Oliver Thylmann

(comment: As originally posted on the OUBS Blog)

This unit is about the two dimensions of the resource of knowledge workers and the management of the process for innovation. Remember that not all knowledge workers need to be innovative. But also, knowledge might be necessary but not enough to manage human resources for innovation. The efficient management of information is still under-used, managed and attached importance to. Managements role is then about facilitation, nurturing, supporting, …

Knowledge Work: A conceptual framework

For one remember that each initiative has to be seen in context, meaning that for example a command/control culture will likely not foster knowledge sharing. Is everyone a knowledge worker or only those not working on non-material things, and does this maybe just simply relabels them? Is that relabeling just a fad, even if knowledge is not? Maybe our move to service work has made knowledge more central. Actually, anything that can be automated will, and hence information and knowledge, or rather knowing, is key. Is the knowing worker, the worker of the future?

In a sense, this means that future companies might be more knowledge than capital intensive and then people need to be managed differently, as they hold your success in their heads. It is no more about access to capital but to knowledge.

What do these knowledge workers contribute? Human assets are part of the intangible asset pool of a company, but they do not belong to the company. They should be management like finances are and in this case the “resources” can actually also be found outside the company. You need to facilitate, coach, empower, foster lifelong learning, knowledge capture and sharing, motivation and commitment.

In the industrial age the focus was on division of labor and the “one best way”, rules objectivity, technology, … But this knowledge age depends on factors that are not heightened by rules or objectivity. They need the above traits like intuition and commitment. Managers were bosses giving orders, held responsible and knowing everything. Now this is harder as you can’t know everything in a knowledge economy and hence the manager has become a coach, working on moving intellectual capital from people to the organization or actually just between people, working on making them stay. The idea that you need to move knowledge to the company is actually just the easy version of all of this, not taking into account that you might not be able to in most cases.

Organizational forms are also being changed from hierarchical to more distributed and blurry, with lateral information flows, often across boundaries needed new human resource ideas. If knowledge intensiveness is true, loosening of control and autonomy will be needed.

The Problem of Managing knowledge Workers and “Managing Innovation”

Innovator companies are characterized as including visionaries, open cultures, market focussed staff and are open to prototyping. This is far from easy:
- how do you access tacit knowledge and not instruct or control people from above?
- how to you gain trust, commitment and motivation?
- how do you deal with contrary legacy messages?
- how to you contract workers and consultants from the outside?
- how to you manage the vulnerability of the organization?
- how do you manage professional workers who seem to be harder to manage the more specialized they are?

In terms of best practices there seem to be more poor than good examples for management of innovation. There are a lot of different views within one company about what innovation really is and without understanding this context, introducing aids to innovation is fruitless. The OUBS “perceptions of innovation” study revealed some barriers to innovation:
- silo mentality
- blame culture
- risk/reward
- bureaucracy
- poor communications
- short-termism, ROI focus

HRM practices for knowledge work and innovation

A clear knowledge management focus in hr does need a different strategy than one focusses on cost. In this unit HR strategy is about structural and cultural strategy as well as HR practices. This links in directly with Gary Hamel’s resource-based view on strategy and organizational capabilities.

1. Organizational structures and enabling conditions
   While structures are mostly linked to a command-control system, Nonaka and Takeuchi showed that given “requisite variety” structures can also help innovation, as this diversity needs to reflect market complexity.

“To maximize variety everyone in the organization should be assured of the fastest access to the broadest variety of necessary information, going through the fewest steps.” – Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1995

You could:
- Keep multiple links between diverse teams
- change structures frequently
- promote job rotation
- “non-experts” in new product-dev to challenge “givens”

1. Teams: shared context, open discussions, big pool of knowledge, big Ts
   You need independent knowledge bubbles within structure with extensive links. Virtual teams are possible through ICT, allowing for dispersed COP to build.

You also need to foster collaboration instead of stars (or both) to improve better and more sustainable innovation. The team leader that becomes more of a coach, managing the discussion and collaboration, … the team development, which today is really an HR function. We all need to become HR managers in a sense.

