can KM prevent this from happening? How can it enable knowledge claim evaluation so that it is performed collaboratively and with, at most, moderate conflict?

I've written a good bit in answer to this question in my paper on "Bridging Knowledge Gaps" and I don't want to repeat what I've said there in this post. However, I will make a few remarks on how KCE can be encouraged by the moderators (the Knowledge Managers) of list serv groups who presumably have an interest in facilitating dialog that can help participants to create new knowledge (learn), and not merely to share information.

The key to facilitating dialog that can lead to learning is to establish a perspective on how exchanges, designed to both produce and share knowledge, will be carried out by members of the group. The perspective should be reinforced by adopting some basic rules, constantly and consistently applied by moderators, to prevent the inevitable conflicts expressed in the content of dialogue from getting out of control.

The Perspective

One perspective and, I conjecture, the best one from the viewpoint of producing knowledge through dialogue and exchange, has been offered by Karl Popper in The Open Society and Its Enemies (Vol. 2, p. 225), and, more recently, in The Myth of the Framework, p. 12, edited by Mark A. Notturno. It was also expressed in Mark Notturno's, Science and the Open Society, p. 38, which I follow here. This perspective may be characterized as the critical rationalist attitude toward exchange and was expressed by Popper as:

"I may be wrong and you may be right, and by an effort, we may get closer to the truth."

This statement admirably expresses both the idea of our fallibility (See the quotation from Xenophanes in "All Life Is Problem Solving"), and the idea that our regulative ideal is to seek truth. Popper extended the critical rationalist attitude by offering three ethical principles that "form the basis of every rational discussion, that is, of every discussion undertaken in the search for truth" (See Karl Popper, In Search of a Better World, 1992, p. 199) The principles are:

The principle of fallibility: perhaps I am wrong and perhaps you are right. But we could easily both be wrong.
The principle of rational discussion: we want to try, as impersonally as possible, to weigh up our reasons for and against a theory; a theory that is definite and criticizable.
The principle of approximation to the truth: we can nearly always come closer to the truth in a discussion which avoids personal attacks. It can help us to achieve a better understanding; even in those cases where we do not reach an agreement. (p. 199, above)

For our purposes here, I'll substitute the phrase "knowledge claim" for the word "theory", in Popper's second principle.

In viewing these principles please note that they emphasize (a) our fallibility, (b) the regulative ideal of getting closer to the truth, (c) rational discussion focused on knowledge claims that are criticizable, and (d) civil, impersonal exchange focused on critical analysis of the alternative views that parties to a discussion hold. The need for impersonality and civility is especially important in view of the emphasis on critical analysis of knowledge claims as the method of getting closer to the truth. The parties to an exchange are viewed as having the common goal of getting closer to the truth. But, because the method of getting there requires conflict, the form of the discussion must be disciplined to focus only on the views at issue and not on the holders of those views.

Now clearly, this idea of rational exchange is no "silver bullet". Many people are not interested in rational discussion and don't believe in its utility in arriving at knowledge. Many others don't believe that our objective in seeking knowledge should be to get closer and closer to the truth. They believe that they should seek "what works", or what predicts well, or what management will approve, or what the community can agree on. Finally, even if people do believe in seeking truth, and also trust and perform civil rational discussion, the conflict embodied in critical exchange may escalate, destroy civility and fail to produce new knowledge. In spite of these difficulties however, it seems to me that civil rational exchange, combined with truth seeking, is the method that, in the long run, is more effective than other methods of exchange in growing knowledge. For others who believe this, it is, perhaps, not unreasonable to suggest that we should organize our list serv groups based on the critical rationalist attitude and the principles I've expressed. I will provide more context for this perspective by considering the distinction between Communities of Practice and Communities of Inquiry.

Communities of Inquiry vs. Communities of Practice

A Community of Practice (CoP) is a group of individuals who freely associate in order to communicate with one another about knowledge claims each of them have, and about their experiences in attempting to solve work-related problems in areas in which they share an interest. CoPs vary in their focus. Some may be primarily concerned with knowledge sharing; others with knowledge production as well as knowledge sharing. Among those focused on both, some CoPs may be characterized by testing and evaluation processes in which a few control access to previous knowledge claims, or have authority to evaluate them, or in which knowledge claims are evaluated by consensus. But truth is not a function of consensus – not a kind of popularity contest. It is also not a function of the voice of managerial, or even expert, authority. It is a function of how well statements correspond with the facts, regardless of what authority believes, or what the majority opinion happens to be.

A type of CoP is a Community of Inquiry (CoI). A Community of Inquiry is distinguished by its:

Objective of producing knowledge that is closer to the truth
Emphasis on continuous testing and evaluation in knowledge claim evaluation attempting to eliminate falsehoods
Refusal to accept that community agreement on the survival of a knowledge claim establishes or justifies it
Members having equal and open access to the community’s previously produced knowledge
Equal opportunity to produce new knowledge claims, and
Equal access to the means to communicate new knowledge claims produced within the community

I hope you can see that the critical rationalist perspective already discussed is further specified by the CoI idea, which when applied to list serv groups emphasizes that the organization of participation in such groups should be democratic, and that continuous testing and evaluation of knowledge claim performance through open discussion is the standard for these groups, rather than community agreement claiming to establish or justify certain knowledge claims over others.

The Rules

While it's important to be clear about the principles guiding activity in a list serv group, it's also important to have rules expressing boundary constraints that may prevent the system state one is attempting to facilitate (the CoI state) from moving toward an alternative attractor that is not focused on producing knowledge that is closer to the truth. I believe there are three simple rules, that, if continuously enforced by moderators, can provide the sought for boundary constraints.

First, no personal attacks should be allowed in posts. This rule should be enforced post-by-post. The moderator should evaluate whether an attack has occurred. If so, the post should be rejected with an explanation of the reason for rejection and an invitation to resubmit after appropriate revision. No further censure or barring of the offending poster should be added to the post rejection. The emphasis here should be on instruction about what a personal attack is from the viewpoint of the moderator, and on the clear communication that they are absolutely prohibited.

Second, casual evaluative labeling of points of view in the absence of explanation should also be prohibited. Labeling can easily be seen as a personal attack by the party whose view is labeled. I know one well-known KM practitioner who punctuates his disagreement with others with single word pejorative labels wrapped into lengthier arguments. The labels express the practitioner's undocumented opinion of the views of those he disagrees with. Recently, in the middle of a longer explanation related to another argument, he characterized his correspondent's view as "naïve" without further explanation of why he thought so. This called forth an impassioned, perfectly well-reasoned response from the correspondent, which however, only served to escalate the intensity of conflict between the two. "The bottom line" is that labeling poisons the atmosphere of discourse. Our second rule therefore prohibits it and suggests that moderators should return posts with labels with instructions to eliminate them.

Lastly, no ad hominem arguments should be allowed in posts. Such arguments proceed by attacking the characteristics, circumstances, or actions, of a person making a claim, and then proceed to suggest or imply that because of these characteristics, circumstances, or actions, the claim, or a related argument made by the person from which the claim follows by deduction, is either false or invalid. The invalidity of the conclusions of ad hominem arguments are not, by the fact of their occurrence, particularly damaging, and they are easily countered in exchanges by persons subjected to them. The problem with them, however, is that the attacks on the characteristics, circumstances, or actions of the authors of the knowledge claims they are directed against, poison the atmosphere of civility, and elicit answering personal attacks from others. If moderators reject posts with ad hominem arguments in the first place, conflict in exchanges will be moderated and people are much more likely to learn something from their dialogues.

