Archive for the ‘Paper Review’ Category
On the ineffable tacitness of knowledge
Introduction
Knowledge management (KM) is essentially about capturing and disseminating the know-how, insights and experiences that exist within an organisation. Although much is expected of KM initiatives, most end up delivering document repositories that are of as much help in managing knowledge as a bus is in getting to the moon. In this post I look into the question of why KM initiatives fail, drawing on a couple of sources that explore the personal nature of knowledge.
Explicit and tacit knowledge in KM
Most KM professionals are familiar with terms explicit and tacit knowledge. The first term refers to knowledge that can be expressed in writing or speech whereas the second refers to that which cannot. Examples of the former include driving directions (how to get from A to B) or a musical score; examples of the latter include the ability to drive or to play a musical instrument. This seems reasonable enough: a musician can learn how to play a piece by studying a score however a non-musician cannot learn to play an instrument by reading a book.
In their influential book, The Knowledge-Creating Company, Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi proposed a model of knowledge creation1 based on their claim that: “human knowledge is created and expanded through social interaction between tacit knowledge and explicit knowledge.” It would take me too far afield to discuss their knowledge creation model in full here – see this article for a quick summary. However, the following aspects of it are relevant to the present discussion:
- The two forms of knowledge (tacit and explicit) can be converted from one to the other. In particular, it is possible to convert tacit knowledge to an explicit form.
- Knowledge can be transferred (from person to person).
In the remainder of this article I’ll discuss why these claims aren’t entirely valid.
All knowledge has tacit and explicit elements
In a paper entitled, Do we really understand tacit knowledge, Haridimos Tsoukas discusses why Nonaka and Takeuchi’s view of knowledge is incomplete, if not incorrect. To do so, he draws upon writings of the philosopher Michael Polanyi.
According to Polanyi, all knowledge has tacit and explicit elements. This is true even of theoretical knowledge that can be codified in symbols (mathematical knowledge, for example). Quoting from Tsoukas’ paper:
…if one takes a closer look at how theoretical (or codified) knowledge is actually used in practice, one will see the extent to which theoretical knowledge itself, far from being as objective, self-sustaining, and explicit as it is often taken to be, it is actually grounded on personal judgements and tacit commitments. Even the most theoretical form of knowledge, such as pure mathematics, cannot be a completely formalised system, since it is based for its application and development on the skills of mathematicians and how such skills are used in practice.
Mathematical proofs are written in a notation that is (supposed to be) completely unambiguous. Yet every mathematician will understand a proof (in the sense of its implications rather than its veracity) in his or her own way. Moreover, based on their personal understandings, some mathematicians will be able to derive insights that others won’t. Indeed this is how we distinguish between skilled and less skilled mathematicians.
Polanyi claimed that all knowing consists at least in part of skillful action because the knower participates in the act of understanding and assimilating what is known.
Lest this example seem too academic, let’s consider a more commonplace one taken from Tsoukas’ paper: that of a person reading a map.
Although a map is an explicit representation of location, in order to actually use a map to get from A to B a person needs to:
- Locate A on the map.
- Plot out a route from A to B.
- Traverse the plotted route by identifying landmarks, street names etc. in the real world and interpreting them in terms of the plotted route.
In other words, the person has to make use of his or her senses and cognitive abilities in order to use the (explicit) knowledge captured in the map. The point is that the person will do this in a way that he or she cannot fully explain to anyone else. In this sense, the person’s understanding (or knowledge) of what’s in the map manifests itself in how he or she actually goes about getting from A to B.
The nub of the matter: focal and subsidiary awareness
Let me get to the heart of the matter through another example that is especially relevant as I sit at my desk writing these words.
I ask the following question:
What is it that enables me to write these lines using my knowledge of the English language, papers on knowledge management and a host of other things that I’m not even aware of?
I’ll begin my answer by quoting yet again from Tsoukas’ paper,
For Polanyi the starting point towards answering this question is to acknowledge that “the aim of a skilful performance is achieved by the observance of a set of rules which are not known as such to the person following them.” …Interestingly, such ignorance is hardly detrimental to [the] effective carrying out of [the] task…
Any particular elements of the situation which may help the purpose of a mental effort are selected insofar as they contribute to the performance at hand, without the performer knowing them as they would appear in themselves. The particulars are subsidiarily known insofar as they contribute to the action performed. As Polanyi remarks, ‘this is the usual process of unconscious trial and error by which we feel our way to success and may continue to improve on our success without specifiably knowing how we do it.’