The spider’s web organizational form is an idea to let the right teams form at the right time and place (also virtual). Mature teams, with possibility for individuality, clear goals, good sharing and the right resources seem to work best.

1. Organization wide structures
   Either you have an expert R&D system or more of a collaborative innovation whole. R&D needs interfaces to the business side obviously in both directions to allow market-pull and technology-push. Organization wide innovation in light of customer demands moves everything from asset management to resource leverage with wide information sharing. You should actually call the human resource manager the human asset leverager.

Joint problem solving and flexible specialization are often cited as important. Some big companies work towards this by subdividing when reaching a certain size. Even though flexibility is important you still seem to be able to use a bureaucratic system to foster flexibility. I think it’s Stevel Ballmer from Microsoft who said that speed is not about being big or small, if you don’t move, you don’t move.

1. Inter-organizational arrangements and networks
   You need boundary spanners, that stay up to date on the latest happenings.

Culture

Encouraging an appropriate culture is said to be key to performance. Some believe that culture can be managed. In relation to innovation this means managing failure, but in general this is how management behaves in reality (doing versus saying) that forms the culture. Conformance to to procedures and short-term profit focus are things noted as barriers to innovation.

Innovation can flourish based on Pascale (91) where:
- constructive criticism is welcome
- creative tension the norm
- curiosity
- passion for learning
- quality enhancement
- autonomy and independence
- free flow of innovation
– few hierarchies
– big cross boundary and cross functional focus
- bureaucracy -> entrepreneurship (or intrapreneurship)
- everybody is a thinker (lean production)
- not cutting funding in crisis
- sharing knowledge (emphasized through performance evaluation and compensation)

Resourcing: Recruiting and selecting

Peters and Waterman (82) argue that those closest to the customers are those most ripe for innovation. Diversity is given emphasis to foster alternative views. Peters (89) believes you need to seperate those using procedures and those breaking them, but others (Davenport, 93) argue that this is getting harder.

Your best people will likely be found by competitors and you need to use things like profit-sharing, challenge, environment and freedom to make them stay.

Leonard (98) suggests key themes in relation to learning, knowledge and innovation:
- shared problem solving
- experimentation and prototyping
- implementing new technical procedures and tools
- importing and absorbing from the outside
- learning from the market

All this need continuous learning on fertile ground. Top management needs to be sure that they don’t kill of new ways the team is working, killing of their learning and sending a bad signal.

“Knowledge is experience. Everything else is information.” – Albert Einstein

Sometimes knowledge stores actually become information junkyards (McDermott, 99) The structure of organizational memory beased on Walsh and Ungson (91) has several stores: See Figure 4.2.

HR Managers need to enhance and exploit each of those. Stories and learning histories might be a good idea here which is where Blogs fit very well.

Training for Creativity

First you need the environment and then you need to test your people and develop them in the right direction. Competence modeling allows you to find those competences that you need and develop them (see activity 4.7)

The learning organization can proceed the knowledge company or vice versa, which depends on the viewpoint. But they are interlinked. Corporate universities show that the idea/need for both is growing, sometimes as a partnership with universities. There are different hierarchies of learning for example adapted by Quinn et. al.:
- know what
- know how
- know why
- care why

(one might argue that “know who” is another one if you can’t know everything )

Career development and management development is often linked to job rotation in successful cases, with managers being a core target group due to their industry knowledge. Courses, mentoring and coaching are other things that have been done successfully. Japan is strong in this respect and it shows in their knowledge increases.

If you focus on management as a whole you really move from manager to management development. All the moves in that direction show the importance seen in KM and high-order learning.

Involving and Empowerment

It’s regarded as an alternative to command-and-control but there is little research on how to really make it work. It’s about high-trust and high-commitment really. Wilkonson (98) has classified various types:
- information sharing
- upward problem solving (quality circles, …)
- task autonomy
- attitudinal shaping
- self-management

Success is dependent on context, and needs to move beyond delegating responsibility. Without training, cost/reward and consistence it is futile.