Conclusion

I can put the argument of this post pretty simply. We need list serv groups whose purpose is to produce knowledge and support learning. For those to work right, they need to be communities of inquiry, not just communities of practice. That means people in them must agree on the goal of getting closer to the truth, on doing this by using the method of evaluating competing knowledge claims exchanging critical evaluations, and by doing in this in a civil manner that avoids personal attacks. In my view this can be done by clearly stating the purposes and policies of such groups while applying the critical rationalist CoI model, and, still more specifically, by implementing rules prohibiting direct personal attacks, "labeling" of points of view, and ad hominem arguments. In the next post, I will take up a related topic called "The Poverty of Communitarianism".

Why Is KCE So Important?

Mon, 10 May 2004 03:09:39 GMT

View of Florence from San Miniato (Thomas Cole,
1837)

The Importance of Knowledge Claim Evaluation

In my last post, I pointed to the problem of the absence of work on Knowledge Claim Evaluation in Knowledge management, offered some thoughts by way of explaining why this was the case, and ended with a statement about what was required for the job ahead. My account asserted the importance of Knowledge Claim Evaluation (KCE), but did little to explain why I thought it should be such a central concern of KM.

In my first post, "All Life is Problem Solving", I wrote about the importance of error elimination knowledge making and problem solving and said the following. The last of the three steps in making knowledge is error elimination or "matching". This step is the gateway to knowledge. But it is, as Popper pointed out, fundamentally negative in character. It is about eliminating mistakes and not about supporting any of one's tentative solutions. In animals lacking consciousness, mistakes are eliminated, when the animal receives negative reinforcement from the environment for selecting the wrong solution. That is, the animal in question can only learn by experiencing the negative consequences of its mistaken expectation and ensuing decision. Often the wrong choice means that the animal making the choice is eliminated along with its mistake. Animals with consciousness and especially sharing language have a great advantage over other animals. We can eliminate errors and learn by testing our solutions through the surrogate processes of criticism, controlled testing, and comparative analysis, before we take a decision. We, unlike other animals, can manage our knowledge making so that "our worst ideas die in our stead", and our best ones inform our decisions and actions. But to do so, we must use our gift of language and be diligent in criticism, testing, and evaluation of our tentative solutions. In other words, we must attempt to eliminate our errors through KCE.

In my second post on "Organizational Problem Solving", I noted that KCE is at the very center of knowledge processing and knowledge production. Think about it. Without it, what is the difference between information and knowledge? How do we know that we are integrating knowledge rather than just information? Or that the “knowledge” we’re using in operational business processes is of high quality? Absent a social process in organizations, be it formal or informal, through which competing claims can be held to tests of veracity or verisimilitude, how can we possibly make judgments about truth versus falsity? Knowledge Claim Evaluation, then, is what gives us the ability to know knowledge when we see it, and therefore to know when we've produced it.

Organizations clearly differ in the quality and success of their Knowledge Claim Evaluation processes and in the quality of knowledge produced by them. KM has many objectives. Enhancing organizational capability to get information from external sources, enhancing creativity and capability to formulate relevant knowledge claims, enhancing the process of sharing knowledge claims that have survived KCE are all very important. But what can Knowledge Managers do that could possibly be more important, than enhancing Knowledge Claim Evaluation the very sub-process that is the gateway to knowledge? I'll leave you to ask that question of yourself, and to wonder, as I do, why so few practitioners in KM talk or write about such enhancements.

For More Information

You’ll find much more information on the views offered in this post, and on training in the New Knowledge Management at three web sites: www.dkms.com, www.macroinnovation.com, and www.kmci.org. Many papers on the New Knowledge Management are available for downloading there. Our Excerpt from The Open Enterprise . . . may also be purchased there. Our print books: Mark W. McElroy, The New Knowledge Management, my Enterprise Information Portals and Knowledge Management, and our Key Issues in The New Knowledge Management, are available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or Elsevier.

Ignoring KCE

Wed, 05 May 2004 16:24:42 GMT

Angels Standing in the Sun (J. W. M. Turner, 1846)

What About Knowledge Claim Evaluation?

It must be the times. Go to any Knowledge Management (KM) professional meeting. Read any KM Journal or popular magazine. Join any KM newsgroup. The story is the same. Except for those pesky KMCI types and a few of their friends, no one seems to be interested in practices, methods, or theory about evaluating knowledge claims. Now, given the general and long-standing interest in decision support, and the fact that KM is often justified as improving it, isn't this passing strange?

The problem of knowledge claim evaluation is a decision problem itself. It is the problem of selecting the best among competing knowledge claims, and the problem exists whether or not one thinks that knowledge is a type of belief network, or whether it is a type of semantic network. For even if one thinks that semantic networks are only information, one should still care very much about the relative quality of information and its relationship to knowledge (viewed as belief) and should, therefore, select among competing knowledge claims by deciding which one has the highest quality. So, why aren't KM professionals concerned about Knowledge Claim Evaluation?

Explanation1: "The Old Knowledge Management" and Knowledge Sharing

"The Old Knowledge Management" is about Knowledge Sharing. Its value propositions are better decision support, higher job productivity and performance, and capture of knowledge assets that would otherwise leave the organization. The Old Knowledge Management is not about making new knowledge, problem solving or innovation. So why should it be concerned with Knowledge Claim Evaluation, the sub-process that allows us to decide what is knowledge and what is "just information"?

Even if one thinks there's some truth to this explanation, the Old Knowledge Management has now been supplemented by a concern for knowledge making and innovation. "Second Generation Knowledge Management" (SGKM) has arrived and KM is concerned with much more than knowledge sharing as a visit to any of the major periodicals and news magazines in the field will attest. Yet the appearance of SGKM has hardly increased the concern for Knowledge Claim Evaluation within the mainstream of KM.

Explanation 2: The Belief that Knowledge Making in Business is a Practical Activity and Includes No Time or Resources for Knowledge Claim Evaluation

I've heard from some that Knowledge Claim Evaluation is not very important in KM, because it is a business activity, process, or discipline, not a science. The implication, of course, is that science uses Knowledge Claim Evaluation because of its deliberative, exacting, theoretical, and precise character, while business with its much more imprecise and action-oriented practical reasoning just can't afford the time and effort that the deliberative approach to knowledge making requires.

This line of reasoning, if it represents a widespread attitude in KM, may provide a part of the reason why there is so little concern about Knowledge Claim Evaluation in KM. As I explained in All Life Is Problem Solving, however, all of our non-routine knowledge making, and that means whether in science or business, or any other area of organizational or human behavior, involves problem recognition, formulating tentative solutions, and error elimination. In organizations we do perform Knowledge Claim Evaluation. It is how we attempt to eliminate errors in our knowledge claims. The only important questions are whether we do so with full awareness of what we are doing, and whether our practices produce knowledge claims that are effective in raising the quality of our business process performance or not.

Explanation 3: The Belief that Knowledge Claim Evaluation Is Based On Authority

Knowledge Claim Evaluation is not of great concern to KM because, since knowledge claims cannot be justified as true through evaluation, there are only three theories of evaluation that count in organizations anyway: (1) what managers think, (2) what experts think, and (3) what one's community thinks. In all three cases, some form of authority: managerial, expert, or community consensus, "justifies" our knowledge claims.

This is another view that may explain why Knowledge Claim Evaluation is not of greater interest to KM. If only authority can justify our knowledge claims, the issue of how we ought to select among knowledge claims is of no importance. We have no choice. What we select is determined by various authorities, by politics and not any rational procedure.