Polanyi noted that there are two distinct kinds of awareness that play a role in any (knowledge-based) action. The first one is conscious awareness of what one is doing (Polanyi called this focal awareness). The second is subsidiary awareness: the things that one is not consciously aware of but nevertheless have a bearing on the action.
Back to my example, as I write these words I’m consciously aware of the words appearing on my screen as I type whereas I’m subsidarily aware of a host of other things I cannot fully enumerate: my thoughts, composition skills, vocabulary and all the other things that have a bearing on my writing (my typing skills, for example).
The two kinds of awareness, focal and subsidiary, are mutually exclusive: the instant I shift my awareness from the words appearing on my screen, I lose flow and the act of writing is interrupted. Yet, both kinds of awareness are necessary for the act of writing. Moreover, since my awareness of the subsidiary elements of writing is not conscious, I cannot describe them. The minute I shift attention to them, the nature of my awareness of them changes – they become things in their own right instead of elements that have a bearing on my writing.
In brief, the knowledge-based act of writing is composed of both conscious and subsidiary elements in an inseparable way. I can no more describe all the knowledge involved in the act than I can the full glory of a beautiful sunset.
Wrapping up
From the above it appears that the central objective of knowledge management is essentially unattainable because all knowledge has tacit elements that cannot be “converted” or codified explicitly. We can no more capture or convert knowledge than we can “know how others know.” Sure, one can get people to document what they do, or even capture their words and actions on media. However this does not amount to knowing what they know. In his paper, Tsoukas writes about the ineffability of tacit knowledge. However, as I have argued, all knowledge is ineffably tacit. I hazard that this may, at least in part, be the reason why KM initiatives fall short of their objectives.
Acknowledgement and further reading
Thanks to Paul Culmsee for getting me reading and thinking about this stuff again! Some of the issues that I have discussed above are touched upon in the book I have written with Paul.
Finally, for those who are interested, here are some of my earlier pieces on tacit knowledge:
What is the make of that car? A tale about tacit knowledge
Why best practices are hard to practice (and what can be done about it)
1 As far as I’m aware, Nonaka and Takeuchi’s model mentioned in this article is still the gold standard in KM. In recent years, there have been a number of criticisms of the model (see this paper by Gourlay, or especially this one by Powell). Nonaka and von Krogh attempt to rebut some of the criticisms in this paper. I will leave it to interested readers to make up their own minds as to how convincing their rebuttal is.
On the elusive notion of leadership
Introduction
In a post entitled, Macrovisions and Micromanagement, I discussed some of the reasons for the gap between the espoused view of leadership and its actual practice in organisations. The post is based on a research study in which managers in an organization were asked what their jobs entailed. Their responses revolved around themes of leadership – things such as strategy formulation, setting direction and generally acting as enablers rather than administrators. However, when asked to elaborate via examples, most managers spoke of administrative and bureaucratic activities rather than those that involved leadership.
There are many possible reasons for this gap. Some of these include:
- Pressure to display leader-like behaviour: Management literature and education tends to place leadership at the pinnacle of managerial practice. Consequently, there is considerable pressure on managers at the middle and senior levels to display leadership qualities (as defined in management texts).
- The issue of identity: Most managers would like to view themselves as being leaders. As a result, they may unconsciously describe what they do in the flattering language of leadership.
- Gap between job description and actual job: Managers are expected to display leader-like behaviour. However, at the same time, they are held responsible for specific and very tangible results. There is thus a continual pressure to get involved in low-level detail while maintaining the illusion of being a leader.
In the present post I delve further into the question of leadership. Specifically, I explore the possibility that the concept of leadership promoted by management literature is flawed. My discussion is based on a brilliant paper by Lesley Prince entitled, Eating the Menu Rather than the Dinner: Tao and Leadership.
To those who may be rolling their eyes at the reference to religion- stay with me, I think you will find that the content and conclusions of the paper merit serious consideration.
Background and context
The author begins by noting that much of management theorising about leadership is based on the following fundamental assumptions:
- The notion that hierarchies are an inevitable within groups, and that those on the top of the heap must exert control to avoid chaos and anarchy.
