The concept of knowledge sharing in organisations; Understanding Modern Business and Organisation

 Learning organisation: The place of knowledge sharing - Video Transcript

This time I would like to tell you about the learning organisations. Many would agree that the most important asset of the organisation today is the knowledge of their employees. So what do they do about it?

Tom Davenport and Larry Prusak went to many com panies, and sometimes they have seen the coffee machines. And they have found a note next to the coffee machine, work, don't talk. Don't spend any time here at the coffee machine, chatting to your colleagues. Go back to your office, sit down, and work.

I said, this is the worst thing you can do about organisational learning. What you should do encourage people.

 You have knowledge workers. They are interested in working better. Encourage

them to talk. They will talk about how to do a better job, because they are interested in it. They want to do it.

If they don't want to do it, create an environment in which they do want to do it. So they were, for example, advising a company on how to set up a completely new plant. They said, the best, most central locat ion should be a coffee shop. You make excellent coffee and you encourage your employees to spend time there, and they will work better.

So why is there this kind of discrepancy between how we approach it? It is because we don't really understand knowledge and learning. So I would like to see how you achieve that kind ofenvironment, where you can say, let smart people talk.

What I want to talk about is the knowledge orientation of an organisation. So I'm not talking bout those organisations which I call the ignorant one's in the previous slide so who don't care about knowledge. They will die out anyway. So it is not important to consider them.

But once you focus on knowledge, what is it that you put into the focus really? What is the focalvalue? Say that it is knowledge. That's the most obvious thing.OK, what will happen if the knowledge is in the focus, if the knowledge is the most important value? If I have knowledge, and my organisation values knowledge in itself, what I will do I will keep it for myself. Not give it to anyone, because I am more valuable if only I have it. So that is actually towards the right direction, but then it stops and goes completely wrong.

So Tom Davenport and Larry Prusak suggested that there is another level. You should focus on knowledge sharing. Encourage people to share knowledge. That's all the coffee machine metaphor's all about.

What happens if you do that? What I will do if I have knowledge, I will start teaching others. Let's get a bit closer to that. I think that they are still wrong.

I had an exam when I was a student, where the professor came into the classroom. It was a written exam. He gave what we need to work on, and then he left the room.

He came back only about 40 minutes later, and he said, you know, while you were here alone, I was over there, in the other building, and I was watching you through the window. Of course, we started laughing. That cannot be really true. Actually, it was. We realised that then he went to the first student. He said, I have seen that they were asking most questions from you. And here is you get the highest mark. It was 5 in that system.

Then he said, OK. He might have really done that. And what he did then--he went to the other guy. He says, OK, I have seen that you were asking most of the questions. Come, I will ask you a couple of questions. Lie, immediate fail.

So what happens in this approach. You are rewarding the person who wants to share their

knowledge, but you are punishing the one who wants to learn. Of course, the exam is not the right moment to learn.

But in an organisation, you need to reward the knowledge increase. That's how you can achievehigh levels of people wanting to learn all the time and doing it and so on. That is where you can get if you are focusing on knowledge increase.

Now, what is it when we say that organisations learn? But it doesn't make any sense. Organisations do not have knowledge.

The knowledge of the organisation is the knowledge of the employees, which is in between theirears. So how can organisations learn? First of all, there is something else--not only the knowledge of the employees. Because from the interaction of the employees, additional knowledge may result.

And there is also quite a lot of knowledge embedded in the organisational processes of roducingsomething. Of course, those processes cannot learn unless there are those people who designthem who can learn more and that way improve the processes. But it means that we can try todevelop the organisational context in a way that it responds to environmental challenges by learning.

What would be the first level? Thefirst level is that we notice that there is something wrong

with the action. The consequences are wrong. For example, it is--the manufacturing process is producing lots of rejects. What do we do? We fix the malfunction. And the same process that was there before will work better.

Or we can go beyond that, and we can decide that actually, we need to improve the whole process. We need to change the process, or we need to change what we are measuring about the process and so on. This is called double-loop learning. And this is already what most authors will identify with a learning organisation.

But actually, you should go a bit further than that. There is a possibility to revise the whole context--where are you, what are you about? For example, most people were thinking about IBM as the biggest computer manufacturer a couple of years ago. What is IBM today?

IBM today is a huge consulting company, a solution provider, and so on. So they reinvented

themselves. It is a different context in which they are operating today.

So what Peter Senge says is that the essence of the learning organisation is that it is a place where people learn together all the time, and they learn about how to learn even better together. And they say that it is the only way to be competitive in today's environment. Now, there is a specific notion. It is called Communities of Practice, which I see is the way of having all of this happening.

So we have the organisation. And then we have these individuals in and also outside the

organisation. They have their own knowledge, and they interacting in multiple ways. And together, they make sense about things.

Now this entity, where this making sense about things together, sharing knowledge, learning

together, joining our minds, this is called the Community of Practice. What is very important is that it is the nature of knowledge that it is sticky and leaky. It sticks to the practice. It sticks to those annoying processes that people perform, and it leaks through organisational boundaries. It does not have any respect for the organisation.

Now, unless your organisation can accept that some of this learning is occurring beyond their boundaries and control, it will not be--the organisational learning will not be happening. This is the only way of organisational learning. And only the organisation who does that is deserving the name of learning organisations. Thank you very much. 

© University of Strathclyde