Explanation 4: The Belief That Knowledge Is Socially Constructed, Determined By Social And Cultural Background, and Unaffected By Reality

Social constructivism, an epistemological theory held by many in the social sciences, holds that reality as well as our knowledge of it is socially constructed and that such knowledge constructions are unaffected by an independently existing reality. Social constructivism often goes along with two other beliefs. First, the distinction between objective and subjective knowledge is meaningless because all knowledge is a function of our social and cultural context and can only be justified relative to that context. And second, such justification can only be provided by community consensus, since only it reliably reflects the influence of social and cultural context on our knowledge. Since community consensus is the only legitimate basis of knowledge, explanation 4 partly agrees with explanation 3. It holds that Knowledge Claim Evaluation is a simple matter of determining whether a knowledge claim network is backed by a community consensus. So we need not spend our time worrying about effective methods of Knowledge Claim Evaluation. All we need do is see to it that knowledge is effectively shared so that the community is informed. Then we just need to wait for consensus to emerge.

Of course, the problem with this reasoning begins with reality. Reality is not socially constructed. Our knowledge of it is certainly mediated by our social networks, along with our psychological predispositions, and biological heritage, but it is also influenced by reality itself, which exists apart from our social construction of it. Since reality, and our knowledge of it, are it least partly independent, the issues of the correspondence of our knowledge claims with reality, i.e. of their truth, and of which of a competing set of knowledge claims is closest to the truth, need to be faced. And since neither correspondence to reality, nor closeness of approach to the truth can be measured directly, facing these issues means facing the issue of how we can effectively evaluate our knowledge claims.

We know enough about knowledge claim evaluation through the centuries to know that it is not effective to use any form of authority, including community consensus as a criterion for evaluating knowledge claims. Knowledge claims cannot be validated by community consensus, but rather should be continuously tested and evaluated in order to eliminate error.

The Job Ahead

Whether KM's lack of concern about Knowledge Claim Evaluation is due to the idea that only knowledge sharing is important, or to the idea that business is imprecise and neither needs nor has the time nor the resources for it, or to the idea that Knowledge Claim Evaluation in business can only be based on authority, or, to the idea that reality and our knowledge of it are both socially constructed, or all four, or some other reasons that haven't occurred to me, is interesting, but, in the end, secondary. What is important, is that this lack of concern means that KM has not been doing anything to enhance the key sub-process in the Knowledge Life Cycle, Knowledge Claim Evaluation. It hasn't been doing anything to distinguish among knowledge claims according to their quality, which also implies that it hasn't been doing anything to distinguish objective knowledge from information, or to measure the success of knowledge claim evaluation in producing effective knowledge.

Knowledge Claim Evaluation is not ignored in every field of business application today. Not even in fields that are closely related to Knowledge Management. Knowledge Discovery in Databases and Data Mining (KDD) has, since its inception in the 1990s, considered validating models an important activity, and continues to produce useful research on validation criteria that are applied in model estimation. But KDD has had little effect on KM, perhaps because its orientation toward using formal reasoning in development of its own perspectives is foreign to most KM practitioners.

The job ahead is to develop methods of Knowledge Claim Evaluation that will enable knowledge workers to do a better job of selecting among competing knowledge claims. In our book, Key Issues In the New Knowledge Management, KMCI Press/Butterworth-Heinemann, 2003, Chapter 5, Mark McElroy and I have begun this process by outlining a theory of fair comparison and two formal approaches to measuring "truthlikeness". But this is just the first little bit of work in an area that requires substantial effort.

Stories and Knowledge Integration

Thu, 22 Apr 2004 14:31:03 GMT

Evening in Arcady (Thomas Coles, 1843)

Storytelling and Knowledge Integration

In my last two blogs, I analyzed the role of storytelling in problem solving, describing both its important positive role and its limitations. In our KLC framework, knowledge processing includes problem recognition, problem solving (or knowledge production), and once knowledge is produced, Knowledge Integration, the process that presents this new knowledge to individuals and groups comprising the organization, becomes the focus of knowledge processing. It distributes the organization's objective knowledge to individuals and groups and in doing so initiates the individual and group level KLCs that represent their reaction to Knowledge Integration and that produces changes in the Distributed Organizational Knowledge Base (DOKB). See my earlier post, "Organizational Problem Solving", for a more detailed description of Knowledge Integration, and the references there for much more detail.

Knowledge Integration has four sub-processes: Knowledge and Information Broadcasting (KIB), Searching and Retrieving, Teaching, and Sharing. All four may be performed either electronically or interpersonally. In KIB, an individual or group, holding previously produced organizational knowledge initiates transmittal of such knowledge to those who are unaware of it. In searching and retrieving individuals and groups actively gather previously produced organizational knowledge. In teaching, individuals recognized as intellectual authorities both transmit organizational knowledge to others and are the focus of inquiries about their knowledge from others. In sharing, individuals and groups use peer-to-peer communications to express organizational knowledge. With the foregoing as background let's examine where storytelling fits.

Knowledge and Information Broadcasting

People can present the codified knowledge and information of the organization to others by sending or telling them stories in the absence of specific requests for them (i.e. "broadcasting"). Storytelling supporters in KM believe that stories are more effective than other tools of expression for doing this. Perhaps they are. But the criterion for effectiveness being used seems to be a story's utility in providing a stimulus that the person receiving it can use to comprehend the lesson the storyteller is trying to communicate. Sometimes those using stories talk about the receivers co-creating the story in their own terms. This is certainly the way Steve Denning describes the "springboard" story. However, it's clear that storytelling proponents don't mean the co-creation of the story in such a way that the receiver comes to reject the lesson being presented or implied in it.

So "co-creation" seems to refer to a process where a receiver comes to understand a story in his/her own terms, but not in such a way that this co-creation leads the receiver to believe that the story is false. This raises the question of whether stories are more useful than other techniques of communication in conveying understanding of the knowledge claims they are asserting, or whether they are simply more useful at manipulating agreement with those knowledge claims. Of course, if it is the second, that would call into question whether stories are really more effective than other tools in helping organizations to adapt.

I think these considerations may be most relevant where interpersonal (and not electronic) methods of storytelling are used since by all accounts, interpersonal delivery of stories is the most effective way of using them to elicit rapid understanding of the concepts underlying a story. In other words, are stories least effective in helping organizations to adapt, where they are most successful in bringing about quick agreement with the vision presented in a story? I think that someone's answer to this question will, in part, depend on how much faith one has in rapid, but uncritical comprehension of knowledge claims, which storytelling sometimes seems to elicit, as a foundation for more effective action.

Searching and Retrieving

Stories play no material role in electronic searching and retrieving, but in interpersonal searching for information the person looking for it from someone else can often help her/his informant by clarifying what's needed through a story. We may not run into too many situations where we need to tell a story to clarify what information we're looking for, but it is precisely in those situations where we can't name or easily summarize the nature of that information that we need a story. We need a story that will state our problem, and in doing so, narrow down, for our informant, the possible answers, or the places (libraries, books, periodicals, documents, the internet, people, etc.) where answers might be found.