- Leadership is a well-defined, independent concept that can be codified and can be the subject of inquiry. In other words, it is possible to formulate principles of leadership that are independent of environment and the actual practice of these principles can be studied.
The above assumptions flow from a western view of management. One of the tenets of such a view is that it is possible to formulate general principles of leadership, independent of the environment in which it is practiced. Indeed this is the very basis of mass education in management: business school curricula would be largely empty if there were no general, environment-independent management principles.
On the other hand, in certain eastern philosophies (Taoism and Zen in particular), the focus is not so much on following prescribed principles or exerting control, but on dealing with circumstances as they are. The latter is a interesting perspective from which to analyse leadership because it emphasises that leadership is a social skill, best learnt through experience rather than theory. The paper is essentially a discussion of how certain precepts of Taoism can aid our understanding of leadership as an experience-based skill.
Taoism and its relevance to understanding leadership
Taoism has mystical connotations in western society because it is often associated with alternative lifestyles and counter-culture groups. However, in reality it is a practical way of life that teaches one to embrace direct experience, avoiding filters of presumption or analysis. The author stresses that it is neither a religion nor a philosophy in the conventional sense. Above all, it emphasises the danger of dogma and the importance of keeping an open mind. As the author puts it:
…it is sufficient to note that the point of Taoist practice is the relatively uncontroversial claim that our habitual understandings and modes of thought, often little more than unexamined assumptions, have a tendency to hijack our ability to apprehend the world, interfere with our perceptions, and often lead us to see what we think we ought (or want) to see rather than what is actually there.
This point highlights the relevance of Taoism in our quest to understand the concept of leadership: perhaps the answer lies in observing how people relate to each other in real-life rather than attempting to force-fit theoretical or empirical models of leadership to situations as advocated by management researchers.
At this point readers may be asking: how can we understand a concept without developing mental models or representations of it? Indeed, it is one of the paradoxes of Taoism that one can understand something without necessarily being able to articulate it. In the same way, the paper is an attempt to get an understanding of the concept of leadership by looking at some of its paradoxical aspects. In the next few sections, we’ll look at some of the seemingly self-contradictory aspects of leadership that are explored in the paper.
The difficulty with definitions
Taoism alludes to the difficulty of using words to describe the essence of Taoism. As the author puts it:
According to Taoism grasping the Tao in mere words is a futile undertaking, like trying to explain the experience of an orange to someone who has never encountered one. In one sense the ideas are pure simplicity, but apt to become complex and nebulous when expressed in words…
He suggests that the same difficulty arises when trying to describe any aspect of social reality: there are so many different variables at play that pinning down the aspect of interest is virtually impossible. Indeed, as the author points out, there are a number of definitions of leadership, each emphasising a different facet of the concept.
Perhaps then, it is futile to attempt to capture the concept in words. However, that does not mean that is impossible to understand it. As the author states, quoting from Keith Grint (a well-known scholar of leadership):
…before I began to study leadership in a serious manner, my knowledge of it was complete. I knew basically all there was to know and I had already spent over a decade practising it.
This insightful line suggests that it is possible to understand what leadership is and what it isn’t, without having to define it. I would hazard an opinion that successful leaders don’t over-think what they do, they simply lead as required by the situations they encounter.
The hidden effect of language
The author highlights some important differences between ancient Chinese (the language in which the original Taoist texts were written) and western languages such as English. One of the most important of these is that Chinese is a verb-based language whereas English is noun-based. An implicit consequence of this is that Chinese emphasises action and relationships between objects whereas English emphasises objects. The relevance of this observation to leadership is as follows: instead of attempting to objectify the concept of leadership, it may be more helpful to understand it in terms of actions and relationships. Once again, this suggests that we should shift our focus on the actions of leadership rather than the words (platitudes?) that define it.
Theological origins
The author makes the interesting suggestion that the dominant view of leadership may have theological origins. This is not as far-fetched as it sounds. Monotheistic religions are based on the notion of an omnipotent being who is essentially responsible for the world as we know it and is, in a sense, in charge. This view suggests that hierarchies are natural and ought to be the way groups are organised which, in turn, leads to the view of a leader as someone who wields power by virtue of their position in the hierarchy. In contrast, in Taoism (in its pure form) there are no omnipotent gods as in the monotheistic religions. It is thus perfectly natural to see the asymmetric distribution of power not as a consequence of hierarchy but as a fact of human existence.