Harnessing motivation: Performance management and rewards

People, above all, need to be willing to share their knowledge. Hence you need job security, also be “upgrading” your employees to remain employable. Pay attention to:
- what gets measured gets done
- sharing needs to be rewarded (expertise networks are an idea)
- include km in routines (e.g. knowledge gained in project management)
- ict tools need to be appealing and useful

People need to feel they get more than they give. Amabile (98) identified 6 ingredients necessary:
- challenge
- freedom
- resources
- work-group feature
- supervisory encouragement
- organizational support

A broader goal base seems to be needed and enjoying work important. The psychological contract need to make people investors.

HR strategies in context

You need to not work on one lever but on their balance and include a sociopolitical angle. Strategic integration is about your strategy being mutually reinforcing and Schuler and Jackson say these patterns are needed:
- high degree of creative behavior
- long-term focus
- co-operation
- moderate concern for quality
- moderate concern for output quantity
- risk taking
- high tolerance for ambiguity

You need to find your best fit in this and it needs to result in a competitive advantage for all this to make any sense. This comes from: innovation, low cost or superior quality. You need to find the “needed role behavior” in relation to this and the fitting HR strategy. Innovation strategy does not require to work harder or smarter but differently by the way. You need to be sure to choose and match internal and external views.

You can also choose different types of innovation and then match different HR strategies. HR needs to fit to your organizations need. Managers need to use the right methods for the context to drive innovation. All this likely need to be changing over time too.

The sociopolitical context

Davenport argued, interestingly, that if there is not politics, then there seems to be no perceived value in knowledge. In any case the value is socially constructed, and not a given. Also it seems that employees actually are becoming less happy in their work and less secure in their job, making you wonder if all this is really gaining some traction or not. Then again, maybe this is just about competition. You still need to remember all the Es.

(comment: As originally posted on the OUBS Blog)

Nonaka and Takeuchi put it like this: knowledge creation -> continuous innovation -> competitive advantage.

Simple. You can also say that next to creation of knowledge you have application, transformation and integration and all those functions interact.

In the 17th century Francis Bacon saw economic power in scientific knowledge and the possibility to then control the world we live in. Peter Drucker stressed the importance of knowledge as a crucial economic resource in 1969 (The Age of Discontinuity). Many companies now see themselves as knowledge based.

While knowledge creation leads to innovation it can also be argued that innovation leads to new knowledge, making this a circular process. Sometimes this process is needed to survive. Schumpeter actually pointed out that a main driver of innovation is the threat of innovation in your sector that you are missing. You need to learn to unlearn to learn again. Schumpeter’s gales of creative construction or discruptive technologies can be mentioned here. You will need to create new knowledge internally and raise your awareness to external threats. On a macro economic level variety occurs higher than at the individual level, meaning you cannot do anything against it at this level.

Definition of innovation

This is about the new, both technological and organizational. Invention is only a building block and often does not have the economic benefit needed for sustained innovation. Drucker said systemic innovation is the “purposeful and organized search for changes.” You need to understand the technical and the organizational part of innovation to really manage it successfully. While innovation is often seen as a leap to something new, this includes a lot of small steps that led you there and will take you further, with the leap actually mostly being on impact. Radical innovation is a lot more risky, especially because once undertaken, there is probably not pool of knowledge to use to build it up.

Embodied and embedded knowledge

This is based on Blackler’s list of types of knowledge. You can also say that “innovation embodies knowledge, or that innovations have knowledge embedded in them.” This is important considering worker education, especially in relation to some kinds of knowledge types only available in people, context, verbal communication or interaction.

Scientific and other knowledge

While it is often believed that technological innovation is the application of scientific knowledge, there are other types too even though. Still, the commercial application of scientific knowledge is a big field not to be underestimated, especially as it’s creation relies on the application of human and financial resources, precluding some form of commercialism in science. In terms of commercial relevance you need to also include the education and training part of science, which will lead to new, potentially commercial, advances. In the end, a lot of different types of knowledge need to be integrated for innovation to be successful. Page 25 in the book does list some types of knowledge needed there and can be really helpful, also in terms of thinking about outsourcing.

Knowledge creation and innovation

Surprisingly little has been done to research knowledge management in relation to its agreed importance and research in other core functions.