Teaching

Of course, stories are a favorite technique in teaching. Every time we describe a situation to illustrate a point, we tell a story. Sometimes we tell it well, sometimes not so well. But teaching is frequently about telling stories to illustrate general points by describing cases, or to give histories, or to explain why an event occurred in the way that it did, or for many other reasons. We rely on stories constantly in teaching most subjects. We may rely on them less in formal subjects such as logic, mathematics and statistics, but even there we need stories to convey complex ideas and to help understanding. When we teach general theories in biology, physics, psychology, and other sciences we often use stories to illustrate theories. When we teach history or political science or anthropology we often use stories to explain particular events or circumstances without relying on the pattern inherent in a story to create understanding. What would teaching be without stories? Nothing but a set of abstractions that only very few among us could understand.

Sharing

Much of the excitement surrounding storytelling in KM has centered around its use in knowledge sharing, by which people normally mean any attempt by one person to communicate data, information, or knowledge to another, rather than the specific formulation of it as peer-to-peer sharing of explicit knowledge. I've already discussed broadcasting, and teaching, which are types of knowledge sharing in the broader sense of the term, and have indicated the importance of stories to performing them well. Peer-to-peer knowledge sharing is similar to the other two sub-processes in its dependence on stories. Much of the time, we really can't do it well without writing, communicating, or telling stories.

In spite of the importance, approaching necessity, of stories in knowledge integration, it is important to emphasize that stories, alone, are not sufficient for good knowledge integration. Where models and other formal knowledge need to be integrated, stories may be used to illustrate, but to show how models work, it is necessary to explain the structure and operation of the model itself. Further, when we have general normative theories to teach, stories again have an illustrative role. One of the most important areas where stories alone won't work for knowledge integration is the area of the outcome of knowledge claim evaluation of stories themselves. Unless we consider the record of analysis of a story for veracity a story itself, it seems clear that stories don't have much of a role in this kind of knowledge integration.

Finally, one of the problems involved in evaluating the role of stories in knowledge integration and other areas of knowledge processing as well, is the generality of the idea of stories. On Steve Denning's web site www.stevedenning.com, there is a section devoted to "Storytelling in the News". At the end of the section Steve comments on the question whether a narrow or broad definition of "story" should be used in looking at storytelling in the news. He argues for a broader view on grounds that it is difficult to make a viable distinction between stories and "straight news", and also because the "soft, squishy, emotional stuff" is everywhere in the news stories.

On the other hand, if we look at every narrative that describes an event, occurrence, or happening, as a story, then it is a trivial conclusion that stories are very important in knowledge processing and knowledge integration. That is, basically our modes of expression come down to generalizing models or explanations and stories. So, of course, both will have important roles to play in the various areas of knowledge processing. Things become much more interesting however, when we either (a) use a much more narrow notion of stories, or (b) divide the general category of stories into types. As I indicated in a previous blog post on this subject, Steve Denning and Larry Prusak have offered typologies of stories. This suggests more illuminating analyses for the future that will analyze which types of stories are most useful for each of the sub-processes of knowledge processing.

An Exchange on The Limits of Storytelling

Mon, 19 Apr 2004 21:57:37 GMT

L'allegro (Thomas Coles, 1845)

Storytelling and Problem Solving: Part 2

In my last blog I analyzed the role of storytelling in problem solving. I concluded by saying that KM's justifiable enthusiasm for stories and storytelling should be tempered, in the area of problem solving, by an equivalent enthusiasm for critically assessing competing stories, because our stories are conjectural in nature and could easily be false. I proposed that we should pledge to cultivate a critical attitude toward them, keeping in mind that if our stories survive our best criticisms they are more likely to provide a better basis for decisions. In this blog I will further emphasize that position by posting an exchange between Steve Denning and myself that is recorded in messages 1497 and 1501 of the AOK list serve group.

I'll begin with Steve's statement in point 5 of his reply to a number of posters.

Steve: 5. "JOE FIRESTONE'S POSTINGS ON NARRATIVE AND KNOWLEDGE: I won't give here the detailed response that Joe's lengthy and helpful postings deserve. I'll just make two points.

First, Joe concludes that story is essentially good for pretty much everything except the weighty task of Knowledge Claim Evaluations. In this I would agree with him: analysis is a better tool than narrative for evaluating the truth of some supposed piece of knowledge. Narrative has many strengths, but sorting out the wheat from the chaff isn't one of them."

Joe: "To have your agreement on this greatly increases my confidence in my reasoning about it.

You also said:"

Steve: "Second, Joe's underlying assumption seems to be that knowledge" is the gold standard and that nothing else is worth a damn. I find this assumption more problematic. In the world of, say, the physical sciences, where what was true yesterday is almost certainly going to be true tomorrow, this is a sound approach. But in the world of human affairs, tomorrow may not look at all like today, and in organizations, the principal issue is what to do tomorrow, about which there can be no certain knowledge. It's in dealing with tomorrow that an approach rooted in yesterday's verified knowledge, and constrained by yesterday's axioms, and dominated by analytical thinking that flows from that knowledge and those axioms, has been shown to be so lacking."

Joe: "My assumption is not that knowledge is the only thing that "is worth a damn". It is that "knowledge" is biologically unavoidable, and that it is developed through a process of problem recognition, developing tentative solutions, and then eliminating the errors in them. The only question is how well we will do the job of performing these three activities.

I think that story-telling is very useful for developing tentative (and alternative) solutions. It is a very old and honored human technique for doing that. But once the stories are told, and even if they are wonderful stories, we still have the task of trying to eliminate the errors in them; of trying to make the stories as strong as they can be so that the knowledge they carry does not fail us. The physical sciences and the world of human affairs are not different when it comes to the need for critical evaluation of the stories we tell in both spheres. If anything, criticism is more necessary in the area of knowledge claims about human affairs, so that we don't act on what are obviously false knowledge claims.

Moreover, regarding your critical comments about analytical thinking and yesterday's verified knowledge, I, don't believe that knowledge claims can be "verified" in the sense I believe you have in mind. I do believe, however, that knowledge claims can be criticized and that we can distinguish among them according to how well they meet our tests and criticisms. I also think that even though analytical thinking in the Social Sciences has been far less successful than in the Natural Sciences, the lack of such thinking and uncritical reliance on intuition and authority has had even worse results. And that we see those results around us in the corporate world and in Government every day. So while, I believe in intuition, in story-telling, in unfettered imagination, and in artistry, I also believe in analysis, in logic, in rationality, and in criticism. All of these are our faculties and they are all equally human."

Steve: "Narrative is often a better way of exploring possible futures and their implications, and certainly needs to be part of the toolkit. Verified knowledge is obviously part of the picture but it isn¹t the whole ballgame when it comes to innovation in human affairs."

Joe: "As indicated just above, I don't think error elimination is the whole ball game in any field. Inquiry is a mix of the creative and the evaluative, and so is innovation. I think one problem with KM as a field these days is that it is out of balance. There is tremendous emphasis on novel techniques and experiences for generating knowledge claims, but very little concern and emphasis on how claims, once generated, will be tested and evaluated. This is a great mistake, and in calling for its correction I am not denigrating story-telling, collaborative spaces, mind mapping, communities of practice, or any of the techniques we currently value because they free up our thinking. What I am calling for is the recognition that the results of using these and other techniques stops short of Knowledge Claim Evaluation, and that our task in solving problems is not done until we've completed that activity as well."

Steve: "6. DETECTING THE FALSE NARRATIVE: I agree with John Barrett that there is no reason why narrative should be more likely to be false than abstractions, and so I disagree with others who advise against using narrative because it might be false. If anything the presumption should be the opposite: narratives are typically specific to individual situations and can usually be verified in various ways. Abstractions are typically more general and are more difficult to verify. We may believe that all swans are white because no one we know has ever seen anything but white swans, but then one day we may find that there's another upside-down part of the world where swans are black. In human affairs, generalizations are even more difficult to prove than narratives and even more likely to be false."