Understanding leadership vs. knowing it
One of the central teachings of Taoism is to seek direct experience, free from preconceptions of any kind. This principle is in direct conflict with the way in which researchers attempt to study and understand concepts such as leadership. Typically, researchers make hypotheses, build models and test them against reality. They objectify the thing to be studied and analyse it through the lens of their pre-existing knowledge. Instead a case-study based approach that focuses on the actual experience of leadership may be more fruitful. As the author put it:
The conceptual tangles and contradictions in leadership that seem to be an inevitable part of the models derived from the empirical and quasi-empirical methods of the western tradition often cause more confusion than clarity when people try to apply them. In contrast an approach derived from the theoretical naivete (but conceptual sophistication) of Taoism generates powerful insights that are often difficult to express in words. Part of the key here, perhaps, is to consider leadership not as a set of intellectual principles, but much more as a set of experientially located and responsive relational skills-in-process…
A couple of lines later, he goes,
…there seems to be a stubborn adherence to an old-fashioned objectivism, particularly in the persistence of the subject-object dichotomy. This inevitably excludes the felt and experienced realities of power, influence and involvement in the leadership relation, and this has generated some of the more intractable problems we face when studying leadership. If our models are to have any value they must speak to and from experience, even if this seems messy and inchoate at times.
Although it may be difficult to capture in words, leadership is far from a fuzzy notion: given a situation, most people just know if leadership is being displayed (or not). We understand leadership because we know it when we see it.
Labels do not make a leader
Although it is generally recognised that calling someone a leader doesn’t make them one, most organisations still conflate leadership with positions and titles. The fact that high level management roles are often termed “leadership positions” is proof that this misconception is rife.
Moreover, as the author states:
…the conflation of `leader’ with any of the available position labels, makes the definition of `leadership’ and `leader’ completely superfluous – all one needs is a specification of position within a hierarchy, and all else follows. Except of course that it doesn’t, because we should still have to explain why some leaders by such a definition come to be regarded as fools, idiots, incompetents and charlatans.
Perhaps the most insidious feature of the confusion between position and leadership is that it devalues the work of those who are in subordinate roles by presuming that they are somehow unable to display leadership qualities. They are considered passive players whose job it is to follow. Ronald Heifetz’s brilliant work on leadership speaks to this very issue. As he states in this interview:
In our society, we carry a common notion of the leader as the person with the vision, who then gets people to buy in, to align themselves with that vision. This notion is bankrupt and dangerous, because the leaders who have done good for their communities and organizations are not the ones who came up with the vision. If we picture them as the conductor of an orchestra, they are good at embodying the soul of the music. These leaders are good at articulating the transcendent values of the organization or community. But it’s not their vision.
The leader is an enabler, not an oracle who has all the answers.
Doing by non-doing
Another central teaching of Taoism is the concept of non-doing. Just to be clear, this should not be interpreted as inaction. Rather, it is effortless action. In the context of leadership, there are two aspects of non-doing that are particularly relevant. They are:
- Acting without any preconceived ideas of what leadership is. That is, acting in a manner that is most appropriate to the situation at hand, without worrying about what convention might deem as leader-like behaviour.
- Creating a work environment in which people can operate autonomously and, where required, collaborate spontaneously. Instead of attempting to control events and people, the emphasis is on creating the conditions that are conducive to high quality work.
As the author puts it, “non-interference as an essential quality of leadership”
Unconventional leadership
In essence, the teachings of Taoism urge us to experience things as they are. However, this is not the same as accepting standard conventions or interpretations of how things are. The failure to appreciate the difference is the reason why many people dismiss much of this as mystical claptrap. Further, it should be emphasised that one does not have to be a revolutionary: the point is not to do battle with the system or overturn convention; it is not to be a prisoner of convention, to be able to step outside of it when the situation demands.
Conclusion
I have to say, this is one of the most delightful and stimulating papers I have ever read. Although it has been published in a research journal, there are some brilliant insights in it for managers, leaders and those who don’t know the difference between the two.