Design, something that cannot be automated or routinized, can be closely related to Gibbons’ Mode 2 knowledge or Flick’s contingent knowledge or Schön’s reflective practitioner. Schön actually sees design as a “reflective conversation with the materials of the situation.” Each problem is unique and handled in context. Some see it as a rational solving process but Dorst and Dijkhuis actually found out that each approaches appropriateness depends on the context.

This leads in to two perspectives on knowledge creation frameworks. In Nonaka’s SECI model new knowledge comes from the interaction of implicit and explicit knowledge. Knowledge conversion is key and different types of knowledge are created at each step. (More on Nonaka here.)

Building a new product needs interaction from a lot of different people and both socialization and externalization, individuals from the ba of the team who form the ba of the organization. (Lots of ba in SECI )

Top management needs to build a vision that shows the direction this knowledge creation should take. Then you have two dimensions of knowledge creation:
- epistomological dimensions: tacit/explicit conversion
- ontological dimension: individual to group to organization

Cook and Brown emphasize the concept of knowing, which only really works in a master and apprentice system where you learn what knowing something really means.

Important here is that you need to have variety and a deep (beyond immediate need) knowledge pool and interaction and communication between different/diverse people.

Experimentation and prototyping is another way to innovate and its actually easy to do with today’s technology in some fields. Leonard-Barton talks about it in her book Wellsprings of Knowledge in terms of “purposeful experimentation.” You need to support risk taking and allow experimentation with the option of failure. You need to put a system in place that allows all this to happen and foster learning from it. Unsuccessfully trying some things might lead to something successful in an unexpected field, something she calls “failing forward.” Rapid prototyping and an open mind is needed. Local experts, early adapter types and all the stuff from Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point is needed.

Thomke has found 4 main areas of focus to exploit technology with prototyping and experimentation in mind.

1. Organize for rapid experimentation
2. Fail early and often, but avoid mistakes
3. Anticipate and exploit early information
4. Combine new and traditional technologies

Learning and Innovation

Learning and knowledge creation are un-separable. Ruggles (1997) argues knowledge management needs 4 independent activities:
- knowledge identification
- knowledge codification
- knowledge interchange
- knowledge creation
(all this seems very similar to SECI)

A lot of firms need to go to learning by doing as Arrow (1962) believed, citing as evidence increased output. Ludvall talked about learning as incremental additions and deletions from your pool of knowledge through experience and practice. Cultural, social and historical as well as your own pool of knowledge interact. Everything is context sensitive.

Knowledge Practices for Innovation

Either knowledge has its own dynamic or it is driven economically… technological push vs. market driven. Actually we are somewhere in the continuum between the two. We can actually build a matrix putting knowledge about means and about ends in categories of unknown, definable or understood.

At a firm level your knowledge will be cumulative and path dependent and you need to balance keep your core constant and keep an eye on the edges, which should be fluctuating. Creative abrasion is a term signifying that different specialists share knowledge, like designers and coders, building new knowledge based on their different knowledge and viewpoints in the process.

Strategic Context

You need to innovate to stay competitive and therefor build up the capability to do so strategically. But rational planning processes are rarely possible, so you need a way to manage and to cope with complexity. You need to continuously link opportunities to market possibilities, within and outside the organization.

Freeman (1992) identifies 6 strategies:
- Offensive innovation strategy
- Defensive innovation strategy
- Imitative innovation strategy
- dependent strategy (subcontractors and suppliers innovate)
- traditional products
- opportunist (identify niches)

Perceptions of innovation

The extremes, found in a OUBS research by Storey (200), are routinized innovation versus more individual creative events. Most are in the middle. Different dimensions play a larger or smaller role dependent on who you ask. There is a social – individual dimension and the external – internal dimension.