Joe: "I don't think abstractions are true or false. Abstractions are concepts. We use them in statements. The statements that include them are true or false. And stories are not free of abstractions, even if they are about specific events. When stories are told we must be aware of the generalizations that are implicit in the stories and we must be aware of the abstract concepts that these stories contain. You said there was no reason to believe that narratives are more likely to be false than abstractions. I would not put it that way. I think the comparison is between narratives and more formal knowledge claim networks that express theories containing abstractions. And I think that while it is true that narratives are not more likely to be false than theories, in theory, it is also true that in practice we are likely to treat theories differently than we do narratives. When we use theories we are likely to compare them against each other, to view them as competing, and to criticize them in an effort to see which is the stronger. But when we have narratives, we are likely to use them to try to sell and to provide support for a point of view we favor, and we are not likely to use them to test and to evaluate and to determine whether our point of view can survive our evaluations.

You also said:"

Steve: "In practical terms, the issue boils down to whether we are going to be intelligent about our storytelling or not. Refusing to learn what works and what doesn't work in this field isn't all that smart - in fact, it's the antithesis of knowledge management. Refusing to do it because of the risk of misuse is a bit like saying we won't give people hammers or allow them to fly in planes because hammers and planes can be used as weapons rather than for their intended, constructive use."

Joe: "I quite agree. The remedy is not to prohibit story-telling or to refuse to learn about it. It is to learn more about it and to subject narratives to Knowledge Claim Evaluation.

You also said:"

Steve: "We are a storytelling species."

Joe: "With which I also entirely agree, but I must add that we are a criticizing species as well. And as I pointed out in an earlier post, the evolution of language was accompanied by the evolution of story-telling, which, in its turn, was accompanied by the evolution of criticism, so that we could eliminate the errors in our stories.

Best,

Joe"

The Limits of Storytelling

Sun, 18 Apr 2004 21:49:48 GMT

Lascaux Horse

Storytelling and Problem Solving: Part 1

One of the most popular techniques identified with Knowledge Management is storytelling. Led by Steve Denning, Dave Snowden, Katalina Groh, Larry Prusak, John Seely Brown, and Seth Weaver Kahan, storytelling has become a vibrant movement within KM with a life of its own. Two new books, due out in June 2004, by Denning, and Brown, Denning, Groh, and Prusak, promise to fuel the fire of storytelling and spread it well beyond the disciplinary confines of KM into the general field of Organizational Management.

Storytelling was introduced into Knowledge Management by Steve Denning (See The Springboard: How Storytelling Ignites Action in Knowledge Era Organizations, Woburn, MA: KMCI Press/Butterworth-Heinemann, 2001) as part of a Knowledge Sharing initiative at the World Bank. It was used to present "Springboard" stories to communicate an action-igniting vision of what Knowledge Sharing might mean to the World Bank. But its purpose was not simply to share the idea that Knowledge Sharing might be valuable to the Bank and its clients. It was also to induce listeners to "co-create" their own vision of Knowledge Sharing and its benefits to the bank. The stories used are called springboard stories because they "catalyze" a process in listeners which (a) leads to a new level of understanding about Knowledge Sharing and its significance and (b) leads to action based on this understanding.

Springboard stories are not the only ones that are useful in organizations. In Squirrel, Inc. one of the two new books I referenced earlier, Denning covers stories whose primary function is (1) communicating about who we are, (2) getting people to work together, (3) expressing and transmitting core values, (4) springboarding, (5) taming the organizational grapevine, (6) sharing knowledge, and (7) leading people into the future. Many of these functions of stories transcend knowledge processing, showing that storytelling has applications broader than knowledge processing and KM.

In this blog and the very next one, I'll focus in on the relationship between storytelling and problem solving (or knowledge production) in organizations. In future blogs, I'll write about storytelling and knowledge integration, and storytelling and knowledge management.

Popper, Storytelling, and Problem Solving

In his later writings, Karl Popper had a good bit to say about stories, storytelling, and problem solving. He viewed stories in an evolutionary framework and in the context of the appearance of language in animals and humans. In animals, primitive languages have two functions: expressive (of inner physiological states) and communicative (signaling). But with the development of human language, an informative/descriptive/explanatory function of language co-evolved, along with human culture and cultural products.

Up to this point Popper's account is based on a theory of his teacher, Karl Bühler. To this theory of the functions of human language, Popper added (p. 84-91) the critical/argumentative function, which, he believed, was the key to creating objective knowledge. Other functions of human language such as the persuasive, advisory, hortatory, and others also exist. But the first four are the most essential ones and stand in a hierarchical relationship to one another, such that the higher functions cannot occur without the lower ones. Thus, argumentative expression presupposes, description, communication, and emotional/physiological expression. Descriptive/informative/explanatory expression presupposes communication, and emotional/physiological expression, and so on.

The evolution of descriptive human language, according to Popper (1994, p. 89), was accompanied by a number of important biological effects, including:

"A fuller awareness of time and . . . a more flexible conscious anticipation of future events";
"The formulation of questions" and "the beginning of objectivization of problems";
"The development of imagination" . . . used in myth-making and storytelling";
"The development of inventiveness"; and
The "entrenchment" of newly invented tools, behavior, and social institutions in culture.

Inventiveness (pp.89-90):

"increased tremendously with the invention of storytelling. Its role in the rise of the higher civilizations cannot be exaggerated.
Storytelling is found, as far as we know, in all human communities, however low they may be in their cultural development. Sticks are not found in all human communities, but storytelling is. So I would say that the invention of tools, and the richness of the different tools that men can invent, is connected with storytelling. . ."

Popper connected storytelling with the critical/argumentative function as well as with the descriptive function. He said (p. 90):

"Almost all conversation and even most stories are largely argumentative and critical. Myths are invented as explanatory theories and are, like all explanations, partly argumentative, although often in a primitive way. It is also obvious that the descriptive function cannot fully develop without the critical function: only with the argumentative and critical function can negation and similar things develop, and these, of course, greatly enrich the descriptive and informative function."

But elsewhere, he contrasted stories and criticism and pointed out that human language (p. 452):

". . . gives rise to the need to criticize because of storytelling. With the invention of language there also comes the invention of excuses, of false excuses, and of false explanations produced in order to cover up something not quite right that one has done, and so on; and with this arises the need to distinguish between truth and falsity. Thus, with storytelling there arises the need to distinguish between truth and falsity, and this, I think, is how criticism actually arose originally in the development of language . . ."

And later:

". . . What characterizes a descriptive statement is that it can be true or false, and therefore also that it can be used for different purposes: for the purpose of telling the truth - that is to say, for conveying information - or for the purpose of lying; for example, for making certain excuses acceptable, or for covering up failure, and so on. I think storytelling emerges from these descriptive reports, from the telling of lies, or from both. Both descriptive reports and lies fulfill a kind of explanatory function. . . ."

In light of Popper's work, the connection between language, storytelling, and criticism, on the one hand and problem solving on the other is made by realizing that storytelling, along with other descriptive/explanatory language formulations, addresses real, visualized, or envisioned problems. Stories are one method of expressing knowledge claims whose intent is to describe/inform/or explain a pattern of related events or occurrences. Stories are conjectural in nature. They assume theoretical propositions about cause and effect and about change, even generalizations, in many cases, but they are about specific events or occurrences, and in that way they are different from general theories.