The author quotes from Alan Watts at the end of the paper, and I can think of no better way to end this review:
I have associated and studied with the `objective observers’ and am convinced that, for all their virtues, they invariably miss the point and eat the menu instead of the dinner. I have also been on the inside of a traditional hierarchy . . . and am equally convinced that from this position one does not know what dinner is being eaten. In such a position one becomes technically `idiotic’, which is to say, out of communication with those who do not belong to the fold.
The central message of the paper is nicely summarised in its title which, though intended to take a gentle dig at scholars of leadership, applies rather well to many who claim to be leaders. Indeed, many so-called leaders act according to what books, gurus and consultants tell them rather than respond to the situation at hand. In this sense they do indeed eat the menu rather than the dinner
Macrovisions and micromanagement
Introduction
Much has been written about leadership, management and the difference between them. The former is associated with creating a shared vision and strategy for the future whereas the latter has administrative and bureaucratic connotations. Most organisations celebrate leadership but consider management to be little more than an operational necessity.
In view of the exaggerated rhetoric regarding leadership it is of interest to ask how it is actually practiced on the ground. This question was investigated by Mats Alvesson and Sven Sveningsson in a brilliant paper entitled, Good Visions, Bad Micro-management and Ugly Ambiguity: Contradictions of (Non-) Leadership in a Knowledge-Intensive Organization. In this post I elaborate on one of their key conclusions: that there is a gap between the espoused view of leadership and its practice.
Leadership in theory
The emphasis on leadership in management theory has lead to the widely accepted notion that leaders matter and that their actions can affect organizational performance and effect change in a positive way. Moreover it is also assumed that it is straightforward to identify leadership qualities in people as these manifest themselves through a set of well-defined behaviours and attitudes. In other words, leadership is a stable and robust concept. The main aim of the authors was to find out how well this theoretical conception of leadership holds up in the real world.
The case study and research methodology
The authors conducted a detailed study of how managers in a knowledge-intensive organisation viewed and practiced leadership. The study consisted of extensive, multiple interviews with managers at different levels in the company (from the CEO to project managers) supplemented by observations made at management meetings. Two rounds of interviews were conducted. In the first round, the authors asked the interviewees what their jobs entailed. Most responses centered on vision, leadership and strategy. However, when asked to elaborate on their responses, most managers described their day-to-day work in terms of administrative and bureaucratic managerial procedures. This pointed to a gap between espoused leadership and how it is actually practiced. In the second round of interviews, the authors attempted to gain some insights into the reasons for the gap.
Macrovisions: the espoused view of leadership
The authors observed that when asked questions about their jobs, most managers spoke of leadership and how they practiced it. Big picture topics such as vision and strategy – what I call macrovisions – were recurrent themes in their responses . Most managers claimed that their job was to articulate such macrovisions while leaving the details of day-to-day operations to their subordinates. As examples, consider the following responses from interviewees:
A strongly knowledge intensive work as ours build on independent and active employees who has (sic) the ability to take their own initiative.
This is consistent with modern themes of worker autonomy in decision, particularly in knowledge-intensive organisations such as information or biotechnology. Reinforcing this, another manager said:
I try not to interfere too much in operations. That would be wrong in every way, no one would benefit from that, but I am available if anyone has an operative question, otherwise it’s more me trying to make myself unavoidable in strategic issues but avoidable in operational issues.
Yet another manager spoke of macrovisions in the following way:
And if you provide the big picture, if there is a sense that these [minor decisions] are in the context of the wider strategy and it is not just, bang, bang [shooting with finger from the hip] we shoot this one and now we shoot that one, and now we gallop off in some other direction; if it fits a bigger picture, then I think we can manage. But that is where leadership comes in I think, we need to provide that context and the picture and the overall direction, to say “we are not here in the middle and you cannot [be allowed to] ride off in just any direction.
Macrovisions thus appeared to provide a broad framework within which employees had the freedom to make decisions that were broadly consistent with the organisation’s strategy.
Again, it is important to emphasise that managers were not specifically asked about visions, strategy or leadership, yet their responses invariably alluded to these themes. The responses suggest that most managers in the company viewed leadership rather than management as their primary role.