Some things are noticeable in relation to this:
- innovation happens in stages, with potential reviews at each stage
- the social part emphasizes the influencing process part, or even fight for resources
- cross-functional teams are important
- skunkworks (Tom Peters), aka individual experimentation
- find and keep innovative individuals
- importance of inter-firm collaboration
- social relationships are critical (internal and external)

Internal and External Knowledge for Innovation

You need to build knowledge but also look for diversity which is sometimes found outside your organization. Make or buy is an important consideration here. Working internally has high costs and risks, while externalizing things means you need to work hard to select the right collaborators. Learning from consultants needs a real effort as they are often not there to part with their specialized knowledge. The capability you can build is choosing, communicating and taking advantage of external resources. Outsourcing can be related to more diversity and larger communities of practice, which actually makes it attractive if the right partners are chosen.

In terms of R&D it can be argued that the capability to orchestrate resources needs to be internal but the build does not need to be. Remember the transaction costs though.

(comment: As originally posted on the OUBS Blog)

“In the future the brand will be the most important asset of the firm.” – Jean Noel Kapferer (1992)

Brands can take many forms, from FMCG to pop stars and places. They make the ware stand out in functional performance and psycho-social emotions. The ware is augmented, featuring tangible and intangible assets. When these are unique and relevant they can have a powerful influence on customer’s choice.

As brands are a lot less easy to copy, the provide a lot of strategic value to companies. Good brands lead to potential for premium prices, more bargaining power in the value chain and more customer loyalty. Brands help leverage resources and makes them unique, very important in the resource based view of strategy.

There are different forms of knowledge needed for managing a brand.

This does show the idea that brand management is about applied knowledge management. You need to manage knowledge at the:
- customer level: needs, wants, … knowing and exceeding them
- intra-organizational level: understanding and consensus among staff about the brand
- inter-organizational level: all stakeholders that have influence on the brand

Then there is the customer level: You cannot control but influence how customers make sense of your messages. Using communication and ICT is key here. There are several levels of communication:

• Traditional Communication: Change attitudes through planned messages. Assumes a passive recipient.
• Integrated Communication: controlling and coordinating multiple flows of information; more personalized messages; does not believe in shared attitudes of all customers; critical recipient.
• Value Added Communication: Coordinating multiple sources and giving the customers information when, where and how they choose to want it; interactive communication; building relationships

Distributors often know a lot more about the customer than manufacturers, but they might be willing to share that EPOS and loyalty card data. Consumer to consumer interaction is also rising, moving the power back to the individual. It goes as far as the buyer becoming the advertiser by announcing their will to buy (Schultz 1996)

A company needs to understand the purchase decision process and be available at the right steps. Managing the brand internally is important as brands can be linked to living entities who start their lives internally. Employees that know the brand value are more likely to deliver that value externally. If you want to be seen as innovative you need to foster an innovative spirit internally. Everybody needs to know and feel that in advance of outside communication.

All this then needs to be extended to other (external) stakeholders that the company might interact with, meaning that you need shared knowledge and communication channel going over the corporate boundaries.

Managing Knowledge and Brand Creation

It’s about communication, functional and emotional. Strong relationships build on:
- honesty
- trustworthiness
- reliability
- predictability

You need to understand the beliefs and value systems of the company. “Information becomes knowledge when it is interpreted [...] ‘truth’, ‘goodness’ and ‘beauty’ are in the eye of the beholder.” – Nonaka et al.

Nonaka’s SECI Model can be helpful here as brand knowledge is just a special form of knowledge. Based on epistemological pluralism there are a lot of ways to know things and all facets play a role in brand knowledge.

A brand can be seen as:
- a legal instrument
- a logo (but it is not something to do to consumers but something they do things with)
- a company (gives a coherent focus)
- an identity (making the brand explicit)
here you look at the brand’s values, create a vision from that and then move to a graphical representation of that vision. Kapferer believes good brand management begins with a “strategy and consistent, integrated vision.” This then gets translated into everything the consumer interacts with.
- an image in consumers’ minds (facing the challenge of consumers’ perception)
- as a personality to go beyond copyable functional advantages
- as a relationship to further extend the personification
- as a cluster of values

Managing knowledge in different brand contexts

So we need to manage different kinds of knowledge at three levels. But now we look at the different contexts.