Stories, like other conjectural formulations, fit into Popper's problem solving schema, and the Knowledge Life Cycle version of it I have described for organizations. Stories, represent tentative solutions to epistemic problems because they explain why things have happened or because they offer predictions about what will happen, or because they prescribe, or because they close an epistemic gap by informing us about a solution. It may help us to get a grip on the meaning and implications of our knowledge claims when we wrap them in stories. And stories may suggest entirely new knowledge claims to us by stimulating us to combine ideas in fresh ways.

But stories, like general theories, and other knowledge claim networks, may be false, or if they prescribe values, may be illegitimate. They may fail to explain, describe or inform about reality, or they may fail to prescribe the right actions. To use them to solve problems, we need, once we've formed them, to subject them to criticism and testing through Knowledge Claim Evaluation. Only if our stories survive competition against other stories during knowledge claim evaluation can we conclude that they provide solutions and objective knowledge. Even then, however, we cannot say for certain that they are true. They along with other knowledge claims remain conjectural and subject to further critical evaluation as the need arises.

Storytelling and other areas of Problem Solving

Knowledge Claim Formulation is not the only area of problem solving where storytelling can help. Let's review the others.

Storytelling and Problem Recognition

Story-telling can help us to recognize and clearly formulate knowledge gaps (i.e. problems) that are relevant for improving organizational business processes. If you're the storyteller, the act of formulating a good story can be a great aid in increasing your own understanding of the problem. If you're the listener, a good story can help you to see a knowledge gap clearly and to better appreciate its connection to the practical decisions that cannot be made without closing that gap.

Storytelling and Information Acquisition

Is story-telling useful for acquiring information from outside our organizations? Storytelling within an organization has no role here. But listening to, and acquiring, stories from outside one's organization can be among one's most relevant sources of information for competitive intelligence.

Storytelling and Knowledge Claim Evaluation

Is story-telling useful for Knowledge Claim Evaluation? Here, I think the answer is mixed. Alternative stories express competing knowledge claims, and are indispensable for comparing competing knowledge claims about particular events or occurrences. By-and-large, however, except for their role as the targets of comparison, stories are not very useful for performing logical analysis, or for analytical criticism, or for comprehensive and close comparisons of competing knowledge claims. For these activities we need critical frameworks, models, or perspectives, rather than stories.

Knowledge claim evaluation is the area of knowledge processing activity in which stories are least helpful. Unfortunately this is the area of knowledge processing which most distinguishes it from information processing (See Chapter 3 of Key Issues in The New Knowledge Management).

Storytelling and Individual and Group Learning

Is story-telling useful for individual and group learning? Recalling what I've said earlier about problem solving, and keeping in mind that individual and group learning refers to individual and group-level knowledge life cycles nested within organizational systems, I think that story-telling is very useful for much of it. But, as with problem solving at the organizational level, it is less useful for Knowledge Claim Evaluation and Information Acquisition in individual and group learning.

Being Sensible About Storytelling and Problem Solving

So what is the bottom line on storytelling and problem solving? From the Knowledge Life Cycle perspective, story-telling is very helpful in Problem Recognition and Formulation and in Knowledge Claim Formulation. But it has shortcomings in Knowledge Claim Evaluation, and Individual and Group Learning. So, I think that we should use stories and learn to tell them skillfully. But I also think that we should all take out a membership in story-tellers anonymous, and pledge that we will not get drunk on the appeal and success of our stories in persuading others to our beliefs. Instead, recognizing that our stories are conjectural in nature, we should pledge to cultivate a critical attitude toward them, keeping in mind that if our stories survive our best criticisms they are more likely to provide a better basis for decisions.

In my next blog I'll explore this attitude toward storytelling and problem solving further, by posting a recent AOK Group exchange I had with Steve Denning on "Narrative and Knowledge".

Can the Theory of Knowledge Making be Applied to Organizations?

Mon, 22 Mar 2004 05:05:20 GMT

                        The Savage State (Thomas Cole, 1836)

Organizational Problem Solving

In the opening blog of "All Life is Problem Solving", I gave a general account of how problem solving occurs in living things including humans. But are organizations living systems, or, at least, are they like living systems in their problem solving patterns? How does organizational problem solving happen?

In seeking an answer to that question, I’d like you to recall Popper’s theory of knowledge making as I explained it in my first blog. In living systems, ordinary activity sometimes leads to situations that don’t match predispositional knowledge and expectations. This leads to formulating tentative solutions, and then to error elimination producing new knowledge and expectations.

With that theory in mind, let’s begin with decisions and actions, the ordinary activity of organizations. Decisions are part of a sequence that has been described in slightly varying terms, using many names (e.g., the organizational learning cycle, the experiential learning cycle, the adaptive loop, and others). I call it the Decision Execution Cycle (DEC). It includes planning, acting, monitoring, and evaluating behaviors. Decisions are produced by planning and are embodied in acting. Decisions produce actions. And actions - activities - are the stuff that social processes, social networks, and (complex adaptive) social systems are made of. These are built up (integrated) from activities in ways my collaborator and friend Mark McElroy and I have described in our books (See McElroy, The New Knowledge Management, KMCI Press/Butterworth-Heinemann, 2003; Firestone, Enterprise Information Portals and Knowledge Management, KMCI Press/Butterworth-Heinemann 2003; and Firestone and McElroy, Key Issues in the New Knowledge Management, KMCI Press/Butterworth-Heinemann, 2003, and Excerpt #1 from The Open Enterprise: Building Business Architectures for Openness and Sustainable Innovation, KMCI Online Press, 2003).

Now let's distinguish three tiers of organizational processes: (1) operational processes, (2) knowledge processes, and (3) processes for managing knowledge processes. Operational processes are those that use knowledge but, apart from knowledge about specific events and conditions, whose acquisition doesn’t require problem solving, don’t produce or integrate it. For that, we turn to knowledge processes. There are two knowledge processes: knowledge production, the process an organization executes that produces new solutions to its problems; and knowledge integration, the process that presents this new knowledge to individuals and groups comprising the organization. Knowledge production and problem solving, on this account, are one and the same. There are at least 9 processes related to managing knowledge processes. I won’t cover them in this blog, but I’ll have occasion to return to these Knowledge Management processes in other blogs.

Incidentally, the three tiers of organizational processing I just distinguished, are part of a high-level model Mark and I developed at the Knowledge Management Consortium International (KMCI). We use the model as one of the organizing constructs in our Certificate course in Knowledge and Innovation Management (CKIM). You can see a graphic on p. 8 of the KMCI Brochure at: http://www.kmci.org/KMCI_Brochure_as_of_3.04.pdf.

Knowledge Processes

What corresponds to Popper’s theory of knowledge making at the level of organizations? To begin, problems occur for organizations just as they do for other systems. Organizations go through problem production processes to produce their knowledge of problems. Here is how things work.

Operational business processes are performed by individuals and groups using previous knowledge, both their own mental knowledge, knowledge claims in organizational repositories; and also situational knowledge, the result of on-going non-problematic learning, to make decisions. Sometimes previous knowledge and situational knowledge do not provide the answers they need to perform their roles in organizational processes. If so, a problem has arisen -- an epistemic gap between what an agent knows and what it needs to know to perform its role in the organizational process. Such a problem initiates knowledge processing: specifically, a new knowledge production process.

