Nonaka, Ikujiro and Takeuchi, Hirotaka, 1995 The Knowledge-CreatingCompanyOxford University Press: New York
Uses
Apart from the product-design and service focus in the book, this theory of knowledge creation lends itself to any kind of facilitated process – a meta process which you use to plan your workshop or chainge process.
A year after I facilitated my first major multi-stakeholder process I discovered the book and recognised how I had implicitly applied many of the principles encountered in the book.
Knowledge-creating process
The knowledge spiral
The five phases of knowledge creation:
Types of knowledge
There are two intrinsic types of knowledge. They are:
tacit
explicit
of the body,
the here and now,
practice or experience,
simultaneous,
analogue
of the mind,
the there and then,
the theory or rationality,
sequential,
digital
Modes of knowledge creation
There are four modes of activity in knowledge creation and of knowledge conversion:
tacit
explicit
Socialisation
Externalisation
Internalisation
Combination
tacit
explicit
Four types of knowledge
The process yields four types of individual and organisational knowledge:
tacit
explicit
Sympathised
Conceptual
Operational
Systemic
tacit
explicit
Enabling conditions
Five enabling conditions are required to for the knowledge creation process:
Intention - the organisation's aspiration, vision, strategy
Autonomy - of the individual, of the self-organising team
Fluctuation and creative chaos - breaking down routines, habits, cognitive frameworks to face a challenging goal or crisis
Redundancy - information resources available beyond those required by the task at hand, overlapping approaches, "fuzzy" division of labour, internal competition
Requisite variety - fast access to wide variety of information, ability to combine information flexibly Note
Tools to assist the process
The following tools assist to facilitate the knowledge creation process:
The larger the variety of actions available to a control system, the larger the variety of perturbations it is able to compensate.
In this context it is taken to mean:
"an organisation's internal diversity must match the variety and complexity of the environment in order to deal with challenges posed by the environment" p82 Back
tacit
explicit
tacit
explicit
tacit
explicit
tacit
explicit