A: Consumer Brands

Consumers go through similar decision processes all the time and brands help them in their search and evaluation work. For one there is the topology of the buying process:

1. Extended problem solving happens when there is high consumer involvement and significant perceived brand difference. You move through: Problem recognition -> Information Search -> Evaluation of alternatives -> Purchase -> Post purchase evaluation (Solomon et al. 1999)
   With these kind of products consumers likely use a lot of different channels and you need to make sure that you are presenting a consistent message over all those channels.

2. Dissonance reduction is needed with high involvement but little brand difference. Advice by friends or others gain more importance and people are generally unsure of their purchase after the fact. This leads to the following process: Problem recognition -> Purchase decision made -> Brands then evaluated -> Brand beliefs formed by active learning and information search

In this case you need brand re-assurers reducing the perceived risk of choosing the wrong thing.

1. Limited problem solving no matter what the involvement means that the cost of information search and evaluation is seen as too high. You go through the following process: Problem recognition -> Brand beliefs formed from passive learning recalled from memory -> Purchase made -> Brands may or may not be evaluated afterwards.

Here you need to make sure that your brand is in stock at the POS, keep things simple and keep the brand at the top of the consumer’s head through advertising.

This brings us to the idea of brand loyalty; meaning that consumers remove the effort of search and evaluation by sticking to one brand. You need to understand the consumer and try to get into their repertoire of brands. A relationship helps here and all staff need to be aware of this and the importance of a consistent communication of build the brand.

This also means a company cannot misuse the information at there disposal in relation to consumers needs and wants. Consumers need to feel that they get value for the information they gave.

B: B2B Brands

In B2B markets the specification between brands will be similar but some can maintain a higher market share and premium prices, which is linked to the perception of superior value. You need to look at the multiple facts that provide value to the perceiver/customer. The value to the customer depends on the transaction as a whole, shown through the pinwheel of brand value (Mudambi et al, 1997). It has several different facets:

Product performance:
- Tangible: Fit, Defects
- Intangible: Reliable, highly technological

Distribution performance:
- Tangible: lead time, JIT, online ordering
- Intangible: reliable, hassle free

Support Services performance
- Tangible: range of services
- Intangible: expertise, rapport

Company performance (as a whole):
- Tangible: profitability, market share
- Intangible: Reputation, image

The most successful B2B brands have a well balanced pinwheel.

You can enhance the value of your brand through building relationships with others. This is most favorable if there is little risk involved but a potential high value added in terms of brand value transfer. While the functional capabilities might fit you should also look at the emotional values. Here you can look at Schein’s three layers manifesting culture and values:
- artefacts
- values
- basic assumptions (mental models)

C: Service Brands

Service brands are more based on the intra-organizational level because they rely more on people. You need to focus on knowledge management to deliver consistent high level of service. There are several distinctive characteristics:
- Inseparability of production and consumption (you need to try to keep employees on one level, but obviously not at the lowest)
- Intangibility, meaning difficulty of sharpness of differentiation (difficult to judge QOS before the fact)
- Heterogeneity. They are difficult to standardize and might even have to be variable on a per customer basis. You need to build up a tacit knowledge and reinforce that internally.
- Perishability as it cannot be stored

To execute the service brand strategy you need to remember that employees pay a larger role and open communication is needed to pull together all employees, making sure their efforts result in customer satisfaction and increased sales, which then feeds back to motivation through a job well done.

Brand Evaluation

You might need to know what your brands is worth. First you should look at the stages in your customer decision processes and evaluate how much value is created for you through your brand at each step.
- Awareness: familiarity and unaided recall are measures here
- Perception and Attitudes: here different attributes are ranked via different brands
- Preference: What brand do you prefer, x or y?
- Choice of intentions: Do you prefer but do not need the brand? It might be the best ice cream but it still doesn’t sell as you don’t want ice.
- Actual choice

Why should you evaluate brand value though?
- To buy or sell a brand
- To measure brand management effectiveness
- To determine the appropriate level of future brand support.
- To make financial forecasts
- To identify underlying sources of brand value