Popper’s second step of attempted solutions corresponds to three sub-processes of knowledge production at the organizational level:

Information Acquisition
Individual and Group Learning
Knowledge Claim Formulation

That is, once an organizational problem is produced, there is a need to formulate tentative solutions in response. These can come from new individual and group learning efforts to address the problem; or from external sources through information acquisition; or from entirely creative knowledge claim formulation efforts; or all three. Where the tentative solutions come from, and in what sequence, is of no importance to the self-organizing knowledge processing pattern of knowledge production.

Individual and group learning is itself knowledge processing. It produces knowledge claims for consideration at higher levels of analysis of knowledge processing. But at the individual and group levels, learning is knowledge production and also problem solving. Let's call this the recursive "nesting" of problem solving in organizations. Knowledge claim formulation uses the results of both information acquisition, and individual and group learning, and its own sub-process interactions to produce alternative solutions for:

Knowledge Claim Evaluation (KCE); the organizational sub-process corresponding to error elimination in Popper’s theory.

Organizational knowledge is not produced until the tentative solutions, the previously formulated knowledge claims, have been tested and evaluated. And KCE is the way in which organizational agents select among tentative solutions (competitive alternatives), by comparing them against each other in the context of perspectives, criteria, or newly created ideas for selecting among them.

KCE is at the very center of knowledge processing and knowledge production. Think about it. Without it, what is the difference between information and knowledge? How do we know that we are integrating knowledge rather than just information? Or that the "knowledge" we’re using in operational business processes is of high quality? Absent a social process in organizations, be it formal or informal, through which competing claims can be held to tests of veracity or verisimilitude, how can we possibly make judgments about truth versus falsity? Knowledge claim evaluation, then, is what gives us the ability to know knowledge when we see it.

Once knowledge is produced by KCE, and an organizational problem is solved, the process of knowledge integration begins. Knowledge integration is an organizational process that may have a loose analog at the individual level in the processes of reinforcement learning, which fix knowledge in memory and synaptic patterns. Knowledge integration distributes organizational knowledge claims across knowledge repositories and also distributes beliefs about these knowledge claims across the organization.

Knowledge integration is made up of four more sub-processes, all of which may use interpersonal, electronic, or both types of methods in execution:

Knowledge and Information Broadcasting
Searching/Retrieving
Knowledge Sharing (peer-to-peer presentation of previously produced knowledge), and
Teaching (hierarchical presentation of previously produced knowledge)

There is no particular sequence to these integration sub-processes. One or all of them may be used to present what has been produced to the organization's agents or to store it.

Those agents receiving knowledge or information through knowledge integration don't receive it passively. For them, it represents a communication that may create a knowledge gap and initiate a new round of their own problem solving. The integration of knowledge, therefore, doesn't signal its "acceptance." It only signals that the instance of knowledge processing initiated by the problem is over and that new problems, for some, have been initiated by the solution. For others, the knowledge integrated is knowledge to be used: either to continue with executing the business process that initiated the original problem, or at a later time when the situation calls for it.

Either way, the original problem that motivated knowledge processing is gone. It was born in the operational business process, solved in the knowledge production process, integrated throughout the organization afterwards, and, in this way, it ceased to be a problem -- i.e., it died. This pattern is a life cycle, a birth-and-death cycle for problems arising from business processes and through which new knowledge is also produced. Since the life cycle gives rise to knowledge, both mental and cultural (linguistic), Mark McElroy and I call it the Knowledge Life Cycle (KLC) (See p. 12 of the KMCI Brochure for a graphic at: http://www.kmci.org/KMCI_Brochure_as_of_3.04.pdf).

Every organization produces its knowledge through myriad KLCs that arise from its problems. KLCs occur at the organizational level and also at every level of social interaction and individual functioning in the organization. It is through these cycles that knowledge is produced, and the organization acquires the solutions it needs to adapt to its environment.

The KLC is another critical organizing concept used at KMCI in our CKIM classes and developed extensively in our books. KCE is discussed in some detail in Chapter 5 of our Key Issues in the New Knowledge Management, KMCI Press/Butterworth-Heinemann, 2003, and I suspect this is the most complete treatment of KCE in the recent KM literature, where KCE is, most often glossed over, or ignored entirely.

Outcomes

Organizational knowledge and problem solving processes, of course, produce outcomes. From my point of view, knowledge is an encoded, tested, evaluated, and still surviving structure of information that helps the system (agent) that developed it to adapt. There are two types of knowledge important in organizations: (1) tested, evaluated, and surviving beliefs or belief predispositions (in minds) about the world; and (2) tested, evaluated, and surviving, sharable (objective), linguistic formulations (knowledge claims) about the world. There are also other outcomes of knowledge processes, the most important of which are knowledge claims about the performance of other knowledge claims during knowledge claim evaluation. Mark McElroy and I call these ‘meta-claims’, or claims about claims. Organizational linguistic knowledge consists of claims that have survived our tests, criticisms, and evaluations, along with their corresponding meta-claims, whose content records the performance of such claims.

The various outcomes of knowledge processes may be viewed as part of an abstraction we call the Distributed Organizational Knowledge Base (DOKB). The DOKB in organizations has electronic storage components. But it is more than that, because it contains all of the outcomes of knowledge processing in documents, and non-electronic media. And since it includes beliefs and belief predispositions, as well, it also includes all of the mental knowledge in the organization as well.

For More Information
You’ll find much more information on the theories and models offered in this paper at three web sites: dkms.com, macroinnovation.com, and kmci.org. The last web site has the most complete information on the CKIM class team-taught by Mark and myself, and on our new KM strategy and methodology class called K-STREAM(tm). Many papers on The New Knowledge Management are available for downloading at all three sites. Our Excerpt from The Open Enterprise . . . may also be purchased at any of them. Our print books are available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or Elsevier/Butterworth-Heinemann. Finally, there will be many more blogs coming and these will apply the point of view expressed here to many of the major issues in Knowledge Management today.

Popper From 30,000 Feet

Sat, 20 Mar 2004 19:46:59 GMT

Adam's Peak

All Life Is Problem Solving: Learning and Knowledge Making in an Evolutionary and Critical Perspective

I've named this blog after a statement from a lecture of Karl Popper's, delivered in 1991 near the end of hislong life. "All Life is Problem Solving" also became the title of a book of his essays published posthumously in 1999 by Routledge. I love the phrase because it sums up his wonderful work in epistemology, ontology, philosophy of science, and political theory performed over a period of nearly 70 years -- his general theory about how new knowledge is made, or, if you like, how learning occurs.

The Theory of Knowledge Making

Knowledge is made, he thought, through a simple three-step process found in evolution, in individual psychodynamics, and in social interaction. That process is:

the problem
the attempted solutions
the elimination.

Living things have expectations. Problems have their origin in events that run counter to those expectations. The response of life, however primitive, to a failure of expectation is to search for another way around. Living things engage in search behavior and testing to "replace the wrong expectation with a new one." We "make" solutions whose successful application would create new expectations. And we "match" those solutions against aspects of our subjective reality, that, in turn, if we are to be successful in action, must have some correspondence with actual reality.

We see this three-step pattern in Darwinian evolution, where a failure of expectation caused by environmental change creates problems of survival for species which are solved through genetic recombination and mutation (attempted solutions) producing individuals that are better adapted to the changed environment than individuals of the old species were. The old species, along with most mutations and recombinations are eliminated by the environment. They are errors. The species that survive embody genetic knowledge -- encoded information with adaptive value relative to the changed environment.