This was consistent with the overall management vision set by senior executives. As the authors put it:
The expectations formulated by higher-level senior managers and made explicit by the CEO on various occasions, is that managers should refrain from detailed management
Indeed, some managers spoke of managing details in derogatory terms. Consider the following response:
Requesting detail which is of no value to your personal job or position, and that can be detail about a specific office, budget thing through to really me going down to the project level and saying, “Well, how are we doing on that project and I really want to know”, so it is about the ability not to do that, and delegate and trust the people.
In short: most managers felt that their work involved articulating and implementing macrovisions rather than practising micromanagement.
Micromanagement: the practice of “leadership”
A natural question arising from the above is: how did managers actually practice leadership? What are the things they did in their day-to-day work that exemplified leadership?
To answer this question, interviewees were asked what they did in their day-to-day work. Strangely, most managers reverted to themes they had described in uncomplimentary terms. For example, when asked to elaborate on how he practiced leadership, one manager said:
There are many different ways of working. I think that as a manager here one has to implement significantly more directive ways of handling people, that is, that you say to people that you will spend the next month occupying yourself with this development, I want you to learn about this. I think that you have to have a much more directive way of handling of people in these operations.
This was not an isolated case; another manager said:
I do get involved from a technical viewpoint, I expect, obviously my knowledge is still developing here, but I expect to understand quite consciously what the group is doing.
Yet another manager, when asked about the leadership tools that he used, referred to things such as budgets, recruitment etc. – things that are usually concerned bureaucratic, administrative procedures. There was little if any reference to activities that one might associate with leadership.
There is thus a clear gap between what the managers professed to practice and what they actually practiced. In the authors’ words:
…the responses brought forth aspects of managerial activities obviously quite far removed from most understandings of leadership in contemporary management literature and also from the more ‘grandiose’ ideas on the subject that they also claim to believe in and base their work on. Managers therefore talk of themselves as leaders without doing much that clearly and strongly refers to ‘leadership activities’. The case study exhibits the contrary: the activities of managers are more closely related to what is understood as micro-management…
Indeed this view was confirmed when the authors spoke with lower level managers. A project manager said:
Perhaps there’s a dialogue about that (leadership) that doesn’t really percolate down to those in production and it tends to become reactive. And micro-management, there’s a will to know too much in detail, when perhaps they should really be working with empowerment, that people are able to take responsibility, to send responsibility for the budget to me and have faith that I take responsibility for my colleagues, and all the positive talk such as “we are going to be the company of choice”, how are we going to realize all that, there’s too much administrative detail going through my superior.
…so much for all the talk of leadership.
The rhetoric and reality of leadership
From the above it is clear that we have a paradoxical situation: managers believed they were being leaders when they are actually weren’t leading at all. The question is: why did this happen?
The authors offer a number of speculations for this, which I briefly outline below.
Firstly, leadership qualities are generally seen as desirable. Management literature and education tends to place leadership at the pinnacle of managerial practice. Consequently, there is considerable pressure on managers at the middle and senior levels to display these qualities.
Secondly, there is the issue of identity; how managers see themselves. Like those described in the case study, most managers would like to view what they do as leadership rather than “mere” management or administration. As a result, they may unconsciously describe what they do in the flattering language of leadership rather than the mundane terms of management. However, as the authors stated in the paper, “Leadership talk and fantasies seem to leave a thin spray of grandiosity on the ‘leaders’” Clearly, this may be of more use in bolstering managerial self-esteem than anything else.
Thirdly, managers often have to deal with conflicting agendas and requirements. In the case study managers were expected to display leader-like behaviour. However, at the same time, they were held responsible for specific and very tangible results. To deliver on the latter, they often felt they had to keep track of the details of what their teams were doing and step in when things were going wrong. There was a continual pressure to get involved in detail while maintaining the illusion of being leaders.
Another point that the authors do not mention explicitly is that middle and frontline managers are often expected to lead without being given the autonomy to do so.
It is likely that some or all of the above factors lead to a divergence between the rhetoric and reality of leadership.
Conclusion
The central message of the paper is that the concept of leadership is an idealization that is often compromised in practice. Most people who work in organisations will not find this surprising: managers are generally aware that their day-to-day work has little in common with the rarefied notions of leadership promoted by management schools, while others are likely to have worked with micromanagers who are masquerading as macrovisionaries.
Eight to Late 