Methods of measuring brands can be:
- price premium (focussed on the past)
- market share
- a combined price premium and market share, looking at the rise of the curve seeing how much your market share drops with increases in price. The steeper the better.
- proprietary measures

There are a lot of stories showing that the right measurement is important, that market valuation is not a simple calculation of tangible assets, or that showing new measurements are used to give further insight in the organization. All this is related to the term intellectual capital, which has been defined in many ways. It is about those intangible assets that do not show up on financial statements but can be codified, valued and managed by the company. It might be knowledge of people that is important to a company. Or it can be said to be the combination of patents, processes, skills, about stakeholders of a company. Economists define it simply as Tobin’s-q.
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External markets exist and perfect competition doesn’t, so sometimes you have more knowledge, something you have to decide to give to or take from the market. Machlup (1962) fond that 29% of GNP of the USA was coming from knowledge production. The public wants knowledge public as markets ensure the best use of all available knowledge.
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An organization is a legal entity with resources and capabilities, with a permeable boundary. What is a company in terms of knowledge though: a processor (Cohendet et al) or repository (Fransman) or a system of interpretation (Daft and Weick)? GRant argues about resources and capabilities in this respect: resources are the source of a firm’s capabilities, capabilities are the main source of competitive advantage.
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(Comment: As originally posted on the OUBS Blog)

The word communication has been derived from the latin word communare, meaning “to impart” or “to share”. It is used a lot broader though as computers seem to communicate via phone lines in our language. Telephones however don’t. In a company’s shareholder meeting it might be unclear who is communicating, the company or the executives and the communication might also be one way. If you don’t respond to someone, are you only not talking or also communicating on a non-voice level? All this is not simple. The exploration follows.

Many would argue that machines fail to communicate because they lack intention and understanding. But this is now wrong in that with the advent of web services there is a way for machines to communicate. The semantic web is another idea that will further the possibility for computers to understand.

Key issues with communication are: symbols, messages, interpretation, understanding, meaning, interaction, intention and persuasion. If you put all of this together you end up in stories.

Theories of Communication

The SMCR Model of communication is one way of seeing it:
Sender -> Message via Channel -> Receiver

More complex systems also include a coder and decoder. Noise and interference are also often noted. To overcome communications problems in this model, you can use redundancy in the message or feedback. This is the difference between UDP and TCP as an internet communications protocol for example. In TCP the other side says that it has received a message creating some overhead. In UDP you do not need this having less overhead but at the same time needing some overlap to be able to piece together the data even if some parts are lost. Another thing is that English text and normally be reduced by 30% and still be understandable. Mac OS X, the operating system by Apple, has a system wide summary function for example which often yields some very nice results.

There are strengths and weaknesses in the information theory model. It is very well understood and can very easily be applied and used. But, it does not address meaning, understanding or interpretation. AT the same time it sees the message as the communication, not the way to get a certain behavior from the receiver. Communication problems in our real world kind of prove that its just not that simple.

An alternative is the constructivist model. It sees people as constructing mental images and models used to make sense of the world. IT places weight on the difference of individuals. For newborns for example the world is a “buzzing booming confusion” as psychologist William James (1890) said, before it learns and makes sense of the world at least. You construct your understanding and are only conscious of those things that you need to be aware of at any time.

For example, when you started out driving, you might have had problems to listen to the radio at the same time. This becomes easier as you need to put less direct attention to driving. You might even have noticed that you suddenly become aware that you do not remember the last few seconds driving. Your subconscious took over there and would have put your conscious in the drivers seat again if something happened.

The person we wish to communicate with is different from us by culture, age, gender, experience, … hence the message we send might be interpreted differently. The constructivist will acknowledge the likelihood of different interpretations and to find shared meaning.

Bennet made a six step model for empathy in this model:
- assuming difference
- knowing self
- suspending self
- allowing guided imagination
- allowing empathetic experience
- re-establishing self

This leads us to semiotics, the idea that we communicate through signs (words, images, acts, objects, …). These signs might be arbitrary but only as long as they don’t become a community standard. All signs have certain codes behind them Chandler argues that. Learning these codes involves adopting the values, assumptions, and world-views which are built into them without (our) normally being aware of their intervention in constructing of reality.

This is used all around us, like in ads, where a signifier is used to convey a certain image idea or codes. The process is as follows:
Signifier -> Signify -> (social) beliefs and attitudes -> larger assumptions

This also leads to the concept of branding in that you create an identity for a product and that people are made to buy into a lifestyle.

Communication and Culture

The concept of culture was first used in writing by Edward & Taylor in 1871. It is again hard to define. I personally liked the simple on the one from Stradley (1980): The acquired knowledge that people use to interpret experience and generate social behavior.

Of course there is a bit of ambiguity in there, as to how knowledge was acquired or codified. But it seems that knowledge happens in context, in a culture. There is also no real world or real knowledge if you look at it like this. You need to ask yourself how much culture fit is needed in knowledge and how constructivistic do you need to get.

Going from here we need to look at language and ethnography. Ethnography was developed as a sub-branch of anthropology concerned with the different ethnic cultures. A central focus has always been on language. e.g. a culture in Afrika has no language concept for numbers. They have the values “some” and “many”. Just think of the limits this puts on knowledge or the opportunities it creates.

(Update: Steve pointed out that they do theoretically have a concept for numbers. None, some, many. It’s just a different one from mine. Okok )

Hofstede did one of the best known studies on different ethnic cultures within IBM which you can read about here.

A nice example cited in the book is this. Americans say: Don’t just sit there – do something. Japanese might say: Don’t just do something – sit there.

Culture as a knowledge system

White put it like this in 1959: (Culture does not exist of) extra-somatic things and events… (but) consists of things and events considered within an extra-somatic context. [Extra-somatic meaning outside or beyond a person.]

This means that you can study culture based on the things around it. Culture is our frame of reference. This leads to the idea of distributed cognition and potentially even collective knowledge. Then start thinking about individual knowledge and corporation knowledge and hear your brain boiling over

Organizational Culture

It is argued that this should fit the environment and hence there potentially isn’t a best culture out there for a company. The culture might even have to change over time, especially with faced with technological discontinuities. Deal and Kennedy categorized companies’ culture into, yes, you guessed it, a quadrant.

Feedback quick and risk high: Tough guy, macho
Feedback quick and risk low: Work hard, play hard
Feedback slow and risk high: bet-your-company culture
Feedback slow and risk low: process culture

The internet now really enabled the work hard play hard culture because we can have amazingly quick feedback in low risk environment.

Communication, culture and managing knowledge

Personal knowledge is deeply linked to our mindsets. A Vietnamese will be unaware that a “brother” can be referred to without giving an age. These tacit models are important to keep in mind. Knowledge is contextual and the empathy model suggests that this context is very important.

Communication via stories has a long history here because it is one of the most important ways to transfer knowledge. Snowden argues that they work so well because they are simple, non-threatening, memorable and can bring across complicated ideas.

Welcome blogging, sorry drifting off.

Communication and Learning

This section is intended to provide a framework and can be summarized roughly as … (ok not so easy to do rough but anyway)

Learning is key to knowledge and thinking. It has a function of diminishing returns as more learning will become harder along the way (learning curve). Learning is also culturally influenced as well as by our mental models in general. The question arises whether all thinking requires speech and hence language has a high influence. Speed reading might be a good way to think about this.

This also means that the human brain does not work in a vacuum. Different people learn better at different stages of Kolb’s learning cycle. There is a theorist, pragmatist, activist and reflector. Learning seems to be messier and more context sensitive though. You need critical attention for learning and double loop learning to go to the next level. At the same time the brain seems to have an easier time recalling things if you are in a similar situation or state of mind than when you remembered them. Still, the situation where you need to apply what you learned will need to different in context from that where you learn.

Communications and media systems is the last part in this. Stories here have been even more important and media evolved from speech to writing and then to cheaper writing, images, movies, … . There is also the difference between synchronous and asynchronous communication types here, where the Delphi method of creativity is quoted.

If knowledge is so important to an enterprise then you might see your own career development as the trading of your own knowledge and if this is the case, will this ring in a new form of employment?
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