Cognitive Edge

Paula Thornton at the Fastforward blog, in a comment to my previous entry suggests a reason for my frustration with listserv censorship and the robotic postings of the Frank. She states: You're experiencing the dissonance of the field you're trying to align yourself with and the fundamentals of their beliefs. I do find that a bit confusing as I thought I was already strongly aligned with KM, but let us leave that aside for more important matters. She also points me to one of her recent blog postings in which she argues that Knowledge doesn't want to be managed. This entry has its fair number of sweeping statements and rhetorical questions, for example asking What reasonable goal would suggest a need to manage knowledge? Her conclusion is that the promise of 2.0 is to 'free' the knowledge, and she requests notification of the death of KM.

Now I have written about the death (or rather the long tail of KM) before. Some of my thoughts reflect those of Paula, although I would not want to endorse her blog per se. To take one case, I think it fairly self evident that a large number of business goals require knowledge to be managed in some form or other. Her alternative of facilitating action or enhancing thinking is going to require some form of KM (even if it not called that). However it is pretty obvious that she is equating KM with Information Management tools and the type of beliefs espoused by the Frank and his acolyte. She makes one very important statement about context, although she does not use the word specifically.

Even more fundamental to the deeper philosophy here is that knowledge is relevant…it can only reasonably be applied to specific conditions. Few knowledge management technologies embrace this reality and ensure that the relevant conditions are captured and likewise communicated.

Now this is important, and is a good summary of the weakness of KM tools in the main. They assume a common or constant context. So knowledge captured in one specific context can be generalised to apply in all contexts. With this go industrial recipes and the whole attempt to define best practice. Weick and Sutcliffe provide for me what is the classic mistake in this area. They study the ability of fire fighters to share stories of failure within a trusted environment and then attempt to generalize that behaviour into a recipe for other organisations. My response to this has been to agree it is possible, but only we we recreate the context and to do so would necessitate that we burn the office down each morning.

Now 2.0, specifically blogs and the links between them are much better at passing on context than traditional KM tools. Mainly I think because they are fragmented, real time and emergent in their connectivity. As such they mirror to a degree the normal knowledge seeing behaviour of any human who has not succumbed to the autism of process based information theory. However, and here I want to disagree with Paula, I think it will still need to be managed, but not in the command and control sense of the word, there are other meanings.

One of the great challenges is going to be to allow a co-evolution of the capability of 2.0 tools with the needs to organisations. Those organisations are going to be managed, will need to make revenue and sell solutions and products. Governments have to handle significantly higher demands on resources, while those resources are themselves reducing. All of this requires transformation, but it will also require management.

Comments (4)

Paula Thornton:

One critical concept is missing from your thinking: emergent order.

Posted by Paula Thornton | June 25, 2007 12:39 AM

Posted on June 25, 2007 00:39

Dave Snowden

It (emergent order) is very much present in my writings Paula. However in this context you may be forgetting that humans are actors in the system and they make choices. I will blog on this later this week as I think Existentialism with its emphasis on choices has much that would inform complexity theory. As such their actions can influence what order emerges. Just letting things happen may produce emergent order, but it may not, and the nature of that order if it happens may be perverse as well as beneficial (something that over-enthusiasts for 2.0 everything thed to ignore). I often think that more of them (FAD I am not including you in any way in this) should study complexity theory before they use its language.

Posted by Dave Snowden | June 25, 2007 5:42 AM

Posted on June 25, 2007 05:42

Well, then perhaps you'd consider Kevin Kelly's perspectives: http://www.well.com/user/bbear/kellyart.html#RTFToC1.

Controls should come in the form of 'agreements'. Governance models should be placeholders for the agreements. A governance model can be something as simple as the 'rules of engagement' for a discussion group. Indeed, discussion groups quickly moved from moderated models to self-governed ones, or they died from lack of energy.

Posted by Paula Thornton | July 7, 2007 3:58 AM

Posted on July 7, 2007 03:58

Thanks Paula. I fully agree with you on discussion groups in terms of how they should be. However some moderated groups continue over long periods of time.

I think Kelly confuses complexity theory and chaos theory, assuming they are the same. The distinction if important, but more so if we consider (as I and others do) that human complex systems have an additional order of complexity that arises from the awarness of the agent and the ability of the agents to communicate beyond their immediate proximity.

This links back to my original comment about the nature of choice (and my implication intentionality). Not all order in human systems is "emergent" some is designed. Human's have the capacity to create equilibrium states and the maintain them. Also emergence is morally neutral.

In this respect Kelly's whole body metaphor on distributed intelligence is I think dangerous, its a common one when cybernetics and systems thinking get involved in thinking about complex adaptive systems. I can agree with a lot of the things he suggests should happen in health care but we need a more rigorous theory, and a realization that co-evolutionary systems have neither cause not purpose. The whole body metaphor does not help this critical understanding.

Posted by Dave Snowden | July 7, 2007 6:02 AM

Posted on July 7, 2007 06:02

Only if we burn the office down each morning ....

Comments (4)

Post a comment