We see the three-step pattern again in the area of learning resulting in cognitive knowledge. Changes in the environment of living creatures result in failed expectations (problems). Search behavior leads to the discovery of new solutions, which if they match the changed environment are then encoded into the memories of living creatures. In humans this pattern is seen in the development of changes in synaptic structures and changes in beliefs as we discover new solutions, test them, and then encode the successful ones in our brains, and, we think, in our minds, as well. So, for living individuals, the three step pattern, the learning process, produces biological, and in some species, mental knowledge (beliefs).

Humans are unique, or at least, close to unique, on earth in enjoying evolution's gift of language. Through language we can and do create sharable encodings that help both ourselves and our societies and cultures to adapt. The process of creating such sharable, adaptive encodings, or cultural knowledge again fits the three- step pattern. We recognize problems, we formulate tentative solutions (but now with the aid of language we can formulate and consider many and much more complex solutions than can animals who are not able to "objectify" their thinking), and we attempt to eliminate errors in those solutions so we can arrive at the solution that is the strongest in the sense that it has best survived our tests, i.e. our matching of it against those aspects of reality we think are important for its evaluation. Of course, our attempts at error elimination are also much stronger because of the gift of language. We can take the stories we tell about tentative solutions, write down those "stories", or knowledge claims, or "theories", or "models" and do a much better job of comparing them and evaluating them because language is the handmaiden of our comparison.

The Unified Theory of Knowledge

The solutions that survive error elimination constitute, once again, our cultural knowledge. As Popper pointed out this knowledge is objective because (a) it is sharable among those who have language, and (b) once made by us, it is autonomous, in that its continued existence can effect our future mental states, and through them our behavior. In contrast, mental knowledge is subjective because we cannot directly share it. However, this in no way dminishes its importance, since it is our mental knowledge which we use in order to behave, make decisions, and act, and since we create our cultural knowledge through action, it is also true that we use our subjective knowledge to create objective knowledge. So mental knowledge, while subjective, and also influenced by cultural knowledge, is also partly autonomous and responsible for the occurrence of cultural knowledge.

By now it should be plain that Popper used his three-step learning process (see Figure 1) to explain how three different kinds of knowledge are made: adaptive encodings in the material world (e.g. genetic encodings and synaptic patterns), adaptive encodings in the mind (attitudes, values, beliefs, etc), and adaptive encodings in cultural products (stories, arguments, theories, models, knowledge claims, propositions, etc.). Though Popper never used this term, this is a unified theory of knowledge (thanks are due to Art Murray of Tel-Art Technologies for the name), because each type of knowledge identifies encodings that are adaptive for the systems that use them relative to their environments. At the same time, the unified theory of knowledge acknowledges that "knowledge" is diverse in chraracter, and suggests that the ambiguities and variations we experience in using this term are due to this diversity.

Figure 1 -- Popper's Theory of Knowledge Making

Evolutionary Epistemology and Complexity Theory

Popper's Theory of learning and problem solving along with his associated unified theory of knowledge emerge from an evolutionary persective. In his later years, he was associated with a movement called evolutionary epistemology; and it is important to recognize the connection between Popper's epistemological work and modern Darwinian Theory. Popper's perspective is also close to complexity thinking. He believed strongly, as I do, in the emergence of complex systems from simpler ones as a fact of life in the universe. And he believed, as I do, in the importance of downward causation as a factor in the emergence and maintenance of complex systems. Interesting work is being done today in the area of merging evolutionary epistemology and the sort of complexity theory that we find in the work of Maturana and Varela and Fritjof Capra. That work (see especially Mark Bickhard's papers) will reinforce Popper's view that "all life is problem solving".

The Critical Perspective and Fallibilism

The last of the three steps in making knowledge is error elimination or "matching". This step is the gateway to knowledge. But it is, as Popper pointed out, fundamentally negative in character. It is about eliminating mistakes and not about supporting any of one's tentative solutions. In animals lacking consciousness, mistakes are eliminated, when the animal receives negative reinforcement from the environment for selecting the wrong solution. That is, the animal in question can only learn by experiencing the negative consequences of its mistaken expectation and ensuing decision. Often the wrong choice means that the animal making the choice is eliminated along with its mistake. Animals with consciousness and especially sharing language have a great advantage over other animals. We can eliminate errors and learn by testing our solutions through the surrogate processes of criticism, controlled testing, and comparative analysis, before we take a decision. We, unlike other animals, can manage our knowledge making so that "our worst ideas die in our stead", and our best ones inform our decisions and actions. But to do so, we must use our gift of language and be diligent in criticism, testing, and evaluation of our tentative solutions.

So, in problem solving and in life, the critical perspective is the key. It is responsible for the elimination of errors, the growth of knowledge, and for adaptation in individuals and society. But why is this so, why has nature and biology relied on error elimination to get us closer to the truth rather than a process of justification or proof of our ideas? The answer is that all of our knowledge, including our biological, mental, and cultural expectations, is uncertain, and no amount of positive support can prove' beyond doubt, that any proposition or idea is surely correct, or that any piece of genetic encoding, will allow us to adapt to changes in environmental conditions that are yet to occur. This idea, called fallibilism, also espoused by the founder of Pragmatism, Charles Sanders Peirce, before Popper, is skepticism, but it is not relativism. It doesn't deny that we can find the truth, or that we ought to seek it, but only that we can never know with certainty that we have found it. Xenophanes expressed fallibilism in a wonderful way that Popper liked to quote:

The Gods did not reveal, from the beginning,

All things to us; but in the course of time,

Through seeking, men find that which is the better.

But as for certain truth, no man has known it,

Nor will he know it; neither of the gods,

Nor yet of all the things of which I speak.

And even if by chance he were to utter

The final truth, he would himself not know it;

For all is but a woven web of guesses.

The connection between fallibilism and error elimination is this. Since justification and certain proof is not attainable, the obligation to find a method that will produce certainty does not exist, and the obligation to pursue certainty ourselves without such a method is also gone. What remains is the problem of selecting among our tentative solutions, "our guesses" according to a method that is open to us. This method is error elimination through criticism of competing ideas and beliefs in light of various critical perspectives (fallible ideas themselves) we develop and use.

This whole perspective may be summarized by the concluding line of a brand new article by Deborah Blackman, James Connelly, and Steven Henderson called "Does Double Loop Learning Create Reliable Knowledge?" The Learning Organization, 11 (2004), 11-27. The line, which may take off from Xenophanes, by way of Popper's Conjectures and Refutations, is:

" . . . what a wonderful web we weave, when first we practice to critically believe."

This Blog and Me

In future installments of "All Life Is Problem Solving" I will use the perspective you've just read to treat a variety of subjects. Many of them will be in the fields of Knowledge Management and Organization Theory, where I do much of my work using an approach developed by myself and my friend and close collaborator Mark McElroy called the "The New Knowledge Management" and a normative model called The Open Enterprise. Sometimes though, I will write about Politics and Open Societies, and Physics, and Philosophy, and, as is appropriate for a blog, anything that comes into my head. Whatever I write about is likely to reflect the perspective of "All Life is Problem Solving" and that's why I've given that name to my blog.

If you'd like to learn more about me, what I do, Knowledge Management in general, my collaborator, and our organizations, Executive Information Systems, Inc., KMCI), and (Macroinnovation Associates), please visit our web sites. There you'll find lots of information about us, and lots of free papers and presentations about Knowledge Management, Enterprise Information and Knowledge Portals, and Data Warehousing. You'll also find information about our books, both printed and